Our project
Dear reader,
in these lines we would like to tell you about Stalker, a project born in 2016 at the crossroads of two cultures. A Russian girl and an Italian guy in the room of a flat in Passau (Germany) decide to combine the useful with the amusing, giving birth to abandonedme, our first blog of abandoned places. The project developed over the years in parallel with our travels in order to share our every emotion, exploration and adventure around the globe. We visit and document unexplored, off-road places, learning about different ethnicities and peoples, experiencing unknown spaces and living by surprises. We are guided by our spirit of travellers without following any roads, searching for places that are not marked on maps. We document every abandoned place with photos, articles and research, bringing up forgotten pasts and stories.
Why stalker?
Of all the visitors to abandoned places, we have taken inspiration from the ‘stalkers’, explorers featured in Andrei Tarkovsky‘s film of the eponymous name – 1979 and the science fiction novel ‘Picnic by the Roadside’ – 1972. They explore ‘shadow zones‘ with the utmost respect, without invasion or tampering. They are ‘guests’ and explorers of structures forged by the hand of man, often abandoned, in ruins, forgotten, desolate or made off-limits. The places they visit are numerous and of different types: disused industrial sites, uninhabitable hospitals or asylums, abandoned military installations, fallen-down factories, forgotten castles and monuments, uninhabited cottages, sewers and drains, villas and basements. They move around in groups or individually, what is ‘hidden’ and ‘invisible’ to the sight of any passer-by is for them a new treasure to discover, a new adventure to catapult themselves into, a new danger to confront.