Anatomy of a Scam
Anila Shehaj is an Albanian architect and researcher based in Berlin. She trained at IUAV University of Venice and is a registered architect in Italy. Her research addresses housing issues, urban and labor informality in construction, and the political economy of the built environment.
Her master's thesis analyzed the use of propaganda as an instrument of urban design in post-socialist Tirana. Earlier, an academic exchange between IUAV and the University of Hong Kong led to her participation in "This is Hong Kong," a project presented at the Venice Architecture Biennale, examining the image of the city as a fragmented, collective construct.
Her professional practice has included private commissions — primarily residential renovations — collaborations with artistic collectives, and consulting work for local administrations in Italy. She leads Shadow Builders, an ongoing research project on the undocumented labor that maintains Europe's built heritage, from Albanian craftsmen restoring Unesco-listed dry-stone walls in Puglia to Polish workers commuting overnight to construction sites in Berlin.
Her current project, Anatomy of a Scam, examines housing fraud and bureaucratic opacity in the Berlin rental market. It is published through Zimmerdruck, the micro-press she founded, and was selected for the Berlin Founders Program in 2025 and presented at the most recent edition of 48 Stunden Neukölln.
It started in 2021, searching for an apartment in Berlin from Italy, until I flew there and it was real. Close friends were not so lucky: they lost 3.000 euros in a Kaution paid to a copycat website mimicking a real agency, she was pregnant with her second child and the police report changed nothing. Eva Kuta, my alter ego, the perfect victim who writes back instead of blocking, was born from my friend's story. My first instinct was to document, collecting the absurdity. Eva was meant to multiply, to mirror the scammers' tone but somewhere in that mirroring something cracked, and that crack is where Zimmerdruck was born: a micro-press in my own room, the series Anatomy of a Scam.
The most honest test so far: public walks with strangers ending in an installation inside my own apartment, built from recorded voices of the scammed. Visitors didn't know the apartment was mine or that I was Eva. Their confusion was the fear I'd had refreshing a listing from another country, no longer read about, but a room people stood in.
I'm now doing a Weiterbildung in construction law, finding that the bureaucracy itself, the infamous Anmeldung and the Schufa work like scams themselves: promising access, producing delay, rejecting without explanation and creating anxiety. This is where the work goes next: reading bureaucracy itself as fraud, more Zimmerdruck editions, testing public derives beyond my walls, so Eva becomes everyone Berlin's housing market wasn't built for. In a few months I have to leave this apartment. I'm writing from inside that uncertainty. Berlin is where I stand but can be elsewhere. The problem remains the same.