Paola De Pietri

The major seismic events that in 2016 struck a number of regions of Central Italy, given the nature of the terrain and the morphology of very ancient town centres, destroyed a great number of communities, making houses uninhabitable and causing deaths among the population.
The images were produced in the Marche region in the valleys of Tronto, Chienti and the surrounding areas, between October 2017 – a year after the earthquake – and May 2018.
Here, the destruction caused by the earthquake and the planning interventions put in place to build the new little temporary dwellings are part of a great transformation of these spaces, of the things and the lives of people, with an ensuing loss of points of reference and intimacy.
I photographed the cracked houses, the found objects, today catalogued and stored in deposits, the building sites for the construction of the new temporary lodgings; I thought of them above all as intimate, family spaces, shattered and not yet pieced together. Here, the dust of the stones from the old houses that were destroyed and the dust from the new excavations in the building sites seems to cover everything, making everything alike, both what is old and what is new.
In this sense of displacement, of confusion, the people were photographed individually, by day and using the camera flash, isolated for an instant from everything, in the communal areas of the new temporary settlements.