Ero Industria
by Fabio D’Arsiè
portfolio shortlisted call 'Urbanautica Institute Awards 2024', 2024
Category: Representations of Space, Architecture, and Conflicts
I'm an industry man, I've always been the one who makes the factories work, I know how they start, I know their silence when they are abandoned, so, going to photograph them I listened to what they told me
"So at a certain point no one came back, no one turned on the lights and walked in my corridors and crossed my doors.
So the wind began to turn free and the water slowly found its way in and wet me...
Every now and then someone came and knocked down a wall and took away some cars, snatched it from my heart because by now I knew his voice and it was part of me.
So without the presence of those who lit me up every day I am slowly aged, my woods are rotten, ancient bones.
I remain still, I wait.
Someone will come to look inside me to see the splendor of my walls stained and colored by mosses, they will play the wood of my ancient stairs with their steps and will marvel at the mysterious beauty that inhabits decadence, they will walk in religious silence as inside a sanctuary.
A thousand and a thousand lives have passed through me, they have leaned against my walls, tired, they have drunk from the rivers of water of small drinking fountains, they have treated my wounds with continuous restorations, I have been a security for them and they have been for me.
So enter, walk through my avenues invaded by plants and wild herbs, stop and look around, read in the traces of an infamous fire the remains of ancient woods, once solid attics.
Go up my stairs and imagine how much life has passed through me how many voices have resounded inside me, I still hear them.
A goodbye then, this is a goodbye, remember me for what I have been and admire what remains of me"
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.
also from Urbanautica Institute Awards 2024