EJAlbum – La Biennale di Venezia 2018 – Zero Space

The 16th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice will open on 26 May 2018, closing on 25 November 2018. “La Biennale di Venezia” was founded in 1893. The Architecture Exhibition dates its first edition to 1980 and this year is in its 16th edition. An audience of over 300 thousand visitors is expected, preceded by another 15 thousand visitors during the first days of the opening.

Over 4 thousand journalists and 90 news agencies cover the press, documenting 65 national pavilions, 71 international architecture studios, 16 collateral projects, 13 workshops, 3 special projects, 20 important meetings among architects, etc. More than 150 universities from all over the world are also accredited, and the international presence creates an extraordinarily wide resonance chamber, with an echo truly unmatched by any other event of this kind.

The project for the Albanian pavilion is called “Zero Space” and aims to stimulate a broader involvement of citizens with the perception of public space and to raise the awareness of citizens and city administrators about this phenomenon, which directly and indirectly affects the quality of citizens’ lives. The project has passed several selection phases in a public competition, is commissioned by the Ministry of Culture, has the support of the Municipality of Tirana and is implemented by 4 studios; Varka Arkitekturë, commonsense.studio, Fablab Tirana and of course EJAlbum could not be missing.

Art critics as well as architects, urban planners, but also philosophers, sociologists, intellectuals in general, bear responsibility and take active part in the “negotiations” between culture and the economic, political and social communities. It is concretely a matter of giving a form and a model to our way of living and of proposing this at the level of the city, the country and, why not, even wider. Our installation translates and interprets the momentary nature of Tirana’s life, captures a moment of its flux and hands it over to the Biennale’s public. We think that nothing better than this form of visual art manages to interpret our city’s resistance to the loss of the sense of time, a distinctive sign of “liquid modernity”.

We seek to expand the geography of our open model for further discussion, without any complex and without any pretension other than our desire to positively interpret a phenomenon that arises as social but that translates into a mutation which, through the architecture of the city, shapes our entire way of life. More or less what we at EJAlbum have been doing for 10 years in photography and contemporary art, with all our projects.

EJAlbum is proud of the professional and human contribution of several of our collaborators engaged in Zero Space. Involved in various phases so far in this project, from EJAlbum alone: Jonid Koritari, Ervin Bërxolli, Rildo Ngjela, Florian Kodra, Bevis Fusha, Andis Rado, Bledar Hasimi, Ergys Zhabjaku, Artemis Hajdini, Elton Koritari, Albes Fusha, etc.