All things Left Behind

Photographer Carolina Sandretto takes the visitor to Cuba, Svalbard and Antarctica to explore the idea of time and its passing, and what it signifies for the landscape of things that belong to us.

Time and its passing influence objects in a visible way. Their superficies and external aspect change as well as the significance and importance of these things hold for us. They become part of a lost landscape, traces of who we were a testimony of our past life, memory of what we were by what we left behind. Our collective past reflects on the surface of the landscapes depicted, even in places where these things are still in use.

In Svalbard, Carolina Sandretto explores a mining city where more than 3,000 people lived and worked prior to it being abandoned following USSR’s fall in the 1980’s. The inhabitants left their personal belongings, their memories, and traces to constitute an eternal museum of time set in an icy landscape, as to testify their passage on hearth. These things left behind testify of their life and their stories as time is both preserving them and slowly transforming their meaning and their surface.

In the Antarctic, in the past 40 years, traces of human passage have been fortunately removed and the environment protected; except for a few whaling villages along the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula where the traces of the humans are still visible. Today, as guilty exploiters, we can admire in the pristine landscapes, the ruins left by our passage.

Cuba is the island where time lingers and landscapes never really change. Here Carolina Sandretto portrayed rooms full of things still in use, even if old and often broken. In a place where nothing is replaced or replaceable due to a continuous scarcity, time transforms the surface of the objects but they are recycled and reused and life is still striving in them even if time makes them appear old. Different landscapes, traces of time.