The MAMO webinar cycle: programme and abstracts
The webinar cycle Materializing-Modernity: Landscape, Architecture and Anthropology Intersections in 20th Century Rurality1 was organized and implemented from April 12, 2021, to May 6, 2021. It has been realized and implemented within the framework of the EU-funded project Materializing Modernity – Socialist and Post-socialist Rural Legacy in Contemporary Albania (MaMo), by Federica Pompejano (MSCA-IF Researcher, Academy of Albanian Studies), the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Art Studies (IAKSA), the Department of Cultural Heritage and Environment and the Laboratory of Ethnomusicology and Visual Anthropology (LEAV) of theUniversity of Milan (UNIMI), Milan, Italy. The MaMo Webinar Cycle was part of a project that received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 896925. The following pages contain the programme of the MaMo Webinar Cycle and the abstracts (in English and Albanian languages) of each oral presentation in order to give a more complete and a better understanding of the topics covered during the implementation of the webinar.
Reading the traces of 20th century rurality in the albanian rural landscape
This article makes use of the notion of modernist rural landscape conceived as the result of imprints that modernity left within different countries’ territories. As an example, the Albanian rural landscape is introduced as a palimpsest in which the country’s 20th century history acted as a visible mark on the territory. Socialist processes and transformations in the countryside generated what could be identified as an extensive Albanian modernist rural landscape. Considered a palimpsest in which the tangible and the intangible are strictly intertwined, the landscape should be tackled through interdisciplinary methodologies and biographical approaches. The authorship of the modernist rural landscape is often primarily associated with ideological policies and engineering schemes implemented by governments during specific historic periods. However, by applying a biographical approach towards the study of the 20th-century Albanian rural landscape, emerges that the everyday authors are also the local communities and the people. The urbanization of the countryside was a clear and tangible goal of the communist regime that was reflected in the establishment of many new rural centres as part of the agricultural cooperatives or agricultural and livestock state farms. The aim was the reduction of socio-cultural differences between urban and rural contexts; a modern living for the new socialist rurality that had to be realized also in the countryside through urban planning and architectural standardization. In the late 1940s, among the first cooperatives, the livestock agricultural cooperative of Asim Zeneli was founded as the first of many others in the Drino Valley, Gjirokastra district, South Albania. What are the memories and narratives of those that experienced the socialist rural life in the cooperatives? What do they remember about the cooperative’s establishment and the edification of the new rural centre of Asim Zeneli? What is left and still can be recognized in today’s village urban texture? By adopting a biographical approach that considers the overlapping of local community narratives with historic published and unpublished sources, the last part of this article focuses on relocating and reconnecting memories of the inhabitants to the Asim Zeneli village’s architectural and landscape legacy.
Investigating 20th century rurality at different scales: the MAMO webinar cycle
The webinar cycle Materializing-Modernity: Landscape, Architecture and Anthropology Intersections in 20th Century Rurality1 was organized and implemented from April 12, 2021, to May 6, 2021, in order to discuss the Albanian rural landscape and its multifaceted characteristics and challenges at the international level, and to place it within the wider framework of European studies on 20th century rurality2. The MaMo Webinar Cycle aimed to bring together experts in the field of architecture, ethnography, visual anthropology, cultural landscapes, and cultural heritage to discuss different methodological and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of 20th century rurality through different lenses.