Lomography

Manifattura Moncalieri (Torino)
written by champi on September 3rd, 2008 , 5 comments (0 votes)

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I can’t remember how many times I passed in front of this abandoned factory with my car, insulting myself for not having a camera with me to take a few shots of this awesome piece of architecture… Till the day I said come on, I have to go there and shoot! So I took my bag with a few cameras and drove to the factory!

The factory was projected in 1951 by the architects Mario Passanti and Paolo Perona. It’s basically a huge cube of concrete made of three stories of high windows, standing between a few centenarian trees in a beautiful park…
My first idea was to take pictures only of the outside of the building, being the park closed by a big wall and a fence in front of a not so desert street… But I tried anyway to turn around the park and found a little river which passed under the road and arrived just behind the building in the park… It was quite epic but I made it inside!

And I was stoked! I expected the building to be quite empty, but I found instead much more than an empty box! It was like something had happened many years ago, which had made everybody escape, leaving their work in progress and never coming back! I found a car and a little truck, a whole storey full of weaving machines, sewing machines, stocks of cloth, buttons, patches etc, some suitcases, a mummified dead cat, a calculator bigger than a toaster… Anything and everything… I finished my rolls so fast I had to come back again a few weeks later with my girlfriend (and lomographer fellow), shooting, running here and there like two kids in a toy shop! And I’ll go back again someday for sure!!