Gabriele Basilico

Basilico photographs places which are suspended in time, without a history or a future, and this indetermination is precisely where their beauty and interest lay. These are images that reflect upon the end of the industrial cycle, upon the ruin—both physical and ideological—of modernity. They are an attempt to understand a new environment arisen from the ashes of industrial spaces and compact cities. Basilico’s photographic career changed direction the day he decided to start a project on the urban and suburban buildings in south of Milan, an area which had been protagonist of “the Italian miracle” during the fifties but which the oil crisis had emptied. This emptiness turned these industrial buildings in “landscape monuments”, captured in their transit towards dissolving themselves into another world. This interpretation of “ruin” reaches its peak with his images of Beirut, where he shoots ruin itself. Basilico photographs that go forward and reverse between nature and urban, that neutral space left in the middle, those terrain-vagues where city planing has succumbed to the conurbation’s incoherent expansion.