Pasqyra e Lëndës (Sommario)
This project made of fragmentary images I have taken over the past six years between Albania, Greece, and Italy, is presented here as a metaphor that invites the viewer to reflect on the circularity of time and history, between the overlap of disparate geographies and the intimacy of a complex meditative landscape, paradoxically arise the conflict between generations in perpetual motion.
By focusing on politics and landscape, I want to draw attention to the significance of diaspora and its impact on the environment. In this series of photographs sublime atmospheres appears and disappears, some places has been transfigured, in some other we find rituals that shows a tension within the landscape, offering a double gaze, and building together a sort of archaeology of the outdated memory of the exile.
The exile is a detached figure, it escapes the coordinates of time, strike it, is continuously out of sync, ejected from the ancestral lands, this exotic figure embodies displaced memory, opening up to the creation of the myth resting somewhere through the truth and distortion. And memory became the sarcophagus from which emerge amorphous structures that tear apart the space of the visible, and the white shroud of photographic paper here becomes the sum of utopias lived and recounted a thousand times, shadows that wreck on the beach of memory like the relict of a ship.
Project fetured in Giovane Fotografia Italiana #12 | UNIRE / BRIDGING
BIO
Erdiola Kanda Mustafaj
Erdiola Kanda Mustafaj is an albanian/italian visual artist. In her artistic research she combines image, video, writing and sound with extreme fluidity, tracing the troubled history of her country in a narrative that is intertwined with oral tradition, myth and fairy tale, offering a personal vision of Albania’s spiritual heritage.
Her works are mainly articulated in a deeply relationship with the space, and its transformation, in which raw material and human create a connection, inseparable, shaping each other without hierarchies of values.
The photographic act become then an intimate process, a metamorphosis of forms in relation to space and time, mainly looking to different ways we embody memory.
In 2019 she exhibited at Arthouse and Marubi National museum of photography in Albania and most recently participated in the residency held by Photoxenia in Greece, supported by the G&A Mamidakis Foundation. In 2024 she was a finalist in the Ardhje Contemporary Art Prize in Tirana and in early 2025 she opened a solo exhibition at Kunst-im-kreuzgang, Bielefeld (Germany). She is currently part of the Reflexions 2.0 masterclass.