An evocative collaboration between the British writer Chris Burkham and the Spanish photographer Ignacio Evangelista, Europa? explores the modern-day experiences of ordinary Europeans who move across shadowy borders. The photographs, from Evangelista’s series After Schengen, depict the abandoned and derelict checkpoints of various countries. These range from imposing buildings to small prefabricated edifices and rudimentary obstructions embedded in the ground. Signatories to the 1985 agreement agreed to abolish internal border checks and embrace free movement for people and goods. Gradually, crossing points have been repurposed, have fallen apart or are disappearing altogether. However, as Evangelista observes, they remain “freighted with historical economic and political resonance”.
The short stories, by Burkham, are peopled by protagonists who remain on the margins or are keen to exploit the unchecked borders for their own ends. Charlie Don’t Surf is about a Londoner who attempts to pay off a drug debt by transporting a Vietnamese family from Spain to England concealed in a motorhome. In The AK-47 of Pick-Up Trucks, two Serbian smugglers wait for their next job in a forest on the border of the Czech Republic and Poland. One is “like Europe itself: he was without boundaries; he recognised no borders. He was on what sailors would have called a permanent shore leave.”
