Public Project
Left Behind
Copyright Tiberio Ventura 2024
Updated Jan 2014
Topics Abandonment, Documentary, Photography

During 2008 a strong economic crisis has affected Europe, due to the increase in prices of raw materials, such as oil and also because of a global economic inflation. Among the countries hardest hit by the crisis there is Italy, where my project is based.

Factors of the financial crisis were particularly evident in the Italian territory and especially in industrial areas, where many factories were abandoned by the owners due to lack of work and economical resources. The project analyzes the signs of the crisis present on the territory. Walking through these large abandoned industrial complex, the feeling was that these places which, before the crisis, were source of income, had now been completely forgotten by the people and left behind.

Since the industries had been abandoned recently it was still possible to spot, inside the buildings ,the traces of life left by the man, such as: documents, employee photographs hanged on the walls and materials that were used.

In order to visually describe the fact that people had forgotten and abandoned the places that before had been their sources of income and instead the buildings have preserved the traces of the man, I decided to scan the photographs which I found inside the factories and used them in my project. In order to create a dialogue between the found photographs and the pictures taken by me, some of the photographs are organized as a diptych.

The project wants to document the signs of the financial crisis, present in the Italian industrial areas and highlight the fact that people have left behind factories but the industries have preserved traces of people in them. 

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