The Memory of the Air

National Museum of Photography Marubi, Shkodra January 14th – February 14th 2022

Project supported by the Italian Council (9th edition, 2020), program to promote Italian contemporary art in the world by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture.

The Memory of the Air, curated by #gabiscardi and proposed by AFOL Metropolitana, was born out of the encounter between two Italian artists, #chiaralicerizzi and #alessandrolaita and the National Museum of Photography Marubi in Shkodra, #albania.                  

The Marubi Museum documents a century of Albanian history and society through a central nucleus of almost 500.000 negatives and including the work of 18 photographers, mostly from Shkodra and takes its name by Pietro Marubi, an Italian citizen who moved to #albania for political reasons and that established in Shkodra the first photographic studio of the Country. The Marubi Phototheque was continuously active from 1856, the year of its foundation, until the mid-1900s. Thanks to the fact that it fortuitously escaped destruction during the regime of Enver Hoxha and to the meticulousness with which Marubi recorded the names of his customers, the Albanian community could, in recent years, find photographic traces of their ancestors and discover aspects otherwise lost of its private and collective lives.                       

Intrigued by this resource, Rizzi and Laita (whose work in recent years became increasingly concerned about the topic of the archive, especially photography related) carried out an extensive research on the territory starting from the area of Shkodra and Tirana and introduced themselves into people’s houses with the aim of finding pictures taken by Pietro Marubi or his successors and, in some cases, by other photographers whose legacy has merged into the archive.

Starting with those photographs, Rizzi and Laita recorded a series of stories from the inhabitants of those houses and, when possible, from the protagonists of the photos themselves. The artwork that generated from these moments of encounter took the shape of a sound installation and a series of photographs of the domestic interiors in which Marubi's photographs are still preserved. The result is a scattered fresco, composed of stories and personal memories, which have their counterpoint in the Marubi Museum. The work will be exhibited precisely in the Museum, occupying the entire ground floor of the building.

If the figure of Pietro Marubi bears witness to the century-old relations between Italy and #albania, this intensity of exchange is once again underlined with Laita and Rizzi’s project The Memory of the Air; which, moreover, was conceived during a research period spent by the two artists at the Art House of Shkodra in the summer of 2019.       

By recording both the presence of the photographs in domestic spaces, therefore interpreted as living archives, and the stories related to the subjects of those photographs, the exhibition stands at the intersection between image and word, between past and present, between private and public, subjective and collective; and it highlights the omnipresent traces of history and the vital bond that the individual has with it. Where official history tends to freeze the narrative in an often reductive version, Laita and Rizzi instead bring out nuances, contradictions and unexpected, sometimes unpredictable, often unspoken aspects. All the more so in a country that has been subject, for over forty years, to a dictatorship which has led, among other things, to profound removals. The title of the project, The Memory of the Air, comes from the collection of poems Kujtesa e ajrit (1993) by Visar Zhiti, (Durrës, 1951), victim of persecution and witness of the recent history of #albania.                                                                                                  

In addition to the exhibition that is to be held at the Shkodra Museum from January 14th to February 14th 2022, The Memory of the Air anticipates the release of an artist's book (March/April 2022) as well as the presentation of the project and the publication at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, which will welcome the work in its collections, thus implementing the public cultural heritage.

Alessandro Laita (1979) and #chiaralicerizzi (1982) graduated in Visual Arts at the IUAV in Venice in 2009. From 2010 to 2015 they worked in the same faculty as assistants for the courses of Antonello Frongia, Lewis Baltz and Adrian Paci. Their artistic practice is articulated around the existing relationships between landscape, image, memory and their representation. In their works, through a process of observation, the images become a story, going beyond the simple visual understanding of them.

Revealing itself through different media, their research raises critical questions about the photographic language as a practice. In 2016 they won the Lewis Baltz Research Fund and published their first book with MACK (London). They have been beneficiaries of scholarships and residencies for artists in Venice (Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation - Italy), Winterthur (Villa Straüli - Switzerland), Saratoga Springs (YADDO - U.S.A), Paris (Citè Internationale des Arts - France). They live and work in Milan.