«I want to stress that walls and fences of borders are no solutions to today‘s global political and economic problems. The Berlin Wall was the best proof for this: peace begins where walls fall, not where they are erected». Short, simple and direct, that summarise well the terms of the discourse proposed by Confrontier, the work by Kai Wiedenhoefer exhibited in the rooms on the ground floor of the Vecchio Ospedale (Old Hospital). To pronounce them is the author himself, born in Germany and engaged now for years in this project cultivated on the long wave of memories implanted during the fall of the Berlin Wall: «It was the most exciting and positive political event I’ve witnessed in my life. The fall was for me a formative experience that years later caused me to be shocked and concerned about the erection of the separation barrier in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. I went there to document it and I made a book about, Wall. With Confrontier I expanded the theme at a global level».
An expansion that has certainly helped the success of the project, and that the setting chosen to offer it in Cortona has clearly highlighted. Entering the first hall of the Vecchio Ospedale you are immediately shut in between huge barriers which, reading the captions, turn out to be placed in the most diverse areas on the planet. Printed in large dimensions and affixed to the wall without any frame, the images in landscape format by Wiedenhoefer cause you to back off. To get away from those threatening barriers, interwoven with concrete, wire mesh and barbed wire, able to evoke the dark scenarios we had believed belonged to a distant past. But the past returns, if you do not remain vigilant, slithering in indifference right under the rubble of those walls that we had painstakingly brought down.
A work which visually finds then its strength in an imperfect repetitiveness, able to suggest the progression on a global scale of a dangerous trend and, at the same time, to directly support the confrontation/clash between the different situations photographed. A project that makes you reflect and that, precisely because of its ability to show everything together leaving to catch sight of the specific, succeeds to give off its communicative power especially when exposed in large dimension and with a minimal setting, such as that proposed in Cortona. It is really, a very good exhibition. [
S. B. ]
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CONFRONTIER
by Kai Wiedenhoefer
Vecchio Ospedale | until September 27th, 2015
admission fee: 6,00 €
published on 2015-07-22 in NEWS / EXHIBITIONS
COTM COTM2015FPmag
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