Gabriele Basilico, FREE ZONE 2006, 2018

In 1993, the great Israeli director Amos Gitai visited Gabriele Basilico’s Beirut exhibition in Paris. He was struck by it and involved him in a work on his father, an architect in Israel in the 1930s. A decade later, Gitai contacted Basilico again to work on Free Zone, the free trade area between Jordan and Israel. In Basilico’s eyes, Israel is “a piece of unstable Europe navigating in a very different territory”. But the real destination is the Free Zone, photographed from above and in the suburbs. It is an area that thrives on commerce, especially cars. Basilico writes: “All around is desert. Inside, a city of steel and expanding sheet metal”. Perhaps Blade Runner, certainly a node in the web of globalisation. Most of the photos are unpublished and tell the story of Basilico as a reporter and traveller.