REVIEW BY URBANAUTICA
In the photographic project "Ero industria", Fabio D'Arsiè explores the theme of industrial archaeology through a lens that merges documentary precision with visual poetry. A collection of frames capturing fragments of abandoned factories becomes an introspective journey into the relationship between landscape, memory, and identity—led by someone who has not merely observed industry from the outside but experienced it daily, within its routines and at times its decline.
D'Arsiè's work continues a coherent and long-standing investigation, already evident in earlier projects such as the one on the Eni Village of Borca di Cadore or the hydroelectric infrastructures of his native region, Veneto. In these photographs, the author reveals a deep fascination with the interplay between architecture and landscape, with the marks human activity leaves on the territory. Yet in "Ero industria", the inquiry becomes more intimate, more human: the abandonment of production sites is narrated as a slow loss of meaning, a body emptied of function that still retains its form, dignity, and beauty.
D'Arsiè avoids nostalgic sentiment. His aesthetic is sober, almost ascetic, yet capable of capturing the evocative power of peeling surfaces, deteriorated forms, ambiguous structures, dust, alien-looking devices, and the play of light and shadow that shapes spaces and whispers an industrial "vocabulary." His photographs are silent witnesses, places that wait, solid testimonies. There is no glamorization of decay; rather, there is an invitation to contemplation and responsibility.
His photographic approach is objective, almost topographic, and opens to a subtle empathy. Abandoned factories, in their raw nakedness, become relics of a civilization that once built and later ceased to believe in what it had produced. In this sense, the work takes on a civic, even political tone: it serves as a warning against an Italian society that, as Pasolini once denounced, occupies, consumes, and forgets land, showing neither care for its landscapes nor respect for its history.
The metaphorical synopsis written by the author, in which the factory speaks in the first person, strengthens this sense of humanity transposed into architecture. These disused structures become aging bodies, missing the vital energy that once animated them. Their walls recall the hands that touched them, their corridors, the voices that passed through. The factory, like a living organism, once had a heart and now mourns its absence. Yet it does not plead for pity: it waits. It still stands, available to be seen, cared for, and possibly reborn.
"Ero industria" reminds us that the past is not merely an archive to consult but a living presence, made of walls, floors, iron, scents, and silences. It is a work that questions how we treat our landscapes and what we lose each time we allow memory to fade. It teaches us, with strength and delicacy, that even within decay, beauty and fragments of meaning can endure.
In the emptiness of these forgotten places—which once welcomed lives, ambitions, labor, dreams, and the regrets of entire communities—we glimpse a pervasive nihilism: that of a society no longer able to envision a future rooted in its own history, unable to find orientation in memory, and chasing uncertainty—the gamble of tomorrow—as its only remaining horizon.
