04Parafabrikat

I was born because of a waiting list.

My parents were newly married, had no children, and were last in line for a flat. So they decided to have one. We were assigned a flat with two bedrooms, a kitchen and a living room in a parafabrikat in Fier, the Albanian name for a prefabricated-panel block.

The block answered a real housing need during the building of the new Albania. It was also propaganda: you could live in it. An imposed type taught a whole country to live together, to share a stair, a wall, a landing and everybody’s business. Relations grew out of this arrangement. People remember them as close. I wanted to know how much of that memory was real.

After 1991, no one told the block to stop. Balconies closed in. Roofs rose. A landing was painted to match one flat. One apartment was wrapped in insulation while its neighbour remained grey.

Sara Marini calls such additions parasitic: forms that attach themselves to an existing structure, using its stairs, pipes and walls to grow. The block provides the support; the addition gains space. I do not read them as a disease. I read them as a force: people taking risks, against regulations and safety, and building anyway.

Berlin has its own prefabricated estates: cleaner, more regulated, and often left closer to their original envelopes. In Albania, no one could leave these blocks alone.

Parafabrikat is a study of a type and the people it taught to live together. It follows the prefabricated-panel block across Fier, Tirana and Vlorë: from family memory and housing archives to additions on roofs, altered facades and stairs cut open towards new floors.

The project includes photographs, archival drawings and a film still in editing.