Gabriele Basilico. Shanghai

This volume brings together the photographs taken by Gabriele Basilico in April 2010 when, at the request of the architects Franco Purini, Vittorio Gregotti and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he went to Shanghai to photograph the Italian Pavilion at the Universal Expo. It was an opportunity to explore a city that he did not yet know and, to do so, he constructed an itinerary based on maps and the history of urban development. Shanghai at the time was a metropolis of twenty million inhabitants with more than 5000 newly built skyscrapers.

After completing his ministerial assignment, he chose to work in the new town of Pujiang, on both sides of the Huangpu River, in Puxi, but above all in Pudong, “a forest of skyscrapers, hotels and shopping malls, which only twenty years earlier was a marshland limited to activities in the port.” Basilico is fascinated by the working-class neighbourhoods filled with small houses organised into courtyards, called shikumen, which seemed to be resisting the advance of the skyscrapers. The shots alternate views from above, in which the discrepancies and mutations of the landscape are evident, with images from street level, where the intersections of roads suggest new prospects for development.

Bilingual volume in Italian and English. Translated by Susan Ann White for Scriptum, Rome.