What does sustainability actually look like on the ground?
This study, performed during the winder months of 2026, follows wool and silk across four stages of the Albanian animal fibre supply chain, from shepherds and silkworm breeders to spinners, weavers and factory owners.
Rather than treating sustainability as a fixed goal or a checklist, the study approaches it as something people continuously do, and sometimes stop doing, in their daily work with living materials.
Combining ethnographic fieldwork, on-site interviews and photography, the research traces how fibers move through hands, machines and meanings. In the mountains of Kukës, shepherding remains deeply tied to animal rhythms and generations of care. Moving toward industrial factories in Tirana, fibre becomes something else entirely, a specified input measured in stitch counts rather than lived relationships.
The study shows that sustainability rarely collapses all at once. Instead it erodes quietly, as the connections between material, skill and meaning are stretched thin by standardisation and market demand. Wool stuffed into a window frame as insulation, a silk thread that resists a cutting machine, a hundred year old carpet still used in a mountain hut. These small material facts carry the story of what has been lost, and what still persists.
Visual methods
Photography ran through the entire research process, drawing on the author's 25 years of experience as a professional photographer. The camera worked both as a tool for gathering material and as a way of thinking, helping surface details that might otherwise pass unnoticed in a conversation. Still, the photographs were never treated as neutral evidence. They are shaped by the person holding the camera, by what gets framed and what gets left out, and by how a lens changes the space between researcher and participant. To work with that honestly, images were made relationally, built through trust and shared time in the field rather than taken from a distance. The photographs that appear throughout the study are part of how the research itself was conducted, an embodied way of participating alongside the interviews and field notes.
Conclusions
The study argues that sustainability cannot be separated from the everyday, material relationships people hold with the things they make and grow. It is not a property of a fibre or a factory, but something continuously produced, strained and occasionally repaired, one practice at a time.