DEAD END TRACK

On February 5th, was the first time I went to the Sanremo train station and got on the train to Ventimiglia, the last stop before the border.

- ALDO AMORETTI

PARADISE

I sat and look out the window as the frames of the landscape go by, a paradise. I thought of our life thickened along these lines, an obsession since the days when I was studying architecture: roads, bridges, rivers, and foreshore.

Sedimented like limpets on the edge of the rock. There was a Middle Eastern family, lost faces, and a few bags in their hands in front of me. Their lives cling to migrant routes. We stopped in Ventimiglia, a beautiful neoclassical station. They went off the train. Here, since 2015, when France changed the access to its territory, the route is interrupted. And it spreads through the streets of the city. I got off too.

The railway continues in an intertwining of lines - the freeway entering from the north, the overpasses and underpasses that mix in unitary chaos. I skirt the railway line and arrive at a railway building now used as a Caritas center. It is nine o'clock, and the slow distribution of food is starting by the Volunteers, the people who move with tenacity, day after day, without illusions.

They walk in the mud of the present, their feet heavy, one step after another. I talk to them, and they listen to me: since the reception center was closed, they have been looking after the migrants who arrive. I started to take some pictures with my analog camera, the tripod as if I was filming a ceremony. I put myself on the other side of the railway - wires, cables, rails, fences, it all stand between me and the world.