What is the future of the city, and who can dream that future? What is sacrificed in order to make that vision of the future into a reality, and whose
voices are silenced in the process of making and unmaking the city’s urban
fabric?
As the pace of urban development becomes more rapid under contemporary neoliberal capitalism, the relationships between memory, erasure,
hope, violence and the dominant discourse of progress also become
more fraught, reshaping our experience of public and private spaces.
The heightened intensity of urban change causes investments in real estate to take on an even more central role in shaping socioeconomic configurations and consolidating oligarchic distributions of power.
The inequality between urban centers and peripheries becomes starker,
and peripheries themselves are often eliminated, displaced, or gentrified.
Gerta Xhaferaj’s Aesthetic Abortion is a series of 27 photographs that explores the structural character of urban peripheries in Tirana’s capital city, Albania. The series reckons with the aesthetic legacy of the periphery, recording the visual identity of a zone and at the same time mourning the violence that has fundamentally transformed the character of that site.
Aesthetic Abortion
