© Book "Bunker", Vincenzo Pagliuca, published by Hartmann, 2025

Now finally brought together in a book published by Hartmann, the bunkers photographed by Vincenzo Pagliuca reveal themselves in their silent and unsettling complexity. The author transfigures a military architectural heritage into a dense, introspective visual carousel, open to a multitude of interpretations. The Alpine Wall bunkers, scattered throughout the valleys of South Tyrol, become now pages to be turned, tactile surfaces, not just images—a topography of concrete and memory.

© Vincenzo Pagliuca from "Bunker"

Pagliuca’s photographs speak to us of casematte—structures that suggest a false domesticity, buildings that resemble houses but are, in truth, something else entirely. These cement volumes, embedded in forests and mountain slopes, appear as deranged dwellings: geometric ruins, austere, simplified, weathered by time and camouflage. Their mimicry clashes with, yet somehow heightens, their original function, revealing a paranoid desire for control and invisibility.

© Book "Bunker", Vincenzo Pagliuca, published by Hartmann, 2025

© Book "Bunker", Vincenzo Pagliuca, published by Hartmann, 2025

© Book "Bunker", Vincenzo Pagliuca, published by Hartmann, 2025

© Book "Bunker", Vincenzo Pagliuca, published by Hartmann, 2025

© Book "Bunker", Vincenzo Pagliuca, published by Hartmann, 2025

Pagliuca does not merely document: his photographic act is an analog process—slow, rigorous, ritualistic. Like a visual mantra, his gaze settles on surfaces, excavates their matter, measures their wounds. These photographs neither celebrate nor condemn; they meditate. Uprooted from history, the bunkers are given a new possibility: to reintegrate into the landscape in an unforeseen, almost organic symbiosis. Some have been repurposed as agricultural storage, others lie abandoned, yet they offer themselves to the viewer as archetypal spaces, evoking a primordial domesticity—one of darkness, shelter, and fragility.

© Book "Bunker", Vincenzo Pagliuca, published by Hartmann, 2025

© Vincenzo Pagliuca from "Bunker"

Following the projects "Napoli Nord - Case Rom" and "mónos", Pagliuca returns to a reflection on the idea of dwelling—one that offers no reassurance, but instead insists on resistance. These images express an existential tension masked by the hardness of concrete, an ancient need for refuge between earth and sky. The bunkers thus become metaphors for the human condition: closed, fortified spaces, built to defend, yet also to contain fear, anxiety, and the illusion of security.

© Book "Bunker", Vincenzo Pagliuca, published by Hartmann, 2025

© Book "Bunker", Vincenzo Pagliuca, published by Hartmann, 2025

© Vincenzo Pagliuca from "Bunker"

© Book "Bunker", Vincenzo Pagliuca, published by Hartmann, 2025

The essay by Helmo Prünster, included in the volume, anchors the work within its historical framework, recalling how the Alpine Wall was an expression of fascist militarization of the Italian landscape—an infrastructure born of fear and kept secret for decades. To understand and preserve these remnants is not only to preserve memory, but to question the present—and the often invisible forms in which war and control continue to shape the spaces we inhabit.

Vincenzo Pagliuca (website)
"mónos" on Urbanautica (review)
Interview with Cristina Comparato on Urbanautica