Black ink on Chinese paper, cotton string
5 drawings, 85 x 50 cm each
September 2012(destroyed)
In August 1961, following the DDR political summit’s orders, East Germany’s military forces drew out a line that physically divided Berlin in two. Streets were violently broken; houses were separated from their back yards, paths in parks found a cement wall at their extremity.
More interestingly, soon a second barrier was built, running some distance inside DDR’s territory meant to further prevent human leaks from the border, thus locking inside that strip of ‘no man’s land’, famously known as Todesstreife. On the outside, streets were turned into dead ends; On the inside, a more dramatic change took place.
Inside, an entirely new idea of topography was brought forth, invoked by the simple gesture of cutting with two parallel lines. The deserted landscape inside the Todesstreife was permeated by a haunting and uncanny emptiness : Streets were isolated, mutilated and left without point of origin or direction, and the tropes that follow from the idea of a 'way' discredited.
I took these configurations (following satellite shots taken in late 1988) as a fragmented idiom, to be repeated until they appear human: After more than 400 drawings, they became strange hieroglyphic marks that struggle to appear parts of one and the same language.