The Vjosa River, recently declared (March 15, 2023) a National Park and protected area in Albania, like many other rivers in Southeast Europe, has been the subject of numerous attempts of infrastructural interventions such as the construction of hydropower plants for more than a decade. By delving into ambiguous, uneven nature of the Vjosa, this lecture seeks to rethink the meaning of dynamics, continuity, stability, fixity, and rupture at the brink of the modern quest for control over the changing environments. By intersecting anthropological, geographic, and remote sensing analysis it explores the mutuality of entanglements, disentanglements, and transformations of various scales that configure the Vjosa riverine environment. By intersecting and thinking through big, remote sensing data, and thick., ethnographic data, it argues that the dynamic, wild, and ambiguous nature of the Vjosa is part of the structural continuity or so-called "landscape structure" that seeks to resist the contemporary quest for fixity, stability, and control.
Nataša Gregorič Bon is a social anthropologist with a long standing research in Albania. Her interests include spatial anthropology, movements, mobility and migrations, border dynamics, anthropology of water and environmental anthropology. She is the author of the monograph Spaces of Discordance (ZRC Publishing House, 2008), translated into Albanian and published by Morava Publishing House in 2015. She is also co-author of the monograph (Non)movement and Place-Making (ZRC Publishing House, 2013) and co-editor of the volumes Remitting, Restoring and Building Contemporary Albania (Palgrave MacMillan/Springer Books, 2021) and Moving Places (Berghahn Books, 2016). For the latter, she and co-editor Jaka Repič received the Slovenian Research Agency's award Excellent in Science. She has been a book review editor for Anthropological Notebooks since 2008 and co-editor of the Space, Place, Time at the ZRC Publishing House since 2013. She was Departmental Visitor at the University of Canberra (Australia), Visiting Fellow at SSEES, UCL (UK) and Centre of South Eastern and European Studies (CSEES), University of Graz (Austria) and Visiting Lecturer at Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki (Finland).