Boundlessly Limited: On Exclusion, Restriction, and Delineation

Borders are not lines but the result of iron discipline. They emerge through maps, through concepts, through powerful interventions, through victories or defeats, regulated by labor markets and by aesthetics. They run between inside and outside, between integration and exclusion, between universality and singularization in the state of exception.
Africa was mapped, divided in the Rotes Rathaus, nomads were made sedentary; colonial borders constituted nations, while nationalities to this day struggle for recognition, territory, or survival: the fate of the Kurds; or that of the former Belgian Congo, which remains divided from the Democratic Republic of the Congo by a bridge that, almost mockingly, was never completed. Ceuta and Melilla are not footnotes but flashpoints of an order that asserts itself internally as value and externally as a fence. Europe’s external borders on African soil – and Frontex pushes those borders out into the open sea.
“The border does not run between peoples but between those above and those below!” – so it reads on the walls of Kreuzberg; beyond such memories of class struggle, domestic border regimes intensify in the housing market, in processes of gentrification, and in identitarian culture wars.
The very notion of humanity is eroding while “Western values” are merely asserted, their core — the universality of human rights — systematically hollowed out. Firewalls inward, harshness outward.
Art remains tied to such socio-historical borders, which form the subject of this performative reading. Yet as an aesthetic practice it also “knows” this, and continues to trace how violence need not have the final word. A collage of quotations, insights, experiences, and hopes will be performed in alternation and overlap, at times synchronously, at times estranged — opposing the rhythm of violence with the joyful transgression of borders.
Bee tours with the beekeeper and storyteller Arezki Keddam are also available on request.