Foresta Rossa

Foresta Rossa (416 Ghost Towns of the World)originates from a project to catalogue ghost towns that began in 2010. This research is neither geographical, historical, scientific nor social – or at least not exclusively so: the more than 400 towns recorded have provided evocative material, an ever-evolving archive of stories and visions, mapping out the hidden folds of time and humanity. A stray humanity, built on exchange, dialogue and interaction.

 

History has often chosen to ‘erase’ certain towns and cities for good, as they represent uncomfortable memories or embarrassing failures. This is the case, for example, with the unauthorised settlement of Kowloon, whose inhabitants were evacuated and whose buildings were demolished, or the ‘retro-futuristic’ houses of San Zhi, destroyed before they were even inhabited due to macabre legends. Or again: the secret city of Skrunda-1, linked to the fate of spy settlements during the Cold War in the Soviet Union.

Looking at the map and the histories of abandoned towns, one realises that a town usually ‘dies’ once its ties – be they cultural or commercial – have been severed. Of course, there are also unpredictable natural disasters: sandstorms, volcanic eruptions, floods and earthquakes. But even in these cases, the towns that were not rebuilt had, at their core, an embryonic tendency towards isolation.

This isolation is sometimes voluntary — the mass suicide at Jonestown is perhaps the most grotesquely dramatic example — but more often involuntary, such as the depletion of a gold, diamond or coal mine, the construction of dams, the end of a war or an empire, the discovery of new trade routes, or a nuclear accident.

The very title of the project, ‘Foresta Rossa’, is inspired by the name given by the inhabitants of Pripyat to the pine forest that turned red due to radiation following the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power station.