Steven Seidenberg is a US photographer and author whose work documents marginalised spaces, from ruined but beautiful structures to overlooked or abandoned objects. For his socially critical projects, he has travelled to all parts of the world, most recently to Italy. 

His most recent project, The Architecture of Silence, documents abandoned life in the south of Italy and the post-war land reform movement. In Italian, this reform is known as Riforma Fondiaria. Between 1952 and 1972, as part of the Marshall Plan, the Italian government carried out a land reform that brought land into the possession of impoverished families, but without the necessary infrastructure. This failure led to a mass exodus to the industrial north. In 2017, Seidenberg began to explore the landscapes, post-war buildings and remaining structures in the vast areas of Basilicata and Apulia.

He came across another project in Italy. Seidenberg succeeded in documenting the migrant camp run by the aid organisation Baobab Experience, which was evacuated by the then Minister of the Interior Matteo Salvini in 2018. Baobab Experience is a Roman organisation that aims to help refugees into a legal everyday life. Salvini described the camp as a lawless space after allegations of criminal offences and had it bulldozed. The migrants' personal belongings and official documents were also destroyed in the process. Seidenberg's photos give an impression of what life was actually like for the residents. 

In both series, Seidenberg's photographs capture the living spaces with haunting beauty and raise questions about the lives of the former residents. What both series have in common is that people moved there because they were promised a better life and had to leave because it became unbearable for them. By depicting this loneliness, Seidenberg primarily wants to suggest the opposite. He is concerned with the "dreams and hopes of those who once inhabited these spaces, but are now only present in the decaying traces of their hastily abandoned lives.“

We will be hearing a lot more from Steven Seidenberg in 2024, as several exhibitions are planned, including Photo London in May 2024, the Officine Fotografiche in Rome, the Italian Cultural Institute in London, the University of Amsterdam, as well as exhibitions in Puglia and Zagreb.

27. November 2023

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Name: Steven Seidenberg

Occupation: Writer and artist

Residence: San Francisco

Education: Boston University, Massachusetts, Ph.D., philosophy, Bard College New York, B.A., philosophy, photography, poetry

In your new book „The Architecture of Silence“, one of the topics is the land reform „Riforma Fondiaria“, as part of the Marshall Plan, which was implemented between 1952 and 1972 but did not work. When you documented it photographically, were you able to determine why the plan didn't work?

Before answering your question directly, I think it’s important to note that the Italian government did not consider the Riforma Fondiaria a failure, in the sense that it changed the nature of both landowner and peasant agriculture in the regions where it as implemented, increasing yields through modern farming methods and the corporatization of agrarian practices that had remained largely unchanged for centuries. That this was accomplished at the expense of ‘peasant’ communities and expectations was itself a boon to the post-war capitalization of Italy by mobilizing workers for the rapidly industrializing North, where many of the displaced agricultural workers settled after abandoning the Riforma houses.

That said, I would stop short of suggesting that the act of photographing the vestigial structures of the Riforma movement revealed the necessity of this displacement, rather the inadequacy of the infrastructure provided by the government for these communities made it clear they could not work. This was apparent immediately upon entering the properties, as no irrigation infrastructure was ever constructed to support them, and the surrounding grasslands could provide no more than subsistence level farming. Other reasons for the abandonment of the communities associated with the Riforma––the acreage sequestered for the use of each individual farmer, the structure of the debt accrued by accepting the Riforma offer––became apparent after further research.

Untitled - Couch and Window ©Steven Seidenberg

"My general approach to the imaging of solitude in this series and others is first and foremost a suggestion of the opposite"

There is something beautiful about solitude, but it has fate as its background. How does that make you feel?

My general approach to the imaging of solitude in this series and others is first and foremost a suggestion of the opposite––of the dreams and hopes of those who once inhabited these spaces, but are now only present in the decaying traces of their hastily abandoned lives. As such, I’m attempting to evoke an experience of the sublime, as much as the beautiful, and while these are related feeling and thinking states, they are not the same, and it is precisely the way in which the experience of sublimity puts one in touch with the ecstatic contemplation of each our own eventual absence, extended eternally, that begins to describe the empathy I hope to effect with this work.

There will also be a symposium on your project. What artistic and social message do you have with your book?

Of course, I have many ways in which I hope the project will affect those who come into contact with its images––in the book or in a show, in the form of individual prints or in series, whatever the case may be. Indeed, the previous question begins to approach some of the artistic vectors present in the work, but your suggestion of a social message also rings true. This, too, can become exceedingly complex quite quickly––one of the great privileges of working visually is the way in which the image can hold ideological convolutions suspended in solution, if you will, intricacies that would take treatises to explicate with equal efficacy. In part, at least, I hope these images conjure the tragedy of this materially compelled destruction of a culture and a region and a way of life, and in so doing draw an emotional and material connection between such internal migrants and contemporary peoples enveloped by the pressures of trans-national migration, an emotive invocation of the ways that the exigencies of capital lay waste to such crude bounds.

Baobob - Migrant Tent City- Rome ©Steven Seidenberg

You also documented the so-called "The Baobab Experience" and its removal. This camp took in Rome's new asylum seekers - initially Eritreans, later also from North Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. What brought you here?

My engagement with Baobab is part of a broader project imaging the domestic circumstances of both migrants and Italians occupying abandoned buildings and spaces in Rome and its suburbs. The contact points for this project began with an invitation to install images from the Riforma series at the Museo dell'Altro e dell'Altrove Metropoliz, or M.A.A.M. for short. M.A.A.M. is Rome’s third largest museum of contemporary art, open to the public every Saturday and located in the large open spaces of an abandoned meat processing facility and salumeria, spaces that could not otherwise be used for domestic purposes. Through this process, we had the privilege of meeting many of the residents and the political organizers of Metropoliz, who were kind enough to both allow us access to their domestic spaces and to introduce us to those involved in similar communities around Rome, including Baobab.

"I am only concerned with ways of living, and a mode of rendering those scenes that pulls the viewer into the space."

When did you document it? Did you meet any residents and where are they now?

The aforementioned introduction to the organizers of The Baobab Experience came in the summer of 2018, and we began to spend time in the community. For my work there and in any other similar setting, I will not photograph without feeling sure of the resident’s comfort and permission, which of course requires getting to know them and earning their trust. Part of this is facilitated by the demonstrable absence of any images of people in my work; I am only concerned with ways of living, and a mode of rendering those scenes that pulls the viewer into the space, once again compelling many of the artistic and social imperatives mentioned above––the experiences of beauty, sublimity, and empathy, respectively.

How did it come about that you represent these two themes in Italian society?

As you can tell, perhaps, from my answers to this point, it’s…complicated. That said, the circumstances that contribute to its complexity amplify the satisfactions of making and showing the work. And the response to the work in Italy and beyond has been quite rewarding––moving to those who can be moved, irritating to those who can’t, which is exactly as it should be.

"To borrow a metaphor from the philosopher Franz Rosenzweig,

I understand these practices as reflections of light from the same source, but from different shards of a shattered mirror."

You studied philosophy and write and translate. In which medium can you best express your creativity?

You know, it’s all of a piece for me. There are ways in which my visual practice and my work as a writer are leveraging similar effects in the use of formal repetition and conceptual constraint, in a way that I might rather obtusely suggest is a form of minimalism––in the musical, not the artistic sense, by which I mean that the work can still (and hopefully) overwhelm the senses, just with a minimal compositional variation that grows in urgency over time. In any case, the imperative feels the same, whether I’m working visually or poetically/philosophically, and I find it generative, even energizing, to switch registers, even over the course of a day. To borrow a metaphor from the philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, I understand these practices as reflections of light from the same source, but from different shards of a shattered mirror.

Baobob - Migrant Tent City- Rome ©Steven Seidenberg