The Art Of The Incomplete

Amélie Labourdette’s work documents eerie, grey skeletons of unfinished buildings. Her images are a comment on how we inhabit the world, but they’ve also become pieces of art in their own right – and a hint at what might happen to us all in the future.

- kathrine Anker

At first glance, there’s a clear, socio-political message in Amélie Labourdette’s series, ‘empire of Dust’: the ghostly, grey-concrete skeletons of unfinished villas, flats and dams are a blatant display of the consequences of financial crisis and corruption. And where better to document this than in southern Italy, where corruption seems to have become an artform and the landscape is strewn with concrete foundations that have never been given roofs or walls, like some weird outdoor museum of sculptural art. “the unfinished constructions are the ghosts of the recent economic history of southern Italy,” Labourdette tells us.

The French photographer has just been in London to receive a first-place award in the architecture category of this year’s Sony World Photography Awards, where the jury praised her take on the aesthetic of incompleteness. It’s a topic she has also explored in her previous project in Spain, ‘Non Finito’, but Italy apparently takes the art of the unfinished to a whole new level. “It’s a key to interpreting the architecture of the public sector since the Second World War,” Labourdette says. “It’s an excellent metaphor for bad management of public affairs and embezzlement.”