Transylvania’s German-speaking Saxons have been leaving for a century, and those who remain are outnumbered by their own architecture. Pascual Martínez and Vincent Sáez photograph both sides of that arithmetic: the families still keeping up the houses, and the people who have come back from Germany to hold a culture their ancestors assembled over eight centuries.

The book refuses a single voice. Archival pictures are set beside new photographs, and drawings, legends and present-day testimony interrupt the sequence. History arrives in fragments, and so does the community — a founding narrative, a difficult twentieth century, a dispersed present. The whole reads closer to a working dossier than to a memorial, arguing by accumulation rather than by lament.

That method suits a subject that resists a single image. The Saxons are indigenous to the region and, for most of modern history, a minority squeezed between larger political forces. By declining to resolve the contradiction, Martínez and Sáez keep the project honest about what documentation can and cannot recover.

This is the pair’s second book photographed in Romania, and the continuity is visible in the editing: they construct a present tense out of the past instead of illustrating a world in the act of vanishing. Overlapse published the first edition in 2019 as a 152-page hardcover in English, roughly 23 by 17 centimetres. Collectors drawn to documentary work that thinks with archives will find the interest here in proportion — how deliberately found material and newly made frames are weighed against one another.