A derelict prison in Buenos Aires was for a time one of the city’s largest works of art. Now on the brink of destruction, the project will only be complete when it is gone forever.

The ghostly manifestations in the prison's windows are the handiwork of Seth Wulsin, an American artist who swapped the Ivy league for Argentina at the beginning of last year. Upon his arrival, the Carcel de Caseros prison had an immediate impact on him.

“I saw it the first day I moved to Buenos Aires," Wulsin says. "It’s this rectilinear mass that looms over everything in the neighbourhood. I found out it was going to be demolished and I wanted to transform the demolition into an artwork.” He waited six months to be given access by the Ministry of Public Works, his ladder, rope, and hammer in tow.

The 26-year-old strategically marked out each of the circular panes he needed to smash to compose each visage. Then over five weeks he worked his way through eighteen floors of corridor and stairwell leaving four tonnes of broken glass in his wake. The project is called ‘16 Tonnes’ after the total amount of glass that will eventually be destroyed.

With over 1,600 cells, the prison was one of the main detention centres for political dissidents during Argentina’s military dictatorships, which ended in the 1980s. It was then abandoned for good in 2001. As for the faces, they simply revealed themselves to Wulsin over time. “I didn’t have particular people in mind. It’s like when you look up at the sky and see a face in the clouds.”

For now, the piece in its entirety exists only as a memory, but Wulsin is unrepentant. “Time is one of my central questions,” he adds. “The whole impulse was to create something through disintegration, knowing that demolition would be the end result.”