It is the summer of 2005 and Isador leads me down the narrow hillside path gesticulating and speaking wildly.  Excited.  I can’t understand him – only phrases here and there – his language and legs moving faster than I.  He speaks of his parents and grandparents and his children and grandchildren.  He spreads out an entire history of genealogy and place with a gesture of his arms as we stop and stand overlooking the Tuscan countryside.  A beautifully lush and stepped landscape inset with the crumbling and abandoned structures of his lifetime.

The small farming villages of Italy are largely uninhabited – they are communities of elders who are among the last of their families to cultivate the land that generations before them have tended.  They are the cultural remnants of a new global economy.  These images of absence and migration speak to what remains behind – the residue of human experience and the small gestures of an aging community maintaining the intimate structures of their past.

Vestige – an intent look at the intersection of place, memory, and artifact. Things we no longer need, but hold onto anyway.