The Architecture of Silence: Abandoned Lives of the Italian South

In The Architecture of Silence, Seidenberg examines the failed post-war land reform movement known as the Riforma Fondiaria to which these imaged structures and landscapes belong. Between 1952 and 1972, the Italian government implemented this land reform policy in a few key agrarian centers of the countryside. 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.

In 2017, Seidenberg began exploring the landscapes, material culture, and remaining structures of this failed program in the vast agricultural areas of Basilicata and Puglia. The resultant series of images is not simply documentary, but presents the imperiled remnants of these absent lives in the form of hauntingly beautiful, painterly compositions. Again and again, these photographs reveal a poetic fragility that compels a primordial empathy in the viewer, drawing our attention to the lives destroyed through the Riforma, and thereby evoking the elemental complexity of loss and its aftermath the world over.