Albania 2018

Title: “HAPËSIRA ZERO SPACE”
Commissioner: Mirela Kumbaro, Minister of Culture of the Republic of Albania
Author / Architects: VARKA Arkitekturë, commonsense.studio, Fablab Tirana
Curator: Elton Koritari – EJAlbum

Tirana’s “ZeroSpace” is presented in this installation through a sensorial experience created by composing elements that aim to include all the senses and guide the visitor in a journey perceiving the free space and true essence of the city. The concept behind the installation encompasses a transversal movement: urbanisation of the world – as an important aspect of globalisation – with the utopias and dystopias that it produces. Societies are born, transformed, developed, trying increasingly to become integrated among “places” or “non-places”, while instruments that control their interaction constantly strengthen. These spaces are intertwined into urban contexts where anthropological spaces swap places with instrumental non-contextual ones created by an almost-contractual relationship. We live in a time when people cannot move their surplus of human development towards “no man’s land”. On the other hand, the moving of people is causing “urban congestions” exactly because modernisation is not anymore, a privilege of only a part of the world. The Albanian Pavilion transforms itself into a gravitational centre that pulls on utopias – those utopias that have the human experience-by-architecture in their core.

The Biennale can be the pretext for a tribute to a city that though runs normally towards its modernisation and transformation into a “Generic City”, jealously preserves its bottom-up antibodies-elements that still foster it from becoming “Junkspace”. Tirana has no resemblance to a “non-place” or “Utopia” (claimed by Thomas Moore as the definition of an imaginary place, a metaphysical one, that does not exist in reality), but in our interpretation, we intentionally shift it into another ancient Greek word “Eutopia” – a good place, a place that makes you feel good, makes you visit it, experience it. It is by this phenomenal diptych that we introduce our Eutopian Tirana.

The Albanian Pavilion opens its comfortable doors, full of colours, sounds, scents and shades of Tirana, in the 16th International Biennale of Architecture!