La Cité Perdue

Anthony and Florent GALASSO are two 23-year-old brothers from Burgundy, France. Fascinated by travel, architecture and atypical places, it is quite naturally that they succumb to the charm of forgotten structures. They then took it upon themselves to photograph a once sparkling heritage, a bygone era. Their goal is to help discover a parallel universe conducive to questioning and wonder while demonstrating the poetics that exist within these agonizing buildings.



Abandonment and splendor. Here is an antithesis that fits perfectly into the paradox of the aestheticism of the ruin.



The traveler often finds that the dialogue he wants to establish between the ruin and the past is interrupted. Where does the artistic value of the ruin come from? According to Auguste Perret in "Le Musée Moderne", if the structure is not worthy of remaining visible, the architect has not fulfilled his mission. Architecture is what makes beautiful ruins. According to John Ruskin, on the other hand, ruin must be conceived as a physiological phase in the life of a monument, and it would be wrong to make it a romantic attitude full of regrets.



The ruin then has two types of values, one historical/inevitable and the other aesthetic. The first one diverts the spectator from the contemplation of the object itself to the benefit of the information it conveys, while for the second one the appreciation is attached to the aspect of the object in an intransitive way, without aiming to acknowledge. But this distinction does not really apply to the ruin of the Itinerary, which is aesthetic insofar as it evokes a glorious and mythical past. For Chateaubriand, perception of time and perception of space are closely correlated, and the landscape must be imbued with memories in order to arouse an aesthetic emotion. By looking for the intention at the origin of what is ruined, the traveler tries to find at the same time its aesthetic value and its artistic value. But it is then to make depend these values on the fragmentary and indexical nature of the object.