If this Land Could Talk
2025

If land were a witness to history, what would it see? From revolutions to wars, blood spilled and fields sown, this series examines the history of Albania from the perspective of toka (land). 

If this Land Could Talk is an ongoing visual narration of Albania’s history, through a large-format photographic installation.

Analog photographs are juxtaposed against film stills and state propaganda from Albania’s archives, visualizing the transformation of land as a social and political history. For this project, I collected images from UCLA’s Albanian Photographic and Graphic Art Collection within its Modern Endangered Archives Program, as well as analyzed research by Gilles de Rapper, Raino Isto, Jon Halliday, Elidor Mehilli and others.

Micro yet macro, specific and universal, the social, political, and environmental transformations in this small Balkan country tell a larger story about the Cold War, urbanization, migration, and globalization.