“The sequence of images across these pages—which I conceived as a traveling shot across the dimension of transition—shares a single cursor. No matter where each image appears to lead us or where our imagination drifts, what unifies them is the evolution of light. It is as if the entire book unfolded during a single day. But it is a day whose time has been reversed.” —Anri Sala
This publication, conceived by museo Madre, is more than a simple book; it is an artists’ book in which Anri Sala interacts with the corpus of paintings by Edi Hila. As Eva Fabbris, the Director of museo Madre, points out in her brief essay, Sala engages Hila’s work in a contemplative and cinematic way, allowing the historical and political consciousness the two share to surface gradually through the sequencing of images.
Born thirty years apart in Albania, Hila and Sala share not only a geography but a historical condition. Both were formed at the Academy of Arts in Tirana—Hila as a student and later a professor, and Sala as part of the generation that encountered the institution at the threshold of the regime’s collapse. If Hila’s early career unfolded under the strictures of Socialist Realism and direct censorship, Sala’s began in the vacuum that followed its dissolution.
Sala reads the transformations that have marked Eastern Europe—emerging through Hila’s paintings—as conditions that may also be understood in broader, even universal terms. This narration unfolds through both full views and selected details, photographed under Sala’s direction. The guiding “cursor” of the book is the evolution of light. It is as if the entire publication takes place within a single day—yet a day whose time has been reversed. It begins at night and retreats through dusk, late afternoon, early afternoon, high noon, late morning, early morning, until sunrise, completing a full, inverted cycle.