1st place
gold star award
Mirna Pavlovic
title
Dulcis Domus
"Dulcis Domus" is an ongoing project that documents the many abandoned villas, palaces and castles found across the urban and rural areas of Europe. In this series I present abandoned villas from all corners or Europe, belonging to once affluent families, ranking high in status and in wealth.
The World Wars left many scars, and in terms of abandoned villas of wealthy families, most of them are concentrated in countries which held a precarious political position in the wars. Most of these homes were abandoned, appropriated by the regime and then reappropriated by the surviving members of the families after the conflict ended, only to once again be abandoned when the world entered post-war economic fluctuations. The crumbling economies and high emigration rates sealed their fate.
A staggering number of them now stand abandoned and overgrown, often very difficult to reach. I wanted to preserve the memory of the places as well as the families who once lived there, by documenting and retelling the hidden histories of these spatial and temporal incongruities that were once called home.
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entry description
Photos taken in 2015 and 2016."Dulcis Domus" is an ongoing project that documents the many abandoned villas, palaces and castles found across the urban and rural areas of Europe. In this series I present abandoned villas from all corners or Europe, belonging to once affluent families, ranking high in status and in wealth.
The World Wars left many scars, and in terms of abandoned villas of wealthy families, most of them are concentrated in countries which held a precarious political position in the wars. Most of these homes were abandoned, appropriated by the regime and then reappropriated by the surviving members of the families after the conflict ended, only to once again be abandoned when the world entered post-war economic fluctuations. The crumbling economies and high emigration rates sealed their fate.
A staggering number of them now stand abandoned and overgrown, often very difficult to reach. I wanted to preserve the memory of the places as well as the families who once lived there, by documenting and retelling the hidden histories of these spatial and temporal incongruities that were once called home.
about the photographer
Mirna Pavlovic, 1989, photographer and writer. She caught the travel bug some years ago and hasn’t fully recovered since. Her quest for the abandoned, the forgotten and the derelict has led her all over Europe – fuelled by a yearning to break out of prescribed forms of moving and a fascination with identity shifts in the context of these dystopian blindspots. Writer of the book Between Nowhere and Never – Photographs of Forgotten Places, by Reginald Van de Velde, released worldwide.back to gallery
