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A photography book documenting the Alpine Wall fortifications in the mountain landscapes of South Tyrol.
There is a certain permanence to the border architecture of South Tyrol’s Alpine Wall, a fact Vincenzo Pagliuca has been documenting in his five-year project Bunker. The structures have long outlasted the regime that put them there. Back in the late 1930s Mussolini had the Vallo Alpino designed as an extensive defensive line for Italy’s northern frontier, a system of bunkers, tunnels and gun emplacements to be set into the mountains and farmland. In South Tyrol at least, they were laid over a terrain already defined by matters of language and political allegiance. You would not call them functional military works today, eighty years on; they are more like physical proof of a state’s desire to institutionalise fear.
Pagliuca made his photographs from 2018 to 2023 with the sort of discipline you might expect of a surveyor, but with an eye for how time wears down architecture. He tends to keep a measured distance from the subject so the concrete and the ground around it have equal standing. You will see a round volume under a roof of dry grass, or a low emplacement on a slope with its opening to the mountains, or walls right up against the cultivated fields and woodland where rural life goes on. There is no theatricality to the decay in his work. What gives the images their force is scale and the way the construction sits in the landscape.
The book, coming out in 2025, is unflinching in its use of the original military nomenclature: Opera 14 at Bolzano Sud, Opera 1 in Dobbiaco, Opera 37. Calling them “Opera” is fitting for a planned piece of a larger system, but it also has an unintended ring to it, hinting at the staging and ambition of a conflict that never happened the way they thought it would. Pagliuca lets the classification speak for itself in the captions, which are brief and administrative to the point of being revealing.
At their best, the photographs in the series are open to a number of interpretations. They are architectural forms and territorial markers as much as they are military hardware, the leftover of a political imagination fixated on control. The surfaces have weathered and the setting is different now, yet the meaning is hard to pin down. Pagliuca does not shy away from that. Bunker is ultimately about what is left when power is no longer in immediate use, and the solid things it leaves behind to trouble the land for generations.
