Dritan Hyska (1980) Korce, Albania

Education
Academy of Fine Arts of Venice 2005

Introduction

Since 2001 my artistic research has focused on the study of the urban realities that I have observed first in my home country, Albania, and later here in Italy and during other travels. For a long time I have approached painting through the representation of bridges, overpasses, glimpses of deserted cities, cement and construction as works of man. I have tried in this work to depict a journey, which is my life’s; a man’s journey in the real and in his habitat intended as a city. From that point of view, I looked for a reason, an energy emitted by the matter created by man, but all I saw was sheer matter, where the man disappears, it is swallowed, leaving no trace of itself except the product of his culture of his calculations and his training technique. I feel a form of solitude watching these huge architectural structures that at times have been designed to exceed man’s limits itself. I thought that all this mass of buildings are nothing but a habitat choice, which the human being thought and mediated in the course of its evolution and which brought him very far from the idea of primitive man in nature, to such an extent that sometimes it seems that the new nature is no longer made up of natural elements, but only of concrete and matter. My personal research on architecture and its representation in photography is definitely a work in progress, a continuous collection of images and documents that grows over time. The work that I intend to present is a catalogue of photographs regarding the architectural changes urban realities underwent, particularly in Albania, where the pace of construction and the necessity of living is constantly changing.

Now the center and the outskirts are part of a unique landscape, where there is no more free space untouched by human presence and where control by the institutions and a plan that limits illegal building is increasingly difficult. Landscape now plays a pivotal cultural role in opposition to human interventions caused by industrialization and economic liberalism that, giving the soil a price, raised several questions on how right that process has been. This incredible urban planning process represents a serious threat to the natural landscape that will eventually be robbed of its natural connotation through a process, which almost erases memory, in fact an essential component of its identity here as elsewhere. The excessive production and rapid urbanization will bring to landscapes, which will be more and more distant from people’s aspirations who want the landscape to reflect the best of their action in nature. I intend to investigate and then with my work this sense of excess leading man further and further away from himself by man in nature in essence. The series of photographs “Buildings” is a documentation, the rating of a survey made on the territory in which the place and architecture were the focus of a landscape that now combines these elements relate to the role of man in building the landscape. The landscape has been transformed into a high speed and dizzy at that point to overlay two identities and do another, that we fail to define and control.