Materializing Modernity - Socialist and Post-socialist Rural Legacy in Contemporary Albania (MaMo)

MaMo is a research project that focuses on Socialist rural architecture and landscape and its Post-socialist legacy in the Albanian countryside, aiming at (1) investigating how the communist ideology materialized in the Albanian rural territorial and architectural planning; (2) analysing the current condition of the former agricultural cooperatives and state farms settlements and how they relate with the compelling informal post-socialist transformation; (3) proposing a multi-level and interlaced understanding of Socialist modernism and its contemporary transformation through local rural communities perceptions and experiences. Further, by producing a novel scientific contribution in the academic research fields of contemporary ethnography and anthropology, modern architecture and landscape planning and history, and critical cultural heritage studies, MaMo intends (4) to constitute a national and international platform to discuss and place for the first time Albania in the framework of European studies on modernist rural architecture and landscape. In fact, as for many European states during the 20th-century, Socialist Albania planned, adopted and implemented large scale development and agricultural plans to modernize its rural areas. Crucial to the nation and state-building policies, those plans provided a trial opportunity for new landscape and architecture ideas converging on the vision imposed by the regime. Through a multidisciplinary research-through-training approach based on the collection, processing, and critical interpretation of visual data and multiple narratives, MaMo will systematically explore and document for the first time the Socialist modern rural architecture and its Post-socialist legacies in the Albanian countryside.