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It has been sixty years since construction began on the Berlin Wall, but more importantly, it has been thirty years since Berlin once again became just Berlin, without East or West, officially becoming the capital of a reunified Germany.

Despite the fall of one of the many walls that, throughout history, man has built to divide himself from other men, some parts of the physical wall, as well as the ideological one, are still in place, or perhaps, having much deeper foundations, have now become part of our common perception.

The title of the project, Good Bye Berlin, deliberately inspired by the title of Wolfgang Becker’s wonderful film Good Bye Lenin, poses an interesting analysis of those days of transition in 1989: days that altered the political fortunes of the whole of Europe and probably the world. In Good Bye Berlin, just like in Becker’s film, images and icons of West and East Germany merge, showing a Berlin that no longer exists (or perhaps never did).

To tell my own story of Berlin, I wanted to use a traditional medium, the Polaroid, reinterpreting and updating its modus operandi, because never more than now, when everything has to be shared immediately on social media, has instant photography come first and gone even further, giving a concrete and lasting dimension to the ‘everything all at once’ approach of our time, in which things are so often drowned out and lost in the space of a few comments below a post. Polaroids, not being editable in the post-production stage, paradoxically certify a Berlin that perhaps no one will ever find.

Andrea Tonellotto