Federico Possati

The Archeological Bazaar

The Book

A gust of wind sweeps through a 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 almost no traces remain to testify to this event. What has even taken place?

The Archeological Bazaar is a project that focuses on the Italian Pianura Padana, a vast, flat area that stretches from Milan to the sea. It’s a fascinating territory that underwent significant changes in the last century, transforming from a rural farmland to a hybrid mix of fields, factories, malls, and tourist destinations that is impossible to categorize.

For the past two years, I’ve been traveling and taking photos through these places, trying to make sense of its evolution and to understand what this territory has become.

As time passed, I found myself coming home with more and more images of artifacts, objects, and places that had been abandoned. The subjects of these photos were lost, not only in the sense of being left behind but more importantly as subjects whose origin and function were slowly being erased or forgotten. It seemed like all that I was photographing had been violently ripped away from its original context and was now uprooted, like a blade of grass in a whirlwind.

Slowly, I started to realize that this loss of context was not an obstacle, but rather the very thing I was looking for. Just like a collector, I wanted to find all of these subjects, to collect them and, finally, to exploit them to create something new. All that was left was to embrace the chaos and to dive in. Guided by the words of Gianni Celati (from whom the title of the project is borrowed), a photobook was born.

The project takes shape into a book containing 4 booklets, each recreating a new context for these subjects. From indecipherable symbols, to images that have been slowly erased by time and memory, and from things left behind to a chaotic allegory of the origin of this mess.

The book was designed by Bahut Studio