ITALIAN photographer and video artist Ra di Martino has transformed the ruins of Star Wars movie sets into works of art.

Ra di Martino has learned not to underestimate the power of “The Force”.



The Italian photographer and video artist’s images of the original Star Wars film sets, now reduced to genuine ruins more than three decades after they were abandoned in the deserts of Tunisia, captured the imagination of both the art world and the movie series’ legions of international fans.



“It’s quite funny,” she says. “I didn’t realise when I went to do the work that it would suddenly pick up like this.”



Now di Martino and her works, titled No More Stars, are heading here to be part of the Adelaide International exhibition, called Worlds in Collision, at next year’s Festival.



The International’s curator, Richard Grayson, has selected a diverse range of artists whose work looks at different worlds, both real and imagined, physical and spiritual.



Di Martino was surprised to discover how much interest there still is in the fictional Star Wars universe, a phenomena which has only been heightened by the recent announcement that Disney intends to release a new trilogy of film sequels, with the first directed by J.J. Abrams (Lost, Star Trek) set to open in 2015.



“Of course I saw them … I loved it when I was a kid but I really wasn’t a fanatic,” di Martino says. “I just thought it was great that there were science fiction ruins from film sets. I found some ruins in Morocco as well … some of which I am going to show in Adelaide.”



Di Martino first became aware of the existence of old movie sets in northern Africa when she was scouring Google Earth for locations.



“We were looking to find a desert – then I found this photograph of a tourist that said in Spanish: ‘There is no more English Patient’. I thought ‘What a strange sentence’ – there was just a photograph of a dune with some crumbled ruins.



“I thought that it was The English Patient film set which had been abandoned there. Then, when I went there, I realised that the tourist had made a mistake: That it wasn’t The English Patient but it was from Star Wars.”



Because a small cement road had been made to the dunes when Star Wars was made, many other film crews used the same location for ease of access.



While Tunisia doubled in Star Wars as Luke Skywalker’s home planet of Tatooine (which creator George Lucas named after the nearby town of Tataouine), the deserts of Morocco have been the location for films from Lawrence of Arabia to Gladiator and, more recently, TV’s Game of Thrones.



Di Martino’s images fit the International exhibition’s theme in a twofold way: Both as sets which were originally conceived to represent another world, and now as objects which have become archaeological artefacts in their own right.



“It’s beautiful and terrible to find these ruins of ancient Rome and ancient Greece, but obviously to see a fake old robot standing in the middle of the desert is very odd – because it was meant to be our future, but now it’s a vision of our future which has become something in the past,” she says.



“In one location, a group of fans went and refurbished Luke Skywalker’s home after seeing my photos. So now it doesn’t look like my photo anymore – it’s much more ‘new’.



“The funny thing is, they made it look more new than it ever was originally, because even when they made it for the film they pretended that it had been lived in for years. Now it’s something else: It’s just like a white igloo, so it’s very odd.”



Di Martino moved back to Italy two years ago, after five years living in New York and, before that, a decade in London.



“I have almost never lived in a place where I had subject matters that interested me. I always travelled to go and find them. When I am shooting a video – because I make mostly videos and short films – I always choose deserted landscapes but I have always lived in a very busy metropolis.”



When she attends next year’s Adelaide Festival, di Martino also plans to explore South Australia’s desert regions.



“I am trying to come a week before so that I can do some travelling. Usually I use them as locations where I put characters … I just really like that there is nothing, so whatever subject you put there, objects or persons, comes out in a more stark way and it becomes more stylised and out of time. It’s just an aesthetic thing.”

The Adelaide International will be staged from February 28 to March 30 as part of next year’s Festival.