Lives in Motion in Front of the Wall

Life flashes past what remains of the Berlin Wall. Young people, old people, children, swift as furtive shadows, come and go. Alessandro Vicario captures only their idea, their elusive, blurred outline. Positioned in front of history’s most recent monument, the Modena-born photographer (born 1968) records its new life mechanically and serially. A testimony that seeks above all to be a chronicle. Twenty years after Berlin’s reunification, twenty-one after the fall of the Wall, its inhabitants seem to have digested what happened: the past dominates their daily lives but does not determine them. The 57 photographs on view at Fondazione Mudima reveal the contrast between the material substance of the Wall, motionless and always sharp, and the evanescence of the lives passing before it, captured in a “psychological and existential blur”, a tremor that reveals the uncertainty and precariousness of the human condition.

(i. l.)

Alessandro Vicario. Fondazione Mudima, Via Tadino 26. 02.2940.96.33. From 4 November, at 6.30 p.m., until the 20th.