INCOMPIUTO

Skeletons of houses, like dead leaves laid on the hillside, inhabit one of the most beautiful views of Mondello beach with their red tiles. The collina del disonore is famous in Sicily for its incomplete residences, with windowless openings and bare facades, unoccupied for years, existing but not alive. This image is not uncommon in Italy. The phenomenon of the incompiuto (the unfinished) is rife throughout the peninsula.

Empty forms, suspended in space and time, punctuate the landscape with question marks. More than 1,000 infrastructure projects are abandoned during or at the end of construction, never brought into service because of defects, obscure financial arrangements, bureaucratic red tape or high operating costs. The greyish hospital with no patients in Carmine, the Piedmont motorway that falls into a field, the ghost complex of La Maddalena that will never host the G8... Ambitious works left as they are, sketching out the contours of an invisible country.

The book is composed of fifty unfinished works photographed by Roberto Giangrande using white light tinged with a faded veil, showing no human presence. His images transport us into a recurrence of the absurd, where the memory of places is no longer shared. It proves impossible to construct memories with the unfinished pieces caught between an aimless past and an indefinitely deferred future.

At the end of the book, a text by Italian writer Roberto Ferrucci provides an insight into the political and social context inherent in incompiuto, set against Giangrande's meticulous photographic work.

Incompiuto is full of indignation at these ‘endless concrete flows that are ultimately useless to the community, but very useful to those who have profited from them [...] crimes against the community, against the common good’ (excerpt from the afterword by writer Roberto Ferrucci).