WEST recounts the rise and fall of the last great Western empire in a period of time between the beginning of the Gold Rush (1848) and the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers (2008). Travelling in three long journeys across the deserts of the American West and one of the oldest geological structures on the planet, Francesco Jodice reinterprets a part of our history through a visual repertoire of myths and ruins, utopias, mirages and failures: archaeology of a present that has already passed.

In an age of rereadings and revisionisms, WEST offers an alternative history of power and culture throughout the West and not only of the United States, but it is also a tribute to a visionary and perhaps unrepeatable history, that of the most powerful machine of imaginings that has ever existed. The seventy large-format color photographs taken across eleven states – California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and South Dakota – are accompanied by maps and historical and iconographic materials.

Published on the occasion of 2023/2024 exhibitio at the National Archaeological Museum, Naples