Federico Possati

The Archeological Bazaar

The Book

A gust of wind sweeps through a hay field, causing mild havoc. Hundreds of blades of grass dance in the air until, just as quickly as it all started, everything stands still. Something happened, but it’s almost impossible to decode it from the traces spread throughout the field. What actually took place/p>

It’s from this question that The Archeological Bazaar begins.

I spent the past two years exploring and photographing the territory where I grew up in, on a quest to understand the possibilities of photography as a tool to decode a geographical area. As time passed, I found myself focusing more and more on liminal places, and in particular on artifacts and objects that were scattered around them.

What I encountered were subjects that were lost, not only in the sense of being left behind but, more importantly, because their origin and function were slowly being erased or forgotten. Everything I photographed seemed to have been ripped away from its original context. Trying to use these fragments to build a new context felt like trying to decode the hay field after the wind had passed.

The loss of context turned out not to be an obstacle, but the very thing I was looking for: the point where photography can no longer restore what was lost. Gianni Celati, in his essay “The Archeological Bazaar,” proposes displaying these ahistorical artifacts not in a museum, but on the booth of a bazaar, arranged by the capricious inclinations of whoever put them together. This book is that booth.

It takes the form of four booklets, each building a new context for its subjects: indecipherable symbols, images slowly erased by time and memory, things left behind, and a chaotic allegory of how this mess came to be.

The book was designed by Bahut Studio.