Empires of Dirt

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Empires of Dirt

A publication about abandoned architecture and the transience of our existence.

The book examines empty places that used to serve for leisure. Most of them were built by famous architects and built to grandiose dimensions.

The publication is divided to three parts: the beginning contains archive images of the buildings accompanied by Stephen's king text :"Not a Great Loss" from The Stand, depicting the total breakdown of society after the accidental release of a strain of influenza. The other side of the publication contains current images of the places - for the whole duration of the project I photographed 12 abandoned sites, the images are accompanied by David's Foster Wallace : "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll never do Again". Wallace describes the excesses of his one-week trip in the Caribbean. In each part of the publication, there is a large contrast between what is written to what is really seen in the images, on one side you read about people dying and see lively and active building. On the other side of the publication, you read about debauchery and leisure and see dead places.

Attached to the middle of the publication is the third part, a short Zine about Chernobyl followed by Etgar's Keret text - "The Unusual Disappearance of Alon Shmesh" and Clifford Simak's : "City". The last part illustrates the contrast between the surreal stories to realistic imagery. There is also a large contrast between the main publication and the zine. the publication deals with these local deserted places, on the contrary, the zine deals with a foreign and strange place such as Chernobyl.