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Valérie Anex

Every year, the Irish-Swiss artist Valérie Anex visits her grandmother in Ireland. Every year, the area looks a little different. New houses. New roads. Changed landscapes.

In 2010, while traveling in and around Roosky, a small village on the River Shannon, Ms. Anex, 27, noticed a number of empty houses. All of them were new; all of them “waiting for somebody to come.”

Communities in Ireland where more than half of homes are vacant or incomplete are known as “Ghost Estates,” which is also the title of Ms. Anex’s haunting photo essay. The emptiness symbolizes the country’s degrading economic situation. But it goes beyond visual representation. The estates have had a very physical effect on the face of the open landscape.

“The crisis is something we should think about,” Ms. Anex said. She hopes to turn attention to a very simple question: How do things like this happen?

“One can hear the murmuring of the wind in the grass of the neglected lawns and from time to time a dog barking in the distance,” she writes in the introduction to her project. “Abandoned building sites stand in the surroundings, mounds of earth and all kinds of waste are strewn everywhere.”

Ms. Anex said as of October 2010, there were more than 2,500 ghost estates in Ireland. But, she conceded, “it’s difficult to know the exact number.”

What she did find out was that people are angry. Ms. Anex focused on the counties Leitrim, Longford, Roscommon and Cavan. The people she met while photographing felt as if the character of their communities has been destroyed. Nobody, she said, wants a ghost for a neighbor. “It creates a feeling,” Ms. Anex said.



Now, as immigrants leave the country, young people strive to move away, and unfinished houses remain unfinished, the question is whether to put the finishing touches on the buildings, or to knock them down. The problem is that either option costs money.

Ms. Anex graduated with a master’s degree from Geneva University of Art and Design in July. She lives in Geneva but plans to relocate, possibly to Berlin. Aside from continuing to photograph around the theme of “crisis,” she is working on a fictional short film.

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