The Architecture of Absence

This exhibition brings into dialogue the photographic practices of Carolina Sandretto (Italy, b. 1980) and Wang Tong (China b. 1967), with two bosy of works exploreing cities and landscapes marked by absence. Though geographically and culturally distant, their visions converge on places shaped by abandonment, suspension, and transformation, where human presence is no longer visible yet remains deeply inscribed in the built environment.
In both bodies of work, architecture and urban space become silent witnesses. Streets, rooms, and structures stand emptied of people, yet saturated with memory. The absence of the human figure does not signify emptiness; rather, it heightens a sense of latent life, allowing time itself to emerge as the central subject. These landscapes are not neutral backdrops, but active repositories of collective history, desire, and loss.
Carolina Sandretto’s project All Things Left Behind investigates the passage of time and its visible effects on places and objects that once belonged to us. Moving between Cuba, Svalbard, and Antarctica, Sandretto examines how time alters surfaces, meanings, and emotional value, transforming everyday objects into traces of a shared past. What remains—rooms, furniture, personal belongings—becomes part of a lost landscape, a testimony to lives once lived and now suspended between preservation and decay.
Wang Tong’s photographic work approaches abandoned and transforming cities from a different yet complementary perspective. Active since the early 1990s, Wang has devoted his practice to documenting the rapid and often disorienting metamorphosis of China’s urban landscape. His long-term project Forging Cities is an open, encyclopedic investigation into hundreds of Chinese cities suspended between construction and disappearance, reality and projection.
Working in black and white, often with intentional blur, Wang Tong presents the city as a constantly unfinished collage. Amusement parks under construction, monumental bridges shrouded in mist, concrete barriers dividing rural and urban worlds, anonymous streets and iconic skylines all coexist within a visual language that reflects instability and transition. These cities appear strangely emptied, devoid of individual presence, yet charged with collective aspirations, fears, and desires.
Together, the works of Sandretto and Wang Tong propose two distinct yet resonant approaches to abandonment and absence. One looks at what has been left behind, preserved or slowly eroded by time; the other examines what is continuously being built, dismantled, and reimagined. In both cases, cities emerge as fragile constructs—spaces where human presence is implied rather than shown, and where architecture becomes the last visible trace of collective existence.