Public interventions and urban evolution in Tirana (2005–2025): The case of the 1.60 insurgent space project

Stefano ROMANO

Abstract: Public art is a unique category of art that is fundamentally different from urban art. The idea of engaging with the “non-conventional” spaces of the city — unprotected spaces, unlike traditional art venues such as museums and galleries — poses a challenge for the artwork while simultaneously creating a more “complex” relationship between the artwork and the architecture or public space it interacts with.

Between 2005 and 2006, Stefano Romano conceived a curatorial project on art in public space in the city of Tirana, titled 1.60insurgent space. The project was itinerant, with each intervention designed to last only one day. This methodology allowed the artworks to establish a fleeting yet provocative relationship with the spaces that hosted them, by emphasizing the radical changes taking place in the city of Tirana. At a time when no other exhibition spaces existed apart from the National Gallery, this pioneering project shifted the focus and reflection onto the city itself and the transformations it was undergoing. After 20 years, how has the image of the city changed? How have the spaces where some of these artistic in­terventions took place been transformed?

This paper will analyse whether and how some of these spaces, used for artistic interventions, have changed over a twenty-year period since the project began. It will seek to understand whether art can serve as a catalyst for change in shaping our perception of urban spaces. Through an analysis of a selection of the most significant interventions carried out within the project 1.60insurgent space, and employing a post-phenomenological approach based on the concept of temporal­ity as a flow inspired by Bergsonian memory—interwoven with the notion of “capitalist realism”—this study will draw parallels with the transformation of public and architectural spaces in the same areas of the city.

The paper will attempt to highlight how the relationship between art and archi­tecture can create a perception of the city’s image that transcends spatial rela­tionships. Instead, this perception becomes layered on a temporal level, shaping how we experience and perceive the city’s vertical and horizontal spaces.

Keywords: art in public space, architecture, city landscape, contemporary art, time dynamics, flux.

Preamble

In the last ten to fifteen years, we have often heard the term “site-specific” used – not only in contexts strictly related to visual arts. What do we mean when we talk about a “site-specific” production? We mean an artwork that has been conceived, de­signed, and created specifically for a particular place, taking into account its characteristics. The term was initially used only in reference to the structural characteristics of the artwork and then – over the decades – due to how art itself was transforming in its techni­ques and practices, the term came to also indicate the social, community, and political characteristics of a place. Each place is composed of a certain combination of specific elements that make it unique: its dimensions, the shape of the spaces that delimit it, the proportions of the space, the surroun­ding buildings, or green spaces, the conditions of light and shadow, venti­lation, distinctive topographical ele­ments, the people who frequent it, its use, its symbolic, social, or political value, and so on. This way of concei­ving the artwork from a new episte­mological point of view emerged star­ting in the sixties-seventies (initially in the United States), as a reaction to minimalism and modernism in gene­ral. The idea of the aseptic, white mu­seum space, which estranges itself from the surrounding reality leaving the artwork in a limbo detached from any other external element, is radical­ly challenged by the materiality of the natural landscape or the impurity of the urban landscape. “The uncontami­nated and pure idealist space of domi­nant modernism was radically displa­ced by the materiality of the natural landscape or the impure and ordinary space of the everyday. And the space of art was no longer perceived as a blank slate, a tabula rasa, but a real place”¹. Consequently, the artwork transforms into an object that must be experienced in a specific place and time, through the physical presence and gaze of each subject, through a sensory approach based on physical immediacy and the temporal duration of the individual experience. Thus, beginning to also build a distinction between public art, which until that moment was represented by the clas­sic idea of a sculpture positioned in a city space, and which often could be an interchangeable space; and art in public space, a new artistic category for which artworks must have unique characteristics specifically linked to the place chosen for their realization. In addition to an epistemological change in the form and realization of the artwork, this approach also contri­butes to a change in the artist’s voca­bulary, who, in order to create their work, must adopt a new set of terms necessary for the understanding and development of the work itself. In addition to the existing verbs: draw­ing, sculpting, rolling, folding, cutting, etc., the artist now had to start from other verbs such as: negotiating, coor­dinating, compromising, organi­zing, interviewing, visiting, etc. This ap­proach ensures that the artwork go­es beyond the object we are obser­ving, the parameters can no longer be only aesthetic, mostly related to the rela­tionships of form and materials used by the artist, but must extend, includ­ing something that is difficult to visu­alize a priori, without having had di­rect experience of the artwork. This is what art critic Suzanne Lacy will af­firm a few decades later at the pre­sentation of one of the most iconic projects related to the production of art in public space “Culture in Acti­on”, realized in Chicago in 1993 and which Lacy herself defines as “new genre public art” and that: “what ex­ists in the space between the words public and art in an unknown relati­onship between artist and audience, a relationship that may itself be the ar­twork”². What is emphasized here is the birth of an almost personal relati­onship between the artist, the artwork, and the public and, we add, the space in which the artwork has been instal­led (or performed).

Visions from a Past Future

At the end of 2003, the author of this paper decided to move to Tirana, initially, just as a life experience, with the intention of returning to Italy later. What immediately struck him was the absence of spaces dedicated to art; at that time, the only exhibition space in Tirana was the National Gallery³. Tirana back then was a very different city from the one we experience to­day. Without delving into whether it was a better or worse city, as that would be a long debate, let’s just say it was a city dealing with different problems compared to today. And it was – as it is today – a city under­going significant changes that were transforming it from an infrastructural point of view and, consequently, also from the perspective of its own image. Most artists frequented the National Gallery, which was effectively also a meeting point due to a kiosk located right in its garden, more or less where Fujimoto’s “The Cloud” is situated today. However, the exhibition offe­rings of the National Gallery were usually disappointing. Not that the quality of the artists wasn’t interes­ting, but compared to the changes tak­ing place in the city, what was hap­pening inside the spaces of the National Gallery was, in our opinion, not as interesting. Our gaze was at­tracted to the city and how its image was changing, and in some way, it was in search of its new identity.

Edi Rama (the current Prime Minister) was the mayor of Tirana at that time, in his first term. His impact on the city’s transformation was mas­sive, starting with the now-famous project of coloring and re-signifying the facades of the facades of buildings in the city center – a project later adopted by various editions of the Tirana Biennale – to the demolition of illegal kiosks that filled the “Parku Rinia” and the rehabilitation of the “Lana” river. The city’s building re­habilitation project gradually tran­sformed over time into a gentrification project that today affects not only the center of Tirana but also its metropoli­tan area and its periphery⁴.

At that time, however, the city was living in a sort of new precarious ba­lance, and it was precisely this aspect that caught our attention. Thus, at the end of 2004, the 1.60insurgent space project was born.

The project aimed to be a sort of urban investigation carried out thro­ugh the contributions of invited artists. Local and international artists, whose artworks had to interact each time with a space in the city that the project appropriated only for the duration of the event. All events could last a ma­ximum of 24 hours, regardless of the type of artwork proposed by the artist, thus equipping the artworks with what we had called at the time an “imper­manent citizenship” because it was ephemeral, extending only for the span of a day at most.

Why create ephemeral events in­stead of proposing to the municipality of Tirana to change the use of some city spaces? Because at that moment it seemed important not to appropriate a space and transform it into an art pro­duction center or an exhibition center, but rather to show the creative or ima­ginative potential of spaces that pe­ople used daily for their activities, errands, or leisure. Considering an approach to “art as a system of social actions and considers artefacts like people, that is, endowed with the po­wer to affect and be affected and hence as relational beings”⁵.

This approach recalls that particu­lar relationship – previously men­tioned and clarified by Suzanne Lacy – that is established between the viewer, the artwork, and the space in which the work is installed or per­formed. A relationship that, according to the American artist and theorist, can itself become the subject of the art­work and is of interest to us because it generates a particular temporality, derived from various factors, which we could summarize in the idea of encounter, in the sense of an almost casual appointment between viewer and artwork; what we might also call an epiphany, the revelation of the es­sence of things. A temporality based on the idea of “duration” according to Henri Bergson’s notion. According to the French philosopher, the time measured by scientists through in­creasingly sophisticated machinery is a spatialization of time, a homogene­ous repetition of identical units. Dura­tion, as understood by Bergson, is instead what living beings experience in the form of a continuous internal flow and transformation, it is pure consciousness, “Inner duration is the continuous life of a memory which prolongs the past into the present”⁶.

According to the vision of the French philosopher, time is thus dis­tinguished into external or spatialized time, that is, quantitative, and internal time, or duration, that is, qualitative. We will use this vision as the basic notion on which to build our meth­odological approach for the analysis of the artworks created during the 1.60 insurgent space project and the subse­quent transformations – still ongoing – of those same spaces in the city of Tirana where the project’s events were held.

Spaces, Actions and Transfor­mations

1.60insurgent space lasted exactly 20 months, from January 2005 to Sep­tember 2006. 47 events were realized in various locations throughout the city, at a rate of approximately 3 events per month (excluding August of both years). The areas where the artworks were created ranged from the city center to the outskirts. The spaces were chosen differently depending on the invited artist; sometimes they were directly suggested by the artists, espe­cially when they were Albanian art­ists, in other cases, they were chosen by us. The selection was made accord­ing to various criteria; they could be spaces that had symbolism within the city’s memory (the base of the Stalin statue in the square in front of the tex­tile factory named after the Soviet politician in Kombinat, in the western outskirts of Tirana); or spaces that were used daily and for this reason were “popular” spaces (such as the city’s large market, Tregu i madh), or spaces that were already undergoing change (the ruins of a bar in the gar­den of the Academy of Fine Arts of Tirana demolished by the Municipali­ty because it was illegal).

In this paper, we will analyze four events held during the 1.60insurgent space project, which involved various areas of the city. Areas that have a precise significance in the history of the city and its socio-political devel­opments.

The projects analyzed in this paper were all carried out along the longitu­dinal axis of the Boulevard, which extends from the university campus in the south to the point where, until a few years ago, the railway station stood, now demolished to make way for the extension of the Boulevard that connects to the new ring road. We have decided to highlight the events and architectural and urban changes along this axis because this is the symbolic place of most of the events that have marked the modern history of Albania and not just Tirana.

The first event we analyze is the artwork titled “Memory” created by the Italian artist Salvatore Falci on September 19, 2005, in Skenderbeg Square. The project originates from an autobiographical fact about the artist, whose mother was Albanian from Shiroka. The woman, married to an Italian Navy officer stationed in Albania during the Italian occupation of Albanian territory, follows the man to Italy, never to return to Albanian soil. The artist thus uses the concept of memory as the basis of his project. He asks to work with a group of students from the Academy of Fine Arts of Tirana (now the University of Arts), selected through a call. He makes the students reflect on the meaning of memory and the idea of memory that the city itself contains, not only as in Lynch’s vision of a “time machine”⁷ due to the juxtaposition of buildings constructed in different eras; but above all as personal memory, what Bergson defines as “qualitative time”⁸, a time that is closely linked to our per­sonal life experience and mediated by our body, by our being in space. In fact, “the body stabilizes the mnemon­ic data through habit and intensifies it through emotions that can be consid­ered ambivalent in themselves: they can indeed serve as a guarantee of authenticity, as well as a reason for falsification”⁹.

For this reason, the artist is accom­panied around the streets and neigh­borhoods of Tirana by the group of young girls and boys, asking them to share their memories of those spaces. Where they had their first kiss, where they meet with their friends, where they go when they want to be alone, where their parents took them to buy sweets, and so on. Subsequently, he asks the students to draw these mne­monic maps, which transform a city into their own city, a space that is no longer public in the sense collectively defined by the UN Habitat, in The Charter of Public Space, which de­fines Public Spaces as “all places pub­licly owned or of public use, accessi­ble and enjoyable by all for free and without a profit motive”¹⁰. But a space that transforms almost into a private, personal, intimate space, and it doesn’t matter if the mnemonic data is incorrect. The “other” is a fundamen­tal element in Falci’s production and in this case, it is present as a conscious and intense relationship between the artist and the participants. The artwork is closely tied to their relationship, to the trust that will be established be­tween them, in that famous unknown and unfathomable data mentioned earlier. The artwork will be this rela­tionship, visualized through “imper­manent maps”, drawn on the pave­ment of Skanderbeg Square with chalk first and then traced with water afterward. The water used over the chalk erases it, making those maps visible only until they dry completely. Once erased, those moments and those Tirana will exist only in the minds of those who participated in this experience.

The place chosen to visualize these maps and return them – albeit for a very short period of time – to the pub­lic and to the people who happened to be passing through the square at that moment is not accidental. During the days of work with the artist and the students, careful thought was given to what could be the ideal place to hold the event, and the choice of Skanderbeg Square has to do with the history of the place and its symbolism. Throughout its history, the square has changed its shape and structure many times. During the performance con­ceived by Salvatore Falci, Skanderbeg Square was a sort of elongated oval that opened in the northern part of the axis created by the Boulevard that connected the University Campus (southern end) with the Train Station (northern end). In this oval surrounded mostly by public buildings, we find the corpus of some ministries built in the 1930s, continuing along the west­ern part there is the Puppet Theater and the National Bank, and in the northwest part of the square, the National Historical Museum. On the other side of the Museum, in the northeast part of the square, is the Tirana International Hotel (built in 1979 and modernized in 2001), con­tinuing clockwise we find the Palace of Culture (inaugurated in 1963), fol­lowed by the Et’hem Bey Mosque and the Clock Tower (both completed in the 19th century), closing the square, we find the building that houses the offices of the Municipality of Tirana.

The inner part of the square was a sort of large space that opened in the south with another semi-oval used as a green space that ended with the eques­trian statue of the Albanian national hero, Gjergj Kastrioti Skënderbeu (built in 1968). The center of the square was a sort of empty, pedestrian space, closed on the sides following the perimeter of the semi-oval of the green space – in order to prevent car circulation inside – and ended with a superellipse that contained a series of fountains arranged according to a sort of secondary axis within the main axis of the Boulevard.

The “impermanent maps” were created precisely in that empty space, and in our view, it is significant that this space was chosen, considering the transformation of the square at the time of writing this article (2025); thus becoming a sort of anticipation of the urban form that the square would take, a space erased that persists only in the city’s memory. “To discuss how ur­ban forms anticipates means to distin­guish the technical and the political on the one hand and reveal their compo­sition or tendency at certain junctures on the other, through a retroactive reading of what did not have to neces­sarily happen”¹¹. Indeed, there are a series of technical and political rea­sons that led to the definition of to­day’s Skanderbeg Square. The urban plan by Armando Brasini in 1925 – which followed the first urban plan of the city of Tirana by two years, creat­ed by Austrian architects and engi­neers – was the first to redesign and reconceptualize the city center, de­signing it as a sort of walled city along the perimeter of the main axis. Brasini’s plan also included the design of today’s Skanderbeg Square, which the architect designed inspired by St. Peter’s Square in Rome, as a large empty space surrounded (at the time) by neo-Renaissance style buildings. Despite the small transformations that occurred during the communist re­gime and the subsequent alternating urban plans, Skanderbeg Square has always maintained this semi-oval structure surrounded by buildings. In 2008, the Belgian studio 51N4E, in collaboration with the Albanian artist Anri Sala, won a public competition for the renovation of Skanderbeg Square. Although the project was aborted following a change in the city’s administration¹², it was later resumed (with the Socialist Party’s victory in the 2015 municipal elec­tions) and completed in 2017. The project involved transforming the en­tire surface of the square, about 40,000 square meters, into a pedestri­an space surrounded – or perhaps bet­ter said, isolated from the rest of the city – by plants and trees and made with a variety of stones from different areas of Albania, whose juxtaposed pattern creates a sort of mosaic, with openings functioning as ground foun­tains. The entire square has the shape of a flat pyramid that, in Sala’s origi­nal idea, was supposed to bring citi­zens, at its peak, to the same height as the equestrian statue of the national hero. For technical reasons, the max­imum height of the pyramid is actual­ly 1.8 meters from the base, so not enough to really reach the height of the statue, although in the description of the square on the architectural stu­dio’s website, the role of the pyramid is shifted as a counterbalance to the architecture “The oppressive monu­mentality of communist architecture is counteracted by the ample and low pyramid making up the square: when standing as its tip, the citizens find themselves on a par with the authori­tarian architecture of the past”¹³. It is clear how the analysis of the square was hasty and superficial, because it is actually a stratification of different eras, times, and architectural styles, which cannot all be traced back to communist architecture. Moreover, surprisingly, the paving of the square, in the mosaic-like pattern, produces an image, a pattern, that exactly recalls that type of “authoritarian” architec­ture that the project intended to de­monize.

Another consequence of this – pre­sumed – visual reset produced by the square¹⁴ is the rise – just like an earth­quake causing a tsunami – of a series of new buildings all around the square itself, which make the void even more evident, in mathematical terms, the negative of Skanderbeg Square’s lev­el. These buildings are explicitly a consequence of the new vision of the square, as cited by the architects themselves “The green belt around the square is made up of 12 gardens, each of them linked to one or more of the public or private institutions lining the square”¹⁵. The effect of preparation for this rise indeed extends well be­yond the perimeter of the pedestrian area of the square, and the effects are visible transversely, both along the west side and the east side.

Precisely in the eastern part of Skanderbeg Square, on May 22, 2006, the German artist Kirsten Pieroth per­formed a piece as part of the 1.60insurgent space program events. The peculiarity – as happened in other events of the project – is that the per­formance was an almost private ges­ture with no invited audience, no in­auguration, or scheduled time. The performance in this case is a fortuitous appointment with a place and time, dealing with the concept of “contin­gency”, which overturns the reassur­ing idea of reason and rationality: “in­stead of thinking of contingency as a modality of or an exception to the necessary, one must think of necessity as the becoming-necessary of contin­gent encounters”¹⁶, as expressed by Louis Althusser. By reversing the formula, it is the idea of a contingent encounter, with a person, a place, or an event, through which we can ex­pand our perception of reality and what we consider “coherent.” This is a necessary premise to understand the artistic research and performance car­ried out in Tirana by the German artist Kirsten Pieroth, which is, in fact, the continuation of a similar and opposite action that the artist performed at the First Tirana Biennale in 2001. On that occasion, the artist transferred water from a puddle in Berlin to Tirana, pumping rainwater from a common puddle on a street in the city’s out­skirts into several large jerrycan, which she then transported to Tirana and poured onto the floor of one of the Biennale’s exhibition spaces. The work in this case had a well-defined place and time, those of the National Gallery of Tirana during the exhibi­tion period; despite maintaining its invisible nature because it blended well with the surrounding environ­ment. The puddle indeed seemed to have been naturally caused by water leaking from a damaged roof.

Five years later, when the artist was again invited by 1.60 insurgent space to develop an artwork in the city of Tirana, a puddle took the opposite direction. On the chosen day, the artist brought three large empty jerrycans and a pump purchased in Tirana and began to wander around the city in search of the magical encounter. The encounter happened precisely along the transverse line east of Skanderbeg Square, right near the point in the city then known as “Ushtari i Panjohur” (the unknown soldier), which also became the title of the artwork. Here, the artist found a large puddle that she decided was the right one for the per­formance. After an hour of perfor­mance, the puddle was emptied and the jerrycans were filled with water. The puddle from Tirana was then sub­sequently shipped to Berlin and poured again onto the floor of an ex­hibition space.

In her artistic practice, Kirsten Pieroth uses everyday objects, situa­tions, and activities, isolating them from their original environment and placing them in a different context. This displacement causes a shift in the interpretation of objects or situations in our reality, making us lose the cer­tainty of the habitual perspective that has been attributed to them. In the words of Nikola Dietrich, the curator invited to curate that specific event of 1.60insurgent space, “The de-placement and transportation of some­thing short-lived, taken out from the domestic environment seems to be an absurd attempt of preserving a specific landscape formation – as if a shadow would be mentioned as something specific for a geographic environ­ment”¹⁷. The objects born from Pieroth’s actions can no longer be identified based on their shape, func­tion, or use; instead, they refer to mul­tiple readings, strange systems of ref­erence, and absurd chains of associa­tions.

That point in the city, “Ushtari i Panjohur”, was used by the citizens of Tirana as a reference point for people who needed a worker. A sort of open-air employment office, where those looking for work would go, some even equipped with their own tools, to offer their labor to those in need. The tsunami caused by the transformation of Skanderbeg Square also changed this place, which is only 260 meters from the square. Today, the monu­ment that identifies this spot in the city has been almost entirely engulfed by the buffer zone of trees that isolates Skanderbeg Square from the rest of the city and has completely lost its function. One might argue that this could be seen as a moment of qualita­tive growth in the city’s social life, and certainly, this objection would be valid if Albania had improved the basic social conditions of its citizens and workers in the meantime. In reali­ty, like being swept away by the force of a wave, the people who sold their labor have only been pushed further away, to a less central area.

The consequences of the transfor­mations of Tirana’s image, this “dark side” of its changes, always fall on a certain category of people, once re­ferred to as the “class dimension” – a term now deliberately put out of use in political language – since it is usually the marginalized or the poor who pay the highest price for these transfor­mations. “The absorption of surplus through urban transformations also has a dark side. It has indeed involved numerous phases of urban restructur­ing through “creative destruction”“¹⁸. This notion of “creative destruction” systematically used by Georges-Eugène Haussmann when Bonaparte entrusted him with the direction of urbanization works in Paris in 1853, is absolutely visible – with due scales and proportions – in the contemporary transformation of Tirana’s image. Everything starts and develops from the south-north axis of the Boulevard, and from Skanderbeg Square, it ex­pands in the form of disturbance brought by the wave propagation caused by the square’s transformation.

Moving along the southern axis, we find the Pyramid, originally con­ceived as a museum for the dictator. Erected in 1988 (three years after Hoxha’s death) and co-designed by Enver Hoxha’s son-in-law Klement Kolaneci along with Pirro Vaso, Vladimir Bregu, and the dictator’s daughter Pranvera Hoxha. In 1991, the Pyramid was used as a congress center named after Pjeter Arbnori¹⁹, in 1992 it became the National Cultural Center, and in the following years, it hosted various fairs and also several private commercial activities, such as a radio station, the studios of a private Albanian television, and in the 2000s, even some bars on the south side of the building.

From above, the Pyramid has a plan that extends from a circular cen­ter, at the top of which there was a star (symbol of the Communist Party), with rays of varying lengths that seem to mimic the irradiation of light from the center. This structure allowed nat­ural light to enter from all sides of the building and also from a dome at the top, which filtered additional light through its glass cover. The entire building is made of reinforced con­crete originally covered with white marble and has a maximum height of 21 meters at the center. The sides of the pyramid, interspersed with cuts filled with a system of rectangular windows, which also follow a radial composition around a central axis of rotation, develop following a slope, also variable, which in the front part of the structure directly connects the base of the pyramid with its center at the top, as Kolaneci himself explains in an interview “In a classic building we have a roof and vertical lines, which are the walls. We simply joined the diagonals and what in a classic building is a wall, here starts as a wall and ends as a covering”²⁰ .The build­ing has a strong connection between the exterior and interior despite its strong visual presence, “Observing the pyramid, especially from above, we made sure it harmonized with the shape of Mount Dajti. At the same time, it was not built as a building with a limited function, but as an open shell from the inside”²¹.

Its presence in the urban fabric has always sparked debates about its in­tended use, until 2010 when the then Democratic Party government led by Sali Berisha decided to demolish it to make way for a building that would house the new Albanian Parliament. An international ideas competition was announced, welcoming various proposals for the construction of the new parliament building, but at the same time, protests against the demo­lition of the pyramid multiplied. The Socialist Party led by Edi Rama rode the wave of protests, making the ren­ovation of the Pyramid one of the programmatic points of its govern­ment should it win the political elec­tions to be held in 2013. When the Socialist Party indeed won those elec­tions, the first Rama government²² repealed the decree-law previously approved by the Berisha government for the demolition of the Pyramid, promising its renovation and new in­tended use. In this case too, an inter­national ideas competition was an­nounced, the winner of which was the Dutch studio MVRDV (Winy Maas, Jacob van Rijs, and Nathalie de Vries).

The intervention of the Dutch stu­dio, although it maintained the origi­nal plan of the Pyramid, completely revolutionized its structure, especially through the addition of several paral­lelepipeds around, inside, and above the pyramid itself. The boxes give the impression of a temporary and almost random installation, seeming to follow no rhythm, no proportion to the origi­nal architecture, with no attempt to make them dialogue even from the point of view of pure geometric forms. The choice of flashy colors for the boxes reinforces the sense of loss of the symbolic strength that this place emanated. After all, on the homepage of the MVRDV website, we are greet­ed with this statement “We create Happy and Adventurous Places”²³, and there is no doubt that this building is “adventurous” in its being a mix of shapes and colors, which has – crea­tively – destroyed the symbolic strength that the Pyramid emanated.

On June 29, 2005, Spanish artist Alejandro Vidal carried out his inter­vention for 1.60 insurgent space, right in the square in front of the pyramid. The project titled “Disrupted Noise Terror” was a reflection on the origi­nal tension between street violence, nationalistic wars, and electronic sub­cultures that claimed to be buried along with the totalitarian regimes that characterized not only Albania but the entire Eastern European bloc. The event included the projection of a vid­eo on a screen, already positioned at that time above the entrance of the pyramid, which was used by night­clubs for the projection of soccer matches and music videos. The video depicted a fight between two boys, slowed down to dramatize and make visible the violence present in the eve­ryday gestures of contemporary socie­ty, bringing the viewer into the folds of that violence. Parallel to the video projection, a performance was also taking place. During the performance a mix of Turbo-Folk songs was heard from the lowered windows of a Mercedes-Benz 300TD W123 Station Wagon driven by two boys dressed in military camouflage. Every visual element of the performance had a symbolic reference to the Balkan world and more generally to the East­ern European bloc. The Mercedes rep­resents one of the stereotypes for iden­tifying people from the Balkans, the soldiers are another symbol of milita­rization and the continuous fratricidal wars that characterized the late 90s and early 2000s, especially in the ter­ritory of the former Yugoslavia; Turbo-Folk music represents the capi­talist trivialization of popular music “Extremely mediatic, Turbo-Folk is one of the faces with which the sup­posed internationalization and Open­ing of the cultures of the East conceals the processes of economic and sym­bolic domination from the West under the promise of overcoming the post-Yugoslav cartographic isolation”²⁴. As in all political and social struggles, the inversion of the symbolism of the pyr­amid is the spectacle of resistance to our contemporary world, rather than the glorification of its past.

The last intervention we will ana­lyze in this article starts from what – as mentioned earlier – until a few years ago, was the northernmost point of the south-north longitudinal Boulevard of Tirana, the railway sta­tion (Stacioni i trenit). The artwork is titled “Next Text” – part of a larger series titled “The Walking Project” conceived by Macedonian artist Verica Kovacevska²⁵.

The performance took place on August 30, 2006, and the starting point was the Tirana Railway Station. The action unfolded as follows: the artist – on her first-ever visit to Tirana – chose the railway station as the start­ing point because the bus from Skopje ended its route there. From that mo­ment on, for a predetermined period of two hours, anyone could send an SMS to the Albanian number provid­ed to the artist, which was printed on flyers inviting people to interact with the project. In a bar in the ex-block neighborhood (ish Blloku²⁶), through a map updated in real-time, the public could follow the artist’s movements through the city and, at the same time, send an SMS with a direction the artist should take. The SMS texts were sim­ple, containing only the direction: “forward, backward, right, left”. The artist wanted to reflect on how “In today’s society the concept of person­al freedom is often being disputed. On the one hand we feel free, but on the other hand we feel limited by different factors such as nature, technology, other people, society and its institu­tions. We often feel like puppets, be­ing controlled by these factors in the way we think, feel or act”²⁷. These are indeed some of the themes around which Verica Kovacevska’s research develops: urban design, inclusion, and technology. During the action, the artist literally transforms into a puppet in the hands of the audience, who de­cide where to make her go and how to move within the city. For example, for over twenty minutes, the artist re­mained “stuck” along Rr. Fortuzi, a small street that cuts across Rr. e Durrësit, because people enjoyed making her reach the end of the street and then go back and forth. Except for these moments of blockage, the per­formance was an opportunity for the artist to see parts of the city that – on a guided tour – she would never have seen. Alleys, neighborhoods, glimpses that are part of the essence of what was the atmosphere of Tirana in those years. A sort of Situationist dérive, but dystopian, because the journey within the city is dictated by the will of oth­ers, while in the Lettrist/Situationist practice, this type of city exploration serves to free oneself from the im­posed image of modern cities, to find moments, places, and spaces per­ceived and consequently used by peo­ple in an absolutely personal way. In the definition of psychogeography given by Guy Debord and defined as “The study of the specific effects of the geographical environment (wheth­er consciously or not) on the emotions and behavior of individuals”²⁸ this transformation of the perception of the surrounding environment, in our spe­cific case, the urban environment, transforms the city into a space where even distances assume a relative val­ue, linked to internal emotions, rather than metrically measurable data: “One measures the distances that actually separate two regions of a city, distanc­es that may have little relation with the physical distance between them”²⁹. Therefore, the performance, more than a journey within the “known” space measured by the daily actions repeated in the urban space, should be read as a sensory investigation, where space and time are in an altered rela­tionship due to the perceptions of the contingent moment, even if guided by someone else.

The performance – as mentioned earlier – starts from the Railway Sta­tion and then continues along the Boulevard in a southerly direction, subsequently developing in the neigh­borhoods of Tirana, ending at Wilson Square (Sheshi Wilson) in a southwest direction from the Boulevard. The first direction sent via SMS to the art­ist was – almost – mandatory, at least perceptually “forward”, because in front of the artist the axis of the Boulevard opened up, while behind her the direction was closed due to the fact that behind her was – indeed – the Railway Station.

In the overlapping of Masterplans designed over its 105 years of history as the capital of Albania, the one pro­posed by the English studio Grimshaw proposed the demolition of the Railway Station and the consequent extension of the Boulevard for an ad­ditional three kilometers, in order to connect the artificial lake, located at the end of the Boulevard axis to the south, behind what is now the univer­sity corpus, with the artificial lake of Paskuqan, positioned north along the Boulevard axis, in order to transform Tirana into “a city of two rivers, and two lakes”³⁰ as stated in the master­plan project proposed by the English studio.

That masterplan will not be fully realized, but the idea of extend­ing the Boulevard will be implement­ed during Erion Veliaj’s first term as mayor of Tirana, in 2015. Today, that section of the Boulevard is undergo­ing urban redevelopment and trans­formation, which quickly turned into gentrification. After the end of the communist regime, in fact, the various Albanian governments never attempt­ed to invest in the development of an efficient railway network to favor the large private economic interests of the oil companies operating in the coun­try. The informal urban area that de­veloped over the years right in the area of the former Railway Station is now being dismantled piece by piece to make way for new residential build­ings at prices inaccessible to the peo­ple currently living in that area – and for most people living in Albania to­day – increasingly pushing masses of people outward, bringing with them situations, markets, small shops, and so on.

Conclusions: Temporal Atlas

This look from the future through which we have analyzed some events carried out within the 1.60insurgent space project and the consequent transformations of those city areas allows us to make some reflections about the city and our perception of it. Starting from the very definition of “space” according to the sensory ap­proach described by Arnheim, accord­ing to which “Although space, once is established, is experienced as an al­ways present self-sufficient given, the experience is generated only through the interrelation of objects. […] Space perception occurs only in the presence of perceivable things”³¹. Space ap­pears to be an element we can experi­ence only through “perceivable things”, thus physical elements with which we can interact, through which we can “position ourselves” both phe­nomenologically, through our physi­cal presence in that place, and imagi­natively through what the environ­ment itself returns to us in terms of memory and emotions.

In this sense, the relationship that develops between a work of art specif­ically designed for a place (whether ephemeral or permanent) goes beyond a physical relationship of harmony of proportions or dialogue of materials and forms. This relationship is also structured at the level of “time”, not mechanically measurable through a clock, but, as previously clarified in this article, through the “duration” of the relationship we establish with the work of art and the architectural ob­ject or urban environment where the artwork is placed. This space-time relationship coincides with what Lefebvre defines as social space, “(Social) space is not a thing among other things, nor a product among other products: rather it subsumes things produced, and encompasses their interrelationships in their coex­istence and simultaneity – their (rela­tive) order and/or (relative) disor­der”³². It is precisely in the interrela­tion between artwork, architectural object, urban space, and human pres­ence that their coexistence becomes the perception of a “duration”; in oth­er words, it is in our prolonging the memory of the perception of that con­tingent encounter that we have the possibility of making the past coexist in our present. Only in this way can we have the possibility of rereading the changes taking place in the city of Tirana through the liminal space left open by the artistic interventions that have followed one another on it, on a cartography of which now remains visual memory only through the im­ages we can recover – and use – from our memory.

All the artworks we have analyzed in this article, although site-specific, already suggest different times and spaces from the space (and time) in which they were realized. Think of “Memory” by Salvatore Falci, the col­lective artwork created with the col­laboration of a group of students from the Academy of Fine Arts of Tirana. Drawing on the pavement of Skenderbeg Square maps of a Tirana that exists only in connection with the emotions that the participants experi­enced in certain areas of the city shifts the public’s perception to spaces and times that no longer coincide with the space and time of the performance. Kirsten Pieroth’s private action, “Ushtari i Panjohur”, realised precise­ly in the place from which it takes its title, already has in its origin the dis­placement of a genius loci from one place to another, with the consequent overlapping of different levels of time and space from those of the original, making us reflect on those “perceiva­ble things” that belong to certain plac­es and times and the fragility of this statement. Alejandro Vidal’s artwork “Disrupted Noise Terror” overlays a place – the pyramid – which in its genesis was supposed to represent the idea of the “immortality” of the Alba­nian dictator, with various symbols, the soldiers, Turbo-Folk music, the slow-motion fight in the video, which visualize spaces and times that are not properly functioning at the moment of the performance. This creates a senso­ry shift in relation to our position and our being in a specific place and time; the same process set in motion by Verica Kovacevska’s performance “Next Text” in her forced exploration of the city of Tirana, dictated by the will of other people who are in anoth­er place, but who determine the times of her movements and her waits.

What, then, is the role of art in re­defining the image of a city? Or more specifically, of a city like Tirana, at the center of enormous real estate speculation and strong gentrification? We believe that it is precisely the abil­ity to create those liminal spaces that are the true generators of that “dura­tion”, which allows us to overlay the levels of urbanization with another level whose characteristics of trans­parency and adaptability function like a gravitational field. A field that acts among the “perceivable things” with the ability to attract them, push them away, modify them; thus drawing a perceptual palimpsest, thanks to which we can see – and use – even the now erased levels of the city in which we move every day.

Notes

• Kwon, One place after another: site-specific art and locational identity, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2002, p. 11.
• Lacy, Cultural Pilgrimages and Metaphoric Journeys, Edited by Suzanne Lacy, Bay Press, Seattle, 1995, p. 19.
• At the time of writing this paper, the National Gallery is closed for restora­tion and redesign of its spaces follow­ing damage from a major earthquake that struck Albania in November 2019.
• At the time of writing this paper, Edi Rama is Prime Minister and the mayor of Tirana is Erion Veliaj, On February 10, 2025, he was arrested by SPAK on 9 charges of corruption and money laundering, and is currently being held in the Durrës Detention Center.
• M, Mollona, Art Commons – Anthropology Beyond Capitalism, Zed Books, Bloombsbury Publishing Plc., London, 2021, p.
• Bergson, An introduction to Metaphysics, The Knickerbocker Press, New York and London, 1903, p. 44.
• Lynch, L’immagine della città, Marsilio Editori, Venezia, 1964 [2006].
• Bergson, An introduction to Metaphysics, The Knickerbocker Press, New York and London, 1903, p. 46.
• Assmann, Ricordare. Forme e mutamenti della memoria culturale, Il Mulino, Bologna, 2002, p. 22.
• Biennale Spazio Pubblico, Biennale Spazio Pubblico, May 16, 2013, (Accessed March 29, 2025). http://www.biennalespaziopubblico.it/outputs/the-charter-of-public-space/.
• Luarasi, “The Life and Death of Skanderbeg Square: A Chronicle of an Undoing Foretold, in a Hundred Years”, Future Anterior: Journal of Historic Preservation History, Theory, and Criticism, 19 (1): 2022, pp. 126-148.
• In the period from 2011 to 2015, the city was under the administration of the Democratic Party, and namely by Lulzim Basha.
• 51N4E, Skanderbeg Square, 2018. Accessed March 29, 2025. https://51n4e.com/projects/skanderbeg-square.
• The author owes this idea of visual reset to PhD. Skender Luarasi, which he expressed in his illuminating article: “The Life and Death of Skenderbeg Square: A Chronicle of an Undoing Foretold, in a Hundred Years”. Also quoted earlier in this article.
• 51N4E, Skanderbeg Square, 2018. Accessed March 29, 2025. https://51n4e.com/projects/skanderbeg-square.
• Althusser, quoted in (J. Till, Architecture Depends, The MIT Press, Cambridge/London, p. 55) originally quoted in J. Read, “A Universal History of Contingency: Deleuze and Guattari on the History of Capitalism,” Borderlands 2, no. 3, 2003.
• From the Press Release of Kirsten Pieroth’s event for 1.60insurgent space, 22 May 2006.
• Harvey, Il capitalismo contro il diritto alla città, Ombre corte, Verona, 2013, p. 26.
• Pjeter Arbnori (Durres, 18 January 1935 – Naples, 8 July 2006) was an Albanian politician, writer and activist.
• Kolaneci: Forma e Piramidës, në harmoni me malin e Dajtit. n.d. Wayback Machine. Accessed April 4, 2025. https://web.archive.org/web/20140224113116/http://www.balkanweb.com/gazetav5/newsadmin/preview.php?id=55071
• Ibid.
• At the time of writing this article, Rama is running for his fourth term in office, in the general election to be held on 11 May 2025.
• https://www.mvrdv.com/
• Joaquin Barriendos R, from the Press Release of Alejandro Vidal’s event for 1.60insurgent space, 29 June 2005.
• https://www.kovacevska.net/the-walk-ing-project For the sake of completeness, on 15 September 2006, another artist, the Italian Emma Ciceri, realised a performance entitled “Rails” right along the tracks of Tirana Railway Station. The performance was part of the day of events that closed the 60insurgent space project.
• An area of the city of Tirana to which, during the regime, access was forbidden to the entire population, because it housed the residences of the dictator and the Central Committee of the Albanian Communist Party.
• Verica Kovacevska, from the Press Release of the event, 30 August 2006.
• Debord, in K. Knabb, Situationist International Anthology, Edited by Ken Knabb, PM Press, Binghamton, New York, 2024, p. 52.
• Ibidem, 66.
• Grimshaw, Architecs, Tirana master plan / Grimshaw, 2015. Accessed April 13, 2025. https://grimshaw.global/proje cts/master-planning/tirana-master-plan/
• Arnheim, The Dynamics of Architectural Form, University of California Press, Berkley and Los Angeles, California, 1977, p. 10.
• Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Blackwell, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1974, p. 73.

Bibliography

Books

ARNHEIM, R., The Dynamics of Architectural Form, University of California Press, Berkley and Los Angeles, California, 1977.

ASSMANN, A., Ricordare. Forme e mutamenti della memoria culturale, Il Mulino, Bologna, 2002.

BERGSON, H., An introduction to Metaphysics, The Knickerbocker Press, New York and London, 1903.

IDEM, Saggio sui dati immediati della coscienza, Cortina, Milano, [1889] 2000.

HARVEY, D., Il capitalismo contro il diritto alla città, Ombre corte, Verona, 2013.

KNABB, K., Situationist International Anthology, Edited by Ken Knabb, PM Press, Binghamton, New York, 2024.

KWON, M., One place after another: site-specific art and locational identity, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2002.

LACY, S., Cultural Pilgrimages and Metaphoric Journeys, Edited by Suzanne Lacy, Bay Press, Seattle, 1995.

LEFEBVRE, H., The Production of Space, Blackwell, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1974.

LYNCH, K., L’immagine della città, Marsilio Editori, Venezia, 1964 [2006].

MOLLONA, M., Art Commons – Anthropology Beyond Capitalism, Zed Books, Bloombsbury Publishing Plc., London, 2021.

TARONI, P., Filosofie del tempo – Il concetto di tempo nella storia del pensiero occidentale, Mimesis  Edizioni, Milano – Udine, 2012.

TILL, J., Architecture Depends, The MIT Press, Cambridge/London, 2009.

Articles and studies

LUARASI, S., “The Life and Death of Skanderbeg Square: A Chronicle of an Undoing Foretold, in a Hundred Years”, Future Anterior: Journal of Historic Preservation History, Theory, and Criticism 19 (1), 2022, pp. 126-148.

Online resources

51N4E, Skanderbeg Square, 2018. Accessed March 29, 2025.

https://51n4e.com/projects/skanderbeg-square

GRIMSHAW, ARCHITECS, Tirana master plan / Grimshaw, 2015, Accessed April 13, 2025.

https://grimshaw.global/projects/master-planning/tirana-master-plan/

KOLANECI: Forma e Piramidës, në harmoni me malin e Dajtit. n.d. Wayback Machine. Accessed April 4, 2025.

https://web.archive.org/web/20140224113116/http://www.balkanweb.com/gazetav5/newsadmin/preview.php?id=55071

BIENNALE SPAZIO PUBBLICO. Biennale Spazio Pubblico, May 16, 2013. Accessed March 29, 2025. http://www.biennalespaziopubblico.it/outputs/the-charter-of-public-space/