The Architecture of Silence:
Abandoned Lives of the Italian South
Between 1952 and 1972, the Italian government implemented a land reform policy in a few key agrarian centers of the countryside, known as the Riforma Fondiaria. Funded by the Marshall Plan, the program placed land in the possession of impoverished families, but did so without the infrastructure necessary to make the small holdings sustainable. This failure brought about a mass migration into the developing industrial North, leaving dozens upon dozens of post-war, often cast-concrete structures abandoned in the now machine cultivated fields.
Pipevalve: Berlin
In 2013, Steven Seidenberg encountered the pipevalves (in German, Reinigungsöffnung) depicted in this volume on daily walks around the neighborhood in which he was based during a residency in Berlin. He was hooked at once by their totemic quality, and he first photographed the two located on the same block as his studio. As he walked in and beyond the neighborhood he realized that the structures were concentrated within an area measuring just over .5 square km. Across most of Berlin, the cast-iron fittings photographed in this volume have largely disappeared, replaced by plastic and aluminum plates throughout the East Berlin neighborhoods where they were once prevalent.