In the 30s the king of Albania Zog I, entrusted to the best Italian architect of the time, Cierardo Bosio, the construction of a Royal Palace, now called the Palace of the Brigades. Located on a hill and surrounded by a park from which the king and his entourage could enjoy a panoramic view of the city, it was never inhabited by the king and his family and remains today as it was designed.
If it does not appear on the long list of buildings demolished by the dictatorship in power in Albania during the Cold War, it is because commissioned by Zog I, it was designed, built and completed by other actors who sowed the seeds of their own ambitions, their attachment to this territory, its soil and its inhabitants. Despite its costly maintenance, successive governments have all appropriated it to magnify their official events.
Today, the Palace remains in service, in the hands of a democracy won by neo-liberalism who watch over this jewel of Albanian heritage commanded by an authoritarian king and used only yesterday by a dictator. But but which few Albanians know.
Tami Notsani had the privilege to photograph this place where everything is luxury, calm and pleasure. She gives us back the old-fashioned charm, a little faded of these pieces of furniture delivered to a forced solitude, witnesses of a past and almost unknown because locked in a space-time capsule on the borders of Tirana, on a small wooded hill.
Tami Notasni : Untold Stories
from January 6 until January 22, 2022
DUREV
56, Bld de La Tour-Maubourg
75007 Paris
