Alessandro Vicario’s work takes a look at living, at the experience of life contained in a form that is synthesis and mediation: the city. And if the city is Berlin, the condition of seeing is inevitablymixed with themeasurement of time, memory, sign and presence. A research designed to detect the expression of existence and belonging; to recognise, within the inhabited space, within the city, in the proximity of the Wall, on the Wall, in front of the Palast der Republik (which no longer exists today), that sense of possession and experience that is deposited upon the surface of daily life. A visual subject, photography, which aspires to overcome appearance and to reveal the being within of the ordinary and obvious, that reality that contributes to giving shape to the identity of the place and to giving expression to the genius loci. In the place where a limit to existence once stood, the photographer conducts his mission of recording the space, analysing the surrounding area and taking a sample of evidence andmeanings, sampling after sampling, shot after shot. An investigation is therefore proposed and shown to the public (and the reader) today, which was conducted in 2009, in particular, twenty years after the fall of the Wall, on the twentieth anniversary of the Reunification. As he constructs a map and an itinerary of orientation, Alessandro Vicario has developed a particular plan of intervention, identifying precise points of observation, in order to arrive at the formation of an overview of shared knowledge. The large unpublished section took in Invalidenfriedhof, Mühlenstra.e, Bernauer Straße and Ackerstraße, in addition to the slight traces still present in Strelitzer Straße, is enriched by five works belonging to a previous endeavour (Die Berliner Mauer, 2002-2009), and reveals the changing city; a focus reserved for passers-by, the rhythms, the transit of visages and identities in front of theWall, a focus on that past, which is still held and contained in the present today. In this composite amalgamation, a combination of historical, social and cultural dynamics, a snapshot can be grasped, dedicated to the difficult process of Reunification, witnessed by the contrast between the human figure, which is indistinct and dynamic, caught during its movement in front of the camera, and the portion of the Wall in the background, which is always clear and visible (given its fixed nature). The sequence of five large photographic prints (Passers-by, 2003) brings the observer, in the light of a September afternoon, to a point of departure, an origin, the old seat of the Parliament of the former DDR (Palast der Republik), to those rust coloured panes of glass, which reflect part of the main Cathedral. At the bottom of the picture, along the sidewalk, the passers-by mark off the minutes and seconds of passing time, like metronomes, unaware of being immortalised. Credit goes to Alessandro Vicario for having asked himself questions, with no taxonomic urgency, in the awareness of his action, as one who looks at the signs of history (and the life that inhabits it); at the shadows drawn on the surface, at the recording of matter.