LONDON.- The Italian Cultural Institute in London, Photoworks, and the Royal Geographical Society announced that artist Erdiola Kanda Mustafaj has been selected as the recipient of the Hidden Narratives Residency, during which she will spend a year immersing herself in the historic Collections of the Royal Geographical Society and engaging with materials in relation to the environment and the humanitarian. Erdiola will present her work to the public and peers at Summit Photo - an interactive forum exploring how photography and filmmaking can confront climate change, poverty, conflict, and other ecological and human issues, held at the Society from 17-19 July.

The Hidden Narratives Residency is a partnership between Photoworks, The Royal Geographical Society and the Italian Cultural Institute in London, focussed on developing archive residencies and programmes for Italian photographers to access career-defining opportunities.

Erdiola’s research lies at the intersection of memory, displacement and the politics of image-making. In this residency, Erdiola will bring the archive into conversation with her project Pasqyra e Lendes, Albanian for sommarium or literally mirror of matter. The work is a longform photographic project centred on the displaced figure where the residency will support in expanding her research inquiry into how landscape is constructed through the act of looking. Working within the Royal Geographical Society’s Collections will enable the artist to build a conceptual thread toward a broader meditation on belonging, and the possibility of constructing new visual narrations from the ruins of an inherited gaze. With poetic attention to politics, she meditates on the notion of the living archive and diaspora not as a fixed condition but as a transitional shifting space, one shaped by the tension between collective history and intimate memory.

Throughout the course of the residency, Erdiola will have 3 separate research and presentation visits to the UK, to spend time at the Royal Geographical Society archive, working with the archive team, including mentoring from Photoworks. She will give a talk to share work and research in progress at Summit Photo 2026 (17-19 July), with the final presentations taking place during Summit Photo 2027.

The Royal Geographical Society’s Collections hold over half a million original photographs, negatives and lantern slides, including some of the very earliest geographic photography dating back to the mid-19th century and the advent of the photographic medium, which combined encapsulates the study of Geography over the past two centuries. This collection includes artefacts of Western colonial acts, as well as sincere scientific and personal observations of diverse physical and human habitats. These works, intermeshed with manuscript and cartographic outputs also held in the Collection, tell a wonderfully rich story of our world through a particularly formative period.

Erdiola Kanda Mustafaj is an Albanian/Italian multi-disciplinary artist based in Paris, working across photography, video installation and sound. Born in Albania, she moved to Italy at the age of seven. She graduated from the Bauer School of Photography in Milan in 2019 and has since built a practice that weaves together the personal and the political, drawing on private archives and collective memory to examine the intellectual and political history of her homeland. Her work has been exhibited across Europe and Albania. Solo exhibitions include Kunst-im-kreuzgang in Bielefeld (Germany, 2025) and the Italian Cultural Institute in Stockholm (Sweden, 2026). Group exhibitions at the Marubi National Museum of Photography (Shkodër, 2025), Art Explora x Vila 31 (Tirana, 2025), Luigi Ghirri Prize for Giovane Fotografia Italiana (Reggio Emilia, 2025), Ardhje Prize at Zeta Gallery (Tirana, 2024) and Rencontres de la jeune photographie internationale at Villa Pérochon (Niort, 2022).