Alexandre Coco & Andrea Francke

Political Borders
Cultural Landscape
Discovering East Germany

As children we grew up divided between the idea of nations as a solid concept and the reality of their constant rearrangement. Our parents had to buy us new world atlases every year due to the fast reconfiguration of the world. The notion of borders and nations as an abstraction that only inhabits human minds is what initially moved us to try to rediscover Eastern German borders. What happens to a border when it ceases to exist as such? Are there any intrinsic characteristics that remain, like a geo-political scar on the land?

Our plan is to follow the Eastern German border by all means possible. We will reconstruct a country that only remains in our imagination by pursuing what we think configured it. We will use an old guide book as a lead since we have never been there before. We will walk, drive, cycle, and do everything needed to make our path as rigorous as possible following a GPS reconstruction of the original border and at the same time it will register our actual path, the border of our East Germany.