In this unique collection of photography, postcards, and interviews, Caitlin Berrigan reflects on how abandoned buildings bear the traces of conflict and capitalism.
Her work addresses pressing issues, including viruses, disability, capitalism, contagion, climate crisis, and geological animacies, and blends photography, postcards, and interviews, creating a hybrid book that challenges conventional narrative and archival forms.
Since 2010, Caitlin Berrigan has documented unfinished commercial and residential buildings in Lebanon left incomplete due to the civil war and subsequent financial instability. The photographs were sent as postcards to the very buildings they depict, each bearing excerpts from Samuel R. Delany’s 1975 novel Dhalgren. As the cards circulated through the country's postal routes, they accrued stamps, markings, notes, and other traces of their journeys, often returning to the sender.
The experimental artist’s book Continual Fragments of the Now expands this project through a series of interviews with artists, writers, and architects, exploring the entanglements of architecture and capitalism, the collapse of space and time, collective imagination, and the languages of worldbuilding.