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For other artists, the physical city does not simply manifest as image but it is a socio-political and cultural space that is constantly being mediated and constructed. Theirs is a city that creates, communicates and challenges identities and social relations. As such, these artists are concerned with intervening in the landscape and challenging the dominant narratives and perceptions of the urban space and experience. For the most part, they take a performative approach to the city, entering into direct relationships with its built space and its structure of feeling. These artists tend to directly engage with the city and its citizens at an everyday tactical level that operates under, and counter to, the city’s spatial and social dictates. These sorts of interactions can assume a broad array of forms, ranging from the visual and poetic to the socially engaged. Endri Dani photographed himself in the entryway of various buildings throughout Albania that were built, during Communism, to the exact height of the Albanian dictator: 182 cm. This happens to be the artists height, too. Part of a larger project that includes mapping the buildings with the 182 cm doorways and interviews with the architects, the photographs themselves are rather deadpan. The artist is not interested in identifying with the dictator or even with commenting on the megalomaniac reach of his power to such absurd ends. That’s all too known and notorious by now! But what is less talked about is the way these measures of control and idolatry continue to encroach on the lives of people still living in these
edifices. By inserting himself in these spaces, Dani engages with them as material and social space that give way to a structure of feeling, everyday practices that lend a sense of place. Whether to counter communist or global capitalist bio-power, artists like Dani place the body and social experiences at the forefront of engaging with the city as a construct to be decoded and recreated. Such artistic gestures are constitutive of both self (subjectivity) and space —the urban milieu. Through this work a complex and composite portrait of the city emerges: one that, like the city itself, is constantly being performed and in the process of becoming. The city — its landscape, architecture and urban experience — are not offered as the finished products of a society, but these art works are themselves the processes through which the city as a place of meaning and feeling is constructed. Not merely a structural and conceptual space, the city is an embodied relationship developed through the interaction between structure and the agency practiced by its inhabitants at the street level, on an everyday basis. Irgin Sena’s video, it started started started somehow (zoo), and the drawing object 3 ten provide a multipronged introduction to Tirana. His is a city composed of competing forces and disconnected signifiers. The relationships that emerge between its parts, in the case of the video: the Skanderbeg monument in the city center and the surrounding trees; the half-built buildings around a zoo and crying sounds of its impoverished animals; an interior scene and pedestrian life — do not attempt to represent Tirana on the whole. This would not be possible, even if desired. As any other large and complex city, in a hyper-mediated and accelerated technological age, Tirana can, at most, be apprehended in senso-