What does **virtue** mean to you?
Virtue for us means worth, decency,goodness and honesty.
Inspired by Hiskia’s motto in her Alba, we wanted to investigate how virtue has changed its meaning throughout the
history and most importantly, what it means to live with virtue today.
Besides being friendship book, female albas have served as a forum for discussions and have been filled with flowing
conversations by people around them. By collecting firsthand experiences from those who could share with us how our
society shaped and influenced their way of thinking and living, we wanted to reconnect with the past and continue to
question our own virtue as well as reflect on what it represents in society today.
As young members of society, we still resonate with the bias and inequality that people of color,women and queers face everyday and we cease to inherit and distinguish ourselves from that past. Therefore we created an alternative Alba
that is not curated, ugly and messy, that holds as much historical value as a regular Alba that was neatly and made
pretty for the eyes of the privileged.
In public space where we must stay silent, our alba might be loud and disturbing but it remains honest.
Album Amicorum is what we can call a ‘friendship book’ you might have experienced as a kid, but from all the way back in the 1540 - 1550 in German / Northern and Central Europian countries among university students. During these times, it was common for university students to go on Peregrinatio Academiae, “study trips”, where they traveled throughout the world and built their network. These friendship books contained the name, date, motto, place, family crest and even portraits which they collected from famous people or people of interest for their network.