2nd Place, Andrea and Magda/Neutral Grey, Italy

This series shows the remnants of Egypt’s Sinai tourism industry, a pipe dream shattered when terrorism and national instability decimated visitor numbers. The architecture, artificial and naive, reveals a disconnection with local cultural reality, with facilities designed for a global clientele. The ambition of investors, far from being realistic, resulted in a region dangerously dependent on tourism, with oversized developments that devastated the environment and security requirements that led to widespread enclosures of open land. Using the language of French ethnologist Marc Augé, the Sinai has become a ‘non place’.