The Burrnesha Archive is a book, installation and film exploring the memory of a vanishing transgender tradition in Northern Albania.
The Burrnesha are women who have sworn a life-long oath of chastity and in doing so become men - in terms of appearance, rights and social acceptance within Albanian culture. Few Burrnesha remain today as the traditional reasons for taking this oath have become increasingly obsolete in contemporary Albania. Details on the Burrnesha that existed and those that are still alive can only be found in traces, hidden or erased during an extreme Communist regime between 1945-1991.
The Burrnesha Archive, is a record of three Burrnesha in Northern Albania. An installation film and novel acts as an archive for three individuals’ collective memories and their inevitable connection to the complicated recent history of Albania.
These memories are narrated through a combination of text and photographs that appear as a conventional fictional novel. The factual novel is a chaotic and highly fragmented narrative that explores the unstable nature of trying to communicate the memory of a vanishing culture during a period of extreme censorship.
The project was supported with thanks to the Frøken Marie Månssons Grant.
