“Scene of a crime”

TIRANA, Jan. 31 – “Apartment blocks, squares of apartment blocks, apartment blocks and neighborhoods. Apartment block entrances, Skies of apartment blocks. Apartment blocks under the moonlight, and Apartment blocks that cast shadows on other buildings.”
This cycle of works began in 2008 until 2010 when Koli Ver袮i was studying architecture. It was a quiet period characterized by a decrease in new apartment blocks following the legal and illegal construction boom of the previous years. A necessary silence, it seemed as if people needed to reflect on what they had built.
“Viewing these photos by Koli Ver袮i reminds me of a Walter Benjamin quote on Eugene Atget. Atget photographed the streets of Paris as if capturing the scene of a crime. The same can be said about most of these images, whose solemnity is a reminder of something similar to the architectural torture and murder that has happened to the City in the last 10-15 years,” organizers say.
In the superb documentation that Atget has done to nearly every corner of Paris, the human figure is scarce. The absence makes the photograph almost surreal and distant.
A deep sense of distance is also perceived in these works, where the images are immersed in some artificial silence and mystery, a stagnant atmosphere that has nothing to do with the stillness of the sleep brought on by night, but with a deaf silence of death.
The artist deliberately avoids human presence by choosing as setting the City of night: a city that could have been any other, because its most recognized places are not captured here and a certain anonymity prevails the cycle.
Ver袮i’s photography is not documentary, it is not simply recording through the lens what the eye sees. Behind each composition hides the desire to make these neighborhoods and suburb buildings protagonists of an uncharted City: The desire to show something new.
Is such a claim still possible today?
Thousands of photographs, often of famous cities, main roads, the most impressive buildings, photographed a thousand times, by a thousand photographers, at dawn, in the morning, at noon, in the west, in the evening, after dinner, and so forth. I continuously try to find the differences. It is extremely tedious.
Instinctively, through the anonymity of the details of a city for which we only know that it is not Tirana, the artist has found those urban landscapes that are unknown, without risking his images resembling others, no one else would be able to identify the same view to photograph. By using the landscape’s lack of identity, the artist tries to give us something original.
Initially his interest is directed within the neighborhoods, putting an emphasis on building interventions by private entities such as additions of the most imaginative kind. It seems as if at the core of these interventions is the ability to distinguish the character of the individuals occupying them. The human absence transforms the buildings into anthropomorphic beings so they emerge as self-portraits of each resident.
Koli Ver袮i sees the city as a scene from a film. He tries to select buildings with no lighting, but that are lit only because contrary to the film where something is expected to happen, nothing happens here.
It seems as though he has waited for this shot to be vacated in order to capture it, and as is done in forensic photography, once again he handles the place as a scene of a crime, whereas the buildings and neighborhoods as annihilated victims.”
The exhibition will be on at the newly-opened Miza gallery near to the public Faculty of Law in Tirana until February 6.