BOrderlands, the border story, is a photographic book set on the American side of the border between Mexico and the United States. The volume collects the images made during some trips made by Francesco Anselmi, Italian photographer, between 2017 and 2020.
Silent and quiet, the images distil lives of an apparent normality. The border, with its long history of hopes and betrayals, looms unaware of its atrocious function, preventing dreams from realizing.
There are those who get married, go to school, market, play football, pray. There are those who patrol from telescope or rifle or bothI, camouflaged between the vegetation of the woods. Along the border you can meet bone traders and indomitable hippies, solitary knights and desert tourists.
The illusion is a state of quiet in which the existences of those seeking salvation and those who fear to lose what they have, even if what it has is little, overlap.
The inhabitants of Borderlands are not the epic heroes of the Frontier trilogy of the writer Cormac McCarthyare rather similar to the protagonists of the Trilogy of the death of the director Alejandro González Iñárritu.
Humanity varies
There is Harry Hughes, leader of the National Socialist movement and founder of the so -called frontier guard of the United States, a group of paramilitary militia of the so -called Us Border Guard, who patrols the border between Arizona and Mexico. Along the way, in the woods, the most extreme stories live, you can meet Gabriel and Marilena, exhausted after being abandoned in the desert by the smuggler with whom they traveled and Pablo and José who smoked crack at the Balboa Park of San Diego, California.
There are many churches, there are everywhere along those three thousand unfortunate kilometers of border where dreams die.
The border between the United States and Mexico occupies four American states: Texas Nuovo Mexico, Arizona and California. On the other hand he occupies six, Bassa California, sound, Chihuahua, Cohuila, Nuevo León and Tamaulipas.
On the American side, the apparently less dangerous one, where you can breathe Trumpist, racist and afraid America, the photographer collected moments, small personal stories, portraits of individuals and groups, to build a partial fresco of this border life.
Francesco Anselmi’s book
If we had known what direction he was taking this crazy world and if we had imagined that Trump would have been re -elected – promising the army along the border and repatriation of millions of immigrants from the first day – perhaps today this volume would be different.
We would have conceived it – I speak to the plural, since I cared for it with the graphic support of Emiliano Biondelli – full of angry images. We would probably have made ideological choices, calculating their hand on the dissent of the Americans – many of them do not want the wall at all – and finally, we would have included photographs of Naziskin and exasperated paramilitary. Instead, the book marks a sincere normality of contradictions.
Borderlands It was born from the photographic observation of a foreigner. Anselmi is the traveler who patrols the border, looking for his reading – in a happy syncretism between documentary language and reportage – of this middle ground. The bright color color of black and white shows deserted and lunar landscapes violated by the wall which, like a long snake, runs alongside fragments of existences: those of supervised and supervised, both prisoners and protagonists of a contemporary tragic epic without winners.
Borderlandsthe book, is a travel trip. He guides us to discover the landscape, so equal on one side and the other, an immense desert on which small urban agglomerations of anonymous humanity are incorrect which remains such until some tragedy slips out of here and beyond the border.
Borderlands Francesco Anselmi 136 pages, € 44.00 Kehrer Verlag
The wall of shame
If the frontier between the two states ranges from Ocean to Ocean, the wall of shame should have done the same. But so it was not. Started during the Era of Bush Father, in 1990, the wall continued his march with Clinton to then continue, with strokes of decrees and billionaire funding, his sad evolution. Until the Biden Administration which, despite proclamations of opposition to its construction and the effectiveness of the wall, continued the confiscation of the lands and the investment for new sections. Today of the cursed 3000 kilometers, only a third is covered by the barrier.
In America, the wall is continually subject to surveys that have been confirming for thirty years that the country is half divided between those who want that wall and those who know that it will not solve the problem of immigration.
The most dangerous route in the world
The United States have always treated Mexico as a territory to be exploited, for natural resources and for investments, to create companies and trade.
The history of the relationship between these two countries is the history of the border.
Everything takes place here, on one side and the other. A unique place in the world that is legally crossed by 250 million people every year. People who enter and leave every day: they live there, work here. While illegal estimates speak of half a million who try to enter the United States every year. A human tide that pushes itself to the north from the south of the continent in search of luck, running huge risks. It is the most dangerous migratory route in the world. A report spread by the International Organization for Migrations (OIM) supports it, which in 2022 recorded 686 dead or missing refugees. In a wider time framework, according to the Open Data portal activated by the International Organization for Migrations, around November 3, 2014 and 3,865 migrants died.
The necessary words
By avoiding the chronicle of the emergency, the images of Anselmi open windows from which we can observe this land of all and nobody. Frame after frame, like a silent film, we observe deserted landscapes and the city of the future and feel the echo of American documentary photography. These will be shiny vastness, or the sky that descends to swallow the dunes. Live and abandoned scrap bodies animate the surreal scenario that invites a reading freed from the news and therefore immersive and engaging. In this narrative, Francisco Cantù’s text becomes precious testimony. The American writer, of Mexican origin, on the border dedicated his successful novel, “Just a river to separate us” (Minimum fax 2019)in which he tells his long experience as a guard along the border between the damned of the earth. A poignant book that better than many disposal makes us grasp reasons and hopes of a humanity looking for redemption. The contribution of the writer to Borderlands is original: he comes to the heart of the visual narrative by describing migrants and guards, outlines the humanity of one and other and, with a sort of candor, observes both the cruelty of the coyote and the consequences of the political choices and from Too much decades have made this long road of sand an open -air hell.
“More than a century ago, my grandfather’s family crossed Mexico and unknowingly instilled the desire to understand the power of this border line in shaping the ancestral identities and history”.
And continue: “I was pervaded by a very American naivety, which derived from narratives that have long positioned the individual as a powerful powerful force to change long -standing institutions through pure willpower, a conviction exacerbated by the narratives focused on the hero of countless books and films, in particular the cowboy stories with which I have grown up. “ Francisco Cantù
Today Borderlands, By contravening his intentions to offer a slow and meditative reflection, it is a topical book, and allows us to look at an experience in the making that contains the hopes of many and the absurd inability of the policy to give solutions to human problems.
Borderlands will be presented in two appointments, both moderated by myself:
Tuesday 11 February 2025 at the Milan Triennale at 18.30 there will be the authors Francesco Anselmi and Francisco Cantù.
Wednesday 12 February, at 18.30 at the Gallerie d’Italia, Turin with the authors will speak the journalist and writer Mario Calabresi.
Borderlands
Francesco Anselmi
136 pages, € 44.00
Kehrer Verlag
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