To investigate the Albanian rural landscape as a palimpsest, the research considered five representative macro-areas in the countryside. The project implemented an interdisciplinary approach that foresaw the collection, processing, and critical interpretation of multiple data. During the intense research activity, twenty-eight rural villages in five macro-areas were investigated, and intangible and tangible aspects of the socialist and post-socialist rural landscape and architecture were considered. The intangible legacies consisted of memories and narratives of people who experienced the socialist modernisation processes and the post-socialist transition. By using ethnographic methodologies were recorded semi-structured and go-along interviews with local people. The tangible architectural and landscape elements were investigated through the consultation of archival materials and mapped and documented by using GIS tools and by taking digital photographs and footages. The critical overlapping of narratives provided by local communities with published and unpublished sources, helped in understanding, relocating, and reconnecting inhabitants' memories to the surrounding landscape.
The results achieved highlighted how socialist modernization processes extensively impacted the landscape, affecting also remote rural areas. Modernisation covered a long span of time and was conceived as a complex process strictly linked to the socialist political ideology, the industrialisation processes, the strengthening of the socialist production relationships, the intensification of agricultural production, the electrification campaign, the implementation of cities’ urban masterplans and architectural standardization processes, and the socio-cultural regime propaganda. In the aftermath of the regime collapse, faced with the question of what to do with those tangible legacies of a difficult and still recent past, the Albanians chose three main options: to destroy, to seize and reuse, or to abandon. In the early 1990s, the destruction was, and to some extent still is, the result of spontaneous acts of anger conducted by single individuals or silently authorized by governmental decisions. The reuse concerned especially former socio-cultural, administrative, agricultural, and industrial state properties and was often not consistent, following the seizing of the public property to satisfy the new societal individual, rather than collective, practical needs. The abandonment phenomena went along with the abovementioned two. Today perception of the socialist rurality composed of both its tangible and tangible aspects and elements is complicated. The survival of remnants and the difficult memories went along with a difficult transition from dictatorship to democracy, as much as the privatization of the former collectivized land, the neglect of cultivated fields, the massive abandonment of rural areas, and the consequent hyper-urbanization of the major cities’ centres. While most aspects associated with the socialist regime’s persecution or suppression are difficult to process, others are remembered with a sort of sentimental yearning, such are for instance the memories attached to the active and vivid rural socio-cultural life and youth, despite were unfolded in the socialist propaganda context.
The results of the project are being disseminated in scientific publications, such as conference proceedings and peer-reviewed journals, as well as on the project's social media webpages and website. The MaMo project participated in the H2020 Open Research Data Pilot which aims at making research data FAIR. Hence, data not containing confidential information have been organized in datasets and are available on Zenodo.
