The Matarazzo Industries' remnants constitute an archaeological field in the center of the metropolis. Buried by debris and brushwood, there lays an important part of São Paulo's industrial era. A future transformed into past. Arnaldo Pappalardo's photographs, encrusted in the walls and in the ground of corridors close to the chimneys, look like an archaeological site. As if an excavation had brought to view what was buried there. Fragments of objects and bodies that emerge from the ironworks, from the furnaces. Everything seems sedimented by the course of time. An archaeology of our era. The newest transformed into relic. Diving flippers that look like an old lamp, a helmet that in fact is a surfer's mask, a tool that gains a larval aspect. Everything disposable, like the urban remnants. An archaeology made in Taiwan.

The hand that emerges from the earth, apparatus that are bodily extensions. Everything portrayed in a 1 x 1 scale, to suggest a real presence. But it is a strange realism: these things were never there. The photos comment the paradox of the archaeological enterprise in the contemporary soil: instead of a hole, the flat surface of the chrome.