Niemandsland
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In Niemandsland [No Man’s Land], Alán Carrasco studies three natural spaces enclosed within some of the harshest borders erected in the 20th century. These are the Korean Demilitarized Zone, the German Grünes Band, and the enclaves of guerrilla influence in Colombia.

The DMZ, or Demilitarized Zone of Korea, is a security strip that protects the territorial boundary agreed upon in the 1953 truce between the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the Republic of Korea. It is 4 kilometers wide and 238 kilometers long. The year this piece was produced also marks the 70th anniversary of the establishment of this hard, non-traversable border, which has allowed the proliferation of the region’s ecosystems, which have not been affected by human presence for seven decades.

The Grünes Band Deutschland, on the other hand, refers to the approximately 1,400-kilometer-long and about 200-meter-wide portion of non-traversable borderland that separated the two German entities until 1990. In the early 1980s, biologists discovered that this area was a refuge for several animal and plant species that had disappeared from most of Central Europe due to anthropogenic action.

For their part, the enclaves of guerrilla influence are the areas of Colombia over which there was very limited governmental access and which in the years of greatest guerrilla presence, and only on the part of the FARC, accounted for more than 20% of the municipal lands in the entire Republic. Following the 2017 Peace Accords, there have been several scientific expeditions that have discovered up to 89 new botanical and zoological species that have been named, precisely, “Species of Peace”.

The artist proposes the symbolic preservation of these three topographical landscapes of conflict -all of them established and entrenched between the 1950s and 1960s- in Wardian cases. On this occasion, the boxes do not carry living plants, but the topographies of the three contexts themselves, framed with solid woods of mahogany, oak, and pine respectively, three kinds of wood from the same geographies they represent.

Carrasco’s project delves into a paradox that allows us to pose a deep reflection: the hard borders generated by conflicts -despite their harshness and arbitrariness against humans-, have served for the unintentional preservation of three unique natural spaces, in three different latitudes. The militarized borders have become particular Wardian cases on a monumental scale, capable of preserving landscapes and ecosystems that, outside of them, human beings destroy without compassion.