Stefano Carnelli

www.stefanocarnelli.com

Stefano was born in Milan and lived in Lisbon and Barcelona before moving to London in 2013. With a background in architecture and urban planning, he has come to believe that cities, to a good degree, eventually end up shaping themselves, no matter how much effort urban planners put in their “good design”, in a continuous transformation and re-confirmation process that deeply affects concepts like identity, belongingness and sense of community.

Stefano’s desire to understand and document this phenomenon is the reason he first started using photography to implement his theoretical work, starting with landscape and architecture pictures of the city, to then focus on its inhabitants and their relation to the environment they live in. Photography, he believes, is the most effective tool to capture the essence of the transformations we endure, deciphering the complexity of the world we live in.

In today’s Laos, a country going through a rapid process of modernisation, the typical wooden pile houses are being replaced by a new exuberant residential typology that expresses the recent emergence of a new upper middle class. The bamboo scaffolding, fragilely erected to sustain the villas still in construction, is the perfect paradigm for a perceptive glitch that highlights the country’s current - and sometimes disruptive - transformation.