
On 4 July 1982, polish refugees—an agricultural pilot, his wife, and his daughter—landed near Vienna in a helicopter. A thunderstorm and low-altitude flying while crossing over the CSSR made their adventure possible. Langenzersdorf, 1982 image by Seiichi Furuya

In 1980, Dlubač Milan, a twenty-two-year-old Czech, attempted to swim across the swollen Morava River, which he succeeded in doing at the cost of his life. Marchegg, 1981 image by Seiichi Furuya
NATIONAL BORDER 1981-1983
Austria borders on seven foreign countries:
the Federal Republic of Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Italy, Switzerland and Liechtenstein representing most diverse political systems: countries of the so-called Eastern Bloc, one non-aligned state, the NATO countries, a neutral state and a principality.
Artificially drawn political borders have always played an important role for mankind and probably will continue to do so as long as man exists. Such borders, I believe, will only lose their importance when common defense against an extraterrestrial enemy is called for.
The 1640-mile-long Austrian border is far less brutal than, for example, the Berlin border, where a concrete wall cruelly cuts a city in half. It is even beautiful, romantic, inconspicuous, but in this quiet landscape one feels the silent, sad facts more than in Berlin.
On my trips along the border I have tried to find places where there have been tragic incidences, and to find out personal stories to give myself a chance to think about the “border” phenomenon.
Seiichi Furuya, 1983
Check the the project online or see it in as a book recently published by Spector Books
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What kind of impact does it create to publish ‘border projects’ from the 80s in the 2010s?
Does the distance of time create also the distance of memories?