A tower, red, like clay somehow. Balustrades, arcades, passageways. A girl and the hoop she’s trundling, or used to trundle at some point. Before the impact? Her shadow, burnt into the stone. Or is it the other way round, is she just about to turn the corner?

Roughly halfway through the 800 pages of The Albanian Files – Freedom and Architecture, Giorgio di Chirico’s pittura metafisica is referenced. Renowned for his otherworldly tableaux of deserted streets populated by statues, silhouettes and mannequins, de Chirico’s paintings are renderings avant la lettre. What remains an intimation in his work is presented here, in Italian practice Luca Dini’s architectural visualization, as a ready-to-move-into skyscraper.

Machine imagination, humans without faces. Espresso tonic on terraces beneath a fine artificial drizzle. Piazza d’Italia is the name of 45 paintings by de Chirico, and of a public plaza in New Orleans where the American architect Charles Moore brought these images to life. Stagnant water in fountains. Quinine against malaria. Places surrendered, then deserted. Visions rendered, very slowly, at low heat. Could you render an image like you render lard?

In 2001, Albania had a population of over 3 million. In 2026, the figure has fallen to just 2,3 million. According to the National Statistics Institute, around the same number live abroad. Those who remain live mostly in the rapidly expanding Tiranë-Durrës conurbation, between port and airport. Here, as everywhere outside China, a centre dotted with half-empty, absolutely unaffordable high-rises is circled by ever-larger ring roads in ever-farther suburbs for ever-later arrivals. Concentric repetition in a morally coded landscape: Inferno. There are few jobs in industries beyond construction, private hospitals or tourism. Roles that don’t involve tips, such as kitchen help or factory work, pay so little that they are carried out by Bangladeshis living in shared rooms. As early as 2021, Prime Minister Edi Rama advised a factory owner that he should replace them as soon as they start learning Albanian, lest they organise.

Meme Politics

Rama is a prototype of the meme politician. Before becoming Prime Minister in 2013, he was Mayor of Tirana. Active as a basketball player and artist during the dictatorship, Rama had spent some years in Paris, and was spontaneously appointed as Minister of Culture in 1998, which launched his life in politics.