In 1993, the great Israeli director Amos Gitai visited Gabriele Basilico's Beirut exhibition in Paris. He was captivated and involved him in a project about his father, an architect in Israel in the 1930s. A decade later, Gitai contacted Basilico again for a project on the Free Zone, the free trade area between Jordan and Israel. In Basilico's eyes, Israel was "a piece of unstable Europe navigating a very different territory." But the true destination was the Free Zone, photographed from above and on its outskirts. It was an area that thrived on trade, especially automobiles. Basilico wrote: "All around, the desert. Inside, an expanding city of steel and sheet metal." Perhaps Blade Runner, certainly a node in the web of globalization. Most of the photographs are previously unpublished and tell the story of Basilico as a reporter and traveler.