Christina Deluchi

University of Technology Sydney, Australia
christina.deluchi@uts.edu.au

A Set of Matching Images and the Desire for “European-ness” in Tirana

Filip Dujardin’s image of 51N4E’s Skanderbeg Square in Tirana captures the water-streaked flattened pyramid and its multicoloured expanse of square stone tiles occupied by wandering figures. A twin image, also by Dujardin, adorns the cover of the Ruby Press publication, SKANDERBEG SQUARE, TIRANA. 51N4E later commissioned Maxime Delvaux to re-document the project for their website. Delvaux’s set of 16 images includes a double of Dujardin’s images, a strikingly similar filmic image shot in landscape that captures the movement of citizens crossing the stone surface. These images that are one and the same (Dujardin/Delvaux) capture figures atop a zoomed-in still-life of the square’s pixeled surface – some eventually slipping from the image’s edge. More recently, Ossip van Duivenbode captured MVRDV’s renovation of the communist era Pyramid of Tirana to give us yet another version of Dujardin/Delvaux’s image: a cropped zoom of the “new” pyramid’s stone tiles and stairs to compose a flattened surface. This matching set of five images serves as a point of departure to critically explore the larger process of doubling occurring in Tirana and Albania at large. In efforts to reconcile with the European Union, images of contemporary architecture have been mobilised to construct an avant-garde representation of Tirana’s transformation project. Examining the critical value of images and the media in contemporary politics, this article explores how four quasiidentical images have composed and stylised the city’s urban identity using high-art practices for consumption in print and on the screen. The images are doubles of themselves and others, carrying with them and capturing so well, the tension between branding practices and high culture. Crossing disciplines, national borders and economic zones, the images underscore a vision for a city – and a country – built upon a desire for “European-ness,” which is implicit in the construction of Tirana’s new urban identity: a European doubling.

Keywords: architectural images; urban transformation; urban politics;
Tirana; Albania.