Filippo Berta

One by One is a collective performance carried out between 2019 and 2020 along the borders of Slovenia, Croatia, Hungary, Serbia, North Macedonia, Greece, Türkiye, the United States of America, Mexico, and between South and North Korea, in militarized and hard-to-access areas. “An immersion in unresolved places,” the artist describes it, echoing the definition of a “site of contradictions” coined by Chicana sociologist Gloria Anzaldúa. Here, the artist invites local inhabitants to count, in their native language, the barbs of the wire fences that mark the frontier. The act of counting takes on a ritualistic quality: it becomes a kind of chant, almost sacred, making visible the wounds inflicted on the land by these defensive structures. Balanced between utopian tension and surreal gesture, the impossible attempt to enumerate every barb reveals the infinity of divisions – both physical and symbolic – produced by walls. Touching the barbs and assigning them a number means acknowledging them, removing them from anonymity, and isolating these impersonal and inhuman elements of border barriers.