La Linea Inesistente (2010)

If we want to draw a partition line on a map, a stroke of the pen is enough. Countries, regions, people and forests are cut, apparently without consequences, except for that improvised drawing. Different is the case when that line matches with a curtain, with an ideological clash, two blocks in conflict involving economic interests and geopolitics. Different when that rift expands itself with time, changing depending on the fronts, strong for the lack of tangibility that renders it more elusive as well as more redoubtable. If we want to rub out a partition line from a map, a simple eraser is enough. And we expect that those countries, regions, people and forests revert to be a singleness, or at least normal neighbors, with the same immediacy and easiness as if they were small pawns in a greater and much more complex board. Twenty years after his passing, I have decided to undertake a journey along the more or less precise route of the Iron Curtain, on the trails of still existing gaps and rearrangements occurred and assimilated. A winding path among fields, people and trees, the latter being the only ones having always continued (memory of Jacques Prévert…) speaking the same language and speaking to each other. Pieces of memories on a ditch that has been cancelledall of a sudden, as if it was a worthless problem. The western meridian and the eastern meridian over forty years of history. And in the end Berlin, where everything began and finished, the origin of that stroke of the pen, the place where the wall was not theoretical but real, where actually it was erected and then broken down. Berlin, where everything seems to be passed away, even forgotten. But where still exists, on the contrary, on people’s faces, in the colours and in some intimate and hidden paths, the reflection of an indelible memory.