“Double Language” is a multidisciplinary art project proposed by Erdiola Kanda Mustafaj which aims to question through a sensitive perspective notions such as exile, migration and language. It began in 2025 during the Art Explora x Vila 31 residency in Tirana, Albania, and continues the artist’s personal and cultural research into the Cham-Albanian dialect and the complex history of the Cham community displacement from northern Greece after World War II. The project is deeply rooted in Kanda’s own story. Born in Albania and raised in Italy, she grew up listening to her grandparents speak of a homeland they were forced to leave behind.

The population of this region, called Chameria, was ethnically mixed and complex, with the overlapping of Albanian and Greek identities, as well as of various other minority groups. During much of the Ottoman period, most of the writing in Chameria was done in Greek or in Turkish, and Cham-Albanian was a spoken dialect only. Mirroring a multicultural reality made up of continuous lexical stratifications, the complexity of this liquid language is the result of a tradition based on orality, difficult to unravel and crystallize due to its original ephemeral nature.