Lost places

I arrived in these parts on a late fall day. The concrete slab road climbed through the fine, thick rain into the mist, with no sign of where it led. I pass the outline of the country - a red Dacia without a wheel - and lose myself in the white. A good part of the way I can't see anything around me, as if I've entered another world.

Gradually, large silhouettes begin to emerge, flanking the road. As I get closer, I begin to make out volumes, then the hollows of windows, but it's only when I get close that I perceive the colors washed out by the dirty light and time.

I discover a dozen deserted blocks, the ruin of a former slum, planted on a mountaintop - the new town. For a few seconds, the clouds of dense fog are blown away by the wind, an opportunity to see the magnificent natural setting in which the neighborhood lies - a place lost in time, lost in space and seemingly lost in itself.

As you go from apartment to apartment in a block, you can see fragments of the lives of the families who once lived there (because man shapes the environment in which he lives, and then that environment shapes man). Personal fragments of the dwelling are preserved in the interior - flowery textures of roll-painted murals, remnants of white earthenware, and walls with flaking oil paint. Pretty much everything that could be reused has been taken. It's an overwhelming experience, a place with a strong identity, where I felt the memory of another time come alive, and it's also chilling.

At the time the photos were taken, there was only a shell of these places that somehow evoked the past, its context and role having changed radically. The neighborhood had become landscape, or at least on its way to becoming part of it, sometimes a shelter for stray animals, sometimes a huge playground for children. On my last visit to the site, some of the roofs were already being re-roofed and it looks as if the whole complex will take on a tourism-related function. So, typical of photography, these shots capture only one stage in the life of the place, which fortunately, it seems, is not the final one...

Through this series of images I tried to capture the overwhelming atmosphere felt in those places. Fog, memory, dream, water, childhood, clouds, rain in the interior, the ruin, all together, made me feel like I was in an authentic Tarkovskian movie, or in a scene from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "Autumn of the Patriarch".