Seven Brief, Visceral Reflections on the Idea of Borders

1.- In 2012, the American curators Elizabeth Sussman and Joe Sanders invited the unclassifiable director Werner Herzog to be part of the prestigious Whitney Biennial, but he declined.

“But why?” they asked, confused, “don’t you go to museums and exhibitions?” “No,” he said. “I don’t go to museums or exhibitions, I’m not part of the art world.” “But aren’t you an artist?” “No,” he said. “I’m a soldier.” Herzog always wanted to be a “good soldier of cinema.”

The creator of Fitzcarraldo and The Bear Man believed that Dutch artist Hercules Segers (1590-1638: the same era as Rembrandt) was the father of modernity. Using the body of work of this Golden Age painter, Herzog made not a film nor a moving painting, but rather an installation that became an iconic part of the biennial. Herzog believes his paintings and films do not speak but rather dance with each other, displacing or rather demolishing the classification categories of artistic disciplines. They are not transcendental. Or rather, everything in and for him was cinema.

2.- Thinking about the idea of ​​borders quickly leads me to connect it with the idea of ​​obscenity. Why obscenity, one might think, what does that have to do with borders? The fact is that the existence of the border itself is always dependent on an imposition, whether physical, socio-political, or geographic, as is the case here. There is no such thing as an unimposed border. Borders do not come from any natural origin, they are not, neither in this continent nor in any other, based on agreements between people in relation to their proper context. They are categories of separation, exclusion and imposition, thart have been arbitrarily imposed for the benefit of some, generally the rich-white-heterosexual-men-winners-of-battles, over others.

3.- And here my thinking of the border imposes itself, an image engraved in me forever, from July 2024, when I stood indignant, bewildered, desolate in front of the 650 km wall that separates the occupied land of Palestine. That is what Israel is today, a voracious, ideological, psychopathological, techno-homeland of border imposition, automated and supported by the giant economy of America (which is not United at all). It hurts to have to write this text under a false ceasefire that should be relieving the overwhelmed area of Gaza, surrounded today by the harshest border in the world. And yet, through non-co-opted media, we learn that since the supposed ceasefire has gone into effect there have already been more than 100 deaths and that the bombings have not stopped.

4.-The idea of ​​a border that is a little closer makes me think of the injustice in Cúcuta. In 2018, the former president of Chile, Sebastian Piñera, visited the iconic bridge that connects Venezuela and Colombia, and invited political refugees from the “authoritarian regime of Maduro” to seek opportunity in our fertile land. Six years later, Chile is immersed in the largest migration crisis in its recent history, and the mere idea of ​​a border carries with it the flood of conflicts over the painful handling of this issue that infuriates politicians and scholars of all ideological hues.

In that very place on the Colombian border, the Mexican artist Teresa Margolles found the phrase “capital fucks you” written on a wall. Margolles uses this phrase to create a series of works about the normalized violence of inequality and neoliberalism in Chile, the promised land south of every border, whose motto is Milton Friedman’s “freedom to choose,” which is nothing more than a lie as big as a cathedral or the mountain range that unites a large part of the South American continent like a bony spinal column.

Freedom, on the south side of the border, is the freedom to choose how capital fucks you. As strong as that, as real as that. That phrase, which seems like a kind of warning or premonition from a migrant who passed through there, serves Margolles to help produce a series of works that go beyond categories and are at the same time actions, canvases, living poems, installations, photographs and posters. Days after inaugurating her exhibition, curated by Andrea Pacheco Gonzalez, Chile burns with the thirst for justice and social equality, and the border has become internal. The border, which was always a border, is Plaza Italia turned into Plaza Dignidad, which puts the periphery in the center, something the elite does not like because it is ugly. That’s not the right way, they would say.

5.- The Indian critical theorist Homi Bhabha develops in his writing the concept of a “third space,” which resonates in its possibility of understanding the interstitial spaces where new forms of cultural identity are arranged and articulated, potentially configuring itself as a useful way to look at the crossings, displacements and diasporas that do not fit in, or rather, directly rejecting the traditional narratives of the already, oft-problematized idea of ​​nationality.

6.- On several occasions this concept of Bhabha has been related to the idea raised in Borderlands, The New Mestiza, by the feminist Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa, in terms of understanding the idea and the site of border no longer as a rigid dividing line that annuls, but as a fertile space of cultural production in itself. It is on this line that border anthropology becomes a useful field to study the cultural phenomena that occur precisely in border areas. On a symbolic level (and not so very much), the border is a place of passage and relations between cultures, and therefore a social, porous territory. No longer a rigid barrier, it is an opportunity.

7.- Curiously, this text ends a bit like it begins. Reflecting on the production of another prolific, boundless creator, Raúl Ruiz, and his cinema-beyond-cinema that always “contrasts the automatism of narration.” (Espósito, in Valenzuela, 2011). ^[1] Cáceres, Y. (2023). Raúl Ruiz. Potencias de lo múltiple (Powers of the Multiple), laFuga, 27. [Accessed: 2025-01-21] Available at: http://2016.lafuga.cl/raul-ruiz-potencias-de-lo-multiple/1133

I quote here part of a text that I had the opportunity to write together with the Chilean academic and researcher Francisca García on this subject:

“Filmmaker, archivist, ghost. Throughout his life, Ruiz was a thinker of images and technologies of vision who articulated a theoretical and situated thought through his work, which consisted of more than one hundred films, as well as theoretical texts, poetry, workshops with students, theater and opera productions, and artistic installations. He was aware, from a very early age, how the film industry works by homogenizing the ways of seeing and filming, relegating the spectator to a passive position as a consumer. His artistic, theoretical and literary references are heterogeneous and come from different eras, from popular culture and academia, from East and West. He thus proposed to reformulate the narrative schemes of the Hollywood movie industry and repair the historical separation of theory and fiction. Most of his films are presented as “adaptations” of theater, literature, and painting, from Palomita Blanca to Treasure Island, including openly hybrid exercises such as La lechuza ciega or Memoria de existencias, and by barely nominal adaptations such as Tres tristes tigres, La colonia penal and even Diálogo de exiliados.

There is also an installation entitled La expulsión de los moros (The Expulsion of the Moors), which consists of a kind of open and speculative reconstruction of a painting by Velázquez. In this way (as well as our curatorial proposal recently exhibited in Raúl Ruiz, Arabesque Ghosts at the Matta Cultural Center in the Chilean Embassy in Buenos Aires), Ruiz knew and explored during his lifetime the power of artistic archives as a starting point for his creative thinking and images, and his legacy is also a space of memory and an expanded Art History in which heterogeneous references, historical times, languages, artistic disciplines and traditions, such as Spanish Baroque, Venetian theater, Chinese painting or popular poetry from the Central Valley of Chile,”^[2]García, F., & Berger Prado, D. (2024). (Audio)visual Curatorships: Archives and Affects in the Exhibition Raúl Ruiz: Arabesque Ghosts. Estudios Curatoriales, (19). Retrieved from … Continue reading coexist.

Always defying categories, rigorously dealing with nonsense and managing its overflow, Ruiz appears as a creator in exile (or perhaps carrying a permanent border within himself), closes this brief reflection, with the understanding that in the field of cultural production today perhaps every idea of ​​an imposed border can be understood as a rich expansion of every possible condition.

[Featured Image: Installation Cementerio Parlante. Exposicion Raul Ruiz. Fantasmas arabescos. Curators Francisca Garcia and Daniela Berger. Centro Cultural Matta Buenos Aires. July 2024]