By
Kasper Heden
& Emil Agerskov

E45 is the longest North-South going European route. It stretches from Alta in Norway and connects Scandinavia with the rest of Europe. It wiggles through the landscape and runs over hills and valleys, tunnels and bridges, over mountains and under rivers, between mainland and islands before it ebbs out in the city of Gela in Sicily.

The International Network of European Roads was UNECE’s first initiative to rebuild and unite wartorn Europe after the Second World War. The goal was to improve transport, trade and cooperation between the nations and thereby secure peace in Europe. 

Today new factors are challenging European unity. Both the financial crisis and the refugee crisis have polarized Europe. And while green parties seek cooperation between the countries to stop climate change, nationalists are gaining power elsewhere with Brexit as the clearest example of this. Most recently our notion of European identity and what brings us together has been made relevant with the war in Ukraine.

In the following project we’ve photographed Route E45, as a visual exploration of what physically connects the Europeans in a time where unity is being tested. This is an ongoing project, and as such it's being presented in its unfinished form.

Route E45 wasn’t built as one single road, and it's not everywhere on the route that people call it by that name. E45 was born in the name of bureaucracy. When the United Nations Economic Commision for Europe was created in 1947, one of their first initiatives was to improve transport in Europe and create a European network of roads. It was enacted in Declaration 1264, also known as the Declaration on the Construction of Main International Traffic Arteries, signed in 1950 in Geneva. 

With only a few exceptions the network of E-roads is named in order to make even numbers run East to West and odd numbers North to South. E45 is the longest route going North to South and along the way it carries 24 different names, often with E45 as a secondary name.

Raindrops fall from the gray sky and land on the border between Denmark and Germany. In the background the highways monotone rush ebbs out, while trucks and cars slows down on the road towards the Danish border. Since the Schengen Agreement the Danish border has been a part of the invisible borders in Europe, and the old toll building was torn down years ago. But lately the border has been a bit more visible than it used to. In 2015 a large group of refugees walked along E45 and crossed the danish border, and as a result of the crisis a temporary border control has been created here. The temporary permission of the border control is set to run out in may 2022, but will probably be extended once again, as it has been the last six years. 

Camilla Dam is a newly educated police officer and works at the border. After the refugee situation in 2015 the police have continually been visible at the border between Denmark and Germany.

Karlskirche was created in 1654 and in 1692 monks moved into the monastery, which was built next to the church. Today the old monastery is used by Austrian students who attend the catholic school PORG Volders. The school uses the church in connection with Sunday prayers, holidays and celebrations. Today the religion teacher Klaus Heidegger has taken his class in the church to have lessons here. “You’re not only in the church to see something, you’re also here to do something” He says while he hands out sacramental bread.
Just outside the church, only a few meters away, the E45 runs. Vibrations from the highway hit the church and have started to create cracks in the old building.

The Inn River marks the border between Austria and Germany, when driving down E45. As soon as you’ve crossed the border into Austria, the horizon starts disappearing as you pass between the mountains. The first mountains are the Wilder Kaiser massive and according to locals, these are the first “real mountains” accessible to their German neighbors. That makes the mountain range a popular destination for tourists looking to hike or ski. At times locals say that the parking area at the foot of Wilder Kaiser consists of up to 90% German cars. 

When moving up the Kaiser mountains, you’re quickly enveloped in the quiet of the Alps. That’s until you’re at the top looking down over the river. Even though you’ve moved many kilometers away, it still dominates the soundscape, when the mountains are no longer there to shield you from the sound.

It’s a warm and sunny winter day in the Austrian Alps. 16 degrees at the end of November. The snow, which has been moved to the edges of the gasoline stations parking lot, reminds you that it is still winter. A white truck with fluffy dice in the window parks outside the gasoline station. Georgiana jumps out of the truck, she’s about to swap places with her co-trucker Liviu. Her four and a half hour drive is over, and now he must take his turn.
Georgiana and Liviu were highschool sweethearts and have been together ever since. After they finished their education they started driving goods around Europe together. A lot of truckers are bound to be away from their loved ones for long periods of time, and Georgiana and Liviu feel sorry for these truckers.

At the highway exit 76 Geiselwind is one of Germany's 42 highway churches located. And just across the church lays Eroticmarkt, an erotic shop where your imagination is the boundry. Apart from the actual shop where you can find sextoys and lingeri, Erotikmarkt also has a huge theater room where you can watch porn and have sex with mindliked people. The newest thing in Erotikmarkt is a room only for virtual reality, where you can put on the glasses and get the experience of being a character in one of the many porn movies.
People come from far away to visit Erotikmarkt, one of the people who worked in the shop guesses that people who go here don’t want their neighbors to know about it, and therefor they don’t mind the long journey.

The truck drivers are being monitored by equipment in their trucks. They need to keep a protocol of their time spent resting which is then held up against movement of their trucks. If truck drivers aren't carrying farm animals or other living freight most truckers have to keep away from the road on the weekends. 

Instead they have to find ways of killing time on the rest areas where they end up for the weekend. Vitaly Korabelskyi has been a trucker for 15 years, and tries his best to keep fit. Often he plays soccer, if other truckers want to play with him. If not, he just juggles a bit for himself to kill time.
In the truck behind him his Ukrainian colleague Aleksander is parked. Although they don’t know each other, they have decided to walk to get groceries together and cook food. Hopefully keeping company like this will help kill time on a weekend spent in a German rest area. 

Behind the massive hedges everything disappears apart from the nearest mountaintops and the sound of the highway right on the other side. But on this side of the hedge, the dogs don’t have eyes for much other than eachother and everything else in smelling distance anyways. They’re racing around the lawns of Dog’s Hotel just outside Bolzano, Italy. For 18 years Dog’s Hotel has attended to the needs of dogs, whose owners needed a canine-free vacation. Both tourists landing in Verona and locals make use of it. In the picture we see local Bolzano resident Ivi on the left, staying for a total of three nights at the hotel. On the right is Hugo from Canada, who’ll be staying for about a week.

One of the most densely populated parts of E45 runs through the center of Comiso in Sicily. Here Nunzio Mautese puts up his fruit stand every day to sell fruit and vegetables. Everytime someone comes by he waves at them and smiles - it almost seems like he knows everyone in the city. Just half a year ago he worked as a mason, but a knee surgery has made that kind of work impossible for him. 

Now he sells food to get food on his table, and although he misses his old life, he still enjoys the connection he has to the rest of the city in his new job.

Everything has to end. That goes for cars too. The driveway to Fratelli Ciotti has been the last stretch of asphalt for many cars through the 40 years that Antonio Ciotti has run his chop shop. Here the cars will be stacked, taken apart and end their lives in neatly sorted piles of different metals. What can be salvaged from the wrecks will live on in other cars. This is the life cycle of car parts until there’s nothing left but the pile of assorted metals. And once again Antonio will be there.

Most of Italy’s highways are owned by private companies. They’re financed through the toll booths, that make it impossible to go on or off the highway without payment. The toll booths are called casellos. They join the on- and off ramps in a bouquet, so unlike most other places, E45 is only accessible from one side of the road in Italy. 

The last casello is at the end of the highway, when it fades out in southernmost Sicily. The casello is shining into the darkness, waiting for the planned continuation of the highway to be completed, so it can start working.

At the end of E45, a small Sicilian man passes time. Francesco Corrao has enough of it as it is since he retired from his chemistry job at Gela’s Technical School. Now he spends his time in his father’s old forge fiddling with the old blacksmith tools lying around. The building was his father’s and housed the forge on the 1st floor, Francesco and his family on the 2nd floor, Francesco’s uncle on the 3rd floor. 

Francescos laments the state of the roads in the last 100 kilometers of E45, saying there seems to be little political incentive to repair the roads without toll booths, because they don’t bring in any money. The auto mechanic next door fixes someone’s tyres in the middle of the road while traffic slowly and honkingly moves around the operation. Francesco watches from the side of the road. He slowly moves out of the sun and back into the cool forge to once again pass time.

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