New Urbex Photo Series: Mad Hatter’s Desert

Thursday, October 15th, 2009 | decay, gallery

In Summer of 2007, we went on a longer trip through Northern Italy. One of the places we visited was an abandoned brickworks plant. The workshop was a large area outside a small town, situated atop a hill. It was a beautiful Saturday afternoon, and the orange brick roofs were waiting patiently under the warm evening sun.

Like skeletal structures, welcoming us to enter them, we found the large halls where once workers stacked bricks in neat rows to dry them. The long shadows pointed east, while resting on old transport machinery.

Inside the factory, the deep, cool, and somewhat scary corridors of the ovens known as ‘kiln’. We didn’t enter them, trusting that the light wasn’t strong enough to fight the sleeping ogres hidden inside.

Up the stairs, atop the kiln, a wide desert of brick dust, occasionally broken by humble columns, symmetric compartments and rows of valves, like toddlers in blue and yellow overalls. Fields of regular, rusty, hat-shaped ventilation shafts.

Next to the brickworks, a beautiful old villa, overgrown by a jungle of precious garden plants. It must have been the residence of the owner and his family.

Finally, on our way back to the car, a sturdy little plant, triumphant in her conquest over a man-made thing, looked up from her sunbath, and waved us good-bye.