THE STOLEN COUNTRY
This is a road trip following the trails of the “Incompiuto” in Italy. About a thousand unfinished buildings, infrastructures and urban planning operations abandoned and turned into a no-man’s-land.
This book is the travel journey through an invisible country. A road trip spread out over 4 years following the trails of the Incompiuto in Italy. The term Incompiuto refers to a public work (a building, an infrastructure or an urban planning operation) that has not been completed. It remains, therefore, unusable. Those projects are often financed with EU funds.
Although in Italy this phenomenon is widely discussed, it is almost unknown outside the Italian borders.
There is no precise census of these works, it is estimated that there are thousands! Airports, bridges, dams, roads, schools, swimming pools and sports facilities, that are left to rot under the weather, devastated by vandalism and turned into a no-man’s-land. This photographic project aims to examine the phenomenon of the Incompiuto, from two different and yet converging points of view. The first one aims at highlighting the tragedy of the unfinished works on the social and environmental level. The second one focuses on some aesthetic aspects of the Incompiuto. Two axes of investigation which contribute both to explain the phenomenon in all its complexity. These two levels of inquiry correspond to the two chapters of the book: “Stories” and “Incompiuto”. In the first chapter 15 citizens bring their testimonies on the waste of economic resources and the damage caused by the Incompiuto. In the second chapter, the landscapes question the vague and mysterious esthetical characteristics of the Incompiuto.
This book is addressed to all those who have an interest in the environment and architecture and particularly in the strong relationship between them and society.
ROBERTO GIANGRANDE (Rome, 1976)
After studying literature with a specialization in Entertainment (dissertation on political cinema of Elio Petri), I worked as assistant in a photographic studio in Rome. In the early 2000s, I started to develop my personal photographic experience exploring the portrait than and the urban landscape. In 2001, the Italian “Risorgimento Studies Center” commissioned me a photographic study on the allegories of the Risorgimento, sculpted on the monument to Giuseppe Garibaldi: these photos were exhibited at the “Museo del Vittoriano” in Rome. In 2003, with my reportage “Manhattan: ground one“, I wanted to testify, with a series of shots created around Ground Zero, the subtle relationship between citizens and the traumatic event of the World Trade Center. These photos were exhibited at Teatro Piccolo Eliseo in Rome. Arrived in Nantes in 2008, I started photographing for the City of Nantes the new urban planning projects. In 2009, my photos of the Bottière-Chénaie eco-district were exhibited at the Floresca Guépin media library (Bottière-Chenaie: dawn of a new district) and attracted the attention of the newspaper Libération which bought them for a special edition on architecture and ecology. Successive orders for architectural firms, communications agencies, engineering firms, culture, urban communities. Through my reports for the City of Nantes, Nantes Métropole and the Loire Atlantique department, I had the opportunity to observe no only the rapid evolution of the urban landscape under the impetus of a strong population growth, but especially the effects of this change on citizens: the city landscape as a place of dialectical tension between nature and culture, the mirror in which reflect social dynamics. My two interests, portrait and landscape, converged more and more within a journey that starts from urban forms and architecture and brings back to man. From 2014, I followed various training and workshops with some internationally renowned photographers (David Burnett, Todd Hido, Richard Dumas). In 2016, I started my photographic project on the Unfinished in Italy. In this project I return to my homeland with a journey that is both reflection on the places of an aberration and on the relationship between identity and cultural heritage. In October 2019 some of these images were exhibited at Espace Cosmopolis in Nantes. Today, I work as a freelance photographer and continue my personal research through a new project about asbestos in Italy.
© Text and pictures by Roberto Giangrande
