Imposed Borders, Blurred Borders

I went out for a walk the other day to think before writing these lines. When I got cold, I went inside of a shopping center out of habit to continue walking. It was a normal afternoon, people were shopping, eating, going to the cinema. It was hard (and still is) to believe that there is a war going on in a neighboring country. Panen et circenses [Bread and circuses], as the Romans would say.

It was then that I thought about borders, the keyword I gave to the authors of these texts, and the way in which physical borders today are marked by fire and blood but at the same time are blurred in the arts. Using this as a starting point, I thought it would be a good idea to have four points of view that, from a curatorial and personal perspective (if they so wished), would give the readers of A*DESK experiences from four different regions in the world. Like cardinal points interpreted subjectively but not by chance, they give us their particular perspective from the north (Mexico), south (Chile), east (Poland) and west (Canary Islands). These four cardinal points do not come from the first world power nor from hegemonic points. It is a question of choice and, of course, a question of politics.

Fernanda Ramos in Mexico warns us of a colonization of expats who perpetrate “a historical pattern of external ideologies with little interest in integrating” and who take advantage of their position in a cheap country to seize what does not belong to them. We then move on to the Canary Islands with Adonay Bermúdez, who speaks to us of water borders, history, and emotions, from a line drawn by Bouchra Khalili to sensitive, subtle and subjective borders which echo in the history of the islands and their art. From Poland, Stanislaw Welbel creates a collage of impressions and borders at different levels, times and realities, from the Wallace Line, through the Sahara, to the utopian dream of borders erased by the wind. We finish our journey on the southern tip of the American continent, in Chile, where Daniela Berger gives us seven impressions that are like seven manifestos, with a continuous acceleration and crescendo of rhythms and tones, that are ways of seeing borders, of living them and of feeling them, in a circle that, going around the world, starts and returns from a multidisciplinary and cinematic perspective.

As I finish these writing these lines, reviewing my notes and gazing at the cloudy sky from my window, I look at the photographs that the artist Izabella Jagiello has sent to me for a project that I am developing together with Teresa Correa. The photograph shows a beach with a marked border, separating Poland from the Russian Federation (the Kaliningrad oblast) and which in turn is the border of the European Union and NATO, a territory that, in its silence, screams with thousands of stories. As I look at it and feel its closeness, a phrase comes to mind that has become a mantra, almost a logo, one which we should heed consciously, responsibly, consistently: “Protect people, not borders.”

Enjoy the read.

[Images and drawing: Izabella Jagiello: photographs of the border from Poland with the Russian Federation (the Kaliningrad Oblast) which in turn is the border of the European Union and NATO; view from Piaski, a coastal village in northwestern Poland; 2023. Part of the Malpais Project – Mal du pays by Teresa Correa and Izabella Jagiello 2021-in progress].