the physicality of curating an online exhibition Similar to many events in 2020, Floating Between Borders took place in the virtual realm. However, the exhibition firmly grounds itself in the physical presence of an empty room filled with artifacts that resemble our personal COVID border experience – mannequins fully dressed in single-use hazmat suits, passports, endless numbers of stamps, hand sanitisers, folding tables. This room provides an anchor for thoughts, from which further ideas spiral outward. In Relational Aesthetics , Nicolas Bourriaud argues that the intention of art is to prepare and announce a future world; however today it is modelling our possible universes. For Bourriaud contemporary art spaces present a period of time that we live through, rather than a sequence that we walk through. In our context, the exhibition room is a snapshot of the unprecedented time that we are living in. In examining the concept of the shifting border, we were initially interested in the literal modelling of a national border in a domestic setting – transforming one’s own bedroom into a border services device at an airport. The development of the online proposal runs parallel with the transformation of the room. The process of collecting the materials and setting the room up loosely mirrors the process of preparing to cross a border. Taking the bed apart, packing and placing items elsewhere parallels relocation. Acquiring the props needed for the live performance from many different sources recalls gathering all the required documents, evidence and certificates for a visa application or an asylum claim. This transformation helps us to understand the contemporary border system as an immanent materialised social construct. Its devices, from online customs declaration apps to electrified fences, all aid in developing arbitrary boundaries that segregate families and inscribe varied legal statuses onto bodies. The room is essential to our exhibition, initiating discussions and providing a workstation to continue reading and educating ourselves on the subject of borders.
The border exists not only at the edge of a territorial boundary, but is also a shifting device. For example, the US border is activated by hundreds of American visa regulators and border patrol agents deployed globally, screening potential visitors before they land on American soil. By expanding the buffer zone between US territory and the outside world, the border travels well beyond the territorial border. In reverse direction, the border buffer also seeps into the interior. ‘Expedited removal’ policies allow immigration patrol to remove from American soil undocumented people found 100 miles away from an official land or coastal border. Offshore visa processing is another way that the border has expanded — in Australia, asylum seekers are put through a procedure in what the country calls ‘regional processing’. Set into place seven years ago, the policy states that any illegal undocumented visitor will be automatically removed and transferred to offshore immigration detention facilities to await further action on their claim(s) to asylum. Ayelet Shachar aptly observes that by “legally recharting the area of Australian territory upon which asylum claims can be made, and by removing any intercepted irregular migrant offshore in remote locations in poorer and less stable third countries, Australia has invented one of the most striking manifestations of the shifting border.”
Diana Guo and Mingjia Chen
on site review 38: borders, lines, breaks and breaches 29
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