on physical borders:

Sometimes, physical borders are constructed out of the need to stop violent acts. Then they become 'concrete' evidences of social, ethnic and cultural differences which they project to the future. In this way physical borders have more than just material or real effects on city life. Although they do block real time, physical connections (exchanges, trade, meetings, movement, views) transforming public space in an absolute way, in the course of time they become manifestations of a deeper problem: the loss of the ability to communicate. Their presence affects not only the present and the futrue of the city, but it can shape also the past. Understood as representations of the loss of collective memory they end up momuments of the absence of a community history, the absence of a history of everyday-life.

At the same time openings on the borders, may seem to provide the possibility of contact and construct passages-bridges to the other, but seen differently they can be points of control; another way to complete seperation, to stabilize and make the border official.

How can we utilize the instability of the presence condition and the transitional time before the next transformation takes place, to learn and to propose alternative scenarios, alternative conditions of meeting and exchange?