Lena Szankay has many ties to Germany, but perhaps the most defining one is that she moved to Berlin in the late 1980s. She arrived there in May 1989, driven by a desire to find her own Berlin experience after seeing Win Wenders' film Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin, in German) in Buenos Aires. Moving to West Berlin to study photography a few months before the fall of the Wall meant becoming the protagonist of her own story, determined by an ambiguous plot that led her to experience one of the most important historical moments of the 20th century, while going through—camera in hand—some of the most formative and transcendent events of her personal life.

Her years in Berlin were defined, like all migrant lives, by constant adaptation. First, to the division of a city crossed by a wall, with two antagonistic and complementary sectors, united by the same language but with different idiosyncrasies. Then, to an endless process of reunification that began in November 1989 and determined what the following years would be like: endless construction and remodeling, the negotiation of coexistence agreements, the creation of new spaces. Lena was part of all this and recorded it day by day with her camera. The photos she took in her early years in Berlin during her training as a photographer constituted a diary of urban, political, and personal transformation. The timelessness captivates us. These photos were taken between 1989 and 1994, but there are no precise signs of exact times.

Some may have been taken before or after the fall of the wall, because the process of its erasure was long and mournful. We see long lines of people on Alexanderplatz under the TV tower and also on top of the wall, just below the Brandenburg Gate. Both sides,marked by the complexity of the consequences of a city cohabited by two opposing systems, were populated by large empty spaces with caravans that served as homes, endless train tracks, and cheap apartments with coal stoves that artists and young people from around the world made their own. Lena saw in all this her pure fiction, architectures conceived as sets for her own film.

Between the personal and the historical, between the outside and the inside, the spaces where she and her friends lived, worked,and played were divided. Lena saw all this as pure fiction, architectures conceived as sets for her own film. Between the personal and the historical, between the outside and the inside, the spaces where she and her friends lived, worked, and had fun were divided. The apartment in Kreuzberg and Görlitzer Park would soon no longer be the same. Photography was the tool for processing experiences in a unique city within a unique historical situation.

Julieta Pestarino

Ph.D. in History and Theory of the Arts from the University of Buenos Aires, is an anthropologist, art historian, and curator specialized in Latin American photography. She is Assistant Curator focusing on Latin American photography at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, USA.

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