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.

  “The Archeological Bazaar” is an ongoing project about the Italian Pianura Padana, a vast flat land area that runs from Milan to the Adriatic sea. As a kid, I used to sit in the passenger seat as we drove through these places. As soon as we left the city, it seemed like we were transported into a mysterious area I struggled to decipher. This is not surprising; after all, it’s a 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.

In 2023, I began traveling through the Pianura Padana with my camera, seeking to fulfill this curiosity, being unsure of how the project would develop. As time passed, I found myself coming home with more and more images of artifacts, objects, and fragments that had been abandoned. I was under the impression that the territory itself has shed its identity over and over again, leaving behind traces of what it once was.

I realized that the images I was taking were increasingly focused on subjects that were lost, not only in the sense of being left behind but more importantly as subjects whose origin and function had long been forgotten. It felt like the changes that took place in the territory made it impossible to recontextualize these fragments, to reattach them to a wider history, and to understand what they once were. It was as if I was embarking on an archeological expedition into the territory, with the caveat that what I was finding were un-archeological finds, subjects privy to the ability of creating context.

The title of this project is borrowed from an essay by the writer Gianni Celati. As he suggests in this work, this is a “New Archeology” that recognizes its shortcomings and presents these subjects as if they were on the booth of a Bazaar, completely separated from their original history and arranged according to 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 accordion-bound 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.