Ledia Kostandini: Traces of Tenderness in the Urban City

Ledia Kostandini is an Albanian-based artist whose work explores social transformations and the legacy of inherited or lost cultures. Drawing inspiration from the layering of time, experiences, and the traces people leave behind, she focuses on architectural forms and urban elements that reveal social behaviors in public spaces.

Some of your works introduce gestures of tenderness into urban space, like in The Hug or Aftermoments. What does tenderness mean to you as an artistic language, especially in the context of public, often impersonal spaces?

Yes, I see tenderness as a kind of quiet power. Particularly in big cities, or forgotten places, or times of struggle, tenderness often feels suppressed, but it’s always there. I like to chase moments when it appears very softly, in small, fragile or futile things. There’s something deeply beautiful in that kind of discovery, like stumbling upon a living plant beneath a pile of bricks. As Dostoyevsky wrote, “Beauty will save the world.”, and to me, tenderness in its vulnerability, is pure beauty.  It is not about decoration, but about resistance. The Hug is an action-intervention at the former train station near my hometown. It responds to the emotional charge of decay, offering a tribute to a place of collective memory. In Albania, public space often feels like a zone of tension, a long struggle between nature and the built environment, between presence and erasure. To bring tenderness into such a space is, for me, an act of love. 

@ Ledia Kostandini, Aftermoments, courtesy of the artist.

Cities are often built on hardness, stone, concrete, systems. Your work seems to introduce softness (fabric, clay, touch). What role do you see the physical body and its vulnerability playing in your relationship to urban space?

My public works begin with visiting and returning to a place again and again. I like to observe the site through different perspectives: the quick passerby, the local inhabitant, and the first-time visitor. It is not about physical proportions, but about how a single person or a group of people encounter space and time. Most of my interventions are temporary. They appear and soon disappear. Many are built on principles of disappearance or quiet integration with the public environment. My visual approach is often bold and bright, but when it comes to materials, I prefer not to trouble the space. Permanence in a lived space feels like a delicate position to assume, and I am more drawn to ephemeral gestures that coexist humbly within this flux. Often, I build pieces in my studio or even at home and gradually move them into public space. I want the work to carry my traces of care, so I aim for the most personal involvement. Some public pieces come as embroidery, stitching, painting, or construction. I also seek materials that carry intimacy, such as old fabrics and found objects, things that already hold history and traces of others. Textile, for instance, is the closest material to the human body. It already contains tenderness but becomes even more tender when placed in public space. Clay, on the other hand, captures the very pressure of fingers and makes a form out of touch. 

@ Ledia Kostandini, The Hug, courtesy of the artist.

In his writings, Hans Ulrich Obrist raises the question: “If art is about dreaming up new possibilities, then how could one partially rehabilitate this category [of utopia]?” Would you say that The Dreaming City is, in some way, a utopian gesture, not in the traditional sense of an ideal world, but as an imaginative reclaiming of possibility within urban space?

The Dreaming City is like a small exercise in possible utopias. It’s not about a specific destination, but about understanding ourselves as the real destination. The piece is a gesture to open up possibilities for reading urban space because I believe the city is a field of signals and frequencies. Utopia floats there too! The Dreaming City comes as a cloud of satellite dishes that shimmer day and night. Satellites are a very common element in the urban landscape of Tirana, but they represent more than a domestic device. In post-1990s Albania, they became windows to distant worlds, symbols of curiosity or longing for Western cultures. They embody the collective gaze, a peephole to the world. While researching for the site, I discovered that the colorful structure holding the installation was once the headquarters of a local TV station called UFO, currently failed. It felt like a soft echo of everything the piece was already about. So the installation aims to carry dreams from the entire city, but also the dreams of this very place. 

@ Ledia Kostandini, The Dreaming City, courtesy of the artist.

Do you think tenderness can be a tool for reclaiming the city, not just politically, but sensorially, emotionally?

Yes, I believe there is never just one city. Sensations make the city multiply. The deeply personal way we experience space creates invisible layers and boundaries within the same physical environment. We might walk the same streets, but the way we relate to them can be entirely different. The meaning of space shifts according to each of us. The feeling of belonging gives us the right to emotionally claim spaces. That’s why no physical map can ever truly outline the topography of feelings. 

Your work plays with the layering of personal memory and collective space. How do you navigate the tension between individual dreaming and collective meaning-making in your projects?

I believe there’s no such thing as impersonal art. Every work begins from the artist’s inner position, memory, imagination, concern, perception. I often start from something very specific: a fragment of memory, an object, a site, or a story, and build from there. I am especially fond of working with memory. Since it carries time within, it allows things to resurface in a more mature form. I enjoy embedding myself into current situations that concern me and using my own perspective to spark new reflections. There is a certain magic in exploring how something deeply personal can activate a shared experience.  

If tenderness were a building, a street, or a sound, what form would it take in your city (imaginary city or the city you actually live in)?

It could be the image of a horse walking opposite to the rushing cars; graceful and peaceful, vulnerable and solitary, yet completely free and led by nature.

@ Ledia Kostandini, The Dreaming City, courtesy of the artist.

Interviewed by Emilia Trifunovic