Palimpsests: Genius loci 1

I have engaged in a visual and anthropological journey through Detroit and Torino, two centers of the automotive industry that have experienced de-industrialization and that are attempting to forge a better future, partly at least through the arts and culture. My journey has yielded two outcomes: classical photographs that compare and contrasts the visual identity of Detroit and Torino, and a layering and intertwining of those images, in a process similar to the technique and artifacts we call palimpsests.
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A palimpsest is a writing material, parchment especially since antiquity, which, because of its value and strength, was reused several times, by scraping away a text and writing a new one on it. The word also stands, metonymically, for a text or other object that preserves visible traces of its earlier form.

In both Detroit and Turin destroying, preserving, rebuilding, and repurposing are complex projects, at time successful, at times not, and at times controversial and questionable. As necessary and creative as this process may be, it entails the erasing and rewriting of the two cities' own selves. I have chosen palimpsests to create surprising and estranging visual renditions of its possible outcomes.