What remains of the Wall, twenty years later

Alessandro Vicario presents his vision of one of the greatest symbols of separation

“Photography has the incisiveness of a maxim, functions like a quotation, admonishes like a proverb. It is never merely the transparent account of an event, if only because framing means excluding.” These reflections by Susan Sontag came back to mind as we looked at Alessandro Vicario’s work in Berlin, confronting what remains of the Wall twenty years after its demolition.

To sum up what die Berliner Mauer represented, not only for European history but for humanity as a whole, in a conventional photographic reportage would have been an extremely difficult, if not suicidal, undertaking. Vicario therefore found a productive approach by basing his work on the two cornerstones that have always distinguished his aesthetic research: Time and Memory. He categorically excludes the concept of still life: “Every material is continually changing, even though it appears fixed and motionless to us. When the public looks at my images, the stone will be continuing its unstoppable transformation,” he wrote in connection with another exhibition. These words remain valid for the exhibition that has been open for some time at Castelgrande in Bellinzona.

Vicario concentrates on what remains of the Wall after the scratches, cracks and chipping that followed that historic night of 9 November 1989 — even numerology played a part! Beyond History, but on this side of the Wall, since all the photographs were taken in former West Berlin, Vicario makes the Wall itself a paradoxically neutral subject. He investigates it with an entomologist’s precision to discover traces of Time — decay, ruin, abandonment — and of humankind: graffiti, writing, more or less improbable dedications such as “Ich liebe dich, Mauer!”

Some people, intent on taking home a souvenir, scraped the Wall until they exposed its core of solid iron rods, which Vicario interprets symbolically as bars, beyond which the blue sky can sometimes be glimpsed: a metaphor for freedom now regained. Others sought to leave on the Wall a trace of ancient and disconcerting beauty, given the “canvas” on which it ended up: human limbs recalling a fresco from classical antiquity.

Also connected to the concept of “apparent stillness”, Vicario’s work shows how time has marked the Wall, eating into the concrete, forced, so to speak, to show signs of giving way. Through the photographer’s lens, its porous surfaces are transfigured into an indistinct agglomeration of colour, material and spontaneous graphic motifs. Once again, this brings his “pictures” close to a pictorialism that, escaping the term’s most overused meaning, here recalls Art Informel and conceptual art.

Excluding everything that is not the Wall, as Roberto Mutti points out in the catalogue published by the Biblioteca Cantonale and the City of Bellinzona, “Vicario has preferred to follow his own highly personal path, centred on matter and beauty: he has chosen not to widen his gaze by placing the Wall in the context in which it is preserved and remembered, but to move as close as possible to the reinforced-concrete surface, considering it a skin to be observed at close range in search of signs, allusions and symbols.”