PAUL SUSINI
Che peccato che tu lo veda in cantiere

This series* retraces a ten-day journey through Italy, from Milan to Naples, passing through Bologna, Urbino and Assisi.
It responds, on one hand, to the tradition — or myth — of the Grand Tour: traveling to Italy to observe its architecture. On the other hand, it is grounded in a subjective experience, shaped by a dialogue with Michele, an Italian architect who joins the photographer for part of the journey, expressing his dismay at seeing some buildings under renovation.

And now architecture wraps itself in scaffolding, fences, nets, signs, hoardings, tarps, and sheets of metal.

A shift occurs: the square becomes a dead end, the façade becomes a ladder, the arcades a corridor.
But only for a while.

Like a disruption of history — or perhaps an alternate narrative — the moment of renovation suspends the flow of time, placing architecture inside a strange kind of parenthesis.
It casts places into a curious limbo.

*title = "It's a shame you’re seeing it while it's being renovated"

Author
Paul Susini’s photographic work unfolds at the intersection of image and constructed space. He examines how architecture preserves, transforms, and erases—attending equally to what remains and what is missing, to traces as much as to absences.​

This exploration is driven by a tension: between the fetishization of the past—the cult of the "old," the "authentic"—and the reality of the modern, industrial world, often seen as its antagonist but in fact an heir to what we strive to preserve. Far from nostalgia, his work delves into this paradoxical coexistence: the raw and the refined, the artisanal and the standardized, the visible and the vanished.​

To photograph, then, is to reveal layers, frictions, and contradictions. It is to conceive of architecture as a living archive and the image as a tool for interpreting reality.​

Website
paulsusini.fr

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