Albanian-Italian artist Erdiola Kanda Mustafaj selected for Hidden Narratives Residency

The Society, the Italian Cultural Institute in London and Photoworks are pleased to announce that artist Erdiola Kanda Mustafaj has been selected as the recipient of the Hidden Narratives Residency, a partnership focused on developing archive residencies and programmes for Italian photographers to access career-defining opportunities.

Erdiola’s research lies at the intersection of memory, displacement and the politics of image-making. During the residence, Erdiola will spend a year immersing herself in our historic Collections, engaging with materials in relation to the environment and the humanitarian. Erdiola will bring the archive into conversation with her project Pasqyra e Lendes, Albanian for sommarium or literally 'mirror of matter'.

The work is a longform photographic project centred on the displaced figure and the residency will support in expanding her research inquiry into how landscape is constructed through the act of looking. Erdiola will have three separate research and presentation visits to the UK and will work with the archive team, including mentoring from Photoworks.

Working within the Society’s Collections will enable Erdiola to build a conceptual thread toward a broader meditation on belonging, and the possibility of constructing new visual narrations from the ruins of an inherited gaze. With poetic attention to politics, she meditates on the notion of the living archive and diaspora not as a fixed condition but as a transitional shifting space, one shaped by the tension between collective history and intimate memory.

Erdiola will be presenting her work at Summit Photo, an interactive forum exploring how photography and filmmaking can confront climate change, poverty, conflict, and other ecological and human issues, held at the Society from 17–19 July.

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