Floating between borders … or, perhaps, an Earth without borders? an online exhibition diana guo , mingj ia chen
Diana Guo and Mingjia Chen
Cultural geographer Denis Cosgrove treats the modern airport as a poetic metaphor of the modern world’s unboundedness, flexibility and mobility. For him, the incessant flow of travellers symbolises a modern global interchange that cuts through both geography and the constraints of time. However, this aesthetic observation fails to address the realities of sociopolitical conflict. Today, it is pure fantasy to say that modern travel has blurred national identity or social hierarchy. National borders are, in fact, the very focal point of hyper-surveillance and sociopolitical boundary-making. The pandemic acts as a catalyst, asking people to re-examine and acknowledge inequality in global mobility. A travelling body is now considered as a potential ‘carrier’ of disease by the border. The formation and assertion of geopolitical borders has been pushed to extremes during the pandemic, leaving many people stratified, deported, denied visas or otherwise unable to cross from one country to another.
This exhibition reflects on and proposes radical reunion, borderlessness, the fantasy of reuniting with a loved one who just happens to be born with a different citizenship. It critiques the bureaucracy of borders and asks, what would the world look like without nation-states? What would earth look like if we did not have borders at all, if we could travel freely from one place to another? An Earth where nobody is a foreigner, nobody is inside, nobody is outside?
on site review 38: borders, lines, breaks and breaches 26
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