Empire of Dust

This artwork featured in In Ruins (2019).

For the series Empire of Dust, French artist photographer Amélie Labourdette went on a photographic quest to Southern Italy and Sicily, where financial crises and embezzlement by the Mafia have created extraordinary landscapes of incompleteness and ruination.

Through this ‘archaeology of the present’ Labourdette proposes an unsettling reading of our times, so much so that it almost feels like a mutant version of our own world. Nothing has been altered though, just concrete skeletons photographed in a dense, shadowless atmosphere, amid the lush vegetation that threatens to swallow them.

The massive, puzzling structures are crudely made from one of the roughest, most emblematic materials of our times- concrete. Their status is infinitely complex: they are unexecuted projects of the past, unforgiving witnesses of the present and already remains for the future.

Image: Amélie Labourdette, Empire of Dust, Photographic prints on Dibond, 2015. Installation view, In Ruins, Witley Court, 2019. Image courtesy of Stefan Handy. 

 

About the artist

Amélie Labourdette

Amelie Labourdette exhibited in In Ruins, Witley Court, 2019.

 

Image: Amélie Labourdette, Empire of Dust, 2015. Photographic prints on Dibond. Courtesy the artist and Thierry Bigaignon Gallery.