Architecture of Silence (Signed edition)

During reconstruction of the Italian economy following World War II, the newly established Italian republic and its American allies implemented a program of land reform, the Riforma Fondiaria, which ran from 1950 to 1972. With funding from the Marshall Plan, the Italian state attempted to inhibit the popularity of the communist party and other leftwing movements by appropriating some of their policies. Two extensive reform laws initiated a redistribution of land that had profound effects across Italy, albeit predominantly in the south. Nearly 50 years later, what became a spectacular disaster for the people and a bonanza for the state has left its physical evidence scattered across the countryside. In 2017, Steven Seidenberg and Carolyn White began an interdisciplinary project to document the contemporary remains of the Riforma.

Seidenbergs richly detailed photographs capture the houses, the outbuildings, the interiors, and the exteriors in a hauntingly beautiful manner, drawing attention to the lives that were strung along through the reform process. Some of the photographs depict the houses themselves, documenting the cast concrete structures posed on the landscape.

As Seidenberg turns his lens toward this rural landscape, he captures the tensions between permanence and temporary, between occupied and abandoned, and where the edge of tolerability existsplaces where people moved to live better and where the place was so intolerable that it had to be abandoned again, a dream never realized.

Essays by anthropologists, curators, critics, poets, and architects contextualize the images and by place the project in broader context. Together, the photos and associated essays serve to illuminate the fate of these economic migrants, their powerlessness in the face of larger social and economic forces, and the death of their dreams of a better life.