The Archeological Bazaar

“The Archeological Bazaar” is an ongoing project about the Italian Pianura Padana, a vast flat land area that runs from Milan to the sea. It's an archeological expedition into this fragmented territory and the relics that populate it.

A gust of wind sweeps through a field, causing mild havoc. Hundreds of blades of grass dance in the air until, just as quickly as it all started, everything stands still. Something happened, but almost no traces are left behind to testify to this event. What has even taken place? This is how the book “The Archeological Bazaar” begins.

The book focuses on the Italian Pianura Padana, a vast, flat area that stretches from Milan to the sea. It’s a fascinating territory that underwent significant changes in the last century, transforming from a rural farmland to a hybrid mix of fields, factories, malls, and tourist destinations that is impossible to categorize. For the past two years, I’ve been traveling and taking photos through these places, trying to make sense of this evolution and to understand what this territory has become.

As time passed, I found myself coming home with more and more images of artifacts, objects, and places that had been abandoned. The subjects of these photos were lost, not only in the sense of being left behind but more importantly as subjects whose origin and function were slowly being erased or forgotten. It seemed like all that I was photographing had been violently ripped away from its original context and was now misplaced, like a blade of grass in a whirlwind.

These shortcomings made me rethink my approach: rather than trying to create an Archeological project aimed at decoding the territory, the focus of the project became to highlight the impossibility to do so. Once the opportunity of using these relics to create a wider context, as one would do in a museum, is discarded, all that is left is the booth of a Bazaar. This is a way to invent new contexts by presenting artifacts not by following their original history but rather following the capricious fascination of whoever put them together.

The book follows this approach and creates a new frame for contextualizing these subjects. It consists of a box containing 4 booklets, each recreating a new context for these modern long-lost artifacts. From indecipherable symbols, to images that have been separated from their purpose, and from things that have been left behind, to a chaotic allegory that describes the origin of this mess.