Abandoned places dispersed by padded dust of time has always seduced me.
I am fascinated by the way ivy slowly invades architecture through cracks and windows, the vibrant green moss veils precarious floors and morphs forgotten objects.
Derelict places are lit by a unique, powerful light. A light that vehemently shows colours, shapes and textures, abstracting buildings from their original intention, giving them a new lease of life dominated by a metaphysical silence.
Far from Bernd and Hilla Becher’s rigorous formalism, I am inspired by Dadaism, where aesthetic was questioned and new rhymes and rhythms were created. I seek beauty in places that have forgotten their purpose.
I gravitate towards elapsed histories; histories of everyday life as time colludes with nature to rewrite these memories afresh. Abandon overwrites social difference as ivy wraps sumptuous palaces and shacks alike and dust covers them all.
More than death, for me abandon represents transformation. Places that we once claimed from nature, little by little are repossessed by nature, sometimes with violence and force.
It is a matter of re-dead places, as defined by Italian writer Carmen Pellegrino, of places that acquire new meanings. “Even though lost villages convey a strange and melancholic poetry, they are pervaded by a special, almost tactile, joy” … “In these places the end had come as well as it has gone away: they are not dead places because death has gone too. Remains of houses are there, imperfect and derelict, like an ode to time”.
* Perrotti, Roberto. La bellezza e il silenzio dei luoghi abbandonati. Intervista con Carmen Pellegrino. Art a part of culture, 2015. Web, 9 February 2015. http://www.artapartofculture.net/
