In Albania, Tirana is a city of concealed waters. The Lana River cuts through its center, once a polluted open channel, now tamed into a landscaped corridor. Beneath the city, underground springs and redirected streams flow invisibly, reminding passer-bys that the ground itself is porous and moving. Nearby, the Artificial Lake in the Grand Park of Tirana, which was created in the 1950s, presents another human intervention. Here, we find water as a kind of infrastructure that is planned and engineered for leisure, supply, and control.
 

However, bodies of water in Tirana also carry political memory. During the socialist period, rivers and lakes were mobilized into collective projects of modernization as dams, canals, reservoirs were rigorously built. After 1991, these same systems became fragile, marked by neglect, privatization, and urban sprawl. The Lana’s clean-up projects today symbolize not only ecological recovery but also the city’s attempt to rewrite its relationship with modernity.

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In this setting, we may ponder what it means to engage with water that is not expansive and visible, but channeled, hidden, and shaped by the politics of urban planning?

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In Tirana, these explorations took place in a workshop in collaboration with the Destil Creative Hub thanks to the support of Olson Lamaj and the Goethe Institute Albania. ​​

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