The San Francisco Art Institute

BORDER POLITICS, BORDER POETICS

A thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

In

HISTORY AND THEORY OF CONTEMPORARY ART

by

Ian Alan Paul

May, 2011

The Thesis of Ian Alan Paul

is approved:

__________________________________________

Dale Carrico, Ph.D. Thesis Chair

__________________________________________

Krista Lynes, Ph.D.

__________________________________________

Andrej Grubacic, Ph.D.

____________________________________________

Claire Daigle, Ph.D.

Director of MA Programs

Border Politics, Border Poetics by Ian Alan Paul

is licensed under a

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

2011

visit http://www.bordermachines.net for the internet iteration of this project

List of Figures

1. Ricardo Dominguez displays the transborder immigrant tool. JPG,

http://www.wokitoki.org/wk/440/herramienta-transfronteriza-para-inmigrantes (accessed April 10th, 2011), ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………...… pg 18

2. Demonstration illustrations of the transborder immigrant tool. JPG, http://dpi.studioxx.org/demo/?q=fr/no/12/locative-media-war-by-sophie-le-phat-ho (accessed April 10th, 2011), ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………....pg 23 3. Captured Still from “Contained Mobility” (2004). JPG, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyUBVbNfrcI (accessed April 10th, 2011), ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………...… pg 28 4. Map of the E.U. Highlighting Migrant Deaths. JPG, http://www.abolishforeignness.org/blog/death-at-the-border (accessed April 10th, 2011), ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………...… pg 31 5. Photograph of Contained Mobility (2004) installation. JPG, http://www.code-flow.net/fake/exhibition/biemann-contained-mobility-en.html (accessed April 10th, 2011), ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………...… pg 46 6. Still from “Green Line” (2007). JPG, http://charlotterowley2010.wordpress.com/2010/08/ (accessed April 10th, 2011), ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………...… pg 61 7. Map showing the Green Line and Israeli Settlements. JPG, http://blog.camera.org/archives/2005/04/modiin_not_in_i.html (accessed April 10th, 2011), ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………...… pg 63 8. Still of “Green Line” gallery installation, David Zwirner Gallery, 2007. JPG, http://www.davidzwirner.com/exhibitions/127/ (accessed April 10th, 2011), ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………...… pg 71

Abstract Ian Alan Paul

Border Politics, Border Poetics

Despite the waning sovereignty of nation-states at the beginning of the 21st

century, the borders that define and enclose them are increasingly militarized and have

become the objects of the global North’s moral imaginaries. Contemporary border-

security projects’ effectiveness rests in their affective qualities, and the subjectivities

that they enable. Just as political systems in crisis have become animated by border

discourses, so too does the border become an important site of cultural production.

Francis Alÿs, Ursula Biemann, and Ricardo Dominguez all work to both intervene and

aesthetically engage with political borders. Looking to these three contemporary artists

whom are directly engaging with border systems in their work, my project both

produces a theoretical ground upon which we can critically read borders while also

allowing readings of the artists’ work to encounter that ground. Beyond the content of

the thesis, the project takes on a formal interdisciplinarity and is presented as a

transmedia, where textual, performative and digital iterations all contribute to the

project’s whole.

To view the work, visit: http://www.bordermachines.net

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank first and foremost both my parents, Bil and Loraine,

and my partner Ashley for all of the support and encouragement they have offered me throughout all of my studies and work. Second, I would like to thank all members of my thesis committee at SFAI, Dale Carrico,

Krista Lynes, and Andrej Grubacic, for challenging me on my assumptions and guiding me in the right trajectories. Last, I would like to acknowledge all of those who choose to make it their struggle to resist and dismantle

repressive borders, you’ve inspired me and have made my own work possible.

1

Between here and there you’ll find a line drawn in the ground.

2

A Frame

“At the turn of the millennium, it was easy to recognize the imperializing nature

of transnational capitalism: it crosses all borders, it colonizes and subjectifies all

citizens on different terms than ever before. It is imperative to recognize the

profound transformations in first world cultures that Fredric Jameson points to in

his diagnosis of postmodernism as neocolonial and imperialist in function. It is

also imperative not to lose sight of the methods of the oppressed that were

developed under previous modes of colonization, conquest, enslavement, and

domination, for these are the guides necessary for establishing effective forms of

resistance under contemporary global conditions: they are key to the imagination

of ‘postcoloniality’ in its most utopian sense.” (Chela Sandoval, Methodology of

the Oppressed, pg. 9)

The dominant capitalist narratives at the end of the 1990’s espoused and

celebrated a borderless world expressed in the frictionless and smooth flows of capital

and people. Social struggle would come to a halt as liberal democracy and Western

values would permeate the surface of the entire globe. According to this metanarrative,

the beginning of the 21st century was supposed to mark our arrival at the end of

history.1

1 See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York, NY, Harper Perennial,

February 1, 1993)

3

And yet everywhere we look, we find borders; lines are ceaselessly drawn to

enclose, capture, parse, and divide. While the exchange and movement of capital

has certainly accelerated over the past couple of decades, people nonetheless find

themselves subject to the controls, limits and powers of the states that articulate

and regulate them.2 These borders are more heavily militarized and securitized now

than at any other moment in history, and continue to perpetuate the forces of

colonial pasts. While it is perhaps clear now that the process of contemporary

capitalist globalization hasn’t rid the world of borders but rather have continued to

fuel their operation, disruptive figures continue to appear in these border territories

and drive an alter-globalization3. This other globalization works to sabotage and

undermine borders and generate encounters that aim to not only dismantle these

enclosures, but also poetically point to an always present potentiality of other

futures.

In our experience of perceiving a divided world and understanding it as such, we

affirm the already existing order of things and precariously risk remaining blind to these

radically other futures. This project began as an attempt to study “up”, or to describe

and outline the systems of power that maintain borders. This vertical looking is still

present in the project, although it is no longer the focus. While I found it important to

2 Saskia Sassen, “Globalization and its Discontents: The De Facto Transnationalization of Immigration Policy”, pg. 12 3 William Patterson, “Altering world order: The alter-globalization movement and the World Trade Organization”

4

include tracings of the historical forces and structures which have produced our

bordered world, I soon found it equally if not more important to look horizontally, to

look to some artists and thinkers whom are working against borders and providing

experiences composed not of recognitions, but rather of what I will describe as

encounters. As Simon O’Sullivan describes:

“An object of recognition is then precisely a representation of something always

already in place. With such a non-encounter our habitual way of being and acting

in the world is reaffirmed and reinforced, and as a consequence no thought takes

place. Indeed, we might say that representation precisely stymies thought. With

a genuine encounter however the contrary is the case. Our typical ways of being

in the world are challenged, our systems of knowledge disrupted. We are forced

to thought. The encounter then operates as a rupture in our habitual modes of

being and thus in our habitual subjectivities. It produces a cut, a crack. However

this is not the end of the story, for the rupturing encounter also contains a

moment of affirmation, the affirmation of a new world, in fact a way of seeing

and thinking this world differently. This is the creative moment of the encounter

that obliges us to think otherwise. Life, when it truly is lived, is a history of these

encounters, which will always necessarily occur beyond representation.” (Simon

O’Sullivan, Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari, pg. 1)

5

The critical gesture that constitutes the trajectory of this project is the assertion

that the borders that enclose and deny, separate and bound together, are products of a

phenomenology of recognition. In an experience of encounter, our understanding of the

world is thoroughly ruptured. The codes and assumptions that we would normally

deploy to make sense of and order the things and people around us become inoperable,

and we are forced to look elsewhere in our desire to recognize again. In this experience,

we lose grasp of the literal and instead traverse the poetic.

The three artists whom I’ve included in this project, Francis Alÿs, Ursula

Biemann, and Ricardo Dominguez, all have artistic practices that work to sabotage our

experience of recognition of borders. While the specificity of each of the contexts these

artists are working in (Israel-Palestine, the European Union, and the U.S.-Mexico border,

respectively) warrants the focus of an entire thesis, I’ve found it more valuable instead

to bring these three artists together in an effort to develop a broader conceptual

understanding of contemporary borders, and the power(s) that they generate. Each

artists’ work defamiliarizes our understandings of border systems and make-strange the

operations of such structures. It is in this rupture that the possibility of a radical

affirmation germinates, and new routes to liberated futures are glimpsed.

As will be explored throughout the project, I will be looking to the potential

methodology of teleopoiesis in not only resisting the current border systems, but also in

6

working to imagine and perhaps make world(s) without them. In her text “Harlem”, the

critical theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak first introduces the term in this way:

“Therefore Alice and I attempted teleopoiesis, a reaching toward the distant

other by the patient power of the imagination, a curious kind of identity politics,

where one crosses identity as a result of migration or exile … We beg the

question of collectivity, on behalf of our discontinuous pasts, her mother in

Damascus, I in India, as New Yorkers. If the Ghost Dance accesses something like

a ‘past’ and grafts it to the ‘perhaps’ of the future anterior, teleopoiesis wishes to

touch a past that is historically not ‘one’s own’ …We must ask, again and again,

how many are we? Who are they? …These are the questions of collectivity, asked

as culture runs on. We work in the hope of a resonance with unknown

philosophers of the future, friends in advance.” (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,

“Harlem”, pg. 117-118)

By framing one’s current efforts as in concert with the work of a future project is to

labor in the effort of generating a new now. The teleopoiesis I mean to make use of in

this project manifests as a kind of prefigurative politics that both realizes the

importance of a politics of the now while also requiring a turn to the poetics of a

possible future. The poetics of these projects are manifest as an active process of

imaginative making. Spivak describes the work of teleopoiesis as being situated within a

“future anterior”, as if the work that is being done in the present is acting in relation to

7

the possible futurities that they exist in relation to, and creates a history within which

new poetic work can take place. By reading the poetic in relation to the political, we can

experience and encounter the world in a way that potentially could rupture its order in

the wakes of new ones.

This project is also written in an imagined solidarity with you, the reader.

Whether you consider yourself as a part of a movement for a horizontal world or not, I

hope that your encounter with the text either reminds you of, or points you to consider

the possibility of one. Just as the artists’ works included in this project imagine

subjectivities and collectivities in order to make use of a teleopoeisis, I too am writing

with our potential solidarity in mind. As Spivak reminds us: “We must ask, again and

again, how many are we? Who are they?” It is in my hoped-for collectivity with you that

perhaps the poetic can take root and other futurities can be prefigured.

It is my aim to present all of this in a way that encourages readers to have their

own encounter with my project, to not only challenge borders but also challenge the

traditional methods of reading a text. In my attempt to do this, I’ve chosen a form that

both encourages the reader to navigate the text in a variety of different ways and denies

a single linear route of reading. Throughout the work you’ll find links that will take you

to different sections of the project and will offer different methods of moving through

the parts. I hope that each reader is able to come back to the project several times in

8

search of different paths and routes through the text. I hope for a text which generates

an encounter with the reader and dismantles the familiar avenues of recognition.

9

From Lines to Territories

Ricardo Dominguez, Bang.Labs and the Transborder Immigrant Tool

The English word border is derived from the Latin ambitus, or edge. Interestingly,

ambitus is also understood as going around or as circuit, disrupting the first definition

thoroughly. This way of thinking about borders, as a limit that is necessarily overcome,

reveals an embedded subversive logic of borders. We should resist conceptualizing a

border as an infinitely thin dividing edge between two territories. Rather, it would be

more generative to understand a border in its capacity to expand from a line into a

territory - a zone of affect and entanglement. A border certainly divides and parses, but

it also equally generates the avenues and tunnels through which its logic is inverted.

In the vertiginous landscape that engulfs the eastern half of the U.S.-Mexico

border, a migrant traverses the desert with a cell-phone in hand. A strained and

dehydrated voice (a dehydration that kills hundreds of border crossers each year) calls

out ‘agua’, and a phone responds with a vibration.4 On its screen, an arrow appears,

much like an arrow on a compass. It directs not according to magnetic field lines, but

rather to the nearest water cache left in the desert by the Border Angels activist group5.

4 Richard Marosi, “Border Crossing Deaths Set a 12-Month Record”, Los Angeles Times, October 1, 2005. 5 Richard Marosi, “UC San Diego Professor Who Studies Disobedience Gains Followers — and Investigators”, Los Angeles Times, May 7, 2010.

10

The migrant continues to walk north in search of the water that will help them complete

their travels safely.

Ricardo Dominguez, an artist and professor at the University of California San

Diego (UCSD), made headlines across the United States (U.S.) when he first publicized

the Transborder Immigrant Tool. A project of Bang.Labs, an artist collective based out of

and funded by UCSD, the Transborder Immigrant Tool is an art project manifest as a

piece of software. The program, designed by Bang.Labs, is intended to be loaded onto

widely available and inexpensive cell phones that then can assist border crossing

attempts as well as fundamentally alter the border crossing experience from one of lost

wandering to poetic direction. The reprogrammed cellphones are designed to, among

other things, point the user to nearby stashes of water, show them maps of the border

territory and generate routes through it, and even deliver excerpts of inspirational

poetry to urge the migrant along in their journey.

The migrant remains an imaginary figure in this work; we never witness an actual

crossing or meet any of the migrants whom have undergone it with the Transborder

Immigrant Tool. This is both for practical reasons, that the illegal crossing wouldn’t be

allowed if it were public, but also for poetic reasons, that the body of the imaginary

migrant is generated in each person’s encounter with the work. The migrant in this work

emerges as an embodied collectivity, as the figure comes to be imagined as all genders,

11

ages, races and every other possible subjectivity in our own productive encounter with

the work.

While undocumented migration across the U.S.-Mexico border has been a

constant process since the United States annexed its western territories, the recent

increase in deaths at the border over the last decade is largely the result of its

securitization that pushes crossing attempts into more treacherous terrain. With over

640 miles of protective fencing, a classified number of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS)

patrolling and transmitting surveillance video, and over 20,000 law enforcement officials

regularly deployed, the territory has become the most militarized border in history.6

With over 250 million border crossings each year, 700 thousand without proper

documentation, it is also the most heavily traversed.7

The signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994

established a free-trade zone between Canada, the United States (U.S.) and Mexico,

lifting trade barriers and enabling an economic integration of the three countries. As a

result of its ratification, new economies of exploitation emerged at the northern edge of

Mexico. Accompanying the increase in trade between the U.S. and Mexico was a

relocation of textile plants and automobile factories to border-towns in Mexico where

environmental regulations and labor standards were and are much lower compared to

6 “U.S. Plans Border ‘Surge’ Against Any Drug Wars” http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/08/us/08chertoff.html 7 Bureau of Transportation Statistics: http://www.bts.gov/programs/international/transborder/TBDR_BC/TBDR_BC_Index.html

12

the United States. The factories and plants, known as “maquiladoras”, are sites of

exploitative and unsafe labor practices where union organizing campaigns are often

violently repressed by factory owners and working conditions are extremely harsh due

to the prevalence of toxic chemical exposure, injuries resulting from the use of unsafe

machinery, and sexual violence.8 The increasing gross domestic product (GDP) of both

the United States and Mexico, credited as the result of NAFTA’s signing, was also

accompanied by a larger rise in domestic economic inequality in both countries.9 The

combination of unemployment in rural and indigenous regions of Mexico, poor working

conditions where there is work, and political turmoil across much of Latin America

results in large-scale undocumented migration into the United States.

The border between the U.S. and Mexico, as a contested site, functions

simultaneously to ensure the steady uninterrupted flow of capital and goods while also

denying unpermitted or undocumented crossings. This relationship between open

borders and militarized ones manifests ultimately as a productive conflict within which

the logic of postmodern capitalism flourishes. Although the border territory is policed by

hard-power, that is to say by means of armed agents of the state, it exerts and

manifests its power nonetheless primarily as a coding apparatus. The border is able to

articulate in the way it does because of its structure as an assembly of entangled

political and social actors. In order to maintain and enforce a set of coded subjectivities

8 David Bacon , “The Children of NAFTA: Labor Wars on the U.S. Mexico Border” 9 Saskia Sassen, “Globalization and Its Discontents: The De Facto Transnationalization of Immigration Policy”

13

and socio-economic relationships, individuals are inscribed in relation to the border. The

border does not have an agency or subjectivity unto itself, but rather enables (or forces)

the operation of agencies and subjectivities in relation to it. Wendy Brown describes

how borders and their walls contain a capacity to police and code subjectivities as a kind

of spectacular phenomena:

“… There have been political walls before. Indeed, there have been fences since

the Beginning, and despite the new walls’ distinctive global context, there exist

certain continuities between contemporary walls and older walls. Political walls

have always spectacularized power – they have always generated performative

and symbolic effects in excess of their obdurately material ones. They have

produced and negated certain political imaginaries. They have contributed to the

political subjectivity of those they encompass and those they exclude … Like the

Berlin Wall, contemporary walls especially those around democracies, often undo

or invert the contrasts they are meant to inscribe. Officially aimed at protecting

putatively free, open, lawful, and secular societies from trespass, exploitation or

attack, the walls are built of suspended law and inadvertently produce a

collective ethos and subjectivity that is defensive, parochial, nationalistic, and

militarized. They generate an increasingly closed and policed collective identity in

place of the open society they would defend.” (Wendy Brown, “Walled States,

Waning Sovereignty”, pg. 39-40)

14

Borders and walls function both to create an imaginary homogenous moral interiority

and to conjure the specter of an infectious and violent exteriority that constantly

threatens to invade. To say that the border wall is ineffective at halting illegal crossings

is to miss the true function of the border entirely. A border’s effectiveness rests in its

affective qualities, and the subjectivities that they project and enable.

When articulated by the border in this way, one is rendered always either a

citizen or a hostis (an enemy of the state), a man or a woman, an officer or a criminal,

white or not, and it is through these processes of binary coding that power comes to be

exerted upon those within the border territory. In this process of articulation, the line

which constitutes the division between the two countries folds out and expands into a

territorial zone through its entanglement with agents of the state, artists, activists,

technologies, and of course migrants. Power at the border does not arrive vertically, but

rather from mobile and dynamic relations between subjects. A kind of horizontal

networked power, power in the border territory is always generated between subjects,

but nonetheless relies conceptually on the border’s capacity to articulate and parse. This

is the logic in which the line of the border multiplies into a territorial web of power and

social relations.

By giving border-crossers access to GPS satellite systems that guide their

movement across the harsh terrain of the desert, as well as giving them access to a

library of poetry and even spontaneously generating new routes through precarious

15

canyons and mountains, the Transborder Immigrant Tool fundamentally changes their

experience of crossing. While it is perhaps obvious is that the Transborder Immigrant

Tool is an art object in the traditional sense of its aesthetic sculptural qualities, it is

better understood for its relationship and entanglement with the migrant using it, and

their subsequent entanglement with the activists and artists on the other side of the

border-line. The phone never does anything on its own, but rather requires the

participation of subjects who become active in their entanglement with it.

The figure of the cyborg-migrant, walking through the desert linked to

positioning satellites and path-finding algorithms, destabilizes the juridical and

repressive modes of articulation within which they would be rendered a criminal

situated in a hostile enclosed landscape. It is of no surprise that Ricardo Dominguez

describes the Transborder Immigrant Tool as a “disruptive technology” in that it moves

to disrupt the typical traumatic experience of a border crossing.10 A hybrid cyborg figure

challenges the border both on its conceptual level, as an articulating and categorizing

mechanism, but also on a technical level, allowing the cyborg-migrant to evade the

border-security apparati and survive the crossing. Survival in this context, and in all

contexts, constitutes a resistance unto itself.

There are three very different audiences in this work. There is the physical

migrant whom uses the phone to traverse the border territory. Their experience of the

10 Brad Taylor, “Border Disruption Technologies”, www.fr33agents.com, Dec 8 2009

16

work is a prosthetic one, and as described elsewhere the work becomes about

experiencing crossing the border in a poetic way. The other audience is us, the imagined

collectivity of viewers who are in solidarity with the crosser. Our engagement with the

work is on the discursive level, and as such our politics come to use the work as a vector

of discussion, mobilization and knowledge production. A third audience to the work

emerges in the broader public space, as people with diverse and conflicting politics

relating to the boarder engage with the work. All three of these contexts inform our

reading in very different ways, but in these three different registers we also get a

glimpse of how political and poetic encounters operate in all three instances and how all

three audiences are nested in one another.

More so, when thinking within the North American historical contexts the work

takes on new meaning. One is immediately reminded of the Underground Railroad in

the United States during slavery, where outlaw slaves travelled to the North with the

help of networked safe-houses. We can also think of other instances of migration which

relied on networks of solidarity, such as the migration of Jews from Nazi-occupied

Eastern Europe into Western Europe and the U.S. Similarly, the discourses surrounding

border-crossing also are in conversation with the discourses surrounding Mestizaje

identity or around the emergence of a South American diaspora in the United States.11

The borderlands theorists have positioned a hybrid figure as the site of resistance

11 Karen Mary Davos, “Exhibiting Mestizaje: Mexican (American) Museums in the Diaspora”, pg. 26-27

17

against the border. This hybrid figure is adopted from the post-colonial

conceptualization of the Mestizaje (translated to English as “mixed”), a term used to

describe the people of South America who find themselves in the middle of two

histories: one Spanish and the other Indigenous. Domniguez’s project instead cites both

the cyborg and the networked collectivity as the liberatory site. All of these histories

inform and affect our reading of the work and our imagining of the migrant figure that is

using the tool.

The Transborder Immigrant Tool moves to invert certain modes of surveillance

and control at the border. The military mapping of the border that aimed to document

the territory in enough details to exert total control onto it also enables the Transborder

Immigrant Tool to generate quick and safe routes through some of the harsher areas of

the terrain. In this way the power generated by the mapping process also generates the

methods of its own subversion. Dominguez asserts that the project is meant to do more

than simply assist border crossers in a utilitarian way. Rather, the project is supposed to

aesthetically affect the user: “Immigrants should not only be able to move safely, find

water, and hear poetry, but they should also be able encounter the landscape in a way

that American painters have approached the landscape: as a sublime object."12

12 Evan R. Goldstein, “Digitally Incorrect: Ricardo Dominguez's provocations: art or crimes” , The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 3, 2010

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Figure 1: Ricardo Dominguez displays the transborder immigrant tool.

Why does it become necessary to Dominguez for the migrant to consider the

importance of an encounter precisely when they are most potentially threatened? We

can imagine the migrant holding up the Transborder Immigrant Tool while traversing the

harsh desert terrain between the U.S. and Mexico where one is easily lost, where

temperatures are life-threateningly high and low depending on the time of day, where

right-wing vigilante groups and border control agents hunt for undocumented crossers.

Nearly 500 die trying to cross the border each year in these conditions, as migrants are

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forced to traverse more dangerous territory as a result of the border security project’s

expansion.13

The imagined migrant’s footsteps may very well be activating underground

motion sensors or their image may be being captured by surveillance towers, alerting

authorities to their crossing attempt. Meanwhile, the Transborder Immigrant Tool is

constantly communicating with satellites orbiting the earth and positioning the migrant

in their global positioning system (G.P.S.) coordinate location. This is the moment when

the migrant is perhaps most articulated by the border systems and also most exposed to

the dangers associated with crossing; this is also the moment in which the Transborder

Immigrant Tool urges us to reconsider the poetry of the landscape which threatens to

kill at every moment.

Amy Sara Carroll, a member of Bang.Labs and a contributor to the project,

describes the Transborder Immigrant Tool’s insistence of the poetic in this way:

“For, often—rightly enough—conversations about crossing the Mexico-U.S.

border refer to disorientation, sun exposure, lack of water. The Transborder

Immigrant Tool attempts to address those vicissitudes, but also to remember

that the aesthetic—freighted with the unbearable weight of ‘love’—too, sustains.

A poetic gesture from its inception, the Transborder Immigrant Tool functions, via

13 Wayne A. Cornelius, “Death at the Border: The Efficacy and ‘Unintended’ Consequences of U.S. Immigration Control Policy 1993-2000”

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the aspirations of such a dislocative medium, as dislocative media, seeking to

realize the possibilities of G.P.S. as both a ‘global positioning system’ and, what,

in another context, Laura Borràs Castanyer and Juan B. Gutiérrez have termed, a

‘global poetic system.’ The Transborder Immigrant Tool includes poems for

psychic consultation, spoken words of encouragement and welcome, which I am

writing and co-designing in the mindset of Audre Lorde’s pronouncement that

‘poetry is not a luxury.’ The particular poems included here—part of that larger

collection, which code-switches between languages—are for a predominantly

English-speaking audience, who recognizes uncanny connection (i.e., for the sake

of a Dublin/Belfast presentation, that of the Irish and the Mexican, historically

made manifest in phenomena like the San Patricios, artistically acknowledged

vis-à-vis travelling exhibitions such as the 1995-97 Distant Relations).

Postscriptually, Derrida’s vision of hospitality, indexed as scrolling text in

‘Dubliners,’ speaks to the Transborder Immigrant Tool’s overarching commitment

to global citizenship. For, the excerpt, itself infused with the ‘transversal logic’ of

the poetic, acts as one of the Transborder Immigrant Tool’s internal compasses,

clarifying the ways and means by which I and my collaborators approach this

project as ethically inflected, as transcending the local of (bi-)national politics, of

borders and their policing.” (Amy Sara Carroll, “A Global Poetic/Positioning

System: The Transborder Immigrant Tool”, 2009).

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The way which Carroll describes the Transborder Immigrant Tool as being connected to

the “global poetic system” proposes a poiesis which resists the hegemonic articulating

systems at the border. This gesture can take on the form of a teleopoiesis that,

according to Carroll, points us to a “global citizenship” with a “transversal logic”. If we

consider the Transborder Immigrant Tool as a kind of compass, both in the literal and

the poetic sense, we come to understand it for its capacity to generate a present that

acts as a trajectory towards a multiplicity of possible futures. This is the future anterior

that Spivak wrote of in her work, and provides a potential model of alter-power in the

context of a bordered world. When Carroll tells us that the Transborder Immigrant Tool

is largely for an English-speaking audience that “recognizes uncanny connection”, and

then reminds us of the San Patricios (a battalion of Irish-immigrant soldiers who

switched sides in solidarity with the Mexican army during the Mexican-American War),

Carrol is asserting the poetics of solidarity and collectivity that can never be anticipated

but can be and always are potential.14

While crossing, the Transborder Immigrant Tool directs the migrant towards

water caches left by various activist groups in the United States. The tool also points the

migrant to various buildings which have been established as safe-houses, where the

migrant’s feet can be mended and they can receive food and water. Although they’ve

never met before, in this moment the migrant enters into a political and poetic

entanglement with the activist networks that have made their crossing less dangerous.

14 James Callaghan, "The San Patricios". American Heritage Magazine. Volume 46, Issue 7, November 1995

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This organized effort of activist networks in the North in solidarity with migrants from

the South generates the conditions of a radical future-anterior, where liberatory

trajectories and collectivities emerge. Through working to establish routes and

territories of aid and assistance, these activist networks and artists’ collectives prefigure

a set of relationships that represent a different possible global futurity.

How is it that the migrant’s use of the Transborder Immigrant Tool generates

both a politics and poetics at the same time and what could this mean about the

relationship between the two? In this experience of crossing the border, the poetics of

the encounter come to be an expression of a politics of free movement. An encounter is

understood as an experience that resists closure and resolution. When one experiences

the landscape in an encounter, it is to experience it as both unrecognizable and

productive. The uncontainability of an encounter with the landscape positions it in

opposition to a border-territory, where the landscape is very clearly being limited,

rationalized and divided. Similarly, a politics which asserts a universal right to the

freedom of movement manifests a vision of a globe free of any borders that would seek

to contain peoples or keep them out.

23

Figure 2: Demonstration illustrations of the transborder immigrant tool.

This instance of poetic human solidarity constitutes a political act in that it not

only creates the conditions within which a greater freedom of movement is enabled, but

also poetically suggests different ways of living in the world. The systems that would aim

to deny those freedoms, such as the right-wing vigilante group the Minutemen or the

security agents of the state, become partially dysfunctional as a result of these networks

of solidarity. The activist networks, artists, and migrants help to create the conditions

under which radical kinds of living and being in the world are nurtured, and they work to

develop a collectivity outside of the binary politics of the state.

When I write of a future or of possible futurities that always exist in our

experience of the now, I mean to assert a prefigurative framework for considering

action and social change. In this framework, it’s important to understand that we will

never arrive in the future but rather will always be experiencing the possibilities of a

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multiplicity of futurities in the present, both dystopian and utopian. I started this project

in hopes that it would position you the reader, and myself in opposition to the current

national borders that restrict human movement. However, this single gesture of course

must expand and continue to consider power at all levels, in the economic, the

governmental, the personal and the social. This is in a way a move away from

considering an ideal, but rather positions process itself as the important consideration.

It is my hope that this project works to point to a horizontalized process against the

hierarchies that everywhere tower above us.

It is a claim of the universal right to life and the freedom of movement that is

asserted in this entanglement between the migrant, the artist and the activist network,

and in their mutual entanglement a poetic territory is projected over the political border

line. Community in this instance isn’t a static relationship, but rather is one dependent

on flows and exchanges, always in motion. As tactical media theorist Rita Raley

describes the border-art projects:

“Reminiscent to some extent of the cultural nationalisms of Franz Fanon and

Aime Cesaire, such thinking marks a moment of anticolonial art practice: the aim

is not to theorize liminality but to force a rupture in the binaries of interiority and

exteriority, here and there, native and alien, friend and enemy. The radical

dichotomies integral to the war on terror – ‘you’re either with us or against us’ –

find their counterpart in art practices that themselves depend on the solidarity of

25

the ‘we’ against the ‘them’. A fence has been built, binaries constructed, and

these artists intend to overturn them. Their struggle, while embedded in a binary,

rather than a hybrid, cultural logic, nevertheless suggests a reconfigured notion

of oppositionality. As we will see, both the we and the them in these artists’

projects and practices are understood to be diffuse, networked, and temporarily,

rather than territorially, situated.” (Rita Raley, Tactical Media, pg. 37)

The language that Raley uses to describe the border-art practices mirrors the language

used to describe an encounter. The formless and boundless character of the network

between migrants, artists, and activists point to a collective subjectivity that embodies a

solidarity without clear limits, as if solidarity were an uncontainable vector which could

potentially unravel the politics of the border.

This relationship between the dividing line of the border and the entangled

territory that multiplies from it comes to exemplify two different ways of encountering

the border, one political and one poetic. The border is in the end a moral political

structure, always generating a contained ‘us’ and a marauding ‘them’, always setting the

stage for a politics of opposition and exclusion. The poetic territory on the other hand

exerts a different kind of relationship, one predicated on entanglement, contingency

and exchange. A poetic landscape resists becoming localized or contained and instead is

always extending and changing, defamiliarizing the ordinary and making us look again. A

transborder, for which the tool is named, is a border which is always being crossed and

26

overcome, a dividing line which creates the routes through itself. The border-line is best

understood for its relation to the literal and the political while the encounter with the

landscape is understood for its figurative and poetic operations. This unfolding of the

line into the landscape, through an unraveling of the literal border politics to the poetry

of an encounter is the ground in which the teleopoietic reading of this project takes

root.

27

Flows at the Border

Ursula Biemann and “Contained Mobility”(2004)

The English word border is also derivative of the Latin ora, which can mean edge

but also coastline. Conceptualizing the border as a coast, as the point where the physical

and segmentary material of the land meets the shifting and erosive flow of the ocean

welcomes a reading of border-as-coastline that exposes the liminality not just of borders

but also of all those who ceaselessly wash up and set foot on their shores. Here, the

continental interiority enclosed within a border comes to be enveloped by the crashing

waves of its coastal edges, constantly entangling the solidity of land with the flows of

the sea.

Ursula Biemann’s video work Contained Mobility (2004), starts with a shot of an

open body of water. The camera swings up and down with the waves, disorienting the

viewer in their search for a steady horizon. A voice soon begins to speak over the image:

“Entering the harbor the voyager leaves the exceptional condition of the

boundless sea, this traversable space of maritime immensity, to come ashore in

an offshore place in a container world that only tolerates the trans-local state of

not being of this place, nor of any other really, but of existing in a condition of

28

permanent not-belonging, of juridical non-existence.” (Ursula Biemann,

“Contained Mobility”)

From this starting prologue, we are then presented with the story of Anatol, a migrant

born in 1949 in Magadan, a forced labor concentration camp in the Eastern Soviet

Union. Through a chronicle of displacements, detentions, deportations and even a

nuclear accident, over the course of the work we follow Anatol across most of Western

Europe while he seeks asylum after being expelled as a dissident from his own country.

Figure 3: Still from “Contained Mobility” (2004)

The work consists of two videos playing simultaneously next to one another.

While the images on the two screens sometimes switch their placement from left to

29

right, the content and narrative structure remain consistent throughout. This pairing of

the two screens next to one another immediately establishes a framework of bifocal

viewing, each screen being an input for one of our two eyes. While the viewer

nonetheless comes to focus on one screen or the other in their encounter with the

work, nonetheless both images remain with the field of vision and affect one another in

their visual rhythms, synchronicities and discordances. Most importantly, each screen

presents us with a different way of seeing the world. On one screen we always see

Anatol, the central figure and protagonist of the work. On the other, we are always

looking at the landscape, in a variety of mediated forms. This bifocalized viewing both

resists singular and totalizing monocular viewing but also suggests the constant

operation of multiple modes of production, in this case poetic and political processes. As

we shall see, this work becomes primarily about Anatol’s poetic and political

(dis)entanglement with the landscape which is expressed in the bifocalized relationship

between the two video screens.

After the first shot fades to black, we first get a glimpse of Anatol who has taken

up residence in a shipping container. He constantly paces around the container,

occasionally stopping to look at maps on the walls, lie down on his small bed, or make

cell phone calls to unknown recipients. A text describing Anatol’s travels, resembling a

travel log, scrolls slowly within a black rectangle in the bottom corner of the same

screen. Formally, the video on this screen suggests that our visual encounter with Anatol

and his home is a mediated act of surveillance; the low resolution and choppy frame

30

rate of the video and the text-box which displays his travel logs is reminiscent of footage

recorded on inexpensive surveillance systems. This aesthetic articulates Anatol as a

subject under surveillance and monitoring, and immediately figures him as a suspect to

us as viewers.

That Anatol lives in a shipping container throughout the work reflects the

character of his subjectivity throughout his journey in search of asylum. The shipping

container, like Anatol, doesn’t have a home or resting place where it is meant to be, but

rather it is always in motion, in a perpetual transition. The shipping container is also

suggestive of the political and economic conditions under which Anatol finds himself

trapped. After the creation of the European Union (E.U.) in 1950 as well as with the

signing of the Schengen Agreement in 1985, barriers to trade between Western

European member states were lifted and freedom of movement within the E.U. was

guaranteed to its citizens.15

What the European no-border social movements describe as the establishment

of “Fortress Europe”, the emergence of deregulated movement of capital and peoples

within the E.U., coincided with the militarization of the E.U.’s borders with Eastern

Europe and North Africa. While obtaining citizenship or asylum within the E.U. is difficult

and border security projects continue to become more elaborate and totalizing,

nonetheless individuals do migrate into the E.U. without official documentation in the

15 European Commission. "The EU Single Market: Fewer barriers, more opportunities"

31

hundreds of thousands. Because of the increases in border security, migrants are forced

to attempt dangerous methods of crossing which result in high mortality rates. Since

1993, over 13000 migrants have died attempting to cross into the E.U. 16

Figure 4: Map of the E.U. Highlighting Migrant Deaths.

While the mass-migration of undocumented peoples into the E.U. is largely

discussed in terms of its illegality and economic costs in mainstream discourses, activist

scholars within the E.U. have reframed this migration as a manifestation of social

movement. This kind of social movement, one which does not seek to reform but rather

moves to transcend, has been celebrated in the terms of its resilience, its capacity to

16 UNITED for Intercultural Action, “Death by Policy: The Fatal Realities of ‘Fortress Europe’”

32

survive and flourish despite the harsh border security systems, and its prefigurative

form which creates the conditions of a new world in the present.17 This kind of social

movement moves to transcend in that it does not seek to reform the current structures,

but rather insists on the existence and operation of worlds beyond the dominant

systems already in the present. Undocumented people have managed not only to enter

the E.U., but also have formed long lasting communities and networks amongst

themselves. As briefly explored earlier, the world being prefigured is not simply a world

free of borders, but rather a world free of the systems that necessitate their generation

in the first place. The collectivities that emerge between migrants already within the

E.U. and migrants making undocumented crossing into it prefigure social relationships

and solidarities outside of market or legalistic logics. These radical solidarities do not

represent an end unto themselves, but rather point to a process of liberation that will

always be necessary in the face of power.

Again, this reading of the migration as a prefigurative phenomenon emerges as a

potential teleopoietics, one which makes manifest a community of a future in the

actions and solidarities of the present. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak describes this

imaginative making of a community through her reading of Jacques Derrida:

“Derrida brings the notion of a teleopoiesis – teleopoietic rather than

legitimizing reversal – into play many times in his book. That is indeed one of the

17 “Autonomous rear Entrances to Fortress Europe?!” January 10th, 2006, http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2006/10/352363.html

33

shocks to the idea of belonging, to affect the distant in a poiesis – an imaginative

making – without guarantees, and thus, by definition predication, reverse its

value. Again, note the difference between this and the mechanical convenience

of map-making. ‘The teleopoiesis we are speaking of is a messianic structure …

we are not yet among these philosophers of the future, we who are calling them

and calling them the philosophers of the future, but we are in advance their

friends … This is perhaps the ‘community of those without community’’ … Active

teleopoiesis in all moments of decision makes the task of reading imperative and

yet indecisive” (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Death of A Discipline”, pg. 31)

By figuring the undocumented migration into the E.U. in relation to its future

anteriority, we can read it as a community that is undergoing its formation across great

poetic, literal and political distances. The work Contained Mobility has been

predominantly exhibited across Western Europe as well as the United States, and as a

result the audience members who witness the work are predominantly made up of

people who are on “this” side of the border. This either positions the viewer as someone

who is in a position the affect the conditions which continually displace Anatol as a

landless person, an exile, or it positions them as a migrant themselves who perhaps see

themselves in collectivity with Anatol in a diaspora of migrants. In both instances,

Biemann’s work positions the viewer as someone who is capable of affecting the world

and is in potential solidarity with Anatol.

34

Anatol, throughout the entire work, seems to be in search of this “community of

those without community” in his travels. He is very much a subject lost within the matrix

of the European Union’s harsh immigration laws and regulations. Throughout the work,

Anatol applies for asylum four different times, each time in a different country. Each

time he is turned down. The dense bureaucracy of border-systems is a major theme

within Contained Mobility, as we learn from the scrolling text on the screen that Anatol

is persistently detained, moved between detention camps, deported, arrested and his

possessions confiscated:

“March 1999_The regime in Belarus abolishes elections. Anatol leaves the

country and travels to Poland. Again he swims across the river Neisse to

Germany, this time half frozen. He applies for asylum at the Gorlitz border

checkpoint, where he is detained by border guards. His application is rejected, his

money is confiscated and he is deported to Poland.

March 1999_He enters Slovakia across the green boundary, making his way

through bushes and swamps. Transits the country to enter the Czech Republic,

with the aim of reaching the humanist society of Austria. Crossing the bridge at

night during a blizzard, the police awaits him with dogs on the other side.”

(Ursula Biemann, “Contained Mobility”)

Anatol constantly faces these problems in his search for amnesty as his status as a non-

citizen of the European Union renders him illegal within its borders. Well educated and

35

eager to work, he makes no progress towards becoming situated in this new place. His

unsituatedness comes to articulate him as a person, a person without a place, a landless

person. And yet despite all of this harassment, Anatol remains resilient and determined,

and is able to finally find refuge in his paradoxical permanent non-permanence within

the shipping container at the port.

The title of the work, Contained Mobility, points to this kind of reading as well.

What does it mean after all to be both mobile and contained? This naming seems to

foreground the contradictions between borders, the nation states that build and

maintain them, and the global trade of capital and goods that increasingly transcends

them. Anatol himself becomes an expression of this contained mobility, as he drifts

across the continent but is subject to capture and regulation throughout his journey.

While Domniguez’s Transborder Immigrant Tool focuses on the act of border

crossing itself, Biemann’s work instead contemplates the state of being within a

territory after crossing. Both of these modes seem to connote different expressions of

solidarity and community. In Dominguez’s work, this collectivity is heavily contingent on

temporal and spatial relationships that exist between the entangled subjects in the

border territory. In Biemann’s work, Anatol is forced to consider his community as a

landless person without destination and as an exile. This is an imagined community that

exists in relation to his being, whereas the solidarities imagined in Dominguez’s work

rely upon a community surrounding an act. The one register that both of these works

36

share is their consideration of how poetic collectivities are formed to transform and

potentially disrupt the normative political control of space.

In the opening of the work a voice speaks of “the trans-local state of not being”.

Anatol occupies this translocalilty, always present on the geography of the local but

nonetheless entangled and connected to the flows of the global. He is simultaneously

entrapped and displaced by these relationships – contained and mobilized. It seems

appropriate that Anatol finally finds a measure of rest at a port harbor, where ships

come and go and the border becomes incomparably more porous and open to facilitate

the global exchange of goods. Here is perhaps where the flows of global capital are most

conspicuous, and in his container-turned-home Anatol can finally be situated in his

movement as a placeless person, a perpetual migrant in exile.

James Clifford, in his text Routes, describes how migrants become situated in

their status as members of diaspora, and how border crossing becomes a defining action

for some in this position:

"How do diaspora discourses represent experiences of displacement, of

constructing homes away from home? What experiences do they reject, replace,

or marginalize? How do these discourses attain comparative scope while

remaining rooted/routed in specific discrepant histories? ... Separate places

become effectively a single community ‘through the continuous circulation of

people, money goods and information'. 'Transnational migrant circuits,' as Rouse

37

calls them, exemplify the kinds of complex cultural formations that current

anthropology and intercultural studies describe and theorize. Aguilillans moving

between California and Mochoacan are not in diaspora; there may be, however,

diasporic dimensions to their practices and cultures of displacement, particularly

for those who stay long periods, or permanently, in Redwood City. Overall,

bilocale Aguilillans inhabit a border, a site of regulated and subversive crossing"

(James Clifford, "Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century",

pg. 244-246)

While describing the indigenous people of North America, Clifford speaks to how

communities become situated within the territories they are constantly moving

through, though perhaps never settle in. In Contained Mobility, Anatol similarly seeks to

find a placeness through his travelling, and does find a measure of ‘home’ in his

movement. The importance and consistent citing of the translocal in Contained Mobility

disrupts the traditional claims of rootedness and situatedness that can’t operate when

space becomes entangled and dislocated in the way that it has. A translocal place is a

fractured and decentered one that denies traditional geographical identification in that

it is a place defined by its transience. Thus, when we encounter the travel logs that

constitute Anatol’s journey, we are left with a text that simply lists his movements

across space rather than his placement in them. It is the story of a migrant in exile, and

as such Anatol is robbed of the luxury of localized placeness and rootedness and instead

becomes situated in his movement.

38

While Anatol occupies his shipping container on one screen, on the other we are

shown a series of geographic maps, views from the decks of ships, computer screens

and aerial photographs. Some of the images show a digital representation of a harbor

and seem to be tracking the ships movement through them. The aerial photographs

show a harbor area as well, and the camera slowly pans across the channels and

warehouses in the image. The digital computer maps are of areas that are crisscrossed

with various demarcations, grids and codes, most of which are unreadable or

indistinguishable. And lastly, we see shots from the deck of a ship looking over its railing,

surveying a body of water and beyond that a distant port city.

The trope of viewing the landscape from above is constantly present throughout

the work. A mediated view from the sky, this perspective suggests a subject that

experiences the world through their encounter with the screen. Certainly this cannot be

said to be a bodily phenomenological experience of a geography, but rather is a digitized

perspective that proposes to survey the landscape, measure it, and order its parts in

opposition to one another. This is the perspective of the satellite, the jet fighter, and the

surveillance tower. It is a phenomenology mediated by the technologies and machines

that capture and articulate the data of the geography and transcribes them into the

database and then onto the screen. This indexical view of the geography is an

expression of a database aesthetic, where symbols and information become inscribed in

catalogue entries.

39

This second screen which presents us with the drifting views of digital

geographies is nonetheless dependent on an encounter with a subject. In Contained

Mobility, we as the viewing audience come to be the subjects in an encounter with this

perspective. Bill Seaman describes how a database aesthetic can generate a poetics

outside of a traditional narrative while still producing affect:

“An embodied approach to computing acknowledges the importance of the

physicality of experience as it falls within the continuum that bridges the physical

with the digital. To illuminate the operative nature of database aesthetics, one

needs to point at a number of human processes – memory, thought, association,

cataloging, categorizing, framing, contextualizing, de-contextualizing, and

recontextalizing, as well as grouping. The production of boundary objects,

grammars of information, grammars of attention, the production of media

constellations and the exploration of principles of combinatorics all become

potential variables for employment in the creation of interactive works of art. Of

critical importance is interface design – both physical and digital, as well as how

human processes become operative through the functional nature of a relevant,

robust, digitally encoded environment. A database is derived through human

activity leading to residues and/or inscriptions of experience, including such

creative processes as the shooting and editing of video, the sculpting of virtual

objects, the construction of sonic content, the composition of musical fragments

or selections, the writing of poetic texts, the spoken recording of text, the naming

40

of files, and the conceptual design of specific operative structures. Writing code is

also a human process … The database aesthetic puts the poetic nature of

composition, media configuration, sequence, media ‘distribution,’ and differing

qualities of articulating in line (and/or in virtual time-space when we consider

virtual space) with the constraint based nature of combinatorics … Such works

always depend on physical space and human action in that these works are

always embedded within a set of interconnected physical spaces. They always

depend on bodies for the activation of potential media flows, even if on the

lowest level this is achieved only through observation as interaction … In

particular, this is not a narrative strategy. It is a poetic approach to the

combination and recombination of loaded poetic fields … Thus no fixed narrative

is sought – only a catalogue of shifting impressions and evocations.

Interpretation is open and ongoing – an operative meaning-becoming.” (Bill

Seaman, “Recombinant Poetics and Related Database Aesthetics, Database

Aesthetics”, pg 121-123)

When we are presented with what seems to be a computerized ship-tracking display of

the port, followed by a slow scanning of satellite photos, and then finally a vista from

the deck of an offshore ship, we are always kept at a distance from the physicality of the

geography, and instead perceive a digital trace of it in our encounter with the database.

We remain displaced and drifting, never located or grounded except in our mediated

relation to the database and the screen. The objects and architectures being surveyed

41

all seem very neatly to fit into the space of the database, and all are situated within a

digitized Cartesian grid. This mediated view from above articulates objects and subjects

in this highly rendered way: as resolved and measured coordinates and trajectories

occupying a literal register. Importantly, this encounter with the video-as-database

leads us to think again about borders. The geography on the screen is certainly parsed

and divided in its cataloging and borders become inscribed into the database itself as

sets of code and information. However, in our experience with and access of it, an

imaginative encounter emerges and the segmented data becomes open to

interpretation and production. The relationship between the coded database and our

poetic access is reminiscent again of the border-as-coast, with seemingly firm and sharp

edges that are always unraveling and entangling.

The view from the ship on the other hand seems to represent a different type of

relationship to geography, a liquid one. While the ship floats up and down in the water

it exists in a space that is always shifting and in motion, never steady. Much like Anatol,

the water comes to be defined by its flows and motion and always exists in opposition

to the static materiality of the shore. This relationship is manifest aesthetically as the

horizon line visually swings around on the video screen in the ship’s movement. This

relationship to the geography, from the deck of the ship, is expressed poetically in that

it offers an expanded and shifting relationship to the geography that resists a stable

recognition and instead offers an encounter. In relation to the other screen on which we

are always seeing Anatol, Biemann positions us where we have to reconcile the hyper-

42

rational database articulations of crossing at the border and also the poetic subjectivity

activated by Anatol himself. By positioning these two ontologies against one another,

Biemann invites readings that challenge the relationship between the political and the

poetic, the literal and the imaginative.

Interestingly, the horizon line visible form the deck of the ship comes to operate

as yet another border between the terrestrial land and open sky above it. While Anatol

is restricted to the ground and the water throughout his travels (he never is able to fly,

likely due to his non-legal status and increasing controls at airports), the satellite and

planes that constitute much of the border security systems of the E.U. and monitor the

port where Anatol lives all occupy the space of the sky. Again, this entanglement

between Anatol’s mobility and the E.U.’s containment becomes expressed visually on

this screen. The port is often where travelers first set foot in a new country or territory;

it is the imaginary point of arrival, the entrance to a new place. As a result, it is also a

site that is heavily policed and controlled in order to ensure that only permitted travel is

allowed. Nonetheless, large amounts of illegal goods and undocumented people pass

through them each year. When arriving at the port as someone without citizen status

and as an undocumented migrant, this arrival does not become manifest as a “being

here” but rather a “being in motion”. Just as our view of the horizon is always changing

from the deck of the ship, so too does the poetic encounter with a landscape always

undergo transformation and mutation as each experience generates new possible

ruptures and affirmations.

43

These two different ways of experiencing the landscape are illustrative of the

contradictions that define the contemporary operations of borders and the subjects in

relation to them. One view of the border, mediated and from above, articulates each

object clearly and unquestionably within the database, and every entry conforms neatly

within the administrative logics of trade and capital. Our access of the database opens

the possibility of a poetic encounter, but the entries nonetheless remain fixed. The

other view, from the ship, shows a very different understanding of the landscape, and

encounters the landscape as a geography always in motion and under transformation.

These two different ways of experiencing the landscape come to take on the attributes

of either “recognition” or “encounter” and suggests their entanglement with power in

border territories. This power is expressive of the structures that aim to regulate and

control movement in contested territories but also of the collectivities that aim to

create spaces of subversion and resistance.

When we recognize a landscape, it means that in our experience of it we are able

neatly to categorize and articulate all of its parts into already existing and accepted

knowledges. When something is recognized, it “makes sense” in that everything is found

as it would be expected. In Contained Mobility, this is expressed in the digital readouts

of the port that constantly articulate the landscape as a grid. Recognition is a coded

experience of order.

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To experience the landscape as an encounter is to experience it in its failure to

conform to our expectations and preexisting knowledges. This experience of the

landscape as a failure ruptures our understanding of the world and forces us to

reconsider our own relationship to it. After this moment of rupture, we are forced to

move and ultimately produce a new affirmation of the experience. This is manifest in

the video as the view from the ship, where our movement in relation to the horizon

defines our experience of the landscape. These two modalities of experiencing the

world mirror the conceptualization of the border-as-coastline. If the land were to be

expressive of a static stratified territory that contains its own set of codes and

information, the sea would be expressive of the forces that constantly unravel and

erode these sets of codes.

Throughout the work, these themes of displacement and containment appear in

an entangled relationship. The nuclear accident in Chernobyl appears in the travel logs

as one of the events that displaces Anatol. Conceptually, Chernobyl is tied to Anatol’s

encounter with place. The radiation of a nuclear facility begins as grounded and

contained, and seems to exhibit a distinct locality. Then, in its structural failure, nuclear

emanation and subsequent rupture, this containment fails and the radioactivity expands

out across the geography, thoroughly contaminating and eroding the place-ness it once

contained. In this moment, the radioactivity begins as a singularity and then transforms

into a field. Chernobyl caused the displacement of thousands of people as they were

forced to flee the surrounding areas for fear of radiation poisoning and sickness, and

45

created an entirely new diaspora of nuclear exiles. Even more so, the radioactive debris

from the accident, after entering the atmosphere, spread across the entirety of the

globe as jet streams carried it to each continent. Much like the radiation leaving

Chernobyl that spread and permeated the landscape despite the efforts to create

boundaries to stop it, Anatol is also perpetually in this radiating motion, always moving

and permeating the borders across the geography and resisting containment. It is also

this same process which denies Anatol a place.

These themes of a locality as opposed to a radioactivity repeat throughout the

transcripts of Anatol’s travels. For example, soon after Anatol is born his “family lives in

a dig-out in permafrost soil for two years.”. At the very start of his journey, his home is

composed of frozen water, the sea frozen and contained. From there, Anatol soon

moves back to Minsk and he “listens to prohibited Deutsche Wave Radio, refuses to join

the Communist Party and is interrogated by the KGB.” Anatol here finds himself

entangled with the radio waves pouring across the borders of Europe. He constantly

shifts between being held in detention camps and sneaking across borders into new

territories, between being contained within borders and then radiating past them.

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Figure 5: Photograph of Contained Mobility (2004) installation.

At the end of the work, when Anatol has gone to bed in the back of his

container-turned-home, the text “everything new is born illegal” appears on the

opposite screen that has just faded to black. This text points to a paradoxical logic of

borders and states. To simply parse the statement, it suggests that anything that is new

or inhabits the qualities of newness is articulated as illegal by the state because it is born

outside of its enclosure. This creates a framework for understanding a border system

that both polices and maintains the old and the enclosed, while also articulating

everything outside of its enclosure as illegal and even reducing it to its status as illegal.

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Similarly, if we are to understand the poetic for its capacity to make and produce the

“new” as Spivak describes, the poetic is rendered illegal because of its refusal of

enclosure. Enclosure here dos not simply refer to the political process under which land

becomes controlled and coded by its boundaries, but rather any system which seeks to

contain meaning or police experience.

These claims that rely upon binary distinctions such as inside versus outside, or

old versus new, come to generate these distinctions within their own binary logics. A

term always generates its opposite, and very much relies on it. Much like a border,

which creates an enclosed interior only by imagining an unenclosed and infringing

exterior, in Contained Mobility the “new” is always manifested in opposition to the “old”

of the legalized, legitimized and permitted. This line also charts an interesting

relationship between the temporal and the spatial, as the newness comes to be

rendered illegal because of its position in space. The old is always the moment of

recognition, while the new is the rupture of the encounter.

How do we begin to read Anatol’s shipping container home at the port in

relationship to the enclosure of the E.U.? The shipping container is importantly the

central technology that facilitates the current scale of global capitalist trade. The

standardized size of shipping containers allows them to be quickly unloaded and loaded

onto ships at various ports across the globe, facilitating commodities trading at a speed

and scale impossible before their adoption. While the fantasy of a frictionless global

48

economy proliferated in mainstream discourses at the turn of the century and was

largely pinned to the increases in trade facilitated by the use of shipping containers,

shipping containers nonetheless present limits on and costs to the global trade system.

Perhaps most obviously there are the workers (often unionized) who must load and

unload the containers from the ships. Various hazards related to this kind of labor either

results in a limit on the speed of movement of these commodities in the interest of

safety or in worker deaths as the result of accidents. Dockworkers’ unions historically

have also gone on strike for political, social and economic reasons, halting the flow of

capital completely for lengths of time.18

Ironically, the adoption of the shipping container that was meant to facilitate the

flow of commodities also enables to flow of undocumented labor into the same

territory. Shipping containers have increasingly become the method in which groups of

migrants attempt illegally to cross into countries where border security is strict. This

type of human smuggling has become more prolific as other methods of travel have

become more difficult. The journey is incredibly dangerous as people are often given

little food and water to support them in their travels within the container. The lack of

bathrooms and other sanitary facilities as well as an absence of proper ventilation also

ensures the spread of disease and sickness, leaving those who do survive the trip in poor

18 Andrew Herod "Discourse on the Docks: Containerization and Inter-Union Work Disputes in US Ports, 1955-85"

49

health.19 This human cost is often ignored in trade-discourses which remain disciplinarily

focused on trade agreements, profit margins and other economic registers.

The flow of global capital is undeniably riddled with these unmeasured costs and

frictions, both human and otherwise. Nonetheless, the health of global economies

continues to be dependent on investors’s confidence in their markets, and as a result

any talk of externality or cost is hidden or completely rendered invisible in the interest

of positive speculation.

Anatol’s residence in the shipping container blatantly points us to associate his

experience within the E.U. with those who undergo human smuggling. Anatol is similarly

undocumented and without access to legal forms of transnational mobility. His

residence in the shipping container also points us to the historical processes which

disabled access to legal travel in the first place. The neoliberalization of the West’s

economies generated a psychic need to increase border controls in order to

compensate for fading nationalisms. As Wendy Brown describes:

“Seen from a slightly different angle, the call for strong iteration of national

boundaries would be a crucial element of what Saskia Sassen terms the

‘renationalizing’ of political discourse corresponding to denationalized economic

space. Boundary iteration and defense stages the righteousness and the

19 Lornet Turnbull, Kristi Heim, Sara Jean Green and Sanjay Bhatt, "15 days in a metal box, to be locked up", The Seattle TImes, April 6, 2006

50

possibility of such renationalization against its contemporary undoing. Thus do

declining state sovereignty and the disappearing viability of a homogenous

national imaginary redress each other at the site of walls. Visible walls respond

to the need for containment and boundaries in too global a world, too

unhorizoned a universe. They produce a spatially demarcated ‘us’, national

identity, and national political scale when these can no longer be fashioned from

conceits of national political or economic autonomy, demographic homogeneity,

or shared history, culture, and values.” (Wendy Brown, “Walled States, Waning

Sovereignty”, pg. 119)

Thus, Anatol’s shipping container emerges within the work as a signal of his condition as

a migrant displaced by (and moved by) the economic forces which have shaped the

European border systems. Even the collapse of the Soviet Union and the waves of

revolutions within its satellite states which initially drove Anatol away were largely the

products of economic processes within those countries, mainly the failure of centralized

economies to link supply and demand and a high cost arms race20. Anatol’s home in the

container leads us to read his experience of exile in the E.U. not just in terms of its

juridical functions, but also its economic ones. Biemann has constructed the work in a

way in order for us to consider the economic conditions that both displaced Anatol and

also makes his well-being economically precarious, despite his high level of education

20 Lloyd Dumas, “The Overburdened Economy”, University of California Press, 1986.

51

and training. The neoliberalization of the West’s economies helped to produce many of

the landless people whom now are transgressing their borders.

In its claim to supreme authority over a territory, the logic of nation-state

sovereignty constructs itself around a mythical social contract in order to maintain the

support of the subjects that live under it. Anatol, because of his non-status, does not

participate in this social contract and as a result fails to possess any of the political rights

promised by a sovereign power to its subjects. In the prologue, Anatol is described as

“existing in a condition of permanent not-belonging, of juridical non-existence”. He is

reduced to a kind of bare life, where he has no agency within the sovereign nation-state

but nonetheless finds himself enclosed within its rule. Antje Ellerman describes the

operation of “bare life” drawing from Giorgio Agamben’s writings:

“Giorgio Agamben’s seminal work on the relationship between the individual and

the sovereign state is anchored in the concepts of ‘homo sacer’ and ‘state of

exception.’ Homo sacer, a figure of Roman law, embodies what Agamben terms

‘bare’ or ‘depoliticized’ life (1998). Under Roman law, a man convicted of certain

crimes was banished from society and stripped of his rights as a citizen. Drawing

on Hannah Arendt’s description of the ‘naked life’ of the refugee (Arendt 1973),

Agamben juxtaposes the bare life of homo sacer who subsists in zones of

exclusion and rightlessness with the citizen’s ‘politicized’ and rights-based life.

The existence of homo sacer is central to Agamben’s understanding of sovereign

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power because the possibility of rights-stripping reveals a schism between the

individual’s biological existence, on the one hand, and her political life, on the

other. Reduced to bare, or biological, life, the refugee is rendered politically

insignificant … Agamben’s understanding of life in the state of exception reflects

a conception of rights as fundamentally grounded in the institution of national

citizenship. Following Arendt, Agamben rejects the notion that human rights are

viable outside the confines of membership in the nation-state. Instead, ‘the so-

called sacred and inalienable human rights are revealed to be without any

protection precisely when it is no longer possible to conceive of them as rights of

the citizens of a state’ (1998, 126). Accordingly, it is those excluded from

citizenship—the refugee, the stateless person, the illegal migrant—who most

fundamentally represent bare life in the exception.” (Antje Ellerman,

“Undocumented Migrants and Resistance in the State of Exception”, 2009)

Anatol’s existence as a figure of bare life is paradoxical in that without a proper channel

for integration or legalization, Anatol comes to be articulated in his lack of ability to

become politically articulated. Anatol is not simply an exile-migrant in the sense of his

being from somewhere else, rather he is without place altogether. Precisely because he

exists outside of the social contract as an undocumented migrant, the state articulates

him through systems of surveillance and capture in his condition as a stateless-body in

order to exercise repressive controls onto him. As several entries in Anatol’s travel log

reveal, his constant unpermitted travel across Western European borders is contrasted

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with his detainment and containment in various concentration camps of refugees. In

this way he is both inside of and outside of the legal system simultaneously, or inside of

its regulations but outside of its rights.

Border systems operate in this way, to both articulate the subjects within their

enclosed limits as citizens with certain sets of rights and privileges while also articulating

a bare life in those outside of the enclosure but nonetheless under its regime of power.

Beyond a political life, economic life also is subject to this distinction. Western

economies have become largely dependent on pseudo-legal workforces that aren’t

subject to state controls on labor standards or guarantees of minimum wages.

Agricultural and low-level service workers in particular have become the sites of

incredibly large undocumented labor forces, and the majority of these markets would

be unsustainable and unprofitable without this kind of legal and economic

transgression.21 Even at the site of the port where Anatol has taken residence, the legal

and sanctioned flow of commodities is also accompanied by corruption and illegal

smuggling.

The logic of a sovereign necessitates such a distinction between the citizen (the

political body) and the hostis (bare life). Just as the conceptualization of the border-as-

coast denotes a necessary entanglement between the stable and instable, so too does

the figure of the political necessarily produce the figure of bare life. While it is important

21 Saskia Sassen, “Globalization and Its Discontents: America’s Immigration ‘Problem’”, pg. 47

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that we understand the articulated body as a “bare-life” existing outside of a political

life, it nonetheless comes to generate a poetic power of its own which prefigures other

expressions of life beyond the state. Antje Ellerman goes on further to talk about bare

life as a site of resistance:

“What is the nature of resistance in the state of exception? Rarely do acts of

noncompliance by those reduced to bare life amount to collective acts of civil

disobedience. Homo sacer exists in a state of abjection where the scope of

resistance falls far short of the resource-demanding standard of organized

political action … In the state of exception, resistance arises from the

circumstance that the individual already has lost all claims against the state and

thus has little to fear from defying state orders. In other words, the power of

resistance lies in the freedom from constraints that limit the scope of

noncompliance for those who still have sufficient standing to fear the loss of

rights. Ironically, then, it is homo sacer’s extreme political powerlessness that is

at the root of resistance and thereby presents a potential threat to sovereign

power.” (Antje Ellerman, “Undocumented Migrants and Resistance in the State

of Exception”, 2009)

Anatol’s precarious condition as a landless person emerges as a site of resistance within

the context of contemporary sovereignty. Here again we find the expression of a

different kind of resistance, one outside of a politics of the state and instead rooted in

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the poetic. Anatol’s life outside of the state renders his life precarious under the

repressive apparatus of the state, but his life outside of politics also teleopoietically

points to futurities beyond state controls. His resilience in the face of a “political

powerlessness” also enables the expression of the power of poiesis: the imaginative

making that constitutes new expressions of being in the world. Indeed, Anatol’s

existence and survival points to the possibility of other futurities and existence of other

nows.

The existence, and indeed proliferation, of landless peoples has come define a

certain relationship to senses of both place and home. Edward Said ponders what it is to

be without a home in his “Reflections on Exile”, and describes Theodor Adorno’s

experience as someone without (and even against) an identification with a particular

home:

“Perhaps the most rigorous example of such subjectivity is to be found in the

writing of Theodor Adorno, the German-Jewish philosopher and critic. Adorno’s

masterwork, Minima Moalia, is an autobiography written while in exile; it is

subtitled Reflecionen aus dem beschadgten Lebem (Reflections from a Mutilated

Life). Ruthlessly opposed to what he called an ‘administered world’, Adorno saw

all life as pressed into ready-made forms, prefabricated ‘homes.’ He argued that

everything that one says or thinks, as well as every object one possesses, is

ultimately a mere commodity. Language is jargon, objects for sale. To refuse this

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state of affairs is the exile’s intellectual mission. Adorno’s reflections are

informed by the belief that the only home truly available now, though fragile and

vulnerable, is in writing. Elsewhere, ‘the house is past. The bombing of European

cities, as well as the labour and concentration camps, merely precede as

executors, with what the immanent development of technology had long decided

was to be the fate of houses. These are now good only to b thrown away like old

food cans.’ In short, Adorno says with grave irony, ‘it is part of morality not to be

at home in one’s home.’ To follow Adorno is to stand away form ‘home’ in order

to look at it with the exile’s detachment. For there is considerable merit in the

practice of noting the discrepancies between various concepts and ideas and that

they actually produce. We take home and language for granted; they become

nature, and their underlying assumptions recede into dogma and orthodoxy. The

exile knows that in a secular and contingent world, homes are always provisional.

Borders and barriers, which enclose us within the safety of familial territory, can

also become prisons, and are often defended beyond reason or necessity. Exiles

cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience.” (Edward Said,

“Reflections on Exile”)

Much like Adorno’s exile, Anatol too is perpetually displaced and distanced from his

home in Eastern Europe, caught in the systems and flows of the E.U. Both Said and

Adorno situate themselves with a certain critical distance from their home, suggesting a

process of defamiliarization as an engine of criticism. Anatol, as a landless person, is not

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only perpetually in exile from his home, but is also exiled from politics itself as a figure

of bare-life. Indeed, Anatol does “cross borders” and “break barriers of thought and

existence” in his resilience and life outside of the state and in his own poetic encounter

with the political.

If we are to return here to the conceptualization of migration within the E.U. as a

social movement, we are again reminded to a different model of social change. Chela

Sandoval, in her seminal text “Methodology of the Oppressed”, describes the

emergence of new syntheses of consciousness which could be the foundation for a

global social movement:

“Differential consciousness, the technologies of the methodology of the

oppressed, and oppositional differential social movement and its ideological

weaponry are part and parcel of a global decolonizing alliance of difference in its

drive toward egalitarian social relations and economic well-being for all citizenry:

an oppositional global politics, a cosmopolitics for planeta tierra. Postmodern

neocolonialism is mitigated by the differential form of oppositional social

movement, which etches and transforms it with varying resistant movidas. The

differential form of social movement is guided by the methodology of the

oppressed, which is a set of technologies that grasp meaning—transforming and

moving it on both sides, that of social reality, and that of the realm of the ‘abyss.’

The methodology of the oppressed acts as a punctum, a courier that accesses the

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realm of consciousness that is differential. This differential consciousness is a

practice for identity, a political site for the third meaning, that obtuse

shimmering of signification that glances through every binary opposition. Taken

together, these processes and procedures comprise a hermeneutic for defining

and enacting love in the postmodern world, and a method for generating

oppositional global politics.” (Chela Sandoval, “Methodology of the Oppressed”,

pg. 181)

This operation of what Sandoval describes as the “third meaning” is a site of resistance

in the figure of bare-life. Outside of and read against the binary politics of the state, new

expressions of poetic love are enabled which transcend the limits and logics of such

systems. While Sandoval imagines an “oppositional global politics”, perhaps we could

consider Ursula Biemann’s work Contained Mobility as setting the stage for an

oppositional global poetics.

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Performing the Border

Francis Alÿs and “Green Line” (2007)

“Sometimes Doing Something Poetic Can Become Political and Sometimes Doing

Something Political Can Become Poetic” (Francis Alÿs)

It’s important that when we think about borders, we do not simply think of them

in all of their attributes as material (their walls, checkpoints, high-tech surveillance

systems, etc.), but rather think of them discursively and aesthetically, as structures

which enable new types of speech and utterance to take shape. Ora, another Latin

derivation of the English border, also forms the root of oratio, or to speak. This suggests

another function of the border, its coding and articulating mechanisms and also its

reliance on being spoken, on being animated and called into being. In this entanglement

between speech and borders, subjects come to speak the border and in return the

border speaks us.

Green Line (2007) is the documentation of a performance by Francis Alÿs in

which he walks in Jerusalem along on the border between Palestine and Israel while

carrying a leaking can of green paint. As he walks along, the green paint slowly dribbles

out of a small hole in the can, leaving behind a wavering line on the ground behind him.

On his journey, he crosses through various neighborhoods and streets, inevitably

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passing through the many security checkpoints that divide the city. A videographer

follows Alÿs on his walk, documenting his travel and the green line that is drawn behind

him the entire way.

The way the line is manifest aesthetically on the ground is very much reminiscent

of the marks on one of Jackson Pollock’s paintings. While the marks on Pollock’s works

are seen as constituting a kind of action unto themselves in their suggestion of the

gesture that generated them, the green line suggests the performative walk that drew it

that is situated a specific historical and social context that demands a reading beyond

the act alone. This logic of mark-as-action also lends itself to reading how borders

operate, essentially as an object-action always in immanence, or not as an actual force

but always as a potential one. The border relies upon a cooperation and collusion of

subjects in relation to it in order for its power to become expressed.

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Figure 6: Still from “Green Line” (2007).

The line-making itself manifests as a playful gesture, articulating the border as an

arbitrary mark in the sand. The way in which Alÿs carries the can of paint makes it seem

as though where the paint actually falls on the ground is of little importance to him, as

his arm swings back and forth in his walk and the paint dances through the air behind

him before coming to rest on the ground. What is left behind is a line which seems as

though it potentially could have been left there accidentally, as if paint were spilling

from the back of a truck or someone’s shopping bag. The mark lacks permanence, and is

sure to vanish quickly as traffic and dust erode the line.

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There’s a way in which borders come to inhabit a space of naturalism in their

construction and maintenance, creating an assumption of a naturalized landscape that

has always been (and will always be) divided in this way. This normative reading of a

border is of course thoroughly compromised when we look even briefly into the past, as

the lines that delimit nation states shift and distort constantly in the clash of wars, trade

agreements, annexations and cartography projects. This is mirrored in Alÿs’ drawing of

the line, as a kind of temporary permanence which will be sure to undergo

metamorphosis as time and history lurch forward. To go further, Alÿs’ poetic painting of

the border is in stark contrast to the actual political border which is dependent on a

rationality and literal recognition.

The title of the work, and the green line itself, are references to the historic

Green Line that was agreed upon in 1949 as the boundary between Israeli and

Palestinian land at the end of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. After the war had resulted in a

clear win for Israel, the Israeli state was established and a green line was literally drawn

out on a map to demarcate its borders with Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Lebanon during

the Armistice Agreements. Almost two decades later, after the Six Day War had ended

in another Israeli victory, the Green Line also came to be drawn around the Gaza Strip,

West Bank and Golan Heights.22

22 Brian Willson, "History of Palestine and Green Line Israel"

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Figure 7: Map showing the Green Line and Israeli Settlements.

While created first as a temporary solution to the conflict in 1948 and again in

1967, over the decades it has become increasingly fortified and militarized, now

complete with large wall building projects and high tech surveillance programs. The

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walls are now constructed in such a way as to be easily moveable and transportable,

almost as if the border was expected to shift and the wall would have to adjust with it.

Its status as a temporary division has also lead to a certain ambiguity as to where the

line actually is in some parts of the country, and also divides many towns, farms and

neighborhoods in half. Just as Alÿs seems to have arbitrarily drawn his line, so too does

the cartographic Green Line seem haphazard and arbitrary in its drawing as it follows no

consistent logic but rather is entangled in the politics and histories of the region. Despite

the Green Line forming the basis of a political border for the state of Israel, it is

important also to note the wall that actually composes the border was never conceived

to be permanent, but rather was created in a state of emergency in order to ensure

security for the Jewish settlers in Palestine. As Wendy Brown describes:

“Still another feature of the Wall’s seeming global uniqueness pertains to its

temporally and spatially ad hoc and provisional qualities. Consequent to various

constituencies that have shaped and reshaped its route, including the Israeli

Supreme Court, anti-Wall protestors, settlers, environmentalists, and realtors, the

Wall’s path has been repeatedly altered over the course of its construction.

Moreover, it has never been formally anointed as a separation barrier, but rather

has been built in the name of a ‘temporary state of emergency’ constituted by

Palestinian hostilities. It is officially declared removable and reroutable as the

security situation requires or as a political solution permits” (Wendy Brown,

“Walled States, Waning Sovereignty”, pgs. 30-31)

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What is profound about Alÿs’ walking performance of the border is that it reveals the

constructed nature of all historical, political and economic divisions. By denaturalizing

the border, not only does Alÿs call into the question all of the political and social

systems which require the border to operate, such as claims to land ownership or

restrictions on travel, but also reveals the potential to construct new histories, new

politics and new societies. Through a process of reading Alÿs’ poetic gesture against the

politics of the region, an imaginative space opens in which routes to different futures

are potentially made apparent. Alÿs’ drawing of the line does not only draw attention to

the historical and material processes that have shaped and transformed it over the

decades, but also reminds us that the line can indeed be redrawn (or perhaps even

erased) in any number of futurities.

It’s an understatement to say that the drawing of the Green Line as well as the

construction of the walls and checkpoints which were erected on it has had an

incredibly detrimental effect on the Arab Palestinians living on the eastern side of the

division. A restricted ability to cross the checkpoints, along with the harassment and

security procedures that one must undergo to cross while they are open, manifests in

constant supply shortages and economic despair for much of Palestine. The

humanitarian crisis that has resulted from these strict border controls is similar in ways

to apartheid South Africa in their visible structural oppression of populations.23

23 Uri Davis, “Apartheid Israel: Possibilities for the Struggle Within”

66

Francis Alÿs’ traversal and performance of the border makes certain expressions

of privilege visible within this system. Alÿs, as a male citizen of Belgium with light skin, is

able to traverse the border in Jerusalem without being harassed, detained or arrested

by Israeli Defense Forces (I.D.F.). In the video documentation, as he walks nonchalantly

through security checkpoints with the dripping green line behind him, the soldiers

barely take notice of him. This same performance would have without doubt been

impossible for a Palestinian to act out, and comes to be an expression of how

movement across such boundaries is selectively policed in order to maintain coded

relationships of power. Martha Vanessa Saldivar, a Mexican border theorist, describes

her experience of travelling in Israel-Palestine as a woman of color:

“Inside our blue passports, our names betrayed the brownness of our origins, and

presumably our alliances. Thus, we were profiled under the guise of national

security, as the Israeli soldier made us get out of the vehicle, take down our

carefully arranged luggage, and open each piece so that he could search our

belongings. Interestingly, the ‘search’ was conducted in such a manner as to

maximize fastidiousness and inconvenience along with a militaristic flair, without

actual inspection. The soldier made a performance of making us open all of our

bags and suitcases, briefly penetrating his weapon into each of our bags, leaving

us with the cumbersome task of repacking and reloading. What exactly did he

pretend to be looking for? Weapons? Bombs? Or perhaps more powerful than

that, footage of soldiers or proof of injustices? Regardless, the ‘inspection’ was

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an act conducted on the pretense of some perceived ‘threat’ created by our lack

of legitimacy as ‘Americans.’” (Martha Vanessa Saldivar, “From Mexico to

Palestine: An Occupation of Knowledge, a Mestizaje of Methods”, pg. 822)

Saldivar came to be harassed in the way she did because she failed to pass as an

American, largely because of both her Spanish name and dark skin color. Interestingly,

the IDF soldier didn’t perform an actual inspection that would’ve revealed if anything

was indeed hidden, but instead performed a kind of security theater. Saldivar was

subjected to “a performance” with “militaristic flair”. The soldier performs the border in

this way, by generating the spectacular conditions under which travel for the privileged

in Israeli society is comfortable and for everyone else it is traumatic. Not only does this

performance contribute to the conceptualization of a militarized and as a result secure

interior, but also generates the specter of a hostis, or the enemy of the state. Again,

whether or not this type of security theatre actually deters attacks on Israel is beside the

point. Rather, these performances operate to enable and situate a set of subjectivities in

relation to the border and the state. This experience again points to the reading of

border as an oratory encounter, an event that is ultimately about articulating and

speaking subjects along the lines of power.

It’s important to remember throughout our reading of the work that our

encounter with Alÿs’ walk is a thoroughly mediated one; we experience his walk through

the lens of a camera. Our experience of the walk is the experience of following – we are

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always a few steps behind Alÿs as we observe him drawing the green line across

Jerusalem. We see passerby’s non-reactions and we cross through the checkpoints with

him through the documentation. If we are again to return to Jackson Pollock, the films

of him painting largely impacted the reading of his work. Only in seeing the

documentation of his gestural motions and flinging of paint do we come to understand

the marks on his canvas. Similarly, we can move to read borders in the same way; only

when we see the border being performed, either by Alÿs or the IDF or even by border

crossers in their enactment of security procedures do we come to understand their

meaning and operation. In short, the power of the border-as-object is deeply entangled

with the border-as-speech.

The historic Green Line got its name for the literal green line that was drawn on a

map to mark the separation between the Israeli state and the rest of Palestine, but in

the physical terrain of Israel-Palestine the border is not always so clearly demarcated. In

some places there are walls, at others, checkpoints, and still at others, it isn’t apparent

that there is a division at all. In his painting of the line, Alÿs is performing this boundary

(or lack thereof) and makes this relationship visible. The performance itself is banal in

form, as it is clear in the documentation that the residents of various neighborhoods as

well as security personal don’t read his walk as much more than just that: a walk.

However, in the space of the gallery the documentation of the performance takes on

the shape of an encounter, a provocation.

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These processes of recognition and encounter underlie how power is generated

in relation to borders. A border relies on a literal experience of recognition for it to

parse and articulate the subjects around it in clear and definite ways. Any sort of

figurative encounter with a border in a sense works to undermine its capacity to code.

Alÿs’ walk in Green Line invites this kind of figurative reading in its enactment as an

arbitrary and banal act in relation to the political and literal operation of the border.

This encounter both ruptures the established meaning of the border and while at the

same time invites new readings and affirmations. Just like in Biemann’s work and

Domniguez’s work, the audience of the work becomes incredibly important as this is

where the political work of the project is being done. Alÿs’ walk itself isn’t the

intervention necessarily, just as Biemann’s shooting of the video isn’t of consideration.

Rather, when it becomes placed in a public setting, within the gallery along with the

other works, that an art going audience could potentially constitute a collectivity that he

imagines. It’s important to remember that Spivak, in her writing on teleopoiesis,

reminds us that no future collectivity is for certain. Rather, Alÿs’ performs the border in

the hopes to one day seeing a future where the border has passed.

Francis Alÿs’ art practice almost always is centered on the act of walking. In his

video work “Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing” (1997), he pushes around

a block of ice in Mexico City, Mexico until it completely melts. In “Walking a Painting”

(2002), he walks across Los Angeles, CA with a modernist painting under his arm. In his

video work “Tornado” (2000-10), he runs into the center of spinning tornados. When

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trying to read his work within the register of the literal, we are at a complete loss as the

symbols and gestures are both arbitrary and absurd. The act of walking within his work

is banal, and it is of no surprise that the public fails to recognize his actions as

performances while he is enacting them. However, when we read his work figuratively

within the contexts and histories within which they are enacted within, waves of

meaning come crashing down on the audience. Each of Alÿs’ performances is situated in

such a way as to enable this kind of poetic reading of his work, one in which meaning is

generated in our own figurative interpretation and reading of it against he politics

within which it is situated within.

The subtitle of the work Green Line: “Sometimes Doing Something Poetic Can

Become Political and Sometimes Doing Something Political Can Become Poetic”, offers a

potential reading of his work in relation to the border in that it suggests that his

performance, through its poetic functions, could constitute a resistance or even a

politics unto itself. This relationship between the poetic and the political is suggestive of

the potential consciousness that could be generated in an encounter with the work. We

can think of Alÿs’ walk as an attempt to perform the border and provide the opportunity

for us to reinscribe it with new meaning in our encounter with it.

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Figure 8: Still of “Green Line” gallery installation, David Zwirner Gallery, 2007

The video documentation of the walk is situated within the gallery space along

with several other works. The text “Can an artistic intervention truly bring about an

unforeseen way of thinking? Can an absurd act provoke a transgression that makes you

abandon the standard assumptions on the sources of conflict? Can those kinds of artistic

acts bring about the possibility of change?” appears painted on one of the installation

walls. A map of Israel-Palestine with the Green Line drawn on it is framed and on

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another. Lastly, some rifles made of wood and film reels are propped up around the

edges of the gallery floor.

The toy guns that litter the gallery floor are propped up on their supports, as if

aimed and ready to be fired. In the place ammunition in the guns however, we instead

find film reels. If Alÿs were to propose a model of change, it would undoubtedly be

grounded in the potential of the poetic to transform the political, or the figurative to

uproot the literal. In his film-reel-turned-guns, it’s as if his Green Line documentation

has become the poetic ammunition with which the political battle of the division

between Israel and Palestine will not be fought, but rather the terms of the political

conflict itself will be disrupted as the border becomes unfamiliar and strange. Even the

guns which are used to wage the bloody conflict between the two sides are transformed

into toys on the ground of the gallery, forcing us to reconsider their significance,

proliferation and history. Similarly, the political can manifest as, or even uproot, the

poetic. For Alÿs, the distance (and collision) between the poetic and the political is

where the possibility of social change opens up.

The text painted on the wall of the gallery seems to be an extrapolation of the

subtitle of the work, and suggests that Alÿs is interrogating conventional models of

poetic action. When interviewed about the opening of the exhibition, Alÿs responded:

“Can an artistic intervention truly bring about an unforeseen way of thinking, or

it is more a matter of creating a sensation of ‘meaninglessness’ that shows the

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absurdity of the situation? Can an artistic intervention translate social tensions

into narratives that in turn intervene in the imaginary landscape of a place? Can

an absurd act provoke a transgression that makes you abandon the standard

assumptions on the sources of conflict? Can those kinds of artistic acts bring

about the possibility of change? In any case, how can art remain politically

significant without assuming a doctrinal standpoint or aspiring to become social

activism? For the moment, I am exploring the following axiom: Sometimes doing

something poetic can become political and sometimes doing something political

can become poetic” (Francis Alÿs, “Sometimes Doing Something Poetic Can

Become Political And Sometimes Doing Something Political Can Become Poetic”)

This potential of the poetic to uproot the political which results ultimately in a

poeticization of the political, is the process that Alÿs investigates in his work. Gayatri

Spivak, when describing how literary criticism has offered readings which at the

extremes are either poetic or literal, moves again to assert teleopoiesis as a strategy for

generating collectivities:

“Copying (rather than cutting) and pasting—teleopoiesis—is part of the general

technique of the new comparative literature, and I am grateful to Jacques

Derrida for the word, which allows us to suspect that all poiesis may be a species

of teleopoiesis, although we might keep the difference intact—as the difference

between event and task, provisionally, practically. The most important thing, as

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far as I can tell, is knowing how to let go. And here fiction, as I suggested in the

previous chapter, can be a teacher. If you push literary criticism to its logical end

it becomes either absolute creative freedom (slyly supported by some corporate

entity, as in the case of the Saatchi brothers in Britain) or maximum verifiability

(as in the case of legalistic ‘demonstrate by textual reference’ (literary criticism).

We must learn to let go, remember that it is the singular unverifiability of the

literary from which we are attempting to discern collectivities.” (Gayatri

Chakravorty Spivak, “Death of A Discipline”, pg. 34)

We find a synchronicity between Alÿs’ defamiliarizing articulation of the border and

Spivak’s suggestion that we “learn to let go”. Certainly each person who comes into

contact with the work will have a different politics in relation to the borders, and as a

result the stakes will be different for each person. We can imagine on the very basic

level how different a Palestinian and an Israeli would encounter the work, for example.

Nonetheless, the collectivity imagined in the viewing audience defies these distinctions

in as much as they poetically figure a world beyond them. Alÿs’ performance of the

border is profoundly radical in that in his playfulness, he reduces the terms of the

Israeli-Palestinian conflict to its bare minimum terms: as a line in the sand. In this act, in

this “copying (rather than cutting) and pasting” of the border, do the politics of the

conflict become unraveled in their poetic function and we possibly can generate the

other futures in relation to the politics and poetics of our current context

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Towards an End

“We seek a world in which there is room for many worlds.” (Subcomandante Marcos)

When discursively engaging with the border, it is not enough to simply describe

the operations and modalities of its power. Any theoretical project, if it is to be

considered seriously, must also look to the many microcosms of resistance, rupture and

subversion which are always present. The story of the border territory’s power is

incomplete without also including the antagonists who always collapse and complicate

the normative recognition of such systems. Power is never complete, without cracks in

its foundation or sand in its gears. On the contrary, power is always failing, and it’s our

responsibility as critical scholars to shine light through these fissures and faults.

In this project I’ve attempted to describe both the structural outlines of power in

different border territories but also to introduce artists who have challenged these

systems via aesthetic and conceptual grounds. As Simon O’Sullivan reminds us, to

dismantle a moment of recognition and insist instead upon an encounter, we are forced

to reconsider the state of things as they are and new affirmations are generated as a

result. Ricardo Dominguez, Ursula Biemann and Francis Alÿs all do this on their own

terms, each deploying different methodologies but nonetheless providing opportunities

for audiences to inhibit and inhabit power. The imagined collectivities of each work

differ just as their contexts do, but all of them provide a shared promise of teleopoiesis.

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Through a process of attacking the binary structures upon which power is

distributed as well as intensifying the contradictions between the state’s entangling and

articulating processes, a potential for resistance unfolds. This is ultimately the power of

art which I would like to highlight most: its capacity to defamiliarize the everyday and

make the normal strange. This is art’s promise of subversive resistance.

The border aims to negate the universal and generate the binary. Through its

segmentation, division, polarization and duality, the establishment of the border denies

all claims of a universal humanism. In a divided plane, meaning and beauty are always

oppositional and referential, and necessarily generate a plurality of moralisms. Borders

do this in juridical ways, for example where one subject is coded as a citizen while

another is not, but also generates a ‘good’ on this side of the line and a ‘bad’ on the

other. This moral power is predicated on the division of space.

The artistic interventions described throughout this project aim to explode these

moral territories and subjectivities which borders enable, and instead assert a

revolutionary humanistic universality – an encounter with ethics beyond borders or

nationality. Each work imagines a collectivity that acts against the logic of borders and

suggests the possibly of a future community without them. The contact between the

poetic and the political is the site which offers the potential of other futures. The artistic

practices which I’ve chosen to include in my thesis are very much the experiences of

encounter against recognition and automatic affirmation. I fully believe it is in art’s

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capacity to not only change our perspectives, but also to remind us about the latent

potential of social change.

By way of conclusion, or in defense of my refusal of one, I’ve attempted to make

your experience with this text its own encounter in formal defiance of resolution and

enclosure, and as such having a conclusion seems to be against the structure of the

work itself. On this note, I would invite you to string back through the text and explore

different avenues and routes in your encounter with it.

78

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