Migratory Images

Migratory Images, an exhibition by Bora Baboçi, considers how images circulate between materials, contexts, and conditions of visibility. In an economy of the visible, the image, constituted through movement, is often caught between exposure and concealment, between its availability to view and its withdrawal from it. Baboçi approaches these migratory trajectories, exploring how images are enclosed, withheld, and activated as they pass from one material support to another. In doing so, the exhibition draws on portable architectures and relocation technologies through which iconographic motifs and compositional variations once travelled across different cultural contexts.

This movement finds a material analogue  in the eighteenth-century technique of strappo,  which Baboçi takes as both a material process and  a conceptual framework. Developed to safeguard  frescoes through relocation, strappo has also  been used in the looting of visual heritage. By  stripping the pictorial surface from its architectural  support, the technique destabilizes the image’s  fixed relationship to the wall. Oscillating between  preservation and dispossession, it shows the  image to be at once a material object and a  mobile cultural sign. Relocation can protect an  image, plunder it, or free it from the site that  hosts it. Strappo thus provides a particularly charged model for the migratory image, whose  movement can involve care, violence, loss, and reconfiguration. 

Held folded within the strappo, the image  is rendered passive: preserved, but withdrawn from  circulation. Baboçi’s work, by contrast, attends  to what happens when images migrate and  encounter new contexts. In working with surviving  cultural markers, she draws on them rather than  extracting them, as strappo does. This introduces  a distance between source and recurrence, and  it is through this distance that echoing assumes  agency. The echo neither preserves an image  intact nor severs it from its source. It holds the  two in relation while the image acquires autonomy  through deferral and reconfiguration. Agency  therefore emerges not only in what an image  carries forward, but in the act of echoing itself. 

This logic of echo also has a local history. Baboçi’s earlier works, Murmurim – The Poetics  of a Wall Projection (2019) and Triptych (2020),  examine Albanian domestic interiors transformed  by drywall and plaster ornamentation in the  1990s, tracing new imaginings of domestic space.  Hybrid Wall (2026) returns to this material, treating  drywall as a soft architectural skin, while exposing  the sturdy metal skeleton that supports it. The  stripping away of the wall’s elements reimagines  it as a typology: a mobile structure whose  surfaces bring into a single environment spatial  syntaxes that stand in contrast with one another,  giving the wall a scenographic idiom. Meanwhile,  its surfaces become sites of migration and  transmission: images arrive from elsewhere, while  the drywall, itself reconfigurable and demountable,  superimposes onto the exhibition’s floor plan and  simultaneously departs from it as an echo.

Sculptural forms, pattern books, painting  rolls, and strappo surfaces extend this process  as technologies of echoing. Mobile and portable,  they provide architectures through which motifs  travel, while shifting scale, material, or spatial  relation. In the final two weeks, the exhibition  begins to withdraw from its own conditions of  visibility. Pattern books close and painting rolls  wind shut, their portable architectures withholding  images from view. The mural undergoes strappo:  its pictorial surface slowly transfers from the  drywall onto strappo surfaces, until the exhibition  becomes a largely non-visual environment.  Conceived as a form of deinstallation and open  to the public, the process makes visible how  seemingly technical procedures can carry critical  and emancipatory intent. It opens onto questions  about the image’s power in concealment, its  passivity within strappo as against perpetual  exposure, and whether echoing can produce  alterity within the familiar. 

Curated by Erëmirë Krasniqi