“surrounded”

Mysterious, melancholic, impenetrable – fog has always held a special fascination for people and inspired the work of many artists. Verdiana Albano is one of them. On an exchange semester in the southern Chinese megacity of Chongqing during her studies at the University of Art and Design in Offenbach, Germany, she was confounded by the haze hanging over the city, and began to examine the phenomenon more closely. On long forays through the metropolis, whose countless skyscrapers were mostly shrouded in dense fog, she captured the bizarre atmosphere in Chongqing with her camera.

The city built at the confluence of the Jialing and the Yangtze rivers has grown in the 21st century at breathtaking speed, and now has a population of over 30 million people on an area roughly the size of Austria. Many Europeans associate this kind of urban sprawl with the negative attributes of an anonymous conurbation without character or a historical centre. Albano, however, approached the city with an open mind. She sought out the opinions of local people, and discovered that the fog is also an important topic for the residents of Chongqing. For many, it is a distinctive feature and a peculiarity that can be explained by the topography. Others take a more critical view of the permanent murkiness in the air: They see it above all as smog caused by the city’s unchecked growth.

Without commenting herself on these different voices, Verdiana Albano conveys the myriad facets of this megacity in her work. Her photographs show dense clusters of tower blocks on both sides of the rivers, connected by bridges at dizzying heights. Her view of the urban landscape, always from an elevated position, is frequently lost in the wall of fog in the background. At the same time, the spectrum of colours remains muted, giving her photos an unfathomable, almost mystical aura. This is enhanced by the apparent lack of people – because although Chongqing is a city with many millions of residents, they are surprisingly absent in Albano’s pictures. In her series “surrounded”, Verdiana Albano creates the impression of a seemingly endless urban space that appears strangely inanimate, despite its monumental size, and is as fascinating as it is disconcerting.

A video is available for this artist in our media library.