Gallery: These Extraterrestrial Outposts Are Actually Suburban Strip Malls
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Valerio Platania was struck by how foreign the big box shopping centers seem in their environment. So he started photographing them while imagining them as outposts on a distant world.
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The objects and scenes in the photo book, called BASE, were chosen for being recognizable, but still strange enough that they could be seen as some futuristic of alien phenomenon. It's a subtle interpretation of a space most of us don't spend much time paying attention to.
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“I really focused on scenes where color and shape worked together, because color and shape were ultimately the outcome of the creation of those places ... it was something totally something unnatural that was put there by men, and this contributes to transmitting how artificial those places are,” Platania says.
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The series is shot mostly on film to bring out in greater saturation the conflicting colors of these environments.
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Platania uses the phrase "non-places" to describe these commercial centers, a term that refers to their utilitarian nature and lack of engaging architecture. The addition of decorations to humanize them just seems to make them feel even weirder.
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"I’m more interested in the outcome of the architecture rather than in the history of urbanization in a particular space," Platania says.
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Urban sprawl and shopping centers have been critiqued often in print and photos, but BASE does not take a position on them. It's more an exercise in imagination.
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The photos are sparsely populated, adding to a sense of distance from civilization.
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The landscape occasionally appears in the background of the images, a desert that makes the appearance of the shopping center seem further out of place.
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The structures are only ever seen from the outside, adding to the sense of remove and keeping a little bit of distance from the fact that these are malls.
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"In his galactic expansion towards city outskirts, the man in tracksuit stepped on those arid lands and converted them into parking lots, leisure parks and commercial plazas. Extra-planetary bases for the conquest of a comfortable life," says Platania in the foreword to his book.
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Platania shot the photos in Spain, Portugal, and Italy, usually while traveling.
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The exact locations of the spaces aren't revealed---this is intentional, part of the desire to avoid turning the series into a documentary project.
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“I really didn’t want to say ‘commercial malls are bad because they look artificial,’” Platania says. “Of course by showing the extreme artificiality of the architecture, of the environment, and showing people isolated in the pictures, this is something that should make the viewer think about that, and eventually cause them to critique it themselves. But I’m not pointing the finger---I’m the first one to buy my furniture and my sneakers there.”
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Platania, who does IT work for the ground control side of the space industry, is excited by rise in interest of the topic of outer space, including several photo projects that look to Earth to make allegories for the cosmos. "Even if we observe it, we are stuck on the ground," he says. "People and the infinite worlds they create!"
