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 planning diagram and a couple of sonnets written in the aftermath.
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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 imaginary division, the precise location of this work is ultimately abstract: it might have happened anywhere along a line which is traceable thanks to concrete monoliths that were placed in the woods when the border was established after WWI.
Subterranean Transactions was partly inspired by Ferreira Gullar’s “Poema enterrado”, as alluded to in the ending verse (third stanza) of one of the sonnets published at Robida Magazine. This raw iteration of Gullar’s idea materialized as a literal exchange of soil between Italy and Slovenia.
