Page 223 - Únete. Join us (Bienal de Venecia, 57 edición)

JUMPING OVER WALLS A CONVERSATION BETWEEN FRANCESCO CARERI AND JORDI COLOMER
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JORDI COLOMER: Francesco, I was reminded of you yesterday. We spent three days at the Terramar racetrack, a racing circuit opened in the 1920s near Sitges, south of Barcelona, which has been abandoned since the 1950s. Its cambers, which reach inclinations of 90 degrees, are the most extreme ever built in Europe, it seems that many race cars would fly off. There are photos of this time of splendour with futuristic cars and an audience with top hats fascinated by speed. These days, vegetation and sand are encroaching on the cracked concrete. Yesterday we saw a herd of sheep and goats with its shepherd in the centre of the circuit, whom we invited to go around the track. It was all a bit absurd. I thought of you and the story that you are always telling about Cain and Abel.
FRANCESCO CARERI: Yes, this story of Cain and Abel has become a true obsession for me. It seems to me that everything that has always interested me is condensed in a few lines: Cain, a sedentary farmer who kills his brother Abel, a nomadic shepherd – it is also the first murder in the history of mankind. Then, punished by God, he must wander, reincarnating both Cain and Abel in a new figure which contains the nomadic and the sedentary. The equation would then be (K)AIN + (A)BEL = KA, that is, the symbol of eternal wandering that traverses the continents from the Palaeolithic to the Neolithic. KA is also the symbol of the encounter with the Other, the different, the foreigner. After the fratricide, God tells Cain: I am going to give you a sign – I am going to “signal you” – to protect you, so that you are not killed when you cross borders and wander in unknown territories. I am sure it is the sign KA; walking with open hands raised towards the sky, Cain advances saying: I am disarmed, I do not want to kill you, I just want to pass through ...
I recently found an incredible image of this. It is engraved on some rocks at the Baltic Sea in Bahusia, in southern Sweden; in it many boats appear where there are people making this gesture of the KA with their hands raised. They are not warriors, they are families with children who show it to the strangers to be able to disembark in