In the series Another Facade, the future city and its citizens are shown to us in glimpses of digital images adorning building sites around the city of Tirana, Albania. Since the early 2000s, public space in Tirana has undergone radical changes as the building sector is increasingly controlled by private interests. The city hosts hundreds of building sites that offer promising opportunities to investors, but little to the rest of the population for whom the resulting properties are often far too costly.
As a narrative, it is familiar to the citizens of many cities around the world. In Tirana, these visions of the future are sold via large-format CGI visualisations printed and hung on the fences surrounding building sites. While these artifices may be more or less convincing, the scenes that the images depict range broadly from dystopic to comic.
The photographs in this series were taken during May and early June 2021, during which time I was living and working in Tirana. My work took me frequently to different parts of the city and many of these images I walked by on a daily or weekly basis. I was particularly drawn to visualisations that featured people, who would occasionally turn up on multiple images in different parts of the city as if they were leading normal lives in a virtual world that existed only in the images. Another Facade seeks to portray this virtual world and to question the artifices that it produces.
