Lao PDR: Untitled is a body of work exploring socialist Laos in the midst of its undergoing transformation. The neoliberal reforms implemented over the past decades paved the way to a significant inflow of direct investments, mainly concentrated in the resource sector and in large infrastructure projects. While these investments generate substantial economic growth, they also lead to significant changes on the landscape and in people’s lifestyle. Fragments of the population are pushed out of the countryside and into the cities, where traditions leave space to modernity and urban challenges trigger social and economic inequalities. 

 

Going beyond the presumed objectivity of the conventional documentary language, Lao PDR: Untitled conceive a paradigm of a private vision, intended to bring the viewer in the photographer’s personal space.

 

The project’s narrative unfolds in the outskirts, along highways, in strangers’ homes, along the Mekong, inside Special Economic Zones, through the monsoon rain, in guesthouses, in monasteries, at the border, in the uplands, in the cities, in the plains, on the water, at construction sites, in karaoke bars, along Route 13, at district check posts, on no man’s land, at the edge of town, at sunrise, at sundown, in the darkness.