A few kilometers outside Palermo, the barren hilly landscape of the Mountain Pizzo Sella rises above the bright white sandy beach of the resort of Mondello. The mountain rises 560 meters above the sea and frames the flatlands of the Sicilian metropolis on the northwest side. A mountain like any other, but the history of Pizzo Sella tells volumes about the country's recent past. Even from a distance, a peculiarity stands out to the resourceful eye. Geometrically like building blocks, a gallon of houses clings to the rock face all the way up to the top. Between most of the buildings there is not even a road to access them. As soon as the sun sinks blood-red into the sea, they are surrounded by streetlights and sparkle from a distance, similar to the candles of a Christmas tree - at least that's what the locals call the disreputable building construction above the roofs of the city. But what exactly happened? In 1978, the company Sicilcalce Spa, headed by Andrea Notaro, brother of the Cosa Nostra "Pope" Michele Greco, obtained hundreds of dubious building permits, issued by Rosa Greco, sister of the Mafia boss Michele Grecco. Which result in a land division of about one million square meters of earth. In the course of the privatization almost the entire mountain has been deforested and built on. To this day, Pizzo Sella is thus considered the last devastating evidence of the so-called "Sacco di Palermo". This is the term Sicilians use to describe the Mafia-sponsored tree boom that led to the destruction of numerous green spaces and Art Nouveau villas in Palermo between the 1950s and 1980s, drastically changing the city's appearance. In this way, even after years of endless legal proceedings and heated discussions among citizens, the residential area of Pizzo Sella remains almost a ghost town. Only 59 of the 170 houses built on the slope are inhabited today. The remaining half-finished buildings manifest as sad skeletons the merciless intervention in nature. The deliberately factual presentation of the unfinished buildings, separately without other disturbing buildings or elements, creates, in the tradition of the "New Objectivity", a typology. And elevates them through the monumental isolation to architectural sculptures. A deliberately factual typology is created through the isolated representation in order to depict the raw buildings left to nature in their sculpturality. The 4x5 format alludes to our collective memory in photographic history and thus recalls the use of a large format view camera. Although the images were actually taken with the help of a drone and create a perspective that is in fact otherwise impossible. The perspective of the landscape at the foot of the mountain, which was planned when the architecture was designed, is thus reversed, and the viewer looks against the original view at the monuments of the so-called "Hill of Shame". Julius C Schreiner 2022