english text 174 although they all have the same aim: the margination and criminalisation of those sectors that are thought to present a possible threat to the established status quo. In this context, it is interesting to see that two Spanish artists have worked on those other, equally aggressive “walls”. One of them is Sergio Belinchón (1971), who, in his video Avalancha (Avalanche), 2008, shows us, ironically and with a touch of black humour, what might be an assault on a fence in the heart of Europe by the “real” Europeans, blond and white. It is curious, because the individuals are very different physically, but the attitudes, the sensations of fear, the expressions of pain and the grimaces of anguish are very similar to those that we have seen in other “avalanches”, such as the ones that took place not long ago in the cities of Ceuta and Melilla. For many people this video may be like a bad nightmare, like an experience that they would not wish to have even in their worst dreams; yet it does not matter much to them that this is a frequent experience for other people (admittedly, of another colour or language). A beautiful, pleasant landscape, completely green and covered with dense foliage, is suddenly invaded by some people who emerge from somewhere or other and use clumsy tools and equipment to make ladders to climb over the obstacle of a fence that blocks their advance. Young people and others not so young hurry to get over, there is no time to lose, they must not fail, it is more than their life is worth. The three screens that Belinchón uses in his video show us that the idyllic peace that presided over the landscape has been broken and the tranquillity has been upset by the dozens or hundreds of people emerging from the woodland. At the end of the three and a half minutes that the video lasts it seems that they have achieved their aim, although we cannot be sure, because they have got over the barrier but they enter another wood, very similar to the one from which they came, and we do not know what awaits them. For the time being, the ladders remain resting against the fence as dumb witnesses of the shame of a society (any society) capable of creating these boundaries. The other Spanish artist who has worked on this theme is Montserrat Soto (1961), who made the series Invernaderos (Greenhouses), 2002–03, consisting of striking photographs that show ghostly places made of plastic in which thousands of workers, basically from North Africa, toil in the worst working conditions. They are huge cities erected on the boundaries, on the edge, outside the places where the locals live, constructions that keep multiplying periodically but never become part of their environment. Enormous artificial ghettos in which very high temperatures are reached, all for the sake of mass production. Soto’s pictures are spectacular because of the profound solitude and extreme fragility that they show, metaphors of daily existence on the verge of collapse. A few small abandoned objects can be seen, scanty traces of human presence. It might have seemed that after they had got over the fences and the external walls the lives of the forced migrants would acquire more pleasant characteristics. But that is not what happens, as we see in Montserrat Soto’s photographs; rootlessness, margination and exile continue to form part of their daily existence. All this also shapes and constructs their story, a story that seemingly is not worth telling or recording as such in any place, document or medium of communication. For this reason it is necessary to capture, archive, analyse and document the stories and memories of the forgotten and invisible individuals of each period and place; it is fundamental to have the ability to read the many images that are produced and be capable of discerning what is true in them in order to know the stories and memories of the different peoples and countries that would allow us to rebuild the future. In this regard it is fundamental to know the work of two artists of the same generation and from the same country, Lebanon, ravaged by two devastating civil wars, in 1975 and 1990. The first of them, Walid Raad (1967), created (in collaboration with other artists and architects) a project called The Atlas Group, which has been performing outstanding work of research and investigation on these issues since the early 1990s. This aim is pursued by means of the deliberate appropriation of many sources, such as news reports, photographs, films, archives and so on, and using fragments from them in numerous projects that seek to analyse Beirut’s political past (using the city itself as subject, setting, character and plot) and to try to understand the historical mechanisms that have given rise to the different social constructions, and the role of contemporary art in challenging and subverting them. We can see this series of mingled aspects in his work My Neck Is Thinner than a Hair, 1996–2001, consisting of a hundred black and white photographs, apparently obtained from the collection of a certain Dr. Fadl Fakhouri, who turned out to be a fictitious Lebanese historian. This series of documents that tells us about the deluge of car bombs that exploded in Lebanon between 1975 and 1991 shows us pictures of the engines of the cars (the only part that remained intact), which had been thrown hundreds of metres from the place of the detonation, and it tells us how journalists strove and competed with each other to be the first to find and photograph them. The Atlas Group set out from the idea of considering history as a fluid stream that is constantly being formed, rather than as something fixed or static. The group works on the narrow line between “real” facts or events and fiction, replacing a compact, unitary view of events with one understood as a fragmented assemblage. With this aim, they do not hesitate to recover and archive information and documents about apparently ordinary everyday situations that nevertheless constitute the basis of the memory of a city or a country. One example is the series Missing Lebanese Wars, 1996–2002, consisting of twenty-one photographs that show the results of bets on Sunday horse races. However, what we see is
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