FRONTERES DE COLORS

There are many towns in all the cultures that paint their houses in colours. In Ciutadella de Menorca they also do it and their colours decorate, identify and delimit houses and properties. They are coloured, but they are frontiers, boundaries that cannot be crossed without permission.
It was dawn on the 1st of January 2018 when with a new phone I left the house in Sant Cristòfol to walk through the deserted streets to test the camera. Walking through the centre of Ciutadella is to be surrounded by colours, and that’s what I noticed. Portraying inert walls painted by anonymous hands, I unknowingly started a journey that still lasts.
Kind to the eye, I couldn’t help thinking that those colours were first cousins of impassable walls and barbed wire fences in places where Borders are drawn in blood.
But let’s not dramatise. In Ciutadella, behind each colour there is a Notary who certifies that that house belongs to that gentleman or lady and, apparently, there is no blood, ­although you never know… inheritances can be very treacherous…
A free catalogue of the Colours of the Borders is what the telephone captured that cold January morning. Here is a selection of those colour combinations stolen from the anonymous painters who, from time to time, repaint their properties to embellish life with their brush.