Berlin

Twenty years after 1989, East Berlin is in full mutation. It is no longer the grey city of the GDR, but not yet the polished capital of gentrification. It is in between.

Ferreri chooses an unusual point of view, coherent with his entire work: the back. If in “Le Stanze” he photographed interiors preserved under nylon sheets, and in “Regesto” he isolated artisanal objects extracted from their context, here he photographs the back of the city.

The brandmauern - the blind firewalls - are the Side B of Berlin. They were internal border walls even before the Wall: they separated properties, hid courtyards, showed only bricks blackened by coal.

In 2009 they are suddenly painted. A peach pink, an olive green, a blue, a total white. It is an operation of urban make-up: the city coloring itself to forget the grey.

But Ferreri’s large format camera records the opposite: every repainting is a new layer of archive. Under the peach the brick emerges, under the white the soot, under the green the graffiti. The scaffolding, the wheelbarrows abandoned on the freshly sown English lawn, the yellow and blue bins, the torn posters - are the same objects as in _Regesto_, only on an urban scale.

Side B is not the facade the city shows. It is the facade the city cannot hide. And for this reason, twenty years later, it is the only sincere document of its transformation.