An International Archive
This project, Lost in La Bassa, is about the lands where I was born and where I used to live when I was a little kid. When I moved to another town I used to come back here to visit my relatives but, with the passage of time the visits have become more sporadic. That’s why I decided to retrace these landscapes in order to recall lost memories from my childhood and see these lands with new eyes.
— Brando Ghinzelli, Rome, Italy
The project Streets Without Qualities is a photographic exploration of the residential area of Saione, a working-class neighborhood within the city of Arezzo, one of the main cities in Tuscany, Italy.
At the beginning of the 20th century, this region was dotted with Belle Époque three-story houses and rural homes. Starting from the end of the 1960s until the 1990s, Saione began to develop its current aspect: taller buildings grew up quickly, apparently following no urbanization plan and exploiting the real estate market bubble of the time.
A specific patchwork of façades and streets grew with no identifiable qualities or evidence of any historical moment. In Tuscany, these kinds of areas are often underrated in favor of a visual cliché that privileges Medieval and Renaissance architecture, thereby contributing to creating a distorted idea of a territory.
— Giorgio Bagnarelli, Arezzo, Italy
The Hole explores the destruction and abuse we place on our land for our own personal need and gain, represented visually by disused quarries. In time these forgotten locations, that are sparsely dotted around the country, slowly return to what they once were by virtue of man’s absence. Humans use and deprive the land at their convenience. When it comes at a disadvantage it’s forgotten about and the land is left to deal with the consequences. When the environment finally retakes what is there, it returns in different ways to what was once before. It’s a never-ending cycle of nature versus the human race — with, unfortunately, the latter coming out on top, indefinitely.
— Ben Davies, Manchester, England
Ciudad Jardín Soto del Real at Buniel, Spain: Abandoned, Plundered & Trashed.
More than 1,400 apartments were planned for the development called Ciudad Jardin Soto del Real — on a hill next to the village of Buniel (about 500 inhabitants), about 15 kilometers west of Burgos, in Spain.
In 2008, when one of the largest Spanish construction companies had to file for bankruptcy, just 312 apartments were completed or partially completed. The Spanish property bubble burst.
The bankruptcy of this construction company was a catastrophe for the village as well as for the subcontractors and the buyers of the apartments. The construction work stopped. Many involved companies and buyers lost their money, went bankrupt or were pushed to the brink of ruin.
The apartments and houses were unattended in the following years and were plundered. Recently, the huge area with approximately 55 hectares became more and more of a dump.
— Robert Schlaug, Germany
This series, GSK, documents the visual space of garage building cooperatives (GSK – Garazhno-Stroitel’nyi Kooperativ) in the city of Moscow. GSK is considered to appear as a specific cultural artifact of the Soviet period and became widespread in the 1970s, when the notion of private property was unheard-of in the USSR.
These garages turned out to be the training ground of traits and qualities of a property owner, unknown and unnecessary in the USSR. They also allowed the first instances of social self-organization. According to some estimates, one-story garages will virtually disappear in Moscow in the near future.
— Andrey Gontarev, Moscow, Russia
