Death notice

Tirana, September 2022.

Since its beginnings thirteen years ago, Scriptopolis has been describing the inscriptions on urban furniture and has shine a light on classified ads. In contrast to the city centre’s attempts to turn electrical cabinets into street art that tourists can snap pictures of, in the suburbs of Tirana, they are an important place for advertising. Flats for rent, cars and furniture for sale and offers of private lessons are stuck, torn and erased with the rains before being replaced. In addition to these layers of advertisements, which no website has fully replaced, there seems to be a local specificity: the advertising of death notices. Here you can read that the family of Mr Ramadan Karasani, who died at the age of 73, is organising a ceremony on 21 August from 16:00 before inviting relatives to the Ija restaurant and that his remains will then be laid to rest in the Tufine cemetery.
This is how passers-by and travellers discover, independently of the commemorative plaques or the collages of the feminicides, a mode of presence of the deceased in the city and, in so doing, a more or less dense, durable or extensive display, a luxurious printing, a choice of photos or restaurants, so many clues about the families and the modes of relationship of the living to the dead, which never cease to reshape themselves and to encourage us to carry out new investigations.