Dead End

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Author: Nicola Moscelli
Publisher: Penisola Edizioni in collaboration with Antiga Edizioni
Editor: Steve Bisson
Graphic design and cartography: Roberto Vito D'Amico
Texts: Nicola Moscelli (essays), Maceo Montoya (foreword: "How to Transcend the Distance"), Miriam Ticktin (interview), and Steve Bisson (afterword: "Who Draws the Boundaries?")

Published in May 2024
1st edition, 500 copies
ISBN 978-88-84354-53-2

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360 pages
20 cm x 29.7 cm
Offset printing
Soft book cover with flaps
Swiss brochure binding with exposed spine
English language

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dead end: \ ‘ded-,end \ noun
1: an end of a road or passage from which no exit is possible
2: a situation that has no hope of making progress

“Dead End” is a visual investigation that intersects the past and present of the border between the United States and Mexico developed over the course of the three pandemic years.

The leitmotif of the dead end—both physical and metaphorical—transcends the geographical boundary and threads through the entire narrative. It invites the reader to delve into the complex, layered fabric of events and issues that have shaped the borderlands since their inception.

Contemporary hyper-surveillance imagery captured from Street View on both sides of the border reveals unfiltered scenes of stark beauty, harsh realities, and many roads ending abruptly. What they have in common is the aftertaste of an interrupted story, a suspended magic, a meaning lost in nothingness. Old prints and vintage postcards evoke the historical layers of the region.

The visual repertoire is enriched with quotes from ordinary people and historical figures, excerpts from government documents, interviews, social media, fragments of poems and song lyrics. These pieces of evidence of the historical, cultural, and poetic dimensions of the borderlands are thus unearthed from nowness oblivion, forging an augmented reality that encourages collective reflection.

This investigation proposes a way to reinterpret the border as an interpretive, conceptual, and optical device: a “scopic” archaeology that uses images as fossils of social memory.

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Book photos by Luca Quagliato