20.12.2023 / 18:00h
The photographic series “Between Pattern and Shadow” is a journey into the rediscovery of Tirana’s urban landscape. In a city of unexpected metamorphoses, from the typical neighborhoods with pitched-roof houses to the skyscraping towers, it explores a daily life that the eye accustomed to this sometimes grotesque, sometimes inexplicably beautiful spectacle witnesses without truly seeing it. The fragmented visual pieces captured in the series form encoded symbols, like letters of an alphabet of an unknown language hidden in the secondary streets, where the intimate lives of the residents unfold. Away from propaganda, politics, and recent influxes of tourists, the photographs that make up the series “Between Pattern and Shadow” delve beneath the surface offered to outsiders. It tells the truths hidden behind the fences of houses, the networks of electrical cables, and the insecure working conditions of laborers inside construction sites.In the labyrinths formed by these fantastic patterns and shades, is possible to decipher the narrative of a city ceaselessly striving to bury and transcend its own history. Guided by the ethos of renewal and the influence of capitalism shaping the urban landscape, this photographic essay by Olson Lamaj emerges as a love story dedicated to a fragmented Tirana.
Blerta Hoçia