The National Museum of Photography “Marubi” invited the public to visit it, before the exhibition travels to another destination in Europe.

The title “Olbania” comes from an infamous mistake born in early-2000s forums and chatrooms—an obvious misspelling of Albania that later circulated widely on social media.

The “Alterazioni Video” brought to this exhibition around 700 Polaroids, which create a fragmented, strange but surprisingly familiar Albania.

“Olbania” is an unusual visual archive that reconstructs an Albania of the 2000s: between systemic change, devotion to the West and a beauty, before the unification of aesthetics by social networks.

The “Olbania” is an accidental collaboration, a work of art co-written by Albanians, fans, critics and artists, where distance turns into proximity and memory into interpretation. Images that once circulated on the internet and have now disappeared, return like fake Polaroids, dressed in nostalgia and ambiguity. /j.p/p.s./

This is a collective exhibition by the Italian “Alterazioni Video” artist group, which explores hybrid territories of the “post-truth” period, YouTube neorealism and deepfake technologies.

“Olbania” is curated by Sara Dolfi Agostini. The project was conceived in 2009, during their participation in the 3rd Tirana Biennial. And it takes its title from a misspelling that was widespread in forums and chatrooms in the early 2000s, a label that became a fictional online territory, loaded with symbols and stereotypes of Balkan mythologies.

During an “internet hunt”, in the phase when Albania moved from Italian television to the global internet, “Alterazioni Video”, built a visual archive of over 600 polaroids.

The exhibition appears as an accidental collaboration between online users and artists, a time capsule that documents the circulation of an alternative version of Albania and, inadvertently, its reinvention in the digital space. The exhibition “Olbania” was realized with the support of the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Sports and the Italian Institute of Culture in Tirana. /p.s./