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For those of us with mild resurgence of Star Wars obsession, finding out that something as typically ephemeral as a movie set for Luke Skywalker's adventures on Tatooine still exists elicits a mix of nostalgia, wonder and excitement. Visual artist and filmmaker Rä di Martino set out to shoot old film sets in North Africa and eventually found her way by word-of-mouth to the mother of all desert film sets, a miraculously well-kept Skywalker Ranch as well as two other Tatooine sets from the original Star Wars film. Oddly enough, fans who saw her photos a few years back were concerned about the distressed state of Luke's "boyhood home" itself and eventually raised money to refurbish it and mark it for tourists fans.

di Martino writes us she was exploring the sets not as a documentarian, but rather as an artist exploring our dreamscapes. "These photo series are part of a research on abandoned movie sets in North Africa (which also ended up in a video), but is not reportage. I just liked the poetic potential of those ruins—being ruins of something that is our future in our imagination."

[via petapixel]

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Photos by Ra di Martino. Follow her on Tumblr.
Restoration photo by Mark Dermul / savelars.com