Territory / Extraction

An installation held in an abandoned children's colony inside a post-war utopian village in the Dolomites — an ex-ENI company town, its dormitories left made, its mattresses stencilled and returned to the beds.

The last children who slept in this colony left in the early nineties. They are now the age their fathers were then. The stencil arrives as an alibi thirty years late: it was not me, it was one of my friends.In every recollection, the friend is someone else — a boy who since moved abroad, a warden who since died, a name no one wrote down. The dormitory is empty. They are still awake in it.

Resilience is a word that has been laundered. A stuffy symptom of a pathology no one wants to name. What the institution could not repair, the vocabulary agreed to hide.

Before It Was a Desert is a book made with the photographerGiaime Meloni during a period at the same site — the ex-ENI Villaggio at Borca di Cadore, the alpine company town Edoardo Gellner drew into the forest at the foot of Mount Pelmo. Fifty copies.

Photographs face procedural graphics on facing pages. The book reads the mountain as a set of asynchronies: the plant's timetable against the alpine one, the modernist grid against the pasture, the utopian promise against the year it was abandoned. What was drawn to synchronise a workforce is asked to hold still while its own dyssynchronies — and the failed dystopias that followed — come into focus.