Roberto Conte (Monza, 1980), started to take pictures in 2006, exploring abandoned places in the outskirts of Milan, before traveling around Italy and abroad looking for derelict sites. In the years he increasingly focused on photographing architectures, with a particular preference for the XX century, from rationalist structures to post-war modernism and contemporary architecture, including brutalism and Soviet modernism. He collaborates with architecture and design studios, institutions, and artists (as Edoardo Tresoldi, Gonzalo Borondo, Alberonero). In 2019 he published the book “Soviet Asia” (FUEL, co-authored with Stefano Perego), focused on the Soviet modernist architectures in Central Asia. His pictures have been featured in several online and printed magazines and books, as “Atlas of Brutalist Architecture”, “This Brutal World”, “Ruin and Redemption in Architecture” (Phaidon Press), “Concrete Concept” (Frances Lincoln), the Yerevan Guide of Architecture (DOM publishers) and many others. He held lectures about architecture photography in several universities in Italy, Denmark, and Russia. . . .

This print is part of the “Laissez-faire” screen prints series created by 56Fili from photographs by Roberto Conte, which portrays characteristic buildings from Italy’s economic and industrial boom phase that are now in a state of disrepair: a state that is both desolate and solemn. 

“Palazzo del Lavoro” represents the interior of an impressive tower of the abandoned former Eridania/Alcoplus industrial distillery in Ferrara, untouched at the moment by the ongoing demolition of the complex’s many structures. An unstable and fragile condition of the present.

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