Page 224 - Únete. Join us (Bienal de Venecia, 57 edición)

224 ¡ÚNETE! JOIN US! JORDI COLOMER
their land. They are escaping, they ask for help, to be able to pass to a neighbouring territory. The whole history of humanity is encapsulated in this image. How many times will it have happened? And it does not stop happening: it is happening now at this very moment while we are writing to each other. Humanity has always been a pilgrim, a refugee, a foreigner in strange lands.
JC: Today, when we are talking, the new president of the United States of America has signed a decree to erect a wall along the border with Mexico, to perfect that wall, which already exists, and which is not the only one, nor the first one. Building a wall is something like the architectural zero degree of the border, a primeval gesture. Francesco, in your Roman outings with the university students, I think rule number one is that they must be willing to jump over walls, with all that supposes ... is that so?
FC: Yes, this new wall of Trump is an unworthy thing, but also the complex architecture of the existing wall – on which Teddy Cruz, who is an artist and architect, has worked so much – is a war machine that has functioned for years with disastrous success. To build walls, as you say, is a truly primordial gesture; just as primordial is the act of annulling them. Returning to Cain and Abel, the story – as recounted by Bruce Chatwin in The Songlines – imagined Abel returning home after grazing the animals, when he realises that Cain has built a fence to protect the agricultural fields. Abel does not understand what it is, because until then space belonged to everyone, without divisions. What he does not accept is that his brother has invented private property. When he decides to jump over the fence, Cain kills him. And that is the same reason why in the history of the birth of Rome, Romulus kills Remus: for having climbed over the pomerium (the wall) that Romulus had raised. Walls, then, are made to be jumped over. This is what I try to teach students in our itinerant lessons. The first thing I say is that it is better that whoever respects the taboo of private property should not come. If you really want to know the city, it will give you a surprise when you least expect it: you should go where you are not allowed. Without this force there can be no new knowledge, one cannot be satisfied only with the space that one is given to understand. This is something we understood very early on in Stalker, from the first explorations. Our first edited video – because the other videos are raw, without cuts or interferences, respecting the perception occurring during their filming – is a simple sequence of wall jumps in several of the cities in which we organised our first outings.
JC: I don’t know if you are familiar with this masterful work on how to solve the wall-frontier theme by Venezuelan artist Javier Téllez, One Flew Over the Void (Stray Bullet), made for Insite 2005. Tellez, in collaboration with the mentally ill patients of a hospital in Mexicali, designed an event to launch a bullet-man over the border between Mexico and the United States, between Tijuana and the Border Field State Park. There is a video of the action that is powerful and hilarious. It should be re-shown now, it would make a lot of sense ...
FC:: Yes, I know it. The first time I saw it seemed to me something too ironic and spectacular, but it remained in my memory and, ultimately, it appeared to me in all its tragedy. A real monument to the jump over the wall. An anthology of such works on