A flat plain and a signpost at a crossroads marks Albania. There have been 389km of unfamiliar road between Sarajevo and the city of Tirana.
It is evening. I experience an alarming shift in scale, and complete disorientation. I walk to the site of the Enver Hoxha Pyramid, simply because it sounds strange and intriguing, and cannot get my bearings. I walk around this a huge structure, its white marble tiles now covered in graffiti and dirt. I am told that it was built as a museum to honor the late communist leader, then becoming a NATO base in 1999 during the Kosovo war, and in 2001, an Albanian TV station. It is now part of a site where a wall monument and Peace Bell that has been forged out of melted bullets has been placed. It feels like a disused playground.
The rest of this space is a parking lot and a bus station. This space is surrounded by grand boulevards, wide roads, and the ghosts of rolling tanks. I cannot ‘read’ it and neither can I project on the pyramid. The graffiti covered tiles rejects the light. I am being left alone though…
I wander around the wall, beneath the bell, across a ramp. And here I project whilst walking, whilst the image becomes a torch. This performance become one of searching. I have also slipped out of my four minute ‘structure’. I glimpse dark figures and they glimpse my movement. I become more aware of my fleeting presence, of watching and being watched, focused glimpses. It stands for something.
I start to notice an eroticism in the shifting pace of each city…
