October 2001 In Acta Est Lise Sarfati has photographed a new kind of ruins. Neither the romantic temples favored by 19th century photography, nor the bombed-out shells that war photographers shoot. The ruined spaces and things she displays like so many stage sets are shattered because they were abandoned by those who inhabit them; because no one believed enough in themselves, in the future, to take care of the space where they live. Thus every single thing looks like a ghost copy of itself, a haunting reminder of souls caught in a hiccup of history, who have given up, stopped moving forward. Empty amphitheaters, altars of debris and metal crushed like sheets of paper. Landscapes of mud and peeling paint. Cables. Ladders. Kiosks. Machinery. Scales. Mirrors. TVs. Courtyards. Doors. Chairs and tables and pipes and garage doors, painted in sweet lavender and Palladian red, glistening. Rain and snow and sleet. Neon lights. Showers with broken ceramics, the unending drip of water. Everything has weight, incredible density. We look as we have never looked before yet do not find meaning to what we see. This is not the dream of an endless wait, this is neither science-fiction nor nostalgia though it looks at time like scenes from Andrei Tarkowski's "Stalker" - as if the film had been colorized with gaudy genius. Do people live there? There is no evidence of them in the pale dawn, the dark dusk, the empty streets. Walking through Moscow and the suburbs Sarfati has been familiar with for many years, she spells a desolate alphabet of places and things that are not without a broken grandeur. The failure of ideology embodied by decay and neglect endow Stalinist architecture with a dignity of sorts. Snow hides the holes in the pockmarked facades like makeup on a face. But just when we were becoming more hopeful Sarfati introduces the cast of characters she has known and followed through parts of their lives. When they quietly appear in the second part of her book we have a sinking feeling of recognition: Of course. No one but they could have emerged from those spaces. It is as if they have sprouted out of the rusted bathtubs, the shabby bedrooms and torn sheets, the peeling color landscape on the wall. They belong. Inmates in a detention camp or a psychiatric institute, transvestites, or just lost youth, they tell us the same story: the failure of what could have been, for individuals or for an entire society. Yet the book is never demonstrative. Sarfati's talent is that she hints at those things, never tells them directly. Her poetic gaze is both wonderment and wound. Carole Naggar Acta Est Phaidon Press, Inc., 2001 Forward by Olga Medvedkova