The memory of the air

The Memory of the Air is the research of the Italian artists, Chiaralice Rizzi and Alessandro Laita at the Marubi National Museum of Photography in Scutari, Albania. The Marubi Museum documents a century of Albanian history and society, from 1856 to the 1900s, with a central nucleus of 500,000 negatives, made by 18 photographers, mainly from Scutari, and takes its name from Pietro Marubi, Italian of origin, owner of the first photography studio in the country.
Rizzi and Laita connect the images of a rediscovered memory of private and collective life, kept in the photo library, to the stories of the current Albanian community of Scutari and Tirana and return a widespread fresco of words and photographs fixed in domestic interiors, like living archives and omnipresent traces of history.
The title The Memory of the Air comes from the collection of poems Kujtesa e ajrit, 1993 by Visar Zhiti, (Durres, 1951), victim of persecution and witness of the recent history of Albania.