Galerie am Platz, Eglisau, October-November 2023
A work in progress of the long-term project "Ëndërr!" in Albania.
Download presse articel "Schaffhauser Nachrichten" (PDF)



Between the times
It could be the right weather for writing postcards, but it's raining too heavy to go out and buy some, and so I sit here with a cup of green tea in front of my notes. This city, so it seems to me, and with it perhaps the whole country, finds itself in a different time to the rest of Europe. Or to put it another way, the country seems to lie between the times, or in none at all. It is as if Albania is suspended between its not-too-distant past, which seems to be infinitely far away, and a future that will never begin, and of which one has the impression that it will dissolve into nothing before it has begun – like a dream – to join the many pasts that apparently never took place. But maybe it is quite different. Maybe all times are present here at the same time and are fighting with each other for supremacy. The present seems to be the loser, the victory is decided between the past and the future, but the outcome is uncertain and a stalemate is most likely. Times have become victims of speed, they devour each other.
The future tries to roll down the past with all its concrete force and yet it never really succeeds in destroying it. Again and again, the past returns and insidiously takes away the future's foundation. We see only the remnants of the struggle, concrete scaffolding springing up everywhere like mushrooms in the rain and rotten ruins that no one wants to clear away. Shattered dreams, in-between time. And the present is running after everything, the future and the past, because everything is going far too fast.
My photography, too, always comes a little too late - like everything photographic, perhaps. When I want to depict the future in the present, it is already the past. Still, sometimes I think I have captured a shadow of the past or the future.
The rain has stopped in the meantime.