Whether for defence or to demonstrate their own power, from pride or to instil fear, civilisations built walls which illustrated their characters. They were such audacious constructions that often they were not considered man-made: the marvellous Mycenaean walls King Perseus wanted were said to have been erected by the Cyclopes because no human being could possibly have manoeuvred such huge stones. Likewise King Laomedon of Troy wanted invincible walls for his city which were deemed to be the work of two important gods, Poseidon and Apollo. In other cases, works of disquieting beauty were attributed to man’s industriousness: the boundary wall which defended the road between Athens and the port of Piraeus was a sign of the dominance of the manufacturing classes represented by the democrat Pericles, the walls forming the border of ancient Byzantium’s peninsula prevented enemies using the land route and they were kept clear of the coast by the powerful fleet, the imposing Great Wall, almost nine thousand kilometres long, ensured the Chinese empire was safe from Mongolian incursions. Yet non of these impressive achievements could withstand time except as ruins of an ancient grandness: the walls of Jericho crumbled at the sound of enemy trumpets, those of Troy were breached by cunning and deceit, the Chinese couldn’t prevent several successful enemy attacks at the gates, the only points of weakness. The birth of the Berlin Wall is proof that, in spite of how the saying goes, man rarely learns from history. When, on 13 August 1961, construction began of a border which would physically divide the city, acknowledging the conflict between two opposing world views, it was immediately apparent that the symbolic value of the deed was of epic proportions. Nevertheless, those solid reinforced concrete blocks, relentlessly juxtaposed to form a barrier, had one weak element many overlooked: they were incredibly ugly and as such they were able to be overcome by beauty and art long before politics. In effect, in spite of being seemingly unassailable, a theatre of tragic executions by the Volkspolizei (People’s Police) and daring escapes, in the last few of its twenty eight years the Wall saw unpredictable provocative actions such as the youth, who walked undisturbed along the top for five hundred metres in 1986 or, two years later, the two hundred punks who, to flee from police, climbed over it from West to East. The art world too offered the most varied protests at the “old” Wall: the concert by the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, the demonstrations on 4 November 1989 in Alexanderplatz organised by artists’ associations, the concert in 1990 when Roger Waters conjured up his legendary Pink Floyd rock opera “The Wall”. And photography? Unforgettable, including Henri Cartier-Bresson images like the three men standing on a telephone junction cabinet trying to catch a glimpse of relatives and friends who live on the other side of the Wall, the black and white picture story by Richard Avedon of New Years Eve 1989 at the Brandenburg Gate, the finely detailed, dramatically bare boned documentation of the Wall by Antonia Mulas. When Alessandro Vicario decided to investigate the Wall he preferred to follow his own very personal path, focusing on its physicality and beauty. He has always been interested in the themes of time and memory and has explored them in his work for a long time. He knew how to look at the Wall with that clear gaze inevitably common to recent generations, who have to confront history without it invoking in them the burning passion of having lived through it. Contrary to what many others have done, Vicario chose not to broaden his view and place the Wall in the context in which it is currently preserved and remembered but to approach the surface of the reinforced concrete as closely as possible, treating it like a skin to observe close up, searching for signs, allusions, symbols. He took his time, with old school attention to detail, with the fine eye of someone who knows how to choose his equipment, like the large format camera which demand slowness, and in exchange he rewards us with minute, hyper-realistic detail. The result was surprising because the many photographic plates have also become sections of a journey which winds its way through wonders to reveal an almost unknown world, even if it’s under our very noses. Yet there is always a huge difference between looking and observing and only someone gifted with perspicacity, who won’t allow even the tiniest detail to escape, can capture it. For instance, a nail hammered into the Wall oozing rust and what looks like a splash of oil paint in which we can discern the edges of something metaphorical while the colour slowly flakes off in thousands of blue fragments, leaving a shape in which perhaps we can recognise a profile, an expression, a woman’s face. The sense of time lives in these crevices for Alessandro Vicario and sometimes they allude to ancient times (two legs and an arm of a body survive which, in their colour and shape, look as if they belong to a Roman fresco) and in other cases they attack letters to the point of making the writing unrecognisable and therefore mysterious. Concrete isn’t the inert material we imagined it to be: areas of porosity appear on its surfaces created by long exposure to the weather, the homogenous layers of colour which form monochromatic panels, the repairs thanks to which everything returns to a smooth, clean, grey and anonymous state as it appeared to the graffiti artists. Then, suddenly, the sequence is abruptly interrupted and the reinforcing iron rods emerge from the substance of the Wall, the inner soul metaphorically alluding to prison bars. The metaphor becomes even more vivid when the photographer hovers over parts of the Wall where tourists and souvenir hunters have gouged so deeply that they’ve created gaps through which you can glimpse blue sky, a green field. As with a labyrinth, here too reality can’t be seen except by gaining some distance. However, only by getting up close can the essence be captured and then, the rod which horizontally runs across a hole, seems to stifle the scream of man in search of himself.