Free Zone 2006

In 1993, the great Israeli film director Amos Gitai visited Gabriele Basilico’s exhibition on Beirut in Paris. He was greatly struck by it, and asked him to collaborate on a project about his father, who had worked as an architect in Israel in the 1930s. A decade later, Gitai contacts Basilico once again for a project on the Free Zone: the free-trade area lying between Jordan and Israel. In Basilico’s eyes, Israel is “an unstable piece of Europe drifting through a very different territory.” But his real destination is the Free Zone itself, also photographed from above and around the edges. It’s an area that lives on trade, especially that of cars. As Basilico writes: “The desert lies all around this ever-expanding city of steel and sheet metal.” Perhaps a little like Blade Runner, and certainly a node in the network of globalisation. Most of the photos have never been published before, and show us Basilico in the role of both reporter and traveller.