HISTORIES & FICTIONS
Project Description
This photographic essay was accompanied by text that explored the idea of the architectural uncanny and the imprint that inhabitants can leave on spaces.
Text Excerpt: "Superstition surrounds the abandoned place and, as Victor Hugo noted, it is enough to kill it. If left to the natural processes of decay, it transforms into something sinister. Human absence has made it into a reflection of what it once was; it becomes a corpse, littered with the residue of a past life. This death is uncanny. The building’s remains exist in a state of abjection; its body has not been removed from sight but stands; propped up by its structure, a child of absence with no heart beating in its skeletal chest. It stares out through gaping black windows. Terrible in aspect, “it becomes a place of dread”, for in its death, architecture mirrors human mortality." Victor Hugo, The Toilers of the Sea