If there is something that the four contributions of this month have in common is they are rift-ass-borders. In one way or another, all the authors reflect and question aspects of the door as an object of mediation. They reveal the duality of the door and reclaim its multiplicity. They invite us to remember that no one ever enters or leaves through a door but through the millions of codes that keep it in place, why is it otherwise that we need signs to know whether they are open or closed? This month\u2019s contributions examine, exhibit and criticize the door as a tool to control ruptures and define binarisms such as open. Closed. Yes. No. Inside. Outside. Human. Inhuman. Legal. Illegal. Life. Death. Correct. Incorrect. Mind. Body. We. They.<\/p>\n
Luz and Stephan’s pieces think about the door beyond itself but within its context \u2014\u00a0 often in the context of the museum or gallery \u2014 and the people who pass through it. Luz’s article disassembles the duality of the door by playing with its codes and performativity, inviting us to go through the back door, the cellardoor, the one nobody wants to open, the forgotten one, the sealed-off or the neighbor\u2019s door who lent us their keys. Stephan\u2019s essay revolves around the fantasy of the absence of doors and how it translates into exhibition spaces, a false idea of \u200b\u200bfreedom, because what flows without rhyme or reason\u00a0 \u2014 without the pauses that doors create \u2014 is not set adrift but rather is blind to the limits of the other.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>From the book Knots (1972) by Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing<\/p><\/div>\n
By analysing the door as an architectural object that embodies the politics of breaks and limits, this issue also looked into the collective processes that impose and maintain doors. Or in other words, how these politics carry with them the codes of behavior and moral judgments that we perform out of habit. That penetrate and trap us. That reiterate toxic restrictions and assume what places and bodies can and cannot be crossed. Authors Marjolein and Tait present a critical view on these door policies from the perspective of its penetrability and impenetrability: who can pass through a door and who remains, what doors can we open when all are closed.<\/p>\n
Marjolein proposes the door as a space in-between and focuses on the analysis of city gates; both the old ones at walled cities and the current borders that keep out undocumented migrants, asylum seekers or people without a permanent residence. Marjolein reflects on the door as a space of exclusion when immigration policies make it impossible to enter a place and force people to live literally on the threshold, the doorsill. Marjolein speaks from her experience in her home countries Netherlands and Belgium and thinks together with the work of the artist David Bernstein and the poet Rodaan Al Galidi.<\/p>\n
Tait’s contribution applies the notion of impenetrability to the concepts of history and trauma. Tait guides us through the colonial history of the city of Quito to trace a journey through the signs and lives of indigenous people that coexist and keep permeating the present despite the fact that history wants to keep them in the past. At the same time, Tait reflects on the impossibility of impenetrability in relation to his own trauma and memories which continue to reappear in their life despite the fact that they were already buried. In a series of superpositions of palimpsests, Tait’s text invites us to think of the door as a present always entangled in the fabric of the past. The palimpsest door is like the one described by H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Cixous: an organic and temporary door in which past and death inevitably end up reappearing.<\/p>\n
This is our misfortune: in the case of apocalypse\u2014when we are invited to rise above ourselves, so as to see the worst, as though to see the best\u2014almost always we faint away. Mourning shows us the door, we are dislodged from our interior habitation, an absence moves into our place.[1]<\/sup><\/a>Cixous, H\u00e9l\u00e8ne, \u201cWhat Is It O\u2019Clock? Orthe Door (We Never Enter)\u201d, en McQuillan, Martin (ed.), Deconstruction<\/em>, Routledge, New York, 2000..<\/span><\/span>