Lines

In the 1860s, British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace drew a line on a map, starting from the Indian Ocean to the Philippine Sea, between the islands of Bali and Lombok, and between Borneo and the island of Celebes. The line was named in 1868 by English biologist and anthropologist Thomas Henry Huxley. The line follows an oceanic trench. Interestingly, even though the depression line lies deep on the ocean floor, the two sides of it on land are very different. On the east side of the line, nature resembles the species of plants and animals found in Asia, while on the west side, the fauna and flora are typical of the Australian continent. A. R. Wallace, in the mid-19th century, was developing a theory of evolution parallel to Charles Darwin. Since then, many other lines have been drawn on maps of the Indonesian region to more precisely depict the border between Eurasia and Australia. The more research is done, the harder it becomes to determine the layout of such a line, making it increasingly fictional.

In 2023, the case became even more complex and reached another level due to the discovery of a skeleton on the east side of the Wallace Line, on the island of Flores—a skeleton of a hominid known today as Homo floresiensis. The island of Flores is a unique microcosm, known for the size aberrations of the species that inhabited or inhabit the island, such as giant rats, miniature elephants, and colossal storks. The island is surrounded by an ocean so deep that no species could ever cross it via shallow waters. Thus, the natural border created an environment where species could evolve in unique ways. To simplify, big animals became smaller, and small ones grew larger.

The hominid species discovered on Flores (nicknamed the Hobbit) was tiny. The skeleton indicates that the hominid’s weight was 25 kg, and its skull size was no larger than that of an ape. However, it was intelligent enough to create hunting tools from bones and stone. The Wallace Line and Homo floresiensis are the main protagonists of a 2018 book by Frank Westerman, We, Hominids. The book asks questions about division lines and all kinds of borders—between lands, time eras, species, animals and humans, knowledge and superstition.

In 2024, I curated a solo exhibition by Marie-Andrée Pellerin at Salzamt in Linz, Austria. The show, titled Windbusting, was the result of Marie’s interest in researching the wind. The exhibition’s centerpiece was a video, blowrders, filmed during a residency in Morocco in the Sahara Desert in 2024. The residency took place at Café Tissardmine and was organized by the Ansible Institute, a transitory speculative fiction research laboratory project by Martina Raponi and [M] Dudeck. The framework of this residency blurred the borders between disciplines, the roles of artists, curators, musicians, researchers, and between reality and fiction. The nearby village of Tissardmine is located in proximity to the border between Morocco and Algeria, and it’s a militarized and conflicted area. This local conflict is a reflection and aftermath of a larger struggle. The dispute over the border intensified after Algeria supported the territorial claims of Western Sahara, which is in a conflict with Morocco. The Moroccan Western Sahara Wall, called the Berm, is a 2,700 km long fortified border running through the desert. The conflict not only divided nation-states, but also created a very difficult situation for some of the people inhabiting the desert. The Amazigh, or the Berbers, are traditionally nomadic people, so the rigid border makes their traditional way of living impossible. Moreover, it stops animals from moving freely in the region in search of food and water sources. At first glance, the conflict remains invisible, as the area of the desert is vast, and in front of the fortifications lies a buffer zone, making them hard to see.

My collaboration with Marie-Andrée Pellerin began in Tissardmine and continued through to the exhibition in Linz. The video blowrders depicts the powerful sandstorms that we encountered in the desert. It was filmed on location and was inspired by the looming conflict in the area. The main inspiration was the experience of such extreme weather conditions and the observed fact that the strong wind moves masses of sand between borders so effortlessly, as the rules of transit and politics don’t apply to the forces of nature. The storms could be so fierce and long-lasting that they can shift the dunes upon which the border lines have been set. Therefore, the premise of the movie raises a question: What if wind could move the borders? It is told from the perspective of a weather forecaster who seems to be in a position not only to foresee the weather but also to manipulate and control it. Thus, another border is being questioned here—between science and science fiction, between knowledge and conspiracy.

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While the debate over natural borders continues, the notion of human-made and cultural boundaries also plays a crucial role in shaping our understanding of the world. Let’s return from the historical trip to the 19th century and the journey to the Sahara Desert, and come back to Europe, where I live. Thinking about borders in 2025 brings a local perspective that, in Poland, is mixed with fear and shame. The war in Ukraine and the refugee crisis on the border between Poland and Belarus are two factors that shape the discourse.

In 2021, for the open call for a project to be exhibited at the Polish Pavilion at the International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, I submitted a proposal, together with artist Łukasz Skąpski, entitled Fortress Europe. The idea was to show artwork by Skąpski consisting of precise scale models of all the border walls that surround Europe. It coincided with political events and the construction of new, massive border walls and fences, on Poland’s eastern borders as well as in other parts of Europe. With the rise of nationalism and the right wing in Western Europe and the re-election of Donald Trump, the vision of constructing new border walls and barriers is becoming a reality. From the European perspective, the common vision is that the era of border fences is over—it ended with the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the opening of the peace lines in Northern Ireland, and belongs in museums. In fact, the construction of border walls and fences accelerated after the 2015 migration crisis, according to an EU Parliament report from 2025: “About 13%, or 1,535 km, of EU external land borders (12,033 km in total) are currently fenced off.” ^[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2022/733692/EPRS_BRI(2022)733692_EN.pdf

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At the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022, a project by Yevgeniy Fiks and Maria Veits called the Yiddishland Pavilion was realized. It was not an official part of the Biennale and lacked a dedicated physical pavilion. I had a chance to interview the curators of the project for Jewish Currents, a Jewish progressive left magazine based in the US that covers a range of political, cultural, and social topics. Fiks describes Yiddishland as “… an alternative map of Eastern and Central Europe—a way of naming the space where the Yiddish-speaking Jewish community lived during the last millennia. But as Yiddish speakers have become more dispersed, the concept has expanded beyond that geographic area. Now, there are clusters of Yiddishland in the United States—most obviously in New York City—but also in Mexico, Argentina, Israel and elsewhere”. ^[2] https://jewishcurrents.org/yiddishland-at-the-venice-biennale

The project was a transnational group exhibition and a series of performances, taking place in and appropriating some of the official national pavilions of countries included in the Yiddishland, as well as online. The Yiddishland Pavilion created a hybrid platform—both online and offline—that focused on analyzing cross-cultural and transnational issues. The creators of the project stated that the Pavilion aimed to address several key themes: “Yiddishland Pavilion analyzes the erosion of global political constellations, practices collective remembrance, condemns war and occupation, and documents consequences of migration and politics of exclusion that target “Otherness.” It highlights the necessity to stand in solidarity with those under attack and oppression while bringing into focus the themes of dehumanization and displacement. It unveils hidden ideological strategies of nation-building and colonization while presenting a complex yet hopeful vision of the construction of a new intersectional Jewish identity in the diaspora.”^[3]https://yiddishlandpavilion.art/ (accessed 28.01.2025) Just as the Yiddishland Pavilion explores the boundaries of identity and culture, similar questions emerge in contemporary Europe, particularly with the political climate influencing the art world.

As Europe grapples with its own divisions, other parts of the world, such as the Arctic, present their own geopolitical challenges, where borders are both visible and invisible. On January 6th, 2025, one of the last decisions of the Joe Biden administration, signed by the president, was a ban on offshore drilling in U.S. coastal waters of the Atlantic, eastern Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific coast off California, Oregon and Washington, and part of the Bering Sea. I looked at a map of the Bering Sea, and a small detail caught my attention. The line goes around a tiny island in the Bering Strait called Diomede. Only when you zoom in on the map can you see that there are actually two Diomede Islands, separated by 2 kilometres of water and ice. Big Diomede belongs to Russia, and Little Diomede to the U.S. It was part of the Alaska deal when the U.S. acquired this territory. The border between them was called the Ice Curtain during the Cold War, and similarly, like in the Sahara Desert, local people—who also traditionally had a nomadic culture—were unable to move freely between the islands, and families were divided. During times of tense U.S.-Russia relations, the Ice Curtain became solid again. Interestingly, the protection of the Arctic environment parallels the efforts of both Russia and the prospective Trump administration to increase their presence in the Arctic region. The Diomede Islands have one more fascinating feature. Besides the invisible Iron Curtain that separates them, there is another line splitting them—the so-called International Date Line, running roughly along the 180° line of longitude. This line is a boundary between one calendar day and the next. So, Little Diomede is the island of yesterday, and Big Diomede is the island of tomorrow. This real place reminds me of a fictional island from the 1994 book by Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before. Located in the Pacific Ocean, but also on the 180° line, the place is embedded in constant yesterday. The past is merely a calendar date; it is more an attitude than a latitude. The book brings us back to the 17th century, with true baroque richness, a time when science was closer to magic, astronomy was linked to astrology, politics were the domain of royal courts and emissaries, and scientists were still trying to figure out how to calculate geographical latitude. These invisible lines later became tools to measure the world—to control it, to bring order on the map, and chaos on land and water.

In 1967, Polish conceptual artist Barbara Kozłowska initiated an art project that she continued until her death in 2008. Line was an attempt to create an invisible line stretching from East to West, with its continuation on the Moon and beyond. Through a series of performances on beaches around the world, she marked this fictional line with small sand cones, serving as beacons or milestones. This project, spanning decades and countries, presents a compelling contrast between the idea of borders. Kozłowska’s utopian vision invites us to imagine a world where the line transcends division, becoming not a boundary, but a symbol of beauty and conceptual purity, connecting rather than dividing. It is where borders dissolve into art—a stark contrast to the divisive reality of today’s world.

[Featured Image: Marie-Andrée Pellerin, Windbusting, videostill]