Join us on 5 Nov 2026 at 7 pm for „Images Rendered Like Lard: The Albanian Files“ by Enis Maci. 

Ever since the locked-down spring of tradwivery, we’ve been reminded time and again — to make lard is „to render“ it. Heat the fat, remove what’s impure, heat again. 

Taking the recent publication „The Albanian Files. Freedom & Architecture“ as its starting point, Enis Maci looks at renderings, memes and models to examine how taste and amnesia work at the frontier of post-liberal futurity, where migrant prisons, mineral mines, and gas pipelines meet marvels of nature, brandnew skyscrapers and eurosummer resorts.
 

„Machine imagination, humans without faces. Espresso tonic on terraces beneath a fine artificial drizzle. Piazza d'Italia is the name of 45 paintings by Giorgio de Chirico, and of a public plaza in New Orleans where the American architect Charles Moore brought these images to life. Stagnant water in fountains. Quinine against malaria. Places surrendered, then deserted. Visions rendered, very slowly, at low heat. Could you render an image like you render lard?
In 2001, Albania had a population of over 3 million. In 2026, the figure has fallen to just 2,3 million. According to the National Statistics Institute, around the same number live abroad. Those who remain live mostly in the rapidly expanding Tiranë-Durrës conurbation, between port and and airport. Here, as everywhere outside China, a centre dotted with half-empty, absolutely unaffordable high-rises is circled by ever-larger ring roads in ever-farther suburbs for ever-later arrivals. Concentric repetition in a morally coded landscape: Inferno.“

The lecture will take place in English. Free entry.