Port-au-Prince’s Territories

The remainders of a socialist realist bas-relief on a heap of former Qemal Stafa Stadium debris. Photo from Edi Rama’s Facebook. by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei For the last two months, I have been woken every day by workmen below my apartment building, viciously attempting to renovate the...

In the wake of the Brexit it is perhaps time to look at what Tory leadership contender and Brutus impersonator Michael Gove termed “The Albanian Option.”

When we travel we often yearn for the end of the road, the border between modern life and a time untouched by progress. My son Adrian and I had the opportunity to return to the past when we arrived in May at Mount Athos, a semi-autonomous, monastic peninsula in...

After experiencing last year, as a project assistant for Armando Lulaj’s “Albanian Trilogy”, the reactionary forces of the Ministry of Culture and the exploitative environment of the Venice Biennale, including one of the most scandalously incompetent curators that I ever met.

Kristi Pinderi (Pro LGBT), then opposition leader now PM Edi Rama, and Xheni Karaj (Aleanca LGBT) in better times (2013) by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei Another year, another International Day Against Homophobia (IDAHO), another article that takes stock of the progress regarding LGBT rights in Albania. Spoiler alert: It...

by Jessica Sequeira At the place where I worked a few years ago, two large windows looked out onto the city. From one you could see Retiro station, where a train deposited us every morning after gathering us up from the provinces. That was the view from the room where...

During his election campaign in 2015, pathological lier – excuse me, “socialist” crown prince and Mayor of Tirana – Erion Veliaj promised that he would put an end to the “betonization” of Tirana

On January 12, 2016, late at night, I was called on my Albanian telephone by an unknown Italian number. It turned out to be Lorenza Baroncelli, Consultant for Urban and Cultural Strategies to Prime Minister Edi Rama and project manager at the Serpentine Gallery of Hans Ulrich Obrist, another...

How long can I keep wearing it? I found myself thinking, as the bus lurched into motion and cars honked around us. The rest of the day? Forever? I wondered why it hadn’t occurred to me sooner to try wearing a head scarf—why nobody ever told me it was something...

In spite of its simplicity and methodical pragmatism, Charles Hatfield’s Limits of identity: Politics and Poetics in Latin America is an ambitious and systematic effort to dismantle some of the predominant variations of identarianism

At the City Hall, the two women, mother and daughter, were there to renew the latter’s passport. They got there at fifteen minutes to nine.

Monfort’s project of the “new fiction state” of Balkanland reminded me of the Scientology initiative to found a state in the Balkans under the name of Bulgravia in the 1990s, after the fall of the Iron Curtain.

While you may have no reason to enter the passport marketplace, you may nevertheless know of Henley & Partners from its annual visa-restrictions index

I have always been interested in what other foreigners write, imagine, or fantasize about Albania, to offset my own ramblings.

Before the Tiananmen Square massacre, I was a rebel poet, volatile and impulsive, who liked picking fights and telling tall tales. I’d won more than 20 state literary prizes, and I figured that one day I would earn international fame in the literary world.