Subterranean Transactions

2023

My contribution to the 9th issue of Robida Magazine was based on the execution and archival of an ephemeral installation. Within the time frame of daylight, I clandestinely swapped the land belonging to two bordering countries. In place of what was previously national soil, now there lies ground coming from the opposite side of the border. Be that as it may, the completion of the work made the intervention barely traceable. The only register of this event are some images caught by camera, together with a dirt diagram and a couple of sonnets written in the aftermath.

The exchange was realized on an undisclosed site in the forest, in the authoritative limbo that characterizes the limit between two sovereign states. As a symbolic gesture executed over an immaterial historical division, the precise location of this work is ultimately abstract: it might have happened anywhere along an imaginary line, or an invisible threshold which can be traced thanks to concrete monoliths that were placed in this land when the border between Italy and Yugoslavia was drawn in the beginning of the twentieth century.

Subterranean Transactions was inspired by neoconcrete “Poema Enterrado” (1959) - or “Buried Poem” - by Ferreira Gullar, as alluded to in the ending verse of one of the sonnets published on the Suolo / Prtst / Soil issue of Robida Magazine.