The stories collected by Sergio Maifredi and Gian Luca Favetto for the project ‘Atlas of the Great Kan – Autobiographies of a city’ have arrived at the University of the Arts in Tirana. For months they have traveled around Tirana gathering and intertwining the voices of those who have always lived there and of those who have lived there for a short time or temporarily. The show, created by the Italian Cultural Institute and produced by the Public Theater of Liguria with the involvement of the students of the University Theater Department, goes way back in time and is the result of a program of research, workshops and seminars.
The idea came from the evocative pages of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, according to whom “cities are a collection of many things: memories, desires, signs of a language; cities are places where exchanges takes place, as all history books of Economics tell us, but these exchanges are not only exchanges of goods, they are exchanges of words, desires, memories”. And so, in the story Tirana becomes Nairat and the narrative is made up of the stories of its inhabitants that intertwine with urban geographies, trace horizons, reveal ties and show how the fabric of the city has changed: Italians who live in Albania and Albanians who have been Italians for years, young people in the streets who talk to you in English. The stories arrive at the Theater of the University of the Arts like an atlas and are studied and narrated by the students of the Faculty of Scenography who are coordinated by the actress Ema Andrea. A narrative theater that has already been created in Italy by the Public Theater of Liguria, in particular in Sori – Iros – in the stories, and in Enna, renamed Anen.
