ON SITE r e v i e w borders and breaches 38 w i n t e r 2020/21
This issue is based on the premise that a border only reveals its true nature when it is crossed, or breached. Until that point, it is an edge, inert, often invisible. Cross it, inadvertently or purposefully, and all hell breaks loose. When the call for articles was formulated, climate change was the global trans-national constant, owned by no one but highly industrialised societies, suffered by everyone. As a consequence, there is a migration crisis in which borders play a defining role — their closing, their arming, their razor wire, their steel walls against refugees trying to escape some intolerable situation for some other place perceived to be wealthy and empty enough to allow them some small place in it. Weather literally transcends borders, and the speed with which the coronovirus spreads involves borders within the body — cell membranes breached at the microbial level. Ideology admits no borders, although boundaries are marked in its name. Closing a border to an idea or a drought; impossible. Transmission is through ephemeral materials such as words, breath and wind. Ideas, weather and viruses have breached borders with much violence — a paramilitay quelling of protest, an uncontrollable forest fire or the ICU ward. It forces us to question what a political border is actually for . Some of these essays presage a borderless world, others point out the existing ambiguity of the border condition. Some tie borders to resistance and transgression, others to the unexamined ordering systems that borders represent. The present is a condition to look at, decipher and to step over. Literally.
contents
border occupation Lawrence Bird Andrey Chernykh Fionn Byrne, Diana Guo and Jiahui Huang
para || e | A line made by clearing The common border
2 10 14
border dissolution Evelyn Osvath Diana Guo and Mingjia Chen Connor O’Grady
Checkpoint Bravo Floating between borders Softening the edge
20 26 34
walking borders Francisca Lima and Tiago Torres-Campos Jongwan Kwan
Walking dialectics Curbside effect
38 44
coded borders Piper Bernbaum
Mining the edge
48
calls for articles contributors and masthead
On Site review 39: tools ; 40: books who we are
56 57
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