Liminality, Transgression and Space Across the World: Being, Living and Becoming(s) Against, Across and with Borders and Boundaries [1 ed.] 9781032408033, 9781032408064, 9781003354772

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Liminality, Transgression and Space Across the World

This book analyses various forms of liminality and transgression in different geographies and demonstrates how and why various physical and symbolic boundaries create liminality and transgression. Its focus is on comprehending the ways in which these borders and boundaries generate liminality and transgression rather than viewing them solely as issues. It provides case studies from the past and present, allowing readers to connect subjects, periods, and geographies. It consists of theoretical and empirical chapters that demonstrate how borders and liminality are interconnected. The book also benefits from the power of several visual essays by artists to complete the theoretical and empirical chapters which demonstrate different forms of liminality without need of much words. The book will be of interest to researchers and students working in the fields of urban and rural studies, urban sociology, cities and communities, urban and regional planning, urban anthropology, political science, migration studies, human geography, cultural geography, urban anthropology, and visual arts. Basak Tanulku is an independent scholar based in Istanbul, Turkey. She holds a PhD degree in sociology, Lancaster University in the UK. She conducted her PhD study on gated communities. Since then, Tanulku has worked on different subjects, such as socio-spatial fragmentation, urban transformation and vacancy, urban gardens, alternative spaces and initiatives, urban protests, and the conflicts that emerge in public spaces and commons, boundary-making and the interaction between space and people. Lastly, Tanulku works on the Lake District and Cumbria (England), particularly on the interaction between its natural and cultural elements and its culture and wild(er)ness. Simone Pekelsma is in the final stages of her PhD at Radboud University, the Netherlands. She has great interest in translating her academic work to other worlds, including policy (i.e., Eurocities) and popular science (Geografie Magazine and Agora Magazine). Simone currently works for Utrecht University in a double role. She is a knowledge broker/business developer in human geography and spatial planning and the managing director of a research hub on the future of food.

Liminality, Transgression and Space Across the World Being, Living and Becoming(s) Against, Across and with Borders and Boundaries Edited by Basak Tanulku and Simone Pekelsma

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Basak Tanulku and Simone Pekelsma; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Basak Tanulku and Simone Pekelsma to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-40803-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-40806-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-35477-2 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003354772 Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Prefaceviii Acknowledgementsx List of contributors xi

Introduction: Living on the edge

1

BASAK TANULKU AND SIMONE PEKELSMA

SECTION 1

Liminality, identity and space13  1 Shelter – a portrait in transit(ion): Gender and migration

15

JOÃO PEDRO AMORIM

  2 Towards a Tranarcha Border framework: Sex, borders, and anarchism

31

ALFONZO MENDOZA

  3 The dual nature of the threshold in the pandemic era

47

IOANNA PAPAKONSTANTINOU-BRATI

  4 Living on the boundary: Interstitial identities in ­contemporary Burundi

62

ANTEA PAVIOTTI

  5 Liminality when grounded: Micro-mobilities in ­contemporary art practice during the COVID-19 pandemic

77

PIA JOHNSON AND CLARE MCCRACKEN

  6 Birds through my Window: Photography as Liminal Looking KATRIN JOOST (TEXT) AND JOHN DARWELL (IMAGES)

96

vi  Contents SECTION 2

Liminality and the city105   7 Hotel living: The contemporary mixed-use gated community in Istanbul

107

SIMONE PEKELSMA

  8 Liminality as anti-infrastructure? boundary making and breaking in infrastructure construction

122

SAM RUMÉ

  9 Childhoods on the move: An ethnography of a Brazilian school bus

137

FERNANDA MÜLLER AND LUIZ E. ABREU

10 Digital magic and the disappearing city

151

SHANNON JACKSON

11 Border research from design cultures: Cyprus Pavilions at the Venice Architecture Biennale as transformative proposals for Nicosia’s borderscapes

166

ALICE BUOLI

SECTION 3

Liminality across and beyond the country183 12 Landscape, liminality, lament

185

ANN CARRAGHER

13 The Lake District: Liminal landscape between North and South

202

BASAK TANULKU

14 Euroscapes: Negotiating National and European identities through imagined boundaries

217

JEROEN MOES

15 Stepping off the wooden path: A Visual Essay

237

GINTARĖ KUDŽMAITĖ

16 Curating boundaries and liminality: A method for disruption GIULIA DEGANO

248

Contents vii

Epilogue: We are all borderworkers

263

PASCHALINA T. GARIDOU, LUUK WINKELMOLEN AND HENK VAN HOUTUM

Index275

Preface

In today’s world challenged by economic, political, demographic, and technological changes, borders and boundaries are often viewed as obstacles that need demolishing. Recently, we have also seen more liminality regarding people, places, things, and experiences existing and living outside borders without demolishing them. Sometimes, despite our efforts, there are beings that we cannot categorise. They are beyond borders and boundaries, such as men or women defined outside the gender norms. Liminal people and places cannot be categorised and are challenging to define, include, or exclude. They are in limbo, neither here nor there. Liminality is being confused with many things: hybridity, equality, and borderlessness and also seen as the opposite of borders/boundaries (anti-border). This book envisions liminality not necessarily as a problem but as a global and ahistorical phenomenon seen across cultures and geographies and analyses various forms of liminality and transgression in different geographies. It also looks at the intersections between borders, boundaries, and liminality. This book is the fruit of a long and productive friendship, which started due to our shared interest in gated communities. Basak Tanulku, an urban sociologist, and Simone Pekelsma, a human geographer, came together to understand gated communities with a new approach. Our first step was to co-organise a small symposium in Istanbul. The second step was co-organising an online session for the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) Annual Conference 2021. The session brought together scholars from different countries working on gated communities and demonstrated how gated communities and, more generally, boundaries exist in different realms, such as homes, neighbourhoods, and cities across the world, in both the Global North and South. Gated communities are the epitomes of segregation and exclusivity, but there are other forms of segregation, physically and symbolically. After the successful events mentioned previously, our interest moved beyond gated communities, and we became drawn to other forms of physical and symbolic boundaries. The book looks at liminality in different scales, such as urban, rural, and the Global North and South. The chapters adopt different approaches and are both empirical and theoretical. Some chapters are written in alternative forms, such as visual essays. Some also question the divides taken as natural, such as man/woman or

Preface ix nature/culture. Lastly, the book demonstrates that not all borders and boundaries lead to dualities and conflict but to liminality. The chapters touch on essential subjects such as the following: • • • •

Liminality from micro to macro scales (home, neighbourhood, city, region, etc.); The construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction of liminality; Intersections between physical and symbolic boundaries and liminality; Liminality between public/private, nature/culture, urban/rural, wild/tamed, etc.; and • Political divides (North/South, East/West). The book is divided into three sections, beginning with identity and extending to broader realms, such as homes, neighbourhoods, cities, and beyond. As a result, it provides a coherent picture of liminality and transgression found in physical and digital realms, and found between diverse actors, such as men and women and humans and non-humans. The book shows that borders and boundaries do not always create segregation. They also unite different sides and develop new identities and cultures beyond any category or definition.

Acknowledgements

We thank everyone involved in this volume, specifically the authors and reviewers. We thank all support staff at Routledge, and special thanks go to Professor Henk van Houtum, who supported this volume by co-authoring the epilogue. We started working with the authors, reviewers, and the support staff at Routledge when the COVID-19 pandemic imposed restrictions on our physical mobility and social interaction. We are finishing this book when everything seems to have returned to normal. Without their support, this volume would not have been finalised. Dr. Basak Tanulku Independent scholar, Turkey Simone Pekelsma Utrecht University, Netherlands

Contributors

Luiz E. Abreu is a professor of Anthropology at the University of Brasilia, Brazil. His research projects investigate the role of gifts in Brazilian politics, particularly in building majorities in parliament. He is also interested in the relationship between language and ritual practices. João Pedro Amorim is a visual artist and a PhD candidate at the Research Centre for Science and Technology of the Arts at the School of Arts at Universidade Católica Portuguesa (Porto), Portugal, where he is also a guest assistant professor. His work emerges from speculations around images of different regimes and qualities and on the contemplation of the mechanisms of perception. Working with moving images, photography, and text, he creates surfaces onto which the subject projects itself and discovers the uncertainty of things in the concreteness of matter. His papers have been published in indexed journals (Web of Science and Scopus) and publications such as OnCurating and Membrana. Alice Buoli is an assistant professor in Urban Design and Planning at the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies, Politecnico di Milano, Italy. Her academic and professional experience combines urban research within the EuroMediterranean context, African urbanism, borderland studies, creative practice research, and editorial and curatorial activities. Over the years, she has been involved in different international projects and institutions, such as the MSC Initial Training Network “ADAPT-r” at the Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn (Estonia), the Tallinn Architecture Biennale 2017, and the “Boa_Ma_Nhã, Maputo!” research project at Politecnico di Milano. Her most recent publication includes “Territorial Development and Water-Energy-Food Nexus in the Global South. A Study for the Maputo Province, Mozambique” (2022), co-edited with L. Montedoro and A. Frigerio. Ann Carragher resides between Lancashire and N. Ireland; she is a PhD (practicebased) candidate and Associate Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) and Blackpool School of Art. Ann is a member of Abingdon Studios, Blackpool, and a founding member of the Proximity Collective established in 2019. Her recent work addresses the states of “in-betweenness” and “liminality” relative to the landscape, borders, and architectural/urban environment. She

xii  Contributors presents works that weave together notions of loss and lament by exploring the ambiguous and allusive qualities that manifest (physically and psychologically) in the intersection among space, place, mobility, and memory. John Darwell is an independent photographer based in the UK who works on longterm projects in social and industrial change, concern for the environment, and issues around the depiction of mental health. Current projects include an ongoing series exploring the complexities of the human/dog relationship, life in rural areas (the English Lake District), and the nature of food consumption. His work has been exhibited and published widely, including eighteen monographs and exhibitions in the UK, the Netherlands, Italy, the USA, Mexico, South America, and the Canary Islands. His work is featured in several important collections, including at the National Museum of Media/Sun Life Collection, (Bradford), the Victoria & Albert Museum, (London), and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, (New York). Until recently, he was Reader in Photography at the University of Cumbria but left academia to concentrate on his practice. Giulia Degano PhD in Modern and Contemporary Art History from the Society and Culture: History, Anthropology, Art and Heritage program of the Universitat de Barcelona. Lecturer in Contemporary Art History at the G. B. Tiepolo Academy of Fine Arts in Udine. She has lectured at the Universidad del Pacífico, Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas, and Universidad Católica Sede Sapientiae in Lima, Peru. Paschalina T. Garidou is a PhD researcher in Political Geography at the Nijmegen Centre for Border Research (NCBR), Radboud University, the Netherlands. Paschalina is currently investigating the rich Roman border legacy and afterlife in contemporary European Union (EU) geopolitical and migration affairs, as these are unfolding through her involvement in the “Constructing the Limes” project. Paschalina’s academic interests revolve around the EU external border regime and migration policy, focusing on the Mediterranean. Shannon Jackson is a professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Sociology and Anthropology Department at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, USA. She teaches and conducts research on Urbanization, Technology, and Embodiment. Her publications include a book based on fieldwork in Cape Town, South Africa titled Embodying Cape Town (2017). She has also published articles based on fieldwork in Kansas City for Technology and Culture and Technology, Knowledge, and Society. Pia Johnson is an interdisciplinary artist, early-career researcher, and lecturer at the School of Art at RMIT University, Australia, whose practice explores cultural identity, mobility, and migration with notions of performativity and hybridity. Her current research aims to present a re-imaging of cultural identities, diasporas of care, and how we inhabit spaces. By utilising an autoethnographic methodology embedded in contemporary photography languages, her artwork speaks to individual and collective socio-cultural experiences. Pia has

Contributors xiii exhibited across Australia and internationally and is a regular finalist in photographic awards, and her work is collected in private and public collections, including at the National Gallery of Victoria. She lives in Dja Dja Wurrung country in regional Victoria. Katrin Joost, the Programme Lead for the BA Photography at Leeds Trinity University, the UK, is an academic and artist. Her work is grounded in Husserlian phenomenology, which underpins her research interests in the philosophy of photography, photography theory, media philosophy, and post-phenomenology. She has published in the field and, more recently, has also become an exhibiting artist. Her practice explores the nature of temporality by focusing on the juxtaposition of stillness and movement in panoramic landscape photography. Recent exhibitions include “River Time,” a reflection on Wordsworth’s poems on the River Duddon, which is a collaboration with the Wordsworth Trust funded by Signal, Film and Media. Previously, Katrin was a director of the biannual conference series under the title Visualising . . . which brought together theorists and practitioners to explore different themes as seen through photography. Gintarė Kudžmaitė is a social scientist and a visual border research scholar, with a PhD degree from the University of Antwerp in Belgium. She has been actively using visual, linguistic landscaping and participatory and mixed methods to study borders, border experiences, discourses and narratives, and life in the borderlands. She is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at Tampere University in Finland conducting critical EU migration policy analysis by focusing on the rhetoric and issue framing in policy documents. Clare McCracken is a site-responsive artist, early-career researcher, and the coordinator of Art History, Theory  & Cultures at the School of Art at RMIT University, Australia. Her practice-led research sits at the intersection of art, cultural geography, and urban theory. She employs innovative performance methodologies to research how mobility systems coproduce space, place, and landscape across generations in Australia. In 2019, Clare won an RMIT University Research Award in the Higher Degree by Research Impact category for her PhD research. Alfonzo Mendoza is a third-year Trans/Border Studies PhD student at Arizona State University, USA. They received a bachelor’s degree in Political Science and Global Affairs from The University of Texas at San Antonio and a master’s degree in International Affairs from The George Washington University. Their research interests involve settler-colonialism, trans theory, queer theory, critical border studies, decolonial theory, and transnational feminism. Alfonzo’s current projects include deconstructing horror texts through a Queer Latinx lens and theorizing what they refer to as the “Queer Apocalypse” that engages with the intersections of queerness, Blackness/Indigeneity, and futurity at the end of the world.

xiv  Contributors Jeroen Moes is a senior lecturer at Maastricht University (Research Methodology, Sociology, Political Science). Moes holds a PhD in political and social sciences from the European University Institute, Florence, Italy. He works in the fields of sociology, anthropology, and political science. He has a particular interest in collective identities, inequality, nationalism, European integration, globalisation, and the role of space and place within these subjects. Currently, Moes’ research focuses on issues of identity, inequality, and European integration. His on-going research projects include the symbolic and socio-spatial dimensions of European integration, “Neighbourhoods in Transition,” which looks at issues of gentrification, identity, internationalization, and social class, and “First Generation Academics,” which examines the inequalities and identities amongst students and staff at universities who are the first ones in their families to attend university. Fernanda Müller is a professor in the Social Sciences Department at the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Her research focuses on the experiences of children in urban areas, specifically, in Brasília, Brazil’s modernist planned capital. Her work explores the intersection of the anthropology of childhood, urban studies, and education. Ioanna Papakonstantinou-Brati is an architect (Integrated Master in Architecture, Technical University of Crete, Chania, 2018) and a performing pianist (Bachelor in Piano Studies, 2018). She also holds a M.Sc. in Architecture, Space and Culture (2021) from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), where she has continued her research as a PhD candidate since 2022. Her academic path helped her understand that she wants to more deeply study people and cities through the tools of urban geography and urban sociology. Her research interests focus on housing, the relationship between private and public, communing, and spatial justice. She has working experience as a teaching assistant at NTUA in architectural practice, and she is currently a researcher at the Environment Laboratory of the School of Architecture (NTUA) and a consultant on research projects. Antea Paviotti is an anthropologist and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Antwerp (Belgium). During her PhD research, she analysed the work of boundary-making and -remaking in how Burundians identify themselves and others in their everyday life. In addition to ethnographic research in Burundi, she researches boundary-making on social media. Online, she studies the dynamics leading to the formation and consolidation of (ethnic) communities and the interactions between them. Simone Pekelsma is in the final stages of her PhD at Radboud University, the Netherlands. She has great interest in translating her academic work to other worlds, including policy (i.e., Eurocities) and popular science (Geografie Magazine and Agora Magazine). Simone currently works for Utrecht University in a double role. She is a knowledge broker/business developer in human geography

Contributors xv and spatial planning and the managing director of a research hub on the future of food. Sam Rumé is an early career researcher who recently obtained his PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Manchester, the UK. He has conducted extensive fieldwork in Ecuador specifically focused on sustainable urbanism and mobilities in Cuenca. He explores the cosmopolitics of urban assemblages and brings together reflections on infrastructures, mobilities, heritages, natures, and modernities. Basak Tanulku is an urban sociologist based in Istanbul, Turkey with a PhD in sociology from Lancaster University in the UK. Although gated communities are regarded as exclusionary and segregating housing forms, Tanulku focused on various interactions inside and outside gated communities in her PhD research. As a result, Tanulku interpreted gated communities as housing forms that use various forms of boundaries (physical and symbolic/abstract), which are in continuous change and they are relational and diverse housing forms. Since then, Tanulku has worked on different subjects, such as urban transformation and vacancy, urban gardens, alternative spaces and initiatives, urban protests, and the conflicts emerging in public spaces and commons. More generally, Tanulku is interested in boundary-making and the interaction between space and people. Lastly, Tanulku works on the Lake District and Cumbria (England) particularly on the interaction between its natural and cultural elements and its culture and wild(er)ness. Tanulku has published extensively on peer-reviewed journals such as Geoforum, Housing Studies and Journal of Cultural Geography and chapters in edited books. Henk van Houtum is a professor of Geopolitics and Political Geography at Radboud University and Co-Founder and Head of the Nijmegen Centre for Border Research (NCBR), the Netherlands. He teaches the courses Borders and Identities in Europe, Geopolitics of Bordering, and Mapping. He has written extensively on global justice, the philosophy of borders, b/ordering and othering, borderism, the global apartheid of visa borders, the autoimmunity of EU’s border policy, (undocumented) immigration, cross-border cooperation, borderlands, the geography and geopolitics of football, and the cartography of borders and migration. Luuk Winkelmolen is a PhD researcher in political geography at the Nijmegen Centre for Border Research (NCBR), Radboud University, Nijmegen. He is currently involved in the project “Constructing the Limes,” for which he researches the legacy and interpretation of the Roman era for contemporary thinking about territories, borders, and migration. Specifically, his research interests include how populist and conservative politicians geopolitically instrumentalize the past to popularize and legitimize b/ordering and othering practices in the present.

Introduction Living on the edge Basak Tanulku and Simone Pekelsma

A movie titled “Border” by director Ali Abbasi displays the life of Tina, who checks passengers at airport border security. The movie is about the quest for Tina’s identity and allows the audience to think about the blurring borders between different identities (gender and human). Tina is a liminal subject, regarded as neither human nor non-human and neither woman nor man, working at the border, a liminal site between countries. Tina’s story can help us to understand the recent demolition of borders, such as those among gender, race, identity, nationality, etc. The boundaries that we thought existed naturally and eternally between various realms such as man/woman, nature/culture, and human/non-human are increasingly challenged. Take gender as an example. Currently, the definition of gender has expanded beyond the traditional binary distinctions between men and women. It encompasses non-binary definitions and representations in areas such as fashion, arts, and social media. This book focuses on liminal subjects, places, and experiences by challenging the world based on categorisation, hierarchy, and exclusion. They are in limbo, neither here nor there. Liminality allows us to ask ontological questions about the self and the other and think about how we would define everything without borders. Although liminality seems to be in the minority, it is more common than we think: we remain in limbo when we wait for something, an outcome of an application, marriage, or divorce. We remain in limbo when we face significant decisions such as choosing between opposing sides: families and significant others, ourselves, and our duties. In a time when we question and deconstruct boundaries and borders, liminality comes as a saviour to define the undefined. Liminality is an answer for the continuously shifting world as the antithesis of rigidity. Liminality is a concept coherent with the necessities of globalisation. We change our jobs, careers, and homes continuously. We go with the wind. Liminality refers to temporality and transience. Consider the urban space you use every day. What about it at night? What about your summer resort during the winter? Liminality also represents the experience. For example, you become a flaneur in the city and walk around its streets without following any guide or rule. The physical world contains liminal areas, whether in urban or rural settings. Again, liminal spaces, such as airports and hotels, are used temporarily. However, a liminal space for one person may be permanent for others. Think about the flaneur DOI: 10.4324/9781003354772-1

2  Basak Tanulku and Simone Pekelsma wandering the streets, which contain permanent homes and offices of others. Alternatively, consider your home’s liminality where each room can be multi-functional and used for dining, eating, and partying. Some concepts are often confused with liminality, such as hybridity, which combines different features to create something new. However, liminality is different from hybridity. Hybrid is still an identifiable thing. Liminality is not. It is more dangerous, uncanny, and something or someone we know but cannot remember its name. Historically, there was the outlaw and the scapegoat, religious heretics, or stateless people. However, these can be defined as transgressive subjects or outsiders (outside the borders). Instead, liminality is more dangerous than outsiders because it is difficult to define, such as UFOs – unidentified objects or beings. We hear more about liminality because we live in an era of dissolution and demolition, from family to religion and from nation to morality and ethics. All have been dissolved but have not yet created a world that includes everyone and is formed by everyone. Instead, we have small patches or islands separated from one another where everyone has their own rules, ethics, and reality. Truth is no longer single. Instead, we live in an era of post-truth. The unity has been divided. Liminality looks like an answer to the shapeless world we live in. Liminality exists with borders and vice versa. Once borders are abolished, there is no need to liminality. However, this does not mean that liminality is the opposite of borders (anti-border). Instead, it is neither side. There are black and white. Liminality is different from “grey” which reflects a hybrid of black and white. It is neither black nor white. Liminality does not mean “equality” as well, and it is not the answer to heal inequality. It refers to being out-of-the-box. There are famous examples for these. Consider Yin and Yang; each part has a tiny amount of the opposite. If we remove the borders of one, then the other could invade. Therefore, dismantling borders does not necessarily lead to a world without borders. For example, since the Berlin Wall separating East and West Berlin was demolished, there has no longer been communism or socialism in their conventional meanings. Instead, almost the entire world has been included in the borders of neoliberal capitalism, which has not created a borderless or equal world but a neoliberal capitalist world with extended borders. Moreover, when all borders are demolished, all parts can become the same, with no difference, which can be mistakenly confused with equality. In this case, there would not be a liminal or transgressive subject because everyone would be the same with no need for equality or diversity. Does being all grey mean an equal world? Where is the diversity when we demolish the black-and-white world and create a grey totality? How do we define the self and others when everyone looks or is the same? Liminality is then different from “hybridity”, “equality”, or “borderlessness”. Liminality does not also mean moving and changing, it might be fixed and static. Instead, as more recent literature argues borders/boundaries are the ones which change and move continuously (Brambilla et al., 2015; Fourny, 2013; Szary & Giraut, 2015; Van Houtum, 2012).

Introduction 3 A short review of liminality and transgression “Liminal” comes from the Latin “limen” with plural “limina” and means “of, relating to, or situated at a sensory threshold: barely perceptible or capable of eliciting a response and second, of, relating to, or being an intermediate state, phase, or condition (in-between, transitional).”1 “Transgression” comes from Middle English, Middle French, and Latin and is an “act of crossing, passing over” from transgredi “to step or pass over.”2 Although we can see and define borders and boundaries, liminality is difficult to define. However, liminality has always existed at the margins of human civilisation. For example, borderlands are sites where different and mostly opposing sides clash, which creates liminal sites, such as the Anglo-Scottish Borders. Liminality and transgression have always existed at the margins of human civilisation. History is full of stories of legendary subjects who belonged to neither side, such as human gods, fairies, or human-animal hybrids, such as werewolves, centaurs, satyrs, and sphinx. Ghosts or hauntings can be seen as a form of liminality between life and death, real and unreal, and normal and paranormal. During Halloween, the borders between our world and the other world diminish, leading to a liminal realm where living and dead can meet. In monotheistic religions, people go to Purgatory after they die and wait there until they go to their final destination of Heaven or Hell. Transgressive subjects live on the edge, such as travellers wandering around. Troubadours, knights, and bards sang folk stories across Europe during the Middle Ages. These subjects are liminal and in-between who do not belong to any order or state. All religions have established a system of inclusion and exclusion based on strong binaries between haram and halal, good and evil, and right and wrong. The modern national state has replaced the religious dogma and created its hierarchy, order, and power. Modernism established strong binaries between right and wrong based on modern morality and ethics in which everything and everyone had a position and role that were clearly defined. Both religion and modernity created their enemies, outlaws, or scapegoats. Religion’s enemy was the heretic who did not follow God’s path. Modernity’s enemy was the outlaw who did not obey the rules of the modern and secular nation (citizenship). Liminality and transgression have always existed with borders, but they were regarded as negative aspects of an orderly (and Godly) world. However, more recently, how they are interpreted has changed, and they are now being regarded as more positive. Liminality has received attention in academic studies (Babcock, 2001; Thomassen, 2009, 2015, 2016; Horvath et al., 2015). Anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep first used “liminality” to refer to an intermediate process, a transition from one stage to another, such as adolescence to adulthood, that is called a “rite of passage” (1960). Next, Victor Turner argued that liminality refers to situations or people left in between. Van Gennep focused on rituals, whereas Turner focused on small societies to explore liminality (Turner,

4  Basak Tanulku and Simone Pekelsma 1967). The recent interest in liminality emerged due to several interrelated developments in the sciences and everyday life: • Binary thinking has been challenged by complexity theory and quantum physics, which has also changed our understanding of the physical world. The world is now more complex and relational rather than fixed and absolute (Best & Keller, 1997; McClellan, 1993; Ginn & Demeritt, 2009; Gere, 2019). • Everyday life has changed due to technological developments such as the Internet and computing, which leads to a different notion of time that transforms from linear to non-linear. • Everyday life has also become more diverse and public space is more fragmented due to the emergence of multiple identities (and non-binary), which challenge monolithic cultures. Liminality is studied in the fields of space, identity, and experience (time and transience) and their intersections. First, regarding space, liminality is studied in human geography, planning, urban studies, architecture, and landscaping (Andrews & Roberts, 2012; Shields, 1991; Stavrides, 2007). “Space” is regarded as a liminal and mobile dimension. Binaries or divides are replaced by networks, leading to a more complex understanding of space. Geography has also focused on liminal spaces or the liminality of spaces, as Banfield (2022) argued. Banfield also added that liminality has lost its primary anthropological meaning of ritual transformation as used by Van Gennep and Turner. Instead, it currently refers to different meanings that challenge binary thinking while prioritising hybridity and thresholds (Banfield, 2022). Although modernism created space divided by strong borders, such as inside and outside, private and public, work and home, and urban and rural, they have been demolished or reduced. The current city and countryside have become difficult to define (due to shifting borders, changing inhabitants and cultures, etc.). There are many concepts to define areas that are neither urban nor rural: peri-urban, ex-urban, edge lands, etc. We now have urban wildlife, such as deer, fox, and boar, roaming beside our pets, and as explained by Jorgensen and Tylecote, there are “ambivalent landscapes” or “interstitial wilderness” at urban peripheries (2007). Where should the boundaries be drawn between wilderness and civilisation? As Sarah Hall’s novel suggests, where does the “wolf border” begin, which divides the wilderness from our civilised world (Hall, 2015)? The need for a new understanding of cities has been discussed in the literature (Merrifield, 2013). Moreover, to challenge the hegemonic divide between urban and rural, a more nuanced division between the two realms has been proposed (Jansson, 2013). The design of homes and cities has evolved into a more fluid understanding of space that meets the needs of a diverse and complex society. “Liminal spaces” were first developed by Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck, who designed in-between places to feel the dual phenomena of the opposite, such as inside/outside, public/ private, etc. (Eyck, 2008). Spaces have multiple functions and are shifting, while the boundaries between public and private and inside and outside are blurred. New

Introduction 5 fields of study have emerged in the intersections among planning, architecture, and design to explore temporary urban spaces impacted by post- or de-industrialisation that leaves old industrial areas to rot (for research on liminal urban spaces and dereliction, see Al Shrbaji, 2020). These unused areas are transformed into new developments (housing, retail, business, or mixed-use) by developers. However, some sites are temporarily repurposed for various needs, often through a grassroots approach rather than intervention from professionals, such as designers or developers (Carmona, 2015; Colomb, 2017; Deslandes, 2013; Madanipour, 2013; Mitchell, 2016; Tanulku, 2017; Vasudevan, 2014). In addition, the high street (the main street of a city or town where the shops are clustered), which experiences decay, is being transformed into temporary and multi-functional spaces, such as pop-up stores. In this context, urban space has become continuously temporary rather than fixed and permanent. As Henneberry argues, we live in a state of “permanent transience” (Henneberry, 2017). Liminality also refers to spaces or landscapes, such as marshlands and coasts, that are not land, water, or sky (for a piece on the beach as a liminal space, see Preston-Whyte, 2004). Additionally, there are liminal spaces due to their transience, such as airports, stations, hotels (Downey et al., 2016; Horvath et al., 2020; Anderson, 2020; Imai, 2013; Marinaro, 2022; Otto & Berthier-Foglar, 2020; Rice  & Littlefield, 2014; Roberts, 2018), or prisons (Moran, 2013). Workspaces can also have liminal elements or corners, such as toilets or staircases, that are for neither working nor dwelling. They are “liminal spaces of organisational life” (Shortt, 2015). Liminality is also studied in the field of border studies related to questioning nation-state borders (borderscapes and borderlands) (Decker & Winchock, 2017; Dimova, 2021), and borders are interpreted as mobile and liminal (Fourny, 2013). There are also spaces used temporarily or built for temporary uses, such as tents or prefabs, and mobile homes, such as caravans. Second, liminality has been examined as a separate field within identity studies. There is growing literature on liminality in queer studies (Ahmed, 2006; Besnier, 1994; Binnie, 1997; Browne et al., 2010; Hines, 2010; Longhurst, 2005; March, 2020; Whitney, 2008; Wilson, 2002) and studies about the intersectionality of identity (Crenshaw, 1991; Bobel & Kwan, 2019). Liminality also refers to different readings of gender identity (heterosexual) while challenging strong binaries and well-defined gender roles (Gibson & Vanderveen, 2021; Sweeney, 2009). The recent emergence of non-binary identities in the field of gender, is an example of liminality. A non-binary definition of gender means attaining a gender identity outside the binary between men and women. Moreover, non-binary people use “they/ them/their” when they refer to themselves (a generic and genderless pronoun) (Greey, 2019). Hybrid identities emerge due to increasing migration and global flows of people and cultures. Relatedly, “statelessness” is another concept that has emerged due to increasing crossings and mobility across borders worldwide. Mobility is a characteristic not only of refugees or migrants but also of ex-pats and highly-paid transnational workers who are less tied to their country of origin due to their mobile lifestyle. The concept of belonging now encompasses multiple places rather than a single one (Ali, 2020; Ibarra & Obodaru, 2016).

6  Basak Tanulku and Simone Pekelsma There are also science and technology studies that focus on the cyborg and animal studies on more-than-human (animal and non-human) subjects, all challenging the uniqueness of “human” as the single actor dominating the Earth and biocentrism over other “living beings” (Allen, 2007; Haraway, 1991; Hobson-West, 2007; Howell, 2020; Moll & Law, 2002; Puar, 2012; Ritvo, 1995; Wolch & Emel, 1998). Although they are antithetical to each other, animals and cyborgs, one biological and the other hybrid, challenge and dethrone the human’s central position in the universe. Cyborgs can be regarded as a hybrid of humans and machines, while animals are sentient non-human. Tissues or organs needed in medicine can be created by combining human and animal DNA, resulting in hybrids. The definition of these hybrids is still unclear. We may see the creation of new hybrid species, such as contemporary centaurs or satyrs. Only time will tell. Third, liminality is interpreted as an experience and temporality (Stenner, 2017). In this respect, liminality approaches its primary and conventional meaning used by Van Gennep as “transition.” Specifically, liminality refers to transitions and temporal experiences, such as COVID-19 lockdowns. In this context, “Anthropause” refers to the declining human effect during the lockdowns (Rutz et  al., 2020). Festivals and concerts can be considered liminal experiences that transform participants during that specific time (Lamond & Moss, 2020; Pielichaty, 2015). In addition, as explained by Peterson, protests can be regarded as liminal since, during these times, the political and social order is paused or demolished without creating a new one (Peterson, 2015). Hotels and other touristic spaces (e.g., Ibiza) can also be liminal since people embrace their true selves (Pritchard & Morgan, 2006). During these social or individual pausing events, such as holidays, festivals, or protests, the borders between various realms (people, things, and spaces) diminish and become synergy and “unity,” demolishing all personal, social, and spatial boundaries. Here liminality approaches “hybridity” and “fusion.” These events can also be interpreted as experiences when individuals leave behind their “ego” and reveal their “id” or true self, without the pressures of everyday life. Liminality has additionally been the subject of art (Broadhurst, 1999). First, there is art about liminality, which explores various forms of liminality emerging from various reasons such as climate change, conflicts and increasing number of migrants and refugees. As a result, liminality has become an essential subject in the arts, similar to the social sciences. In this context, the arts have served as a means of resistance and activism that allow communication between conflicting parties and add aesthetic value and positivity to daily life. The arts can demolish borders and look at liminal subjects and places. Murals and graffiti are parts of this process by colouring walls with optimism, aesthetics, humour, and communication (arts beyond/against/anti/borders). Second, there is liminal art that is about the technique used in the arts and the role of different disciplines (multi- or interdisciplinarity). The emergence of new art forms involves combining various techniques, approaches, and artists, resulting in a hybrid art form. Moreover, contemporary arts aim to demolish barriers between everyday life and art to demonstrate that daily life can be art and vice versa.

Introduction 7 The book This book is the fruit of a long friendship that started due to our shared research interest in gated communities. Although we come from different disciplines, namely, urban sociology and human geography, our research focuses on gated communities’ relationalities with different realms. We both go beyond the simple binaries between inside/outside, safe/dangerous, and private/public and look at how gated communities create blurring boundaries between them. As Tanulku argues in her PhD research and following works, the concept of “relational opposite” is helpful in defining the world, which refers to a binary formed in relation to others (Tanulku, 2016). “Relational opposite” unifies and brings together conflicting sides. In this context, gated communities (like anything else) act in binaries with regard to others (Tanulku, 2010, 2012, 2016). We approach space as a relational and non-fixed realm which reflects diverse cultures and intersectional identities (Jones, 2009; Massey, 1991). When we heard that the theme of the RGS-IBG Annual Conference 2021 was “Borders, Borderlands and Bordering,” we co-organised an online session called “Gated Communities: Making and Unmaking Physical and Symbolic Boundaries,” which brought together six papers from different countries showing the diversity of this global phenomenon.3 We wanted to carry forward these debates and opened a call for chapters on contemporary forms of (symbolic and physical) boundaries and how they unfold in space. As a result of interest, we created two books: the first about borders and boundaries and the second on liminality and transgression. In this book, we aim to understand and analyse liminality. First, we define what we mean by liminality. We define  liminality as anything, anyone, or experience that does not belong to either side, which is something difficult to define, judge, or value. According to Achille Varzi, in geography, there are two forms of vagueness: first, conceptual vagueness in representing geographical entities such as a mountain, lake, or river, which can differ according to the approach/method. Second, there is a vague object that cannot be defined or is difficult to define (the difference between semantic and ontic vagueness) (Varzi, 2001). We approach liminality as the second form, and extend this to non-geographical realms such as subjects and experiences. We argue that liminal subjects and geographies are thresholds with porous borders that do not belong anywhere. We argue that liminal experience is a transition period or “process;” it is not about being but becoming, a never-ending process. We define transgression as anything, anyone, or experience against the order or rule. Transgression is different from liminality since transgression disturbs an order or rule. People can punish transgressive acts or people when they go beyond borders. To be transgressive, there must be a border/boundary to be crossed. Instead, liminal does not do this explicitly. It does not go beyond the borders. It stays on the borders, going nowhere and belonging nowhere. People have difficulty judging and punishing liminality.

8  Basak Tanulku and Simone Pekelsma Second, regarding the context, we do not consider only one form of liminality in this book. Instead, we aim to critically examine how different liminality forms unfold in different geographies. We see liminality as a global and timeless phenomenon across cultures and geographies. The book consists of empirical and theoretical chapters from different geographies that use different approaches and methods of investigation and disciplines, such as sociology, anthropology, human geography, planning, urban studies, architecture, and visual and performing arts. The book also provides case studies from the past and present, allowing readers to connect subjects. It includes chapters written by academics and professionals at different stages of their careers, demonstrating the importance of the subject and providing fresh perspectives from different career paths. The book also provides some works by artists that complete the theoretical and empirical chapters. The authors analyse several subjects: identity, gender, ethnicity, migration and refugees, national/regional borders, neighbourhoods, infrastructure, gated housing developments, inequality, and activism. They address “classical” liminality in the context of nation-states and ask new questions about COVID-19, and lockdowns, and the digital world. The book extends its focus beyond many realms, such as homes, neighbourhoods, cities, the countryside, and the Global North and South. Some chapters also question the divides taken as natural, such as those between man/woman and nature/culture, and political divides, such as the North/South. Some chapters also demonstrate the interrelationships between borders, boundaries, and liminality and aim to understand why boundaries lead to liminality, such as gated communities, which are regarded as one of the most segregated forms of housing. For example, consider fences or walls that divide cities, regions, or countries. People demolish them or create connections between different sides in some contexts. The walls of an old house, the usual decor in horror movies, are an excellent example of how borders and liminality are interrelated. In most horror movies, the protagonist discovers a hidden chamber once he sees a leaking wall. Instead, the wall, which should protect and hide things, reveals a secret. These walls play a crucial role in such movies by revealing the truth behind the hauntings or other strange events. Walls not only hide but also reveal things. Walls, fences, and borders do not always lead to segregation and exclusion but also produce liminality (regarding space, identity, culture, and experience), showing the complexity of the phenomenon. It seems like an oxymoron, but borders can unite different sides to develop new identities and cultures beyond any category or definition. To facilitate the journey into liminality in different realms, the book consists of three sections, first, “Liminality, identity and space”, second, “Liminality and the city,” and third, “Liminality across and beyond the country.” Notes 1 www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/liminal 2 www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/transgression#:~:text=The%20noun%20transgression%20 is%20from,to%20step%20or%20pass%20over.%22 3 See Tanulku et al. (2021) Gated communities in a world without borders. https://blog. geographydirections.com/2021/12/06/gated-communities-in-a-world-without-borders/

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Introduction 11 March, L. (2020). Queer and trans geographies of liminality: A literature review. Progress in Human Geography, 45(3), 455–471. Marinaro, I. C. (2022). Inhabiting liminal spaces: Informalities in governance, housing, and economic activity in contemporary Italy. Routledge. Massey, D. (1991). A global sense of place. Marxism Today. McClellan, J. (1993, Winter). Nondual ecology: In praise of wildness and in search of harmony with everything that moves. Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, 3(2). Merrifield, A. (2013). The urban question under planetary urbanization. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 37(3), 909–922. Mitchell, D. (2016). Tent cities: Interstitial spaces of survival. In A. M. Brighenti (Ed.), Urban interstices: The aesthetics and the politics of the in-between (pp. 22–45). Routledge. Moll, A., & Law, J. (2002). Complexities: Social studies of knowledge practices. Duke University Press. Moran, D. (2013). Between outside and inside? Prison visiting rooms as liminal carceral spaces. GeoJournal, 78(2), 339–351. Otto, P., & Berthier-Foglar, S. (2020). Permeable borders: History, theory, policy, and practice in the United States. Berghahn Books. Peterson, M. A. (2015). In search of antistructure: The meaning of Tahrir Square in Egypt’s ongoing social drama. In A. Horvath, B. Thomassen, & H. Wydra (Eds.), Breaking boundaries: Varieties of liminality (pp. 164–182). Berghahn Books. Pielichaty, H. (2015). Festival space: Gender, liminality and the carnivalesque. International Journal of Event and Festival Management, 6(3), 235–250. Preston-Whyte, R. (2004). The beach as a liminal space. In A. A. Lew, M. C. Hall, & A. M. Williams (Eds.), A companion to tourism (pp. 349–359). Blackwell Publishing. Pritchard, A., & Morgan, P. (2006). Hotel Babylon? Exploring hotels as liminal sites of transition and transgression. Tourism Management, 27, 762–772. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. tourman.2005.05.015 Puar, J. (2012). “I’d rather be a cyborg than a goddess”: Becoming-intersectional in assemblage theory. PhiloSOPHIA, 2(1), 49–66. Rice, L., & Littlefield, D. (2014). Transgression: Towards an expanded field of architecture. Routledge. Ritvo, H. (1995). Border trouble: Shifting the line between people and other animals. Social Research, 62, 481–499. Roberts, L. (2018).  Spatial anthropology: Excursions in liminal space. Rowman  & Littlefield. Rutz, C., Loretto, M. C., Bates, A. E., Davidson, S. C., Duarte, C. M., Jetz, W., Johnson, M., Kato, A., Kays, R., Mueller, T., & Primack, R. B. (2020). COVID-19 lockdown allows researchers to quantify the effects of human activity on wildlife.  Nature, Ecology and Evolution, 4, 1156–1159. Shields, R. (1991). Places on the margin: Alternative geographies of modernity. Routledge. Shortt, H. (2015). Liminality, space and the importance of “transitory dwelling places” at work. Human Relations, 68(4), 633–658. Stavrides, S. (2007). Heterotopias & the experience of porous urban space. In K. A. Franck & Q. Stevens (Eds.), Loose space: Possibility and diversity in urban life (pp. 174–192). Routledge. Stenner, P. (2017). Liminality and experience: A transdisciplinary approach to the psychosocial. Palgrave Macmillan UK. Sweeney, B. (2009). Producing liminal space: Gender, age and class in northern Ontario’s tree planting industry. Gender, Place and Culture, 16(5), 569–586.

12  Basak Tanulku and Simone Pekelsma Szary, AL.A., & Giraut, F. (2015). Borderities: The politics of contemporary mobile borders. In AL.A. Szary & F. Giraut (Eds.), Borderities and the politics of contemporary mobile borders (pp. 1–19). Palgrave Macmillan. Tanulku, B. (2010). An Exploration of Two Gated Communities in Istanbul. PhD Thesis, Lancaster University, The UK. Tanulku, B. (2012). Gated communities: From “self-sufficient towns” to “active urban agents” (R. Roth & W. Dressler, Guest Eds.). Geoforum, Themed Issue: The Global Rise and Local Implications of Market-Oriented Conservation Governance, 43(3), 518–528. Tanulku, B. (2016). Rural imaginations in an urban world: Examples from Turkey. In The Proceedings of the XXVI congress. Places of possibility? Rural societies in a neoliberal world. PDF. www.esrs2015.eu/sites/www.esrs2015.eu/files/Final%20ESRS%202015% 20congress%20proceedings.pdf Tanulku, B. (2017). The urban voids of Istanbul. In J. Henneberry (Ed.), Transience and permanence in urban development (pp. 101–116). Wiley-Blackwell. Tanulku, B., Pekelsma, S., Kenna, T, Lois, M., He, Q., Chaves, K. B., & Handal, C. (2021, December 6). Gated communities in a world without borders. https://blog.geography directions.com/2021/12/06/gated-communities-in-a-world-without-borders/ Thomassen, B. (2009). The uses and meanings of liminality. International Political Anthropology, 2(1), 5–27. Thomassen, B. (2015). Thinking with liminality: To the boundaries of an anthropological concept. In A. Horvath, B. Thomassen, & H. Wydra (Eds.), Breaking boundaries: Varieties of liminality (pp. 39–58). Berghahn. Thomassen, B. (2016). Liminality and the modern: Living through the in-between. Routledge. Turner, V. (1967). The forest of symbols: Aspects of Ndembu ritual. Cornell University Press. van Eyck, A. (2008). The child, the city and the artist: An essay on architecture; the inbetween realm. In V. Ligtelijn & F. Strauven (Eds.), Aldo Van Eyck: Writings. Sun Publishers. van Gennep, A. (1960). The rites of passage. University of Chicago Press. van Houtum, H. (2012). Remapping borders. In T. M. Wilson & D. Hastings (Eds.), A companion to border studies (1st ed., pp. 405–417). Wiley-Blackwell. Varzi, A. (2001). Introduction. The Philosophy of Geography, Special Issue of Topoi, 20(2), 119–130. Vasudevan, A. (2014). The autonomous city: Towards a critical geography of occupation. Progress in Human Geography, 39(3), 316–337. Whitney, E. (2008). Cyborgs among us: Performing liminal states of sexuality. Journal of Bisexuality, 2(2–3), 109–128. Wilson, M. (2002). “I am the prince of pain, for I am a princess in the brain”: Liminal transgender identities, narratives and the elimination of ambiguities. Sexualities, 5(4), 425–448. Wolch, J. R., & Emel, J. (1998). Animal geographies: Place, politics, and identity in the nature-culture borderlands. Verso.

Section 1

Liminality, identity and space

1  Shelter – a portrait in transit(ion) Gender and migration João Pedro Amorim

Introduction The screen is dark. We hear a vague phone conversation. Inside a metro station, we see a person dressed in a very large coat running over a fare gate and crossing this liminal access point. For a short instant, we are left wondering: is this a remake, or a scene of Barres (1984) by Luc Moullet, where he comically explores a few strategies to subvert the system of bars that controls the access to the subway? What does this transgressive gesture promise for the rest of the film? How does this movement of overcoming a clear obstacle qualify the main character of the film that we are yet to meet? The transgressiveness of this movement –  literally transgressing a concrete barrier – reveals itself as an allegory as soon as we meet the protagonist. “I’ve created 7 names”, she says, as we see only her back. In Shelter – Farewell to Eden1 (Masi, 2019), we get to know only one of those names, and we meet only one of the identities that she uses to juggle invisibility and visibility across borders and social spheres. Pepsi, a single word that reminds us of the soda drink created to alleviate indigestion (dyspepsia), is the main character of the film. We learn very little about her. She is from Mindanao, the Philippines, where she was part of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. In this context, her homosexuality and gender identity were not accepted, and she had to escape. She worked in Lebanon as a nurse for about 10 years. From there, she migrated to Europe, arriving first in Italy and then crossing the border on foot to France. During the film, she lives in this indefinite state: she has an asylum seeker visa in Italy, but she lives in France, which forces her to be in constant transition between the two countries. In terms of sex and gender she is also transitioning. She identifies as a woman, she took self-prescribed hormonal treatments, but at the moment of filming, she had still not undergone sex reassignment surgery (and it is not clear if she intended to do it). Pepsi is in a double transition: she is a migrant/refugee in Europe, and she is transgender. She is in a state of gender and geographic fluidity that eludes normative social definitions and bureaucratic categories of identity. Shelter provides an interesting platform to reflect on the representation of gender and migration. Taking into account the concerns raised by Walter Benjamin in The Author as Producer, later reworked by Hal Foster in The Artist as Ethnographer?, DOI: 10.4324/9781003354772-3

16  João Pedro Amorim one recognizes that for the “advanced” artist, it is not enough to portray “[a] correct ‘tendency’, [or] to assume a place ‘beside the proletariat’ ”. For the “advanced” artist, it is necessary “to intervene, like the revolutionary worker, in the means of artistic production to change the ‘techniques’ of traditional media, to transform the ‘apparatus’ of bourgeois culture” (Foster, 1996, p. 171). For Foster, the affinity between the “advanced” artist and proletariat proposed by Benjamin, gave way to a new paradigm – emerging with the anthropological turn of the 1960s – where “[a] shift from a subject [of association] defined in terms of economic relation to one defined in terms of cultural identity” occurs (p. 173). This analysis of Shelter first focuses on “the solidarity that counted for Benjamin”, namely, a “solidarity in material practice, not in artistic theme or political attitude alone” (p. 172). Shelter not only tells the story of a transgender migrant (artistic theme) in an activist way (political attitude) but also does so by engaging at the level of the means of artistic production. It proposes a liminal aesthetic approach that shares a solidarity in material practice with the subject that it depicts, and it reimagines formal and aesthetic possibilities. I focus on the specific aspects of the film regarding the involvement of Pepsi in her own portrayal and the hybridization of formats (16 mm, HD, archival footage, among others) that comprise it. Later, I return and review some of Foster’s predicaments around the challenges artists face when working with otherness and how such work is manifested in Shelter. Portrait and landscape of a territory “At the beginning of the film, the portrait was not expected. We were aiming at the portrait of a territory. An observational documentary about a very specific place, in which maybe we could catch the essence of a great phenomenon: the migratory phenomenon”. Extract from an interview with Enrico Masi (Escola das Artes – UCP, 2020)2

Originally Shelter was a research project on the theme of migration across Italy and France: the geographical spine of middle Europe. For about a decade, Enrico Masi, the film’s director, developed an artistic and directorial practice centred around the concept of mega-event, the main focus of his PhD in Pedagogy from the University of Bologna, and Shelter is part of a trilogy that engages with that discussion. The Golden Temple (2012) was focused on the processes of gentrification caused by the 2012 London Olympics; and Lepanto – The Last Cangaceiro (2016) takes the contemporary impact caused by Brazil’s 2014 Football World Cup and 2016 Rio Olympics as a motif to dwell on the socio-cultural history of colonialism in the country. In Shelter, the mega-event is the set of migratory fluxes that have formed around Europe, with a peak around the mid-2010s. Slavoj Žižek (2014) defines an event as something that happens that “retroactively determines its causes or reasons” (p. 13). According to this perspective, an event is something that transforms the historical narrative from which it emerges to define our interpretation of what came before it and what comes afterwards.

Shelter – a portrait in transit(ion) 17 A mega-event, in its hyperbolic form, suggests the spreading of its effects that has an impact on a continental or global scale. Often, this concept is used to describe transcontinental organizational efforts that culminate in global happenings such as the Olympics. Nevertheless, a broader understanding of “event” as something that does not necessarily stem from wilful organization allows us to include in this concept global situations such as revolutions, global conflicts, pandemics, and the subject of the present article, the migratory fluxes in Europe. Before Pepsi, Shelter was not planned to be focused on a single character but rather to represent the “indefinite and international territory, . . . as if this was one single territory” that so many migrants cross pursuing shelter (Escola das Artes – UCP, 2020) – a refuge that is not only political and sociological but also symbolic. The abundance of landscape in the film reveals the several stages of this filmic research and accentuates the connection between the particular story of Pepsi and her belonging to a wider context. The landscapes that retrace Pepsi’s journey are crossed and populated by a few migrant bodies and vestiges of their precarious migration. We understand that there are partially invisible migratory fluxes that can be found in the image, but we cannot grasp their scale. The genre of landscape has become prominent and prestigious in Western tradition, particularly until the 19th century through easel paintings. Following this specific tradition, as Enrico Masi and his team were following the migratory flux, they were filming and depicting a specific territory, namely, the Italo-French axis. Landscape is often associated with the representation of something natural. However, landscape representation captures the essence of the interconnectedness of nature and culture, as the transformations created by humans are also registered by the brush or camera. More importantly, the techniques and the visual codes that define how representation translates the visual existence of a landscape are already informed by the cultural and social backgrounds of the artist. A landscape is the projection of the human gaze that creates a certain pictorial composition through the arrangement of signs and expressions that represent natural and human elements. An artistic representation is always limited. A landscape cannot represent the territory in its wholeness. The artist and film director Ana Vaz claimed about her films that she tries “to escape from the notion of landscape”, preferring the concept of “territory”. For her, “[u]nlike the landscape, the territory is produced by historical, biological, social, spectral, spiritual relationships, and they are alive” (Bergamaschi Novaes, 2021, p. 148). This critique of landscape, however, seems to be attached to the most conventional idea of landscape associated with Renaissance painting that supposes that such representations imply a removal of the body of the artist from the environment to create an ideal representation of nature. As John Berger (1972) evinced in Ways of Seeing, the genre of landscape in European painting in its most usual expressions – never mind the masterpieces and extraordinary works – was before anything else a form of representing ownership of land and, therefore, power. Hence, any withdrawal of the artist that is implicit in the genre of landscape – even when talking about Renaissance painting – will show all the territorial relationships as filtered by the artist’s gaze. That is, a landscape – in

18  João Pedro Amorim painting, film, or photography – can capture and represent, within its own limits, the complexity of a territory. However, it is impossible to think of territory as an artistic genre – it is a set of living and dynamic relations that cannot be reduced to an artistic surface of any kind. But how can a landscape express or suggest the complexity of a territory? In an article that proposes a state of the art around the return to landscape in geography – and in the arts and humanities – Jorge Gaspar (2001) defends a broader understanding of the concept: The multiple investigations about landscape have shown the importance of new dimensions that go beyond the simple visual apprehension resulting from the relations between humans and the environment.3 (pp. 84–85). Such an understanding includes not only sensorial landscapes – such as soundscapes – but also “landscapes of the spirit” (p. 95). The latter can be visited through “imagination, assisted or not by documents” or through the rediscovery “with a retrospective gaze towards the materialization, possible in the now, of a life” (p. 94). One cannot fully transcribe a territory onto an artistic representation, and European conceptions of landscape inherit the aforementioned limitations of the easel painting tradition. Still, a multidimensional landscape composed of textual or sensorial elements edited and arranged can reach a representation of a territory. In Shelter, the landscapes presented by Enrico Masi register the territory. As the camera traverses the territory by entering and penetrating it alongside the migrants,4 it meets several affective narratives (conveyed by the characters and through documentary and archival footage), and as it crosses the march of migrants, it reveals the traces they leave behind. The embodied camera moves from external point of views to tracking shots. It does not imply the removal of the body of the author but rather expresses its presence. These multidimensional landscapes are dynamic representations that, even though they are limited to the specific perspective of their filmmaker, point towards the social, the political, the poetic, and the spectral, as expressed by the materiality of moving bodies. Shelter articulates a collection of landscapes on the migration route, tracing the “intersection of moving bodies” that constitutes it as a territory (Mbembe, 2000, p. 261). Under a viaduct, a group of tents are assembled, and in a close-up shot, two pairs of black hands try to get warm by the fire. Construction work is being done by the French border. The activity in a refugee centre is shown, with the strong impression of a young man playing soccer alone, powerfully shooting the ball against the fence. We follow Pepsi during the night, but we never see her face. She is walking through a pitch-black field and carrying a light and some plastic bags. All of these scenes characterize a territory of/in transition that seems to be at the margin of urban spaces: not only fields and forests but also suburban and lowincome areas of the cities. These places, often underprivileged within the industrial society, tend to be less policed and more invisible. Thus, they become points of possible border crossing, but they are also more dangerous. Epistemological and

Shelter – a portrait in transit(ion) 19

Figure 1.1  Still from Shelter – Farewell to Eden. Overpass in Ventimiglia. Source: Courtesy of the Director.

ontological violence forces some forms of existence towards social invisibility. In Shelter, Masi tries to give visibility to some of these people and, thus, to the political body they form, while preserving the necessary opacity so that they might not be identified by the authorities. For many of these migrants, “invisibility can be deadly” – as Hito Steyerl suggested – but full visibility could mean deportation or worse. The fact is that such conditions have been accepted by the migrants as a dangerous form of resistance against the bureaucratic state and its police. The balance that Shelter tries to find is that of giving visibility to the political and affective narratives, while keeping the civilian anonymity of all of its migrant subjects. A portrait in transit(ion) At a certain moment, a character was able to represent the whole group. And [the] individual portrait appeared. But we couldn’t film her face to protect her identity; hence, a missing portrait. (Escola das Artes – UCP, 2020)

Like landscape, the genre of portrait should also be seen as a surface where the distinction between culture and nature becomes difficult to define. The most evident thing about the portrait of Pepsi is how dangerous visibility can be for her. During

20  João Pedro Amorim the whole film, we never see her full face. Sometimes hidden by a scarf, sometimes seen from perspectives that protect her identity, the portrait of the heroine of this film appears despite the invisibility of her face. This figure overcomes anonymity through the emotional self-narrative of Pepsi. Such representation, although it cannot be traced back to a specific identity, reveals the specific subjectivity of the character. The lack element of this “missing portrait” defines the political subject that presents itself: a subject that has to circulate in between regimes of invisibility while claiming a right to visibility. The absence of a face is fundamental in the depiction of the portrait of this political subject – it integrates the violence of invisibility that Pepsi is subjected to. Marnell et al. (2020) stated that “[a] border crossing of any kind is dangerous, for it marks one out as an other, a potential threat to social categories that are fragile at best – ‘citizens’, ‘subject’, ‘male’, ‘female’ ” (p. 87). As they move through marginal spaces, this threat is double for queer migrants because the mere existence of these subjects represents a disruption of both “hetero-patriarchal norms and claims to nationhood” (p. 87). The intersectionality of Pepsi’s condition qualified this character to represent the ensemble of migrants that, due to different identity traits, face multiple challenges in finding shelter in Europe not only from their country of departure but also from the norms and bureaucracy of European societies. In particular, female and queer migrants find an aggravated risk of becoming victims of sexual violence, adding to all the other risks that they already face. To

Figure 1.2  Still from Shelter – Farewell to Eden. Pepsi by European coaches (Bologna). Source: Courtesy of the Director.

Shelter – a portrait in transit(ion) 21 understand these dangers, we have to consider the intersectionality of their condition, as “queer migrants do not experience homophobia/transphobia in one place and xenophobia in another, but rather live both concurrently” (Marnell et al., 2020, p. 90). However, “even within this context of violence, queer migrants continue to develop livelihood strategies, forge networks and resist oppression” (p. 87). Although individual narratives are important, particularly for the art of cinema, Masi looked at these narratives as a form of enhancing the political movement of migrants who have so little visibility in public discourse. As Pepsi was moving across this territory strengthening the collective portrait through her own affective narrative, the “[b]ackgrounds . . . set up and highlight the individual portrait” (Escola das Artes – UCP, 2020). Masi focused on the collective process of migration, and he admits that the sexual aspect of Pepsi’s story was lost throughout the film. Nevertheless, the gender aspect is fundamental: first, to understand how Pepsi got into this situation in the first place – it was one of the reasons for her migration, as she states in the film that she had to leave the Philippines for “being gay” – and second, to understand the specific challenges that threaten her. As Marnell et al. (2020) proposed, xenophobia and transphobia are experienced concurrently, and an intersectional critique is necessary to fully understand the ontological violence that she suffers by merely existing. Usually, a distinction between sex and gender is advanced: sex relates to biology/nature, and gender relates to culture. However, as proposed by Judith Butler (1990/1999), such a definition would mean “a radical discontinuity” between “sexed bodies and culturally constructed genders” (p. 10). Many feminists, such as Butler and Donna Haraway, have pointed out that this relates to the binary at the core of the myth of Western rationality: nature vs culture. In this sort of binary, it is implicit that one of the poles of the binary dominates the other: culture dominates nature just as the mind dominates the body, for example. Therefore, to take this distinction seriously and to believe in the “mimetic relation of gender to sex” means to succumb to the hetero-patriarchal ideological bias that defines society. For Butler (1990/1999), “gender must also designate the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established . . . by which ‘sexed nature’ or ‘a natural sex’ is produced and established as ‘prediscursive’ ” rather than simply being conceived as “the cultural inscription of meaning on a pregiven sex” (p. 11). Accordingly, sex is not a “politically neutral surface” that stems exclusively from anatomical configuration “on which culture acts” but a cultural and political construction that corresponds to a certain normative regime.5 Moreover, the “presumption of a binary gender system implicitly retains the belief in a mimetic relation of gender to sex whereby gender mirrors sex or is otherwise restricted by it” (p. 10). Transitioning: movements and becomings The heteronormative structure of European societies, even if less evidently violent than those of other societies, is yet another obstacle to the recognition of asylum or residence of migrants. It is in the face of this difficulty that the portrayal of Pepsi,

22  João Pedro Amorim based on the performativity of her agency, becomes expressed only in the lack, specifically, in the invisibility of her face. Such heteronormative structures highlight the difficulty of understanding the complexity of transitioning, particularly by the opposition between “trans as condition” (or as a fixed post-transition category) and “trans as movement” (or as a process of becoming without an arrival stage). The first is more easily understood and accounted for in legal systems, inferring “that transitioning is a limited process where people move to(ward) their desired gender, with transition being realised when they have arrived at it” (Shepherd & Hanckel, 2021, p. 50). This conception excludes the ontological validity of the individual throughout the process – only once it is achieved is the individual acknowledged – and fails to include the diversity of expressions of gender that might exist, including fluid identities that are not fixed in any of the binaries. In addition, Shepherd and Hanckel propose “trans as movement” “[a]s a conceptual tool [that] can be used to create space for more expansive ontologies of gender that confront the harms and restrictions imposed by the gender binary and offer alternative ways of (re)imagining multiplicity in trans(ition) trajectories and futures” (p. 53). Likewise, “[m]igration necessarily involves becoming as much as being” (Collins, 2018, p. 978). A migrant is not a passive and finite political agent. Despite their relative invisibility, “migrants both appropriate and rework the territorialising powers of migration regimes – they become the labouring bodies desired in these regimes as well as active human subjects whose presence can never be completely contained” (p. 978). They transform themselves as they migrate, and they subtly transform the contexts they cross. Their political agency “alter[s] the politics of migration, or they subvert the workings of the migration regime by becoming undocumented and insisting on their continuing presence and stability” (p. 978). Migrants also pose a challenge to bureaucratic and legal systems. As pointed out by Collins, migration descends from a desire that cannot be reduced to “the result of calculative thought on the part of migrants or government”. Migration might be about economic issues or safety or well-being, but many other subjective and ineffable aspects that cannot be located in a single temporal moment can condition a decision. All of these factors are operated by “desire”, and it is always about the “transformation of subjecthood, about becoming more than just a migrant” (p. 978). Both “movements” and “becomings” highlight the difficulty of fluid identities in the context of the centralised and hegemonic forms of social management that fail to recognize them. This, of course, clashes with the several states, and in our case, with the European Union, where freedom of movement is pretty much limited to goods and commodities and to people who are recognised as European citizens or as desirable tourists or immigrants. Xenophobia is not exclusive to the Far-right in Europe but through inaction and silence, is widespread throughout the whole continent. Xenophobia and transphobia do not have to be openly expressed but are unconsciously manifested in the legal structures that fail to include those who do not fit within its limitations. Moreover, “[t]he near impossibility of having one’s sexuality and/or asylum claim recognised by the state has serious consequences for individuals” as they are not able to “participate fully in society” (Marnell et al.,

Shelter – a portrait in transit(ion) 23 2020, p. 100). The limitations and this invisibility are not natural; contrary to what one might believe, they have genealogies. Invisibility is socially produced.6 In this chapter, I focus on the intersectionality of transgender and migrant issues, but clearly this form of epistemological violence that devalues certain “possibilities of viable personhood” can be applied across several categories of identity. In addition to gender, race, and nationality, it is obvious that class also plays a huge role, and certainly, there are several other relevant categories. Ultimately, migration and transgender “phenomena” reveal how “operations of systems and institutions” manage the recognition and elimination of certain forms of “personhood” (Stryker, 1985/2006, p. 3). Therefore, the representation of Pepsi and the struggles of migrants and transgenders, although being acutely personal, are also a story of universal appeal: they talk, before anything else, of which forms of personhood are accepted and which are not. They discuss our freedom of becoming under the tendency of homogenization in mass societies. Performativity At the moment when the authors told Pepsi – You are also representing a movement, you could be a revolutionary subject – she understands it and participates in this process. (Escola das Artes – UCP, 2020)

The most evident narrative and aesthetic choice throughout Shelter is the central role and agency that Pepsi assumes. Although the visual dimension of the portrayal is oblique, shaded, and fragmentary –  as I  have discussed previously – its performative and sound dimensions highlight a deep collaboration between character and director. When we follow her through an empty field or through her intimate space, she is always aware of the presence of the camera. As a paradigm, the opening scene, with Pepsi jumping over the metro fare gate, is shown not as a scene taken from Pepsi’s life but as a performance directed towards it. By accepting the importance of narrative and taking part in its construction in dialogue with the director, she actively participates in its writing. We hear Pepsi’s story through her own words. We hear a monologue throughout the film, not an interview. This is quite significant. An edited interview supposes the ability to catch an impression of the character’s discourse, whereas a monologue is always a construction. It implies thought and analysis; it implies repetition and intentionality. The director is not a neutral agent who tries to document objective reality, as some schools of documentary desire, but rather he is a listener and with all due reservations, an ally. The alliance comes from this filmic platform that Masi proposes to Pepsi and that she takes. She fictionalises and dramatises her own life. Performance towards the camera is a constant in filmmaking. In Cronicle of a Summer (1961), Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin interview a series of subjects in Paris. In a particular scene, one woman walks desperately through the streets of Paris as she tells the story of her father – a Jewish man sent to a concentration camp by the

24  João Pedro Amorim nazis. At the end of the film, Rouch and Morin show the film to all the subjects who participated. The woman comments that, even if at the time she was not aware, she now notices that she had been acting in the scene. This supports the authors’ theory that everything that happens in front of a camera is a performance, even if one is talking of a documentary. Some interpretations of this scene will question the authenticity of the woman’s story and performance. However, although Rouch and Morin walk back and forth outside the screening room in their cigarette break, Morin states that “if she was acting, she was acting the most authentic part of herself”. It is not reality or authenticity that is difficult to reach through cinema but objectivity. The setting of a camera immediately sets the stage for a realistic performance. As they continue their discussion about how Cronicle relates to “usual” cinema or to reality itself, it is necessary to recognise the significant role performativity plays in our everyday life. Before anything else, performativity is directed towards oneself: The so-called inner image of oneself that we all possess is a set of pure improvisations from one minute to the next. It is determined, so to speak, entirely by the masks that are made available to it. The world is an arsenal of such masks. But the impoverished and desolate human being seeks out the image as a disguise within himself. (Benjamin, 1929/2005, p. 271) The “inner image of oneself” appears in the split between selfhood and otherness, from the recognition of the self that emerges from the contrast with the other. Performativity plays a considerable role in the construction of identity and relationships of affinity. According to psychoanalysis, the construction of the self is conducted in relation to the Other, through acts of speech or performativity that consist of intentional and contingent constructions of meaning. Both the self and other are not stable entities but are in constant construction through the ­self-affirmation of the identity of the subject. Along these lines, Judith Butler (1990/1999) proposed that “[t]here is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (p. 33). As such, gender is not so much a condition, but more of a movement or a becoming that results from the repetition and reiteration of certain acts of speech. The performative production of gender is “compelled by the regulatory practices of gender coherence” (p. 33). Transitioning is a movement from certain expressions of gender in a fluid process that might or might not stabilize a certain set of physical and cultural expressions that can be identified within the traditional genders. This is a challenge to the legal and bureaucratic system that is driven by the clear and sharp categorization of humans under specific labels and social roles. This form of transphobic violence, which might not be conscious, means that “people living with diverse genders and sexualities largely remain invisible across all levels” of society (Shepherd & Hanckel, 2021, p. 43).

Shelter – a portrait in transit(ion) 25 Butler claims that performative expressions of gender should not be taken as propositions that demonstrate or that are subjected to a judgement of their truthvalue. Such expressions are affirmative, and they are statements that create their own truth-value. This means that gender identity is not dependent on external approval and that external criticism cannot deny the meaning created by these expressions. Some critics of this theory suggest that it is problematic as it might be interpreted as intentional, not authentic, and as acting – which might fall within some homophobic tropes. However, this critique is based on a misunderstanding. Susan Stryker (1985/2006) explains that declaring “gender as a performative act is to say that it does not need material referent to be meaningful, is directed at others in an attempt to communicate, is not subject to falsification or verification, and is accomplished by ‘doing’ rather than ‘being’ something” (p. 11). Returning to the discussion of Morin and Rouch, performativity implies that a certain expression is produced towards an other (or the self, or the big Other), but it does not mean that what is expressed is fictional or untrue: it is the subject recognizing in the gaze of the other an opportunity to communicate and to selfaffirm their identity. This means that performativity is a “theory of agency, .  .  . one that cannot disavow power as the condition of its own possibility” (Butler, 1990/1999, p. xxiv). According to this understanding, gender becomes released from a material, natural, and biological referent that serves the structure of the ­hetero-patriarchy. Gender becomes independent from the category of sex (that under the hetero-patriarchy, is socially perceived as natural) and is therefore individually constructed through performativity. Likewise, migrants perform their identity by physically transposing borders. It is the desire to exist in a different set of economic and social conditions, often along situations of extreme need or danger, that prompts them. However, the physical and cultural expressions of nationality are sometimes difficult to hide, particularly when they migrate to places with different languages. In the 20th century, the first generations of migrants were compelled to hide their differences to try to blend in and become invisible. The following generations and more recent migratory movements have had some more possibilities to show their cultural expressions, but it is still socially complex to do it – and in many cases, dangerous. Pepsi takes the platform of Shelter to self-affirm her identity. Simply by existing and by performing her gender and her “astronautic abilities”7 to exist beyond borders, Pepsi is threatening the hetero-patriarchal and nationalistic structures of society. If nothing else, this expression in film makes it thinkable and gives visibility to certain modes of existence that usually are invisible. And what is thinkable becomes possible. Hybridization of formats A second aspect that stands out in the narrative and aesthetic construction of the film is how it seems to be in transit through different times and spaces. The film combines different regimes and formats of images: high-definition digital images, analogic film, personal and institutional archives, etc. Masi calls this aesthetic

26  João Pedro Amorim choice the “hybridization of formats” and claims that it intends to “give back a living body to the images” in the most “organic” and “alive” way possible (Escola das Artes – UCP, 2020). The ambiguity around format, across a variety of fields of study, opens the concept to multiple different contexts and for different purposes. Hybridization of formats emerges in the conceptual framework of postmodern aesthetics, alongside pastiche8 (Penas, 2013, p. 134) to describe the melange of genres, namely, of documentary, fiction, television, and cinema visual grammar. In the context of Shelter, however, although some of these hybridizations are also useful, it is the diversity of formats onto which the images are recorded and the different aesthetic regimes that each image brings. The documentary is not filmed by using a single format or a few formats that appear and are contextualized through a voice-over – which is relatively common in films that employ archival footage. Shelter combines all of these formats without contextualization or a strict narrative purpose. Although we can understand different intentions behind each format – the high-resolution image stands for the most observational documentary, the analogue film uses more allegorical or poetic moments, the archival footage provides a historical context to the narrative – they are not stable. For example, the archival footage of a woman dancing on the beach, whose context we cannot understand, materialises as an expressive element of emotional immersion into the narrative. Another example is the image of a white cow, filmed in digital high-resolution, that appears a few times as an allegory for the myth of Europe (Escola das Artes – UCP, 2020). Like the different tissues that compose a body, the different formats become intertwined as different types of pigment in a mixed media painting, while the montage and the ambience created through sound harmonises their differences. Digital and analogue, new and archival, documentary, experimental, and fiction, all of these regimes of images and sounds blend in a discursive composition. Shelter refuses the “wholeness”9 that characterizes Western thought and the myth of Eden as an original state of “purity”. This film portrays a Farewell to Eden, a farewell to these wholesome and coherent filmic objects that portray ideal representations of the world. Instead, Shelter crosses format boundaries and categorizations. Like Pepsi, the film itself is in constant transition between different regimes of image and refuses to ever portray an ideal unity. Traditional Western art – until the aesthetic revolution in the mid-19th century – was defined by the binary content/form. In this paradigm, form was dominated by content – form was there to ideally represent a certain theme (many themes were religious or heroic), and its quality was measured by the ability to reach perfection. The aesthetic revolution, as described by Jacques Rancière (2019), meant that form was released from this form of domination. More importantly, the divide between content and form became more porous, and form (or the aesthetic) came to be equal with content. In Shelter, form and content are intertwined to release the aesthetic object – the film – from the constraints of traditional Western thought. Therefore, purely aesthetic choices have a very strong impact in the political potency of an artistic object – as it

Shelter – a portrait in transit(ion) 27

Figure 1.3 Souvenir de l’enfance perdue (Liguria als Mindanao). Still from Shelter – ­Farewell to Eden. Example of the archival footage used in the film. Source: Courtesy of the Director.

is not enough to free the content (narrative, story) from hegemonic structures; form should also be released to create a possibility of understanding the real. Conclusion Hal Foster (1996) warned artists working with otherness. Between a “reductive over-identification with the other” and a “murderous disidentification from the other”, there is a thin line of balance where one should “negotiate the contradictory status of otherness as given and constructed, real and phantasmatic” (p. 203). Foster suggests that artists will engage in a reflexivity about their own position to “frame the framer”. The complicated status of otherness is the focal point of Masi’s film: to work with and represent a queer migrant narrative. As Marnell et al. (2020) suggested, there is a risk of “reinforcing hegemonic narratives” and “reducing individuals with complex lives” (p. 93). In the context of a documentary film, another issue should be taken into account: the fact that queer migrants, due to their history of facing dangers and difficulties, become “adept at crafting their story to align with the expectations” of those “who may be able to provide assistance”. Masi had to develop strategies of how to offer a political representation that can do justice to the phenomenon and to all the subjects he has met. These strategies were the implicit contract with the main character and how the film could provide

28  João Pedro Amorim a platform for her performativity and self-affirmation and the hybridization of formats: that is, the construction of a filmic object that includes many different regimes of images, without aiming at a visual wholeness or coherence. Although Shelter does not engage in reflexivity –  the film’s director is hidden from the film, and he appears as an invisible listener whose place will be assumed by the audience – it very evidently takes the side of Pepsi. The film becomes a platform for Pepsi to craft her story, one of her seven names, that – according to her most emotional and perhaps best judgement – might provide assistance for her and the queer migrant cause. The film builds an immersive composition of images and sounds, of different sources and natures, around the subjectivity of Pepsi. Like Nani Moretti’s claim in Santiago, Italia (2018), Masi is not impartial, and his stance is implicitly evident in the aesthetic of the film. Art forms can provide platforms for political change but not by privileging politics against aesthetics. As Benjamin (1939/2000) told us, “the aestheticization of politics” tends to serve conservative, neoliberal, and far-right interests (p. 314). To the contrary, the “politicization of aesthetics” takes the progressive perspective (p. 316) by aesthetically engaging with political or collective issues. In our case study, this aesthetic engagement happened through the performativity and hybridization of formats. An intersectional perspective should walk a fine line between identity and affinity. To quote Donna Haraway (1985/2016), Sandoval . . . has theorized a hopeful model of political identity called “oppositional consciousness”, born of the skills for reading webs of power by those refused stable membership in the social categories of race, sex, or class. . . . This identity marks out a self-consciously constructed space that cannot affirm the capacity to act on the basis of natural identification, but only on the basis of conscious coalition, of affinity, of political kinship. (pp. 17–18) A coalition is only possible if the different characteristics of identity are acknowledged and recognized, because oppression is not universally expressed – different groups and different individuals are subjected to and experience it in different ways and intensities. At the same time, to varying degrees, oppression affects most people on this planet. Although expressed in concrete ways against migrants and transgenders, hegemonic violence extends to other forms of minority, of not belonging to the majority. Hegemonic violence is, in itself, a form of homogenization. Therefore, the affinity, kinship, and coalition of different forms of dissent can resist hegemonic violence by embracing difference and challenging such homogenization at different levels. By articulating various forms of dissent, a coalition might gather synergies otherwise spent in facing multiple political fights.10 I believe that this film constitutes an example of coalition, namely, between a filmmaker and a filmic subject in a marginalized condition. By creating the film around Pepsi’s performativity, Masi shares his platform (Shelter) to empower those who would otherwise lack the political visibility to successfully resist hegemonic oppression.

Shelter – a portrait in transit(ion) 29 Funding disclosure The author is a PhD fellow (UI/BD/151010/2021) in Science and Technology of the Arts at the School of Arts at Universidade Católica Portuguesa with a scholarship funded by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT) and the FSE (European Social Fund) through the Norte Portugal Regional Operational Programme (NORTE2020). Notes 1 The film was presented at several film festivals and universities such as CPH:DOX in Copenhagen and Cinéma du Réel at the Pompidou Center, Paris. 2 The interview that is mentioned throughout the text was conducted by the author of the chapter. 3 The translations of all citations not matching the language of the work cited were made by the author of the chapter. 4 Many of these sequences of tracking shots share similarities with the visual grammar of Ana Vaz films (aforementioned). They both share a desire to overcome limited notions of landscape by incorporating the understanding they have of the concept of territory. 5 In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler (1990/1999) follows the likes of Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, and Claude Lévi-Strauss to describe the political, social, and economic reasonings that might explain the formation of norms and taboos and the regulation of sexuality and gender identity. 6 Vide Santos, B. S. (2014). Epistemologies of the south: Justice against epistemicide. Routledge. 7 “A person who travels inside a cosmos. For someone coming from Mindanao and arriving in Calais, the border doesn’t exist, the border is the planet”​(Escola das Artes – UCP, 2020). 8 Postmodern aesthetics might have different interpretations and refer to different aspects, particularly when applied to different disciplines or arts. Here, I refer to the quality of combining in a single work elements coming from different styles, disciplines, regimes, or times. Parallel to the hybridization of formats, which points towards such an arrangement of media elements and fragments, pastiche describes a work (of art, literary, etc.) composed by a combination of elements coming from very different origins while these elements conserve evidence of their origin. 9 See Haraway, D. (2016). Tentacular thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, ­Chthulucene. e-flux #75. www.e-flux.com/journal/75/67125/tentacular-thinking-anthropocene-capi talocene-chthulucene/; Attia, K. (2018). Open your eyes: “La Réparation” in Africa and in the occident. Third Text, 32(1), 16–31. https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2018.14591 02 and Amorim, J. P., & Crespo, N. (2021). Art as expanded rationality. OnCurating.org, 50, 11–29. www.on-curating.org/issue-50-reader/art-as-expanded-rationality 10 A classic example of coalition is that of the London-based Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners movement with the United Kingdom Miners’ Strike in 1984–85. See Gaynor, C. E. (2017). Affect, coalitional politics, and pride: Imagining activism through lesbians and gays support the miners and the United Kingdom miners’ strike of 1984–5 [Master thesis, Syracuse University].

References Benjamin, W. (2000). L’Oeuvre d’art à l’époque de sa reproductibilité technique (R. Rochlitz, Trans.). In Oeuvres III (pp. 217–316). Gallimard. (Original work published 1939). Benjamin, W. (2005). Short shadows (I). In M. W. Jennings, H. Eiland, & G. Smith (Eds.), Walter Benjamin: Selected writings volume 2, part 1, 1927–1930 (pp. 268–272). Harvard University Press. (Original work published 1929).

30  João Pedro Amorim Bergamaschi Novaes, B. (2021). Experimenting post-colonial film landscapes: A conversation with Ana Vaz. Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts, 13(3), 137–160. https:// doi.org/10.34632/jsta.2021.10876 Berger, J. (1972). Ways of seeing. Penguin Books. Butler, J. (1999). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. Routledge. (Original work published 1990). Collins, F. L. (2018). Desire as a theory for migration studies: Temporality, assemblage and becoming in the narratives of migrants. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 44(6), 964–980. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2017.1384147 Escola das Artes – UCP. (2020, May 5). Interview – Enrico Masi – Retrato e Paisagem do Fluxo Migratório [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/MfLksvAjGmI Foster, H. (1996). The return of the real: The Avant-Garde at the end of the century. MIT Press. Gaspar, J. (2001). O Retorno da Paisagem à Geografia: Apontamentos Místicos. Finisterra XXXVI, 72, 83–99. https://doi.org/10.18055/Finis1624 Haraway, D. (2016). A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century [eBook]. University of Minnesota Press (Original work published 1985). Marnell, J., Oliveira, E., & Khan, G. H. (2020). “It’s about being safe and free to be who you are”: Exploring the lived experiences of queer migrants, refugees and asylum seekers in South Africa. Sexualities, 24(1–2), 86–110. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460719893617 Masi, E. (Director). (2019). Shelter – Farewell to Eden [Film]. Caucaso Factory. Mbembe, A. (2000). At the edge of the world: Boundaries, territoriality, and sovereignty in Africa. Public Culture, 12(1), 259–284. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822383215-002 Moretti, N. (Director). (2018). Santiago, Italia [Film]. Sacher Film. Morin, E., & Rouch, J. (Directors). (1961). Chronique d’un été [Film]. Argos Films. Penas, M. F. (2013). La hibridación como motriz de cambio en las comedias de las series de televisión. Análisis de Larry David (Curb Your Enthusiasm, HBO, 2000-) y de¿ Qué fue de Jorge Sanz? (Canal+, 2010). Archivos de la Filmoteca, 72, 133–143. Rancière, J. (2019). The future of the image. Verso. Shepherd, A., & Hanckel, B. (2021). Ontologies of transition(s) in healthcare practice: Examining the lived experiences and representations of transgender adults transitionining in healthcare. Health Sociology Review, 30(1), 41–57. https://doi.org/10.1080/14461242. 2020.1854618 Stryker, S. (2006). (De)Subjugated knowledges: An introduction to transgender studies. In S. Stryker  & S. Whittle (Eds.), The transgender studies reader (pp.  1–18). Routledge. (Original work published 1985). Žižek, S. (2014). Event: A philosophical journey through a concept (eBook ed.). Melville House Books.

2

Towards a Tranarcha Border framework Sex, borders, and anarchism Alfonzo Mendoza

Introduction Since its inception, lesbian/gay studies and queer theorists have seldom tried to reach out to other schools of thought and merge or bridge the gaps that exist. In recent years, more queer theorists and scholars in the United States have begun focusing on issues directly affecting the LGBTQ+ community, such as housing, workplace discrimination, mental health, medical access, etc. Similarly, migration studies experts have rarely located immigration and border policies within a web of broader systemic and societal forces. There has long existed a gap between both Queer theory and migration studies and the violent forces that oppress and exclude LGBT+ immigrants or non-citizens. To explain or describe Queer theory is essentially to de-queer it. Academics have found a comfort and sexiness in utilizing a queer analysis in areas that are already queer, such as Feminism of Color or Lesbian/Gay Studies work. In its more basic form, queer theory is about resisting categorization and serves to radically critique conventional identities, power, and heteronormativity. As Brooks and Leckey (2011) explain, “As a verb, queer can better perform ‘its outlaw work’ ” (Leckey & Brooks p. 21). Queer can signify a “political and existential stance,” an ideological commitment, or a decision to live outside some social norm or other (Leckey & Brooks, p. 21). Queer theory here serves to help us understand constructions of identity (race, gender, sexuality, and nation) while also aiding in tearing down or critiquing these constructs as agents of the nation-state. By examining immigration, migratory processes, and the nation-state from a racialized, queer perspective, we can better understand how sexuality impacts the entire migration process, bordering regimes, and nation-state formation. “Thus, the ‘queer standpoint’ perspective makes visible the heteronormative power infused not only into U.S. immigration policy but also into the academic discourses of migration itself” (Cantu et al., 2009, p. 26). Immigration and queerness in the United States are inextricably linked; therefore, there is a growing need for scholars to recognize the intersecting oppressive strategies deployed by the nation-state upon Queer, racialized, sexualized, transnational, and non-normative bodies. Although Queer theory, migration studies, and, as Anzaldua describes it, borderlands theory, are all useful tools to explain specific phenomenon, other theoretical concepts or scholarship are DOI: 10.4324/9781003354772-4

32  Alfonzo Mendoza essential to engage with to truly demonstrate the intersection among identity, state authority, capital, and empire. Furthermore, it is necessary to merge these theories to examine both the crossroads among sexuality, gender, and the State, and how to counter state-sanctioned sexual and neoliberal citizenship projects. Queer of color (QOC) critique, which builds on Feminism of Color scholarship, incorporated with Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory, and Critical Theory, is useful in this analysis because it serves two roles that Queer Theory and migration studies lack. First, QOC critique engages queer studies’ concern for the “disruptive possibilities of transgressive gender and sexual formations amidst patriarchal and heteronormative regimes” and incorporates U.S. women-of-color feminism to explore multiple and intersecting subjectivities (Brockenbrough, 2015, p. 30). Second, QOC critique can organize analytic works across different fields into a more coherent research agenda while contributing to broader critiques of homophobia, transphobia, racism, citizenship, and other threats to Queers of colour, especially in the U.S. immigration system. Anarchism, as a political philosophy can be defined as being in opposition to the State, authoritative power structures, capitalism, and the hierarchies and inequalities created and maintained by these institutions. In Transarchism: transgender embodiment and destabilization of the state, Herman (2015) argues, “anarchism can also be described as opposition to all forms of systematic and individual oppression and coercion, which are ultimately products of state and economic dominance” (p. 76). Anarchism, because of its foundational opposition to inequality, has convergent histories with other social movements. In Woman Suffrage, Goldman (n.d.) argues that women will not achieve gender and sexual liberation or equality through policies made by the state. Like Anarchism, the most radical factions of other social movements have all identified the State and binarizations of identity categories as the source of legal, cultural, sexual, and gender constraints. Many activists and theorists have sought answers to some of the world’s most pressing political and social problems. Countless scholars have engaged in queer theory and politics to understand the sexual oppression they face, whereas others have explored Anarchism, Marxism, and anti-capitalistic political futures to help explain the inequality present in the world. However, much like Queer theory and migration studies, Queer(ness) theory and Anarchism have infrequently met in academic journals or literature on the subjects. What, then, do these schools of thought have in common with the previously mentioned theoretical concepts or critical lenses? Briefly, Queer theory, border theory, and (Queer) Anarchism or Anarcha-Feminism all have the potential to merge and offer a radically new perspective on borders, gender, sexuality, identity, and governance. Both queerness and Anarchism offer a world of endless, undefined possibilities and allow us to think beyond the constructed boundaries of citizenship, sexuality, and gender. In The Nation On No Map, William Anderson (2021) states, “ ‘Anarchism’ is an open and incomplete word, and in this resides its potential . . . It is to perceive possibilities not yet recognizable” (Anderson, p. 4). Although border theory, Queer theory, and Anarchism have many of the same critiques, they have not yet been in dialogue with one another long enough to create a new school of thought.

Towards a Tranarcha Border framework 33 Since there is a plethora of research on each individual topic or theoretical concept, this chapter brings together these three main schools of thought and offers a radically new perspective. The nation-state and physical and social borders are therefore to be understood as inherently problematic. Migration and B/order Studies scholars need to be in conversation with other (radical) schools of thought and realise their full potential to critique the nation-state and the systems of oppression/violence that come with its logics. For this chapter, the convergence of Queer Theory or QOC critique, Border theory, and Anarchism give life to a new onset that is referred to as Tranarcha Border Critique. Tranarcha Border Critique helps bridge the gaps that exist between the schools of thought and articulate the politics, presence, and philosophy of anti-capitalistic/Anarchistic, Queered border, or migration studies. Queer theory Queer politics of no borders

The politics of no borders and the fight for anti-deportation tactics have similar calls with the LGBTQ+ community. According to Autumn White (2014), “both queer theory and no borders imaginaries focus on potentialities and becoming rather than the apprehensions of ‘being’ ” (p. 19). White examines the challenges of developing queer migrant justice strategies within nation-state contexts in her essay Documenting the undocumented: Toward a queer politics of no borders. White’s essay is one of the most crucial pieces that links queer theory and border theory and must be dissected to truly understand the ways in which the nation-state co-opts queer migrant bodies. In Canada and the United States, anti-deportation activists regularly call on the state to fulfil their demands and rely on visibility politics and ‘methodological nationalism,’ or national frameworks, to make their claims hearable. In 2006, a massive migrant uprising occurred in the United States where millions of deportable immigrants put their bodies on the line to assert their presence. This upsurge was known as ‘A Day Without Immigrants,’ and without anticipating it, the uprising advanced a very decidedly queer, Anarchistic politics that went beyond rights and representation and also challenged border security, immigration regimes, and the very legitimacy of the state. By unapologetically, queerly asserting an undeniable presence, White argues that these queer acts also functioned as acts of subjectivity production where new political actors were created (2014). Although the 2006 immigrant resistance movements gave hope for new political agents that challenge the national framework, White argues that this type of activism can and has fallen into the trap of methodological nationalism that reproduces the nation-state as the primary site of identification. The problem that is common to queer, trans, and migrant politics is the, “relationship between tactics and imaginaries, or what Judith Butler otherwise articulates as a ‘performative contradiction’ ” (White, p. 978). That is, tactics and imaginaries are not to be understood as separate but intertwined and informing each other in a dialectical manner. White traces this dialectic by exploring two cases of queer migrant justice movements in Canada and

34  Alfonzo Mendoza the United States to essentially form and ask the question, “What’s Queer about queer migrant justice organizing?” Although not mentioned specifically in the introduction of this chapter, Queer in this sense takes on the two functioning definitions as used in White’s essay. Queer is an embodiment. Queer is a site of resistance to normative systems. Queer is first an umbrella identity for LGBTQ+ identities, and second, Queer “demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-a’-vis the normative . . . a horizon of possibility whose precise extent and heterogeneous scope cannot in principle be delimited in advance’ ” (White, 2014, p. 978). This will inform the use of the term Queer in this chapter and will generally be easily identified depending on the context given. Furthermore, the 2011 Let Alvaro Stay campaign in Canada and the recent UndocuQueer Immigrant Project in the United States both explored the possibilities and limitations of Queer migratory justice calls. By analysing both, White uses these two examples to help bring together mobility scholarship (as White describes migration studies) and queer and trans scholarship on the violence inflicted by the nation-state. In 2011, Queer undocumented artist Alvaro Orozco was randomly detained by Toronto Police and questioned about his immigration status. Following his arrest, he was held at a hotel-now-prison for illegalized migrants as he awaited his deportation order. Orozco had been living undocumented and under a deportation order in Toronto since 2007 after his asylum claim on the basis of sexual orientation was denied by an Immigration and Refugee Board (immigration services in Canada) member who did not believe he “looked gay enough” to warrant protection on the grounds of sexual persecution (White, 2014, p. 979). Following his arrest, multiple queer and migrant justice organizations began the campaign Let Alvaro Stay. However, White examines the specific tactics used by the queer migrant justice circles at the time to demonstrate the tensions between tactics and imaginaries. During the Let Alvaro Stay campaign, the following themes were identified by White as reinforcing the nation-state and adhering to the seduction of methodological nationalism: migrant exceptionalism, state benevolence, and citizenship for all. The campaign slogans, testimonials, and videos put out by organizations such as No One Is Illegal (NOII) exacerbated common tropes of immigrants as poor, undeserving, and lazy to prop up Alvaro as a heroic, strong entrepreneur who would add to neoliberal states’ productivity. Additionally, in other testimonials, Alvaro is positioned as a queer potential Canadian national in need of protection, with “love and support” by the sexually or gender-accepting and emancipated nation, which positions the nation-state as a benevolent care provider deeply invested in protecting the project of multiculturalism and diversity. In one testimony, Alvaro’s unstable past with his violently homophobic father is utilized to appeal to the familial model normalized in Canadian heteronormative society. As described by White (2014), building upon Jasbir Puar (2007), the family has always been central to the construction of the nationstate, neoliberalism, and the maintenance of patriarchal capitalism. The narrative that Alvaro had an unsteady family model attempts to appeal to this neoliberal, heteropatriarchal familial standard. White notes, however, that although the standard heterosexist familial model has been an agent of nation-building and global

Towards a Tranarcha Border framework 35 capitalism, a queer family can also serve the interests of the state. Here ‘a queer family’ means a non-heteronormative family or non-traditional family. For example, a samesex couple with children; single LGBT parent raising a child; or opposite-sex couple raising children where at least one parent is LGBT. “But even queer family has its uses for the nation-state – family is as family does in neoliberal times” (White, 2014, p. 984). Notably, by highlighting Alvaro’s vulnerability to deportation, possible death due to homophobia, and Canada’s ability to protect him from these circumstances, the onus of responsibility in creating this precarity is shifted from the State to his constructed illegality, lack of a stable familial model, and lack of citizenship benefits. Migrants or immigrants are not naturally vulnerable, but many of the dangers they face are due to the criminalization of mobility. Thus, the state is deeply implicated and solely responsible for their vulnerability and precarious situation through immigration controls, border security, and anti-immigrant legal practices. Lastly, in the testimonials, there is a common call for national and global unity, echoing the previously mentioned methodological nationalism. Some activists advocating for Alvaro’s release from detention attempted to make a larger call for “global unity” and for “citizenship for all.” This itself is problematic and recreates the reliance on the nation-state that White mentioned earlier in the essay. Citizenship, by definition, is exclusionary. Citizenship is a tool or technology of governance. White builds on the writings of Papadopoulos and Tsianos who explain that if citizenship is extended to everyone, citizenship becomes obsolete. A “citizenship for all” model is impossible and designed to fail as citizenship as a practice or mode of governance is meant to be exclusionary; some are meant to be deemed citizens, while others are foreigners. White argues that the categories of citizen, migrant, refugee, undocumented, etc. exist because the nation-state exists, and to achieve a society free from precarious migrant conditions, the categorization of migrant and of, therefore, borders must be dissolved. White quotes Nicolas De Genova, “if there were no borders, there would indeed be no migrants – only mobility” (White, 2014, p. 985). The convergence of queer, trans, and migrant politics in the United States is very different from that in Canada. The number of undocumented immigrants living in the United States is estimated to be 12 million, compared to 120,000 in Canada. In the early 2010’s, a new hybridized identity – undocuqueer – was coined to reflect the many undocumented immigrants in the United States who also self-identify as queer/LGBT. The political moniker (group name) was introduced by the National Immigrant Youth Alliance to develop dynamic and intersectional strategies for expanding migrant and LGBTQ+ rights simultaneously. White analyses the UndocuQueer movement in the United States and compares many of the strategies and tactics used in both the U.S. and Canadian queer migrant activism. Julio Salgado, a Queer undocumented artist from the Bay area, began an “I Am UndocuQueer” series to put a “vibrant face” to a movement that intends to highlight the simultaneity of LGBTQ+ and migrant rights struggles (White, 2014, p. 986). The political activism of migrant, queer and trans politics in the United States has largely been shaped by the DREAM Act. The Act was intended on regularizing the status of a particular section of the 12 million migrants in the U.S. living without formal documentation. This specificity in the Act is extremely exclusionary

36  Alfonzo Mendoza and reproduces dominant ideas about productive and deserving migrants. The UndocuQueer series by Salgado plays on the notions of coming out of two closets: LGBTQ+, and undocumented. In addition, the radical potential of the series aims at challenging sexual and gender constraints and constructions, as well legal. In one of the portraits from the series, Organizer Ireri declares, “Just like being queer has allowed me to forget the norms, I want to be able to say forget the laws (immigration laws specifically) and start living” (White, 2014, p. 989). Furthermore, the UndocuQueer series seeks to challenge the normative, heterosexist stereotype of the undocumented migrant in the U.S., which is usually depicted as heterosexual, poor, criminals, and reproductively threatening (as White puts it). However, the risk with this visibility or representational politics is that they both enact the performative contradiction mentioned at the beginning of this section. The series is individualized, and works to reinforce, as well as disrupt dominant narratives about undocumented and queer migrants in the U.S. This notion of which migrants are deserving and underserving to the extent that, “all queer anti-deportation activism is forced to negotiate the terrain of visibility politics in advocating rights and recognition, it could be argued that such activism is always already wrapped up in the logics of methodological nationalism” (White, 2014, p. 991). It is extremely difficult to label Queer theory or pinpoint its origins. Some believe that Queer theory has been around as long as Queers have been Queered (Othered). Following the feminist and gay/lesbian liberation movements in the 20th century, many scholars began to identify issues with the binary categories of female and male, women and man, and of course, the heterosexist assumption of sexual and romantic relationships only occurring between the two. Queer theory borrowed from feminist and gender theorists the critique of heteronormative ideals. Kathryn Coffey (2014) describes in their essay, Queering Borders: Transantional Feminist Perspective On Global Heterosexism, that “Heteronormality/heteronormativity is the view that all humans are either male or female in gender and sex, and that biological sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and gender roles are in alignment from a heterosexual point of view” (Coffey, 2). Leah Perry (2014) explains the politics of citizenship, freedom, and the neoliberal project in the U.S. The “nation of immigrants” discourse often used to describe the U.S., according to Perry (2014), naturalizes and blurs the relationship among freedom, citizenship, and free markets. By this logic, globalization and capital have become synonymous with American conceptualizations of a “citizen” and practicing freedom. Similarly, Jennifer Randles and Kerry Woodward (2017) reveal how work and marriage were integral to promoting what they call a “good neoliberal citizen” in the U.S. The 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) was passed by Congress and encouraged work and marriage as routes to economic independence. PRWORA was one of many welfare reform programs of the decade that targeted poor families through regulation and punitive measures. States were required to ensure that all poor families receiving cash assistance were scrutinized and understood the necessity of the private sector and free markets in order to maintain self-sufficiency and ideal citizenry. Randles and Woodward (2017) argue that “participants were encouraged to manage every aspect of their lives by

Towards a Tranarcha Border framework 37 developing skills as self-regulating, emotionally competent workers, spouses, and parents – and thereby what we term the good neoliberal citizen” (p. 40). Kellie Burns (2012) makes a similar point when discussing cosmopolitan and sexual citizenship. In her analysis, Burns argues that being a cosmopolitan can denote a certain level of global knowledge, world travel, and/or living in an urban city. This classed and cultural phenomenon of cosmopolitanism becomes more dynamic when paired with sexual citizenship. For Burns (2012), “cosmopolitan sexual citizenship is heavily invested in the neoliberal projects of freedom, choice and self-work” (p. 317). She explains that gay and lesbian neighbourhoods have transformed from marginalized areas to cultural hubs through gentrification and the state emphasis on inclusion and representation via consumption and exploitation. Certain gay, lesbian, and/or queer cultural experiences and aesthetics are promoted and sold to straight tourists as spatial and material tourist sites and are used by the nation-state as evidence of increased political freedom, social mobility, and economic freedom. In this sense, the ideal cosmopolitan sexual citizenship is imagined as White, Western, educated, and well-travelled. This ideal consumer citizen found in Western gay culture entangles itself within rights discourse and the neoliberal version of freedom. According to Burns (2012), becoming a cosmopolitan sexual citizen requires a set of consumerist freedom practices and the othering and fetishizing of non-white queer bodies. By analysing modern depictions of queerness in the U.S. imaginary, we can understand the ways in which neoliberalism and state authority have regulated and controlled individuals’ livelihoods while disguising these projects as visibility and inclusion projects. Through the politics of visibility and representation, as White mentions, and the politics of normalization as Brooks and Leckey (2011) describe, gays and lesbians have been rhetorically and economically brought into the patriarchal, Queerphobic nation-state. This model of inclusion, however, recreates and institutionalizes the exploitation of Queers. In a later section, this chapter draws from AnarchaFeminist critiques of the State that argue that the granting of rights to women in the U.S. only allowed them to legally be exploited as wage workers, and they were still confined by and constrained to normative gender roles and sexual expression and family models. Can Queers be fully included in a capitalist society that seeks to commodify their bodies and identities and still socially categorizes them as consumerist others and/or deviant? In Against Equality: Queer Revolution, Not Mere Inclusion, Ryan Conrad discusses the different methods of inclusion through which the U.S. and other neoliberal democracies have attempted to protect their LGBTQ+ citizens. In the book, Conrad and other contributors comment on different sectors of society including same-sex marriage, military inclusion, adoption rights, and anti-hate crime legislation. Rather than summarizing their main points, which should be obvious from the book’s title, this chapter highlights important questions for other LGBTQ+, Queers, and allied individuals. Ryan Conrad (2014) asks the following: Does gay marriage support the right-wing goal of linking access to basic human rights like health care and economic security to an inherently

38  Alfonzo Mendoza conservative tradition? Will the ability of queers to fight in wars of imperialism help liberate and empower LGBT people around the world? Does hatecrime legislation affirm and strengthen historically anti-queer institutions like the police and prisons rather than dismantling them? (Description, Back Cover) A Queer analysis of the State and power have long seen them both as inherently oppressive to non-normative bodies. While inclusionary policies might serve to legally recognize a civil union between two people of the same sex, for example, the politics of marriage and a dual relationship further add to the state’s agenda of a heteronormative, and in this case, homonormative, household relationship, productivity, and consumerism. B/Orders and border theory B/Ordering, othering, and border imperialism

In her article, Invasion of the Americas and the Making of the Mestizocoyote Nation, Dunbar-Ortiz states that “Borderlands” are “the ultimate Achilles’ heel of colonialism and imperialism.” This analysis of borderlands and borders is the premise of the book Undoing Border Imperialism by Harsha Walia. Walia and Smith (2014) suggest that border imperialism is a new analytic framework that “disrupts the myth of Western benevolence towards migrants” (p. 8). Borders, as physical and legal boundaries, are then transgressed and fortified, and border imperialism seeks to demonstrate the ways that migrants and displacement are institutionally created and maintained. Although borders indicate physical barriers and demarcate territory, Walia (2014) suggests that “an analysis of border imperialism interrogates the modes and networks of governance that determine how bodies will be included within the nation-state” and how territory will be controlled under transnational capitalism and empire (p. 8). Since borders are the nexus of most forms of oppression, Walia urges migrant activists and social justice movements to recognize the violence of borders and actively work to undo borders and border imperialism. Border imperialism, or border theory, as this chapter refers to it, is an analytic framework or concept that can help understand the intrinsic nature of violence that nation-states facilitate. Walia argues that narratives of empire, labour, and capital stratifications in the global economy and hierarchies of race, gender, class, etc. all lay the groundwork for a border imperialism analysis. Border theory then takes on a dual critique of Western nation-states and empire. First, the role of Western nations via imperialism is to actively dispossess communities and secure land and resources for state capitalist interests. Second, Western nations deliberately limit the inclusion of migrants into the state through processes of criminalization and racialization that justify their exploitation, death, and the commodification of their labour. Walia notes that her use of the term Western, or the West does not specifically refer to a geographic location (Walia, 2014, p. 19). This chapter utilizes the same connotations of the terms Western and the West as used in the Walian sense. The

Towards a Tranarcha Border framework 39 West denotes a specific system of global power, most commonly referring to the Global North (North America, Europe, and Australia). Apart from the use of the term as a geographic site(s), the West is also used to refer to an ideology, specifically, the dominance of Western economic, political, and social formations across the globe. This ideology has permeated around the globe through global trade, international organizations, sanctions, and the expansion of the military and borders beyond Western empires. Thus, border imperialism serves to critique this expansion of physical, economic, and psychological borders that maintain Western ideology (capitalism, neoliberalism, etc.) as superior. In Border and Rule, Walia (2021) explains the presumed contradictory juxtaposition between border monetization and militarization. The free flow of capital across borders requires precarious labour, which is achieved through migration restrictions and border immobility. Borders are not only shaped by global capitalism but also rely on and produce the recurring reproduction of social domination via capitalism. She notes that As the current phase of advanced capitalism, neoliberal globalization facilitates the movement of capital and militaries but restricts the mobility of impoverished racialized people unless they agree to inclusion as migrant workers with deflated labor power and no legal or social citizenship. (Walia, 2021, p. 7) This tension among identity, labour, capital, and citizenship is important in understanding how queerness and transnationalism are shaped and regulated by the nation-state, global capitalism, and inclusion and diversity politics. Western imperialism, global capitalism, and neoliberalism all function to serve state interests and vice versa. These systems work to displace and migrate individuals who are caught in the exploited underdeveloped world. Displacement and migration are central to neoliberalism, which requires the movement of goods and capital across borders, and the state that relies upon migrants for labour and to strengthen national identities. The criminalization of migrants is a defining process of border theory. The state has a vested interest in maintaining and building a patriotic, national identity (such as in the U.S.) and portraying migrants as illegals and aliens. Through the fusion of the state and citizenship, borders, whether legal or physical, are sold as a protection of the state and, therefore, of the citizen. The State victimizes itself, and, thus, the citizen and all migrants are then seen to be a threat to the state, capitalism, and national identity. This fusion of the citizen and the state, which is then reinforced by borders, serves state interests, which now has a body of subjects who also work to discriminate, deter, maintain, and control migrants or non-citizens. Judith Butler describes this process of policing and its national subject as masculinist and gendered, where the state is painted as a victim and the undocumented migrant is seen as the aggressive attacker (Walia, 2014, p. 25). “By invoking the state itself as a victim, migrants themselves are cast as illegals and criminals who are committing an act of assault on the state” (Walia, 2014, p. 25). Furthermore,

40  Alfonzo Mendoza racialization and a system of hierarchy are necessary for borders to function in a neoliberal capitalist system. This othering of a subject, as H. V. Houtum and T. V. Naerssen (2002) describe it, is not new or unique to Western states, especially countries such as the United States which is especially known for its racial categorization and hierarchies and history of white supremacist ideology permeating institutions. Borders and the process of bordering require the practices of othering and ordering. However, Houtum and Naerssen (2002) make it a point to specify that borders do not begin or end at fixed lines but instead “symbolize a social practice of spatial differentiation” (p. 126). Spatial strategies of (b)ordering and othering often take place at the scale of nation-states, as Houtum and Naerssen (2002) agree. In one example, the authors explain that otherness is created and reinforced at the borders of states where the education curriculum reproduces narratives of the “other” side of the border, such as in the case of Malaysia and Indonesia. Nation-states and national identity can therefore coincide with the making of the other and strong anti-immigration policy. When describing a situation in Australia, they note that the nation of Australia refused to take in Afghans that arrived on the continent by boat (Houtum & Naerssen, 2002). Instead, the Australian government subsidized the smaller island-nation of Nauru to take in the refugees. This long-term and continuing process of nationstate building and national identity-making is apparent in this case. Australia has a complex history of displacement, migration, criminalization, and othering. When European settlers arrived on the island, the Indigenous Aboriginal population were displaced and now suffer some of the worst living conditions in the country. The country’s ties to Europe, Whiteness as an ideology, and the West showcase this bordering process, and border imperialism is used to maintain a national subjectivity and an underserving outsider. Additionally, Houtum and Naerssen’s article provides clear insight into the social implications of bordering processes. As mentioned in the Queer Theory section of this chapter, binaries in the world only seek to limit one’s potential; binaries work to reinforce the status quo and keep the most vulnerable, vulnerable. This calls for activists to continuously challenge all systems of domination and power that reject fluidity and maintain a binaristic system. Identities are constantly shifting and being reinscribed. Binaries only function to attempt to manage or police these identities. In the Reinscribing Identities section of their article, Houtum and Naerssen (2002) state that “Identities must be understood as social processes of continuous ‘re-writing’ of the self and of social collectives” (p. 132). Identities shift and change depending on the social environment and setting. The authors offer an example from a book about an Indian woman immigrant in the U.S. The book describes the process of being bordered within and bordered from the outside. Her identity is always liquid, never fixed, and she is in a constant state of moving between the binary positions of insider out and outsider in. For this reason, we see the issues apparent in bordering processes that result not only from physical borders but also from symbolic (linguistic, gender, and cultural) sources. Moreover, the connection between (b)ordering processes and border imperialism to Queer theory and gender studies is extremely visible. Both schools of

Towards a Tranarcha Border framework 41 thought critique the nation-state as violent and oppressive to non-normative beings, and border theory and Queer theory challenge the binaries that exist within our current political, social, and economic systems. Walia (2014) bridges the links between gender and sexuality struggles and those of migrants or non-citizens. She states, We see a connection between the policing of people’s genders and sexualities with the policing of borders. . . . We reject the regulation of ourselves and our relationships through socially created borders, such as those used to define traditional families, acceptable sex practices, ideal bodies and gender presentations, and love. (Walia, 2014, p. 123) As Walia mentions, those who understand Queer, gender nonconforming, and transgender as political identities grasp the gender and sexual liberation struggle as one that defies policing and surveillance borders, particularly against fluid gender and sexual boundaries. On gender liberation and the gender binary, Walia reaffirms that “gender liberation strives to abolish the gender binary from which the violence of heteropatriarchy and cis-sexism – and the resulting unequal conditions of women, transfolks, and genderqueer people – stems” (Walia, p. 123). Anarchism, anarcha-possibilities Anarchism is as anarchy does. Because of this, the definition or description of anarchy and Anarchism is complex and difficult to determine. Compared to other social and economic philosophies, Anarchist critiques of society go beyond ­Hegelian-Marxist-Leninist principles of anti-capitalism and revolution. Anarchism as a political philosophy and theory can be defined as being in opposition to the state, capitalism, and all forms of hierarchy and domination. According to Rooum, Anarchists believe that the point of society is to widen the choices of individuals. . . . Anarchists strive for a society which is as efficient as possible, that is a society which provides individuals with the widest possible range of individual choices. (The Anarchist Library, 1995) Anarchism is a political philosophy; anarchy is an ideal that subscribers to Anarchist theory follow. Much like the term Queer, which is an adjective and verb, Anarchism and anarchy function in a similar fashion; they are difficult to define but are completely fitting. Historically, Anarchism was a doctrine taken up by the working class that aimed for the liberation of people from economic and political domination. In Ruth Kinna’s (2015) book, anarchism: a beginner’s guide, they explain the importance of recognizing the three different areas that distinguish contemporary Anarchist arguments. First, there are those who follow the most known

42  Alfonzo Mendoza and historically popular sector of Anarchism, namely, the economic and political tensions between the working class and the elite or government. Second, many women and people of colour have adopted an anarchistic model and have combined the anti-capitalistic, anti-hierarchical model of Anarchism with other metatheories to combat racism, sexism, homophobia, and fascism. Third, some Anarchists challenge societal norms via art and aesthetics; they utilize art and form to create a counterculture to overcome consumerism, boredom, and alienation (Kinna, p. 4). Furthermore, Kinna explains that there is a long tradition of gender and sexual struggles within anarchist movements and circles. Sex, the physical act, is rarely understood as a political issue. However, the act of sex has a history in the U.S. as being highly policed and politicized for certain genders and sexualities. It was not until 2003 in the Lawrence v. Texas (2003) case that the Supreme Court declared that laws against homosexuality were unconstitutional. Sex and sexual activity are inherently anti-authoritarian. Kinna states that “sex undermines Authority.” More precisely, as Alex Comfort argues, the “anti-sexualism of authoritarian societies” springs from “the vague perception that freedom here might lead to a liking for freedom elsewhere.” (Kinna, p. 79) In this short quote, we begin to see the links among law, Queerness, gender, and Anarchist philosophy. Eric Laursen (Laursen & Ramnath, 2021), in his book, The Operating System: An Anarchist Theory of the Modern State, makes use of some of the most unique aspects of Anarchism as a philosophy to give insights on how states operate and build power for themselves at our expense. Laursen suggests that modern states may seem different on the surface, but they all share core similarities. Namely, the State claims the right to determine who is a person, the State is an instrument of violence and war, and the State is above the law (Laursen, 2021). Since economic endeavours are necessary and essential for states to maintain themselves, labour is required to carry out productivity. The State needs waged workers. Waged workers need a stable site (or home), and the State needs a steady flow of potential worker-subjects. The household and family were then born out of these needs and are maintained and reinforced by the State. Women were tied to the home, performing unpaid labour, while men worked outside of their homes, creating a hierarchical structure of gender, class, and sexuality or sexual freedom. Laursen notes that the State did not invent racism, sexism, homophobia, or other forms of or oppression; they already existed. However, the State institutionalized many of these features into the ranks of its legal and social structure. Those who do not conform to gender or sexual norms are criminalized for disrupting the moral familial household model and thus threatening the labour and economic productivity of the State. As Walia describes, displacement and criminalization are features of the process of bordering. The criminalization and social marginalization of queered, racialized, and women/feminine-identified individuals dissuades others from exploring the fluidity of gender and sexual expression. By criminalizing queerness, the State encourages heterosexist ideals of the nuclear family, maintains

Towards a Tranarcha Border framework 43 a steady consumer-worker population, and represses a potentially radical subject, specifically, the Queer(ed) other. As Laursen explains, Instead, the State is a vast operating system for ordering and controlling functions and relations among human society, economy, populations, and the natural world . . . It defines us in relation to itself, and each other, as “users,” and can reward us, reject our requests, or even bar us from access according to its needs. (Laursen, 2021, pp. 85–87) Anarcha-feminism, queer(ing) anarchism

Additionally, the constraints of the State operate under a heteronormative, ­patriarchal-capitalist system. In the U.S., women and self-identified feminists have made the connections between capitalism and sexism. This strand of feminism that focuses on class and gender issues diverts from the mainstream thinking about rights and citizenship status. As more women and non-men obtained the right to vote and exist freely, they became swallowed up in the wage system, and their identities were exploited for profit. Classical anarchists, with their critique of political and economic systems of governance and capitalism, rarely saw the intersectional links among patriarchy, capitalism, sexism, and Queerphobia. Anarcha-Feminism is a strand of Anarchism that emerged as a response to the Marxist, Leninist, and Anarchist denial of gender issues as vital to economic exploitation. From a feminist perspective, the body and family are sites of conflict, according to Revolutionary Anarcha-Feminist Group (RAG). The experience of class oppression is differentiated by gender; to build off this, the experience of class and political oppression are differentiated not only by gender but also by sexuality, nationality, and race. ­Anarcha-Feminism sees the world as constructed into binaries of “male” and “female,” which are ultimately used for domination and control to oppress those who do not fit into the typical gender or sexual norms. In her chapter, Feminism as Anarchism, Lynne Farrow (2012) states that “FEMINISM PRACTICES WHAT ANARCHISM PREACHES” (Farrow, p.  19). The groundbreaking work by Anarcha-Feminists, Feminists of Colour, and Queers of Colour has given life to modern day conceptions of Anarchism and anarchy. Farrow claims that feminists are the only group that can truly call themselves practicing Anarchists. If Anarchism rejects the State and existing forms of hierarchy and power, then feminist women are actively living in resistance to the heteropatriarchal norms of the nation; their bodies are sites of conflict and resistance. This chapter furthers this critique or assumption by applying Anarcha-Feminist’s modes of conceptualizing Anarchism to migration, citizenship, and sexuality. Queers, specifically, LGBT+ individuals, are inherently anarchistic since their very existence is contrary to the institutionalized, homophobic norms set up by the State. Undocumented migrants act in the same way involuntarily, but their defiance of laws and borders challenges the imaginaries of a citizen and therefore delegitimizes the nation-state.

44  Alfonzo Mendoza Queer theory, Anarcha-Feminism and migration or border theory can all relate to and identify with the cages assembled and maintained to entrap our bodies, physically and socially. In the book Queering Anarchism, Daring states, “we are imprisoned by a gender binary, though a sort of freedom may be accessible to some, and if we don’t behave appropriately there are plenty of prison guards to attempt to put us in our place” (Daring et al., 2013, p. 42). Binaries, both physical and social, imprison us, and the State maintains these binaries and borders and polices them heavily. Sexuality and sexual acts are categorized and ordered into a system of hierarchy that privileges certain relationships and activities over others. Abbey Volcano describes this as “institutionalized borders of heteronormativity” (Daring et al., 2013, p. 32). Convergence: Tranarcha Border Critique

Transgender and gender nonconforming migrants face heavy scrutiny at borders, particularly at the U.S. border with Mexico. Trans and queer individuals often face long and difficult battles with legal and bureaucratic systems to obtain documentation that accurately reflects and represents their lived and performed identities. According to Herman (2015), around 41% of transgender people who live as genders other than those assigned at birth do not possess identification that accurately reflects their gender. This gender inconsistency and the inability or unwillingness of governments and institutions to provide the documentation leads to transgender people being subjected to increased scrutiny at borders both physical and cultural. In their article Tranarchism transgender embodiment and destabilization of the state, Herman (2015) states, “border crossing occurs ‘at any instance when one’s identity is open to inspection, questioning, and determination either by in-group members or by a legal authority’ ” (Herman, 2015, p. 86). This quote is essential to this chapter. Border crossings occur when one’s identity is subjected to inspection; therefore, we see the intrinsic links between migration and Queerness. Much like migrants who exist in the borderlands and are transient, transgender and Queer people take up a similar space in the borderlands between gender binaries and sexuality. Herman (2015) further adds that a truly radical and revolutionary stance should centre those most marginalized. “The issues affecting gender non-conforming people must be central, rather than peripheral, in conceiving of anarchist praxis” (Herman, 2015, p. 89). Therefore, this chapter proposes that a new critique of society is needed to better understand the links of oppression and potential for cooperation among the three schools of thought. As shown earlier, Border theory and Queer theory have a lot to learn from each other, and the spaces for analysis already exist with real-world organizing efforts for LGBTQ+ migrants. Anarchism, as a political philosophy, can be used to tie together these two schools of thought and offer political and social alternatives to imagine and build a liberated future. By combining Walia’s border theory, or concept of border imperialism, with QOC critique, Anarcha-Feminism and Queer Anarchism, this chapter suggests a new meta-theory perspective of analytic framework: Tranarcha Border Critique. Tranarcha Border Critique originates from the foundation of the scholars and

Towards a Tranarcha Border framework 45 schools of thought presented here. It comes with an inherent critique of physical borders, and how they manifest into social and legal borders. This concept started from the perspective of an anti-capitalistic future, devoid of sexual and economic domination, and argues for a critical view of the ways that sexuality, migration, the State, borders, and authority are all utilized to maintain a lower class of labour, mainly of sexually and racially marginalized individuals without political power or authority. References Anderson, W. C. (2021). The nation on no map: Black anarchism and abolition. AK Press. Brockenbrough, E. (2015). Queer of color agency in educational contexts: Analytic frameworks from a queer of color critique. Educational Studies, 51(1), 28–44. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/00131946.2014.979929 Brooks, K., & Leckey, R. (2011). Queer theory: Law, culture, empire. Routledge. Burns, K. (2012). Cosmopolitan sexual citizenship and the project of Queer World-making at the Sydney 2002 gay games. Sexualities, 15(3–4), 314–335. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1363460712436473 Butler, J. (2006). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (2nd Edition). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203824979 Cantú, L., Naples, N. A., & Vidal-Ortiz, S. (2009). The sexuality of migration: Border crossings and Mexican immigrant men. New York University Press. Coffey, K. (2014). Queering borders: Transnational feminist perspective on global heterosexism. Conrad, R. (2014). Against equality: Queer revolution, not mere inclusion. AK Press. Daring, C., Rogue, J., & Shannon, D. (2013). Queering anarchism: Addressing and undressing power and desire. AK Press. Farrow, L. (2012). Quiet rumours: An anarcha-feminist reader. AK Press. Goldman, E. (n.d.). Women’s rights – women’s suffrage. Jewish Women’s Archive. Retrieved December 2, 2021, from https://jwa.org/womenofvalor/goldman/womens-rights/womenssuffrage Herman, E. L. (2015). Tranarchism: Transgender embodiment and destabilization of the state. Contemporary Justice Review, 18(1), 76–92. https://doi.org/10.1080/10282580.2 015.1008946 Kinna, R. (2015). Anarchism: A beginner’s guide. Oneworld. Laursen, E., & Ramnath, M. (2021). The operating system: An anarchist theory of the modern state. AK Press. Perry, L. (2014). Overlooking/looking over neoliberal immigration: Amnesty policy in the “nation of immigrants”. Cultural Studies, 28(5–6), 844–868. https://doi.org/10.1080/095 02386.2014.886488 Puar, J. K. (2007). Terrorist assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Duke University Press. Randles, J., & Woodward, K. (2017). Learning to labor, love, and live: Shaping the good neoliberal citizen in state work and marriage programs. Sociological Perspectives, 61(1), 39–56. https://doi.org/10.1177/0731121417707753 Rooum, D. (1995). What is anarchism? An introduction. The Anarchist Library. Retrieved December 2, 2021, from https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/donald-rooum-and-freedompress-ed-what-is-anarchism-an-introduction

46  Alfonzo Mendoza van Houtum, H., & Naerssen, T. V. (2002, December 17). Bordering, ordering and othering. Wiley Online Library. Retrieved December 2, 2021, from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/ doi/abs/10.1111/1467-9663.00189 Walia, H. (2021). Border and rule: Global migration, capitalism and the rise of racist nationalism. Fernwood Publishing. Walia, H., & Smith, A. (2014). Undoing border imperialism. AK Press. White, M. A. (2014). Documenting the undocumented: Toward a queer politics of no borders. Sexualities, 17(8), 976–997. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460714552263

3 The dual nature of the threshold in the pandemic era Ioanna Papakonstantinou-Brati

Introduction The threshold is a zone, an intermediate state such as that of the mind between sleep and wakefulness. The choice of this particular word in this chapter is deliberate and guides the reader through its thought process. It could be argued that thresholds are perceived both intellectually and materially precisely because they have an abstract, metaphorical and at the same time concrete connotation. It is probably no coincidence that they primarily mark areas of spaces in which necessary rites of passage are performed. At the same time, thresholds help us to explore the concept of space in relation to the social behaviour of subjects. Their ability to create images of transition paths, entrances, and steps in the city is optimal to convey the notion of crossing an intermediate territory and the transient experience of modern life. In this perspective, when reference is made to the concept of the threshold, it is not the formal configurations of space that are meant but the experiences and the relations with them, taking as a basis that the threshold is shaped by everyday and social practices and gives birth to new ones. Countless spaces are potential thresholds hidden in public space. Ιt is also useful to consider Chiara Camponeschi’s view (Skordouli, 2015, p. 90) that ‘the predetermined physical, non-private space does not imply that it functions as an active public space unless it is understood as an experience of mutual influence of individuals’. It therefore seems that the condition of creating a threshold requires the interaction of the three elements of space, people and action. In this sense, thresholds constitute a non-fixed grid within the city, since they can appear at any time. Moreover, it is true that every day, we cross or reside in potential thresholds, as Maria Skordouli aptly underlines in her study on Thresholds of wandering in the work of Walter Benjamin (Skordouli, 2015). As sites of nodal experiences, they have a dual nature, being born at the intersection of two often opposing conditions, and they have the potential to open the prospect of encountering otherness in the way that W. Benjamin envisions. It is quite important that the threshold is differentiated from the limit. In the threshold, the transition between a before and an after, between a here and a there and between one place and another is expressed through a movement. Furthermore, transitivity, as Stavros Stavrides points out, ‘must be founded by social practice, collective or individual, because when the threshold DOI: 10.4324/9781003354772-5

48  Ioanna Papakonstantinou-Brati degenerates into a boundary, it loses its transitional character’ (Stavrides, 1998). According to his words, then, for the ‘birth’ of a threshold to be possible, the subjects themselves who experience it must also want the transition that takes place to be a field of subversion. When between two situations there is clearly a before and an after, then it is a question of a border rather than a threshold. Thresholds as spatial arrangements reveal the quality of relations between the private and the public and the interior and the exterior. When the variety, richness and different kinds of spaces contained in this transitional zone are greater, the relationship is richer between inside and outside and between public and private. Spaces that are simply characterized by an arrangement that unambiguously and marginally prevents or even deflects passage demarcate a type of difference between inside and outside. The research interest of this chapter focuses on this constant transitivity. It approaches the definition of threshold based on everyday practices and then identifies threshold conditions during the pandemic period, which at the time of writing this chapter, is not yet definitively over. Speaking of the contemporary thresholds The integration of multiple media into everyday experience radically changes the way that we interact with our surroundings by providing a new perspective that defies traditional limitations and boundaries. The new capital can be likened to a city at the intersection of the possibilities of time and speed utilization. ‘Urban space is composed of physical and electronic forms, such as virtual reality devices, that enrich everyday experiences and underline the parallel existence of an intangible world of information and possibilities’ (Giannoudes, 2012, p. 312). The contemporary world seems to be ultimately composed of innumerable in-between spaces that mediate the gap between the physical and the digital, the personal and the collective and the internal and the external. Thresholds represent ‘an area of choices’ between outside and inside, private and public and order and disorder. They are not empty spaces in the sense of non-existence but active spaces with the effects of connection and separation. ‘The new possibilities of technology, by distorting sometimes impassable boundaries, raise questions of alienating the experience of place and lead to a digital flâneur and a global dérivé’ (Skordouli, 2015, p. 97). Users follow a method of continuous transition from site to site, without spatial and temporal constraints, motivated by the need to adapt to the new reality. Warren Sack writes that rationalistic and romantic critiques of artificial intelligence (AI) assume that the boundary between ‘human nature’ and ‘artificial intelligence’ is either unbridgeable or non-existent. . . . They assign a timeless, unchanging structure to what is better characterized as an on-going struggle to negotiate the ways in which the ‘artificial’ flows into the ‘natural’ and vice versa. (Sack, 1997, p. 56) Users’ identity is shaped by this constant struggle and the perpetual journey across platforms. The real space of the subject is reduced to a representation and replaced

The dual nature of the threshold in the pandemic era 49 by the virtual to provide a paradoxical contact, through distance, of individuals who, while ‘in real space are dispersed, in cyberspace come together through a computer since they share a common environment’ (Schneider, 2017, p. 26). Therefore, if spaces are potential thresholds that reveal encounters between different groups and different ways of life, then this is due to the indissoluble dialectical relationship between the boundary (which separates) and the bridge (which unites). As George Teyssot points out, ‘we still think in terms of inside-outside, private-public, while 21st century society is characterised by the exact opposite, by the blurring of strict boundaries, instability, the osmosis of complex and fragmented experiences, interaction and the constant flow of information’ (Teyssot, 2013, p. 55). In the same fragmentary way of W. Benjamin, he presents the city as a network of relationships rather than established hierarchies. ‘As the established notion of public space is disappearing, it seems necessary to redraw the boundary between private and public, taking into account the new conditions of complexity and pluralism’. He believes that ‘what previously divided us can now unite us, provided it is considered dialectically’ (Teyssot, 1996, p. 7). He metaphorically uses the window, the door, the mirror and the screen as intermediate spaces of interaction that can help the emergence of a virtual space or digital topography. Home, G. Teyssot argues, can be anything in which a person resides. Based on the thought of Gilles Deleuze, he refers to the nomadic nature of the individual. ‘When we know that more than a hundred thousand people fly through the air every day, we can assume that this is the portent of the future society, not a society of permanent settlement, but of transit’ (Teyssot, 2008, p. 9). The key theme in his thinking is that of the transformation of everyday life by the new possibilities of technology, which destabilizes the established relationship between public and private. ‘Following the observations of G. Teyssot, the limit is no longer the walls of buildings, but the interface between man and machine’ (Giannoudes, 2012, p. 262). Phenomenologically, our bodies are out there, extending through the endless and ever-increasing number of cables and radio waves that are constantly crossing the planet. The simplest example cited by G. Teyssot of the transformation of the perception of public space through the use of a device is headphones, which isolate and create a private sphere within the public one (Skordouli, 2015, p. 98). It follows that the notion of the intermediate for G. Teyssot is assumed by virtual reality. This becomes the contemporary threshold, a kind of topological nature that mediates between the private and the public and between the familiar and the unfamiliar. However, according to W. Benjamin’s critical thinking, the need to bring things closer spatially, socially and personally has led to the dissolution of the ‘aura’ of objects. Reproduction destroys the authenticity, he explained, of the ‘here and now’ of the object. As massification is not only about reproduction but also about reception, on a second reading, the growing interest of the masses and their absorption in the virtual world of fleeting, repeatable and easily consumed images could be seen as a social dependency of precipitating the ‘aura’ of everyday experiences. Self-alienation has reached such a degree that it allows the experience of its annihilation as an aesthetic pleasure (Benjamin, 1936/2013, p. 57). Digital

50  Ioanna Papakonstantinou-Brati technology, which has become a ‘trademark’ of how we perceive the world, reveals a contemporary threshold that not only ‘unites’ but also raises issues of alienation of the lived experience of the place. Meta-privacy The incessant spread of mass media and technology has inevitably resulted in their invasion of the home. In the 1950s, the only means of telecommunication in the home were radio and later television, and the linear transmission of information provided by them is gradually giving way to a dynamic exchange of information between users. ‘In this view, the role of the dwelling as a receiver of external ­information makes its boundaries more permeable, shaking the edifice of privacy and, by extension, of privacy’ (Spigel, 1992, p. 100). Home is not only a receiver but also a transmitter, because people change the news or topics in the media by actively intervening in them, especially on social media. The new model of communication comes to add the reverse problem of the internal or private sphere that now seems to ‘leak’ to the outside. ‘In just a few decades, the urban dwelling has evolved from a space for the expression of family life to a post-private living space, which has been swollen by additional activities of leisure, work and mediated social contact’ (Dragonas, 2015, p. 130). Beatriz Colomina states that ‘the dwelling has now become a media center, a reality that changes forever the understanding of concepts such as public and private’ (Colomina, 1996, p. 210). As new digital technologies increasingly permeate the home, the importance of analysing this impact becomes increasingly necessary. As increasingly more activities that used to take place in the public space enter the home, patterns of occupation, established structures and relationships are decisively affected. ‘The primary role of the home, which in a sense, coordinated family members in a common sphere, was undone since, now, they are scattered at different angles in front of a screen within a withdrawn micro-sphere’ (Karadimitriou & Leventopoulou, 2018, p. 73). Moreover, when all manifestations of human activity have now found their place in the meta-space of social networks, this microsphere seems to swell. Information, advertising, work, commerce, politics, activism, interpersonal relationships and encounters, ‘digital’ memorials and all human affairs in general, both public and private, are intertwined as a daily public spectacle. When personal life appears as a public event, expression, communication, affirmation and self-promotion become vital needs. The space of social networks seems to regenerate a new type of theatrum mundi, where everything is exposed in an uncanny way to the public gaze. ‘One could say that the masks and facades of the then public space are now reappearing in a different form, making the boundaries between public and private increasingly indistinct and overlapping’ (a.p). The transformation of privacy, or the abolition of privacy in a sense, has essentially come about by common consent and by distorting once impenetrable boundaries. The notion of privacy, which for Hannah Arendt (Arendt, 1958/1986), lies in the absence of others, is now composed of porous structures where permeability is intercepted through personal codes. The boundaries surrounding the dwelling repel

The dual nature of the threshold in the pandemic era 51 their materiality and are transformed into a hybridity that abolishes the notion of distance. As noted previously, the contemporary world now consists of innumerable thresholds – intermediate spaces that mediate the ‘gap’ (between the real and the digital, the private and the public, the interior and the exterior, etc.). Through the threshold, each interior is ultimately implanted with a perception of the exterior. Additionally, ‘the world today is defined by the lock and key, transactions expressed in different variations such as passwords, PIN numbers and credit card codes, fingerprints and retinal identifications’ (Schneider, 2017, p. 26). G. Deleuze believes that in societies of control, a personal signature or number is no longer sufficient, but a password is required. The digital linguistic interpretation of control consists of codes that can guarantee access to information or conversely, its exclusion. That is, access to any ‘inside’, whether on a digital platform or in private spaces, presupposes a multiplication of such thresholds, which are charged through control mechanisms. Consequently, according to Sarah E. Thorne, the integration of technology into the private sphere inevitably affects the dynamics of the space. ‘A new technology does not just add or subtract something, but changes everything’ (Thorne, 2012, p. 66). It is not just a new introduction of technology into the interior of the home but a rapid mutation of our relationship with it. The rapid proliferation of new social media is shattering the boundaries of private space, as the public sphere currently permeates every corner of the domestic space and vice-versa. The public sphere has now become a collage of islands of privacy in which people create small ‘islands’ of privacy in the middle of the public one. The public has now established itself in the private sphere through digital technology, giving it a new two-way interaction relationship and further disrupting its boundaries. The home ultimately functions as a regulator of incoming and outgoing flows. How will it regulate these flows in the period of the COVID-19 pandemic and compulsory confinement? No-body digital subjects The pandemic period on which the present chapter focuses means the absolute triumph of the visual-virtual civilization, which, as has been noted, has long been in preparation. The private sphere was invested by disembodied relationships that opened into a topology of contacts newly centred on reciprocity in online interconnection and no longer on bonds of spatial proximity. Social relations were mutated or even inactivated, while others of a more limited scope were intensified with unexpected consequences for collective life and spatial belonging. The intertwining of the epidemic with technology not only transformed the experience of embodied life but also at the same time, allowed for new hybrid subjectivities that can defend different types of relations, bonds and collectivities disconnected from the pressures and intensive rhythms of the economy and contemporary everyday life. While in sight, we cannot see our eyes, in hearing, we cannot perceive our ability to hear and in touch, we touch our own ability to touch and be touched. Contact with another body is synchronicity and above all, contact with ourselves. Touch, which seems inferior to the other senses, is in a way, the primordial one, because

52  Ioanna Papakonstantinou-Brati in it, something like the subject is born, when in vision and the other senses, it is in a way, abstractly presupposed. We have for the first time an experience of our own self when in touching another body, we touch at the same time our own flesh. If, as is perversely sought to happen today, all contact is abolished and if everything and everyone are kept at a distance, then we will lose not only the experience of other bodies but also, above all, all direct experience of our own self; that is, we will simply and purely lose our own flesh (Agamben, 2021, p. 8). We talk and see one another through digital mediation, from a distance. Many of the social interactions that take place in the real world and require physical contact or proximity are being transferred to the digital environment, with the aim of reducing pandemics. The instruction given is that anything that can be done electronically should be done in this way, especially if its physical realisation requires the gathering of many people. Courses, lectures, conferences and parties are held digitally, at a distance, which changes everyday life and social life in a decisive way. Virtual reality, as dominant and supported by the repressive regulations of the current state of exclusion, imposes on relationships the exclusion of a very basic human sense. W. Benjamin has informed us of how decisive (this) loss of touch can be. But he refers to exceptional opportunities, to what art offers us, whereas in the current situation, we refer to our own everyday life. The world of (co-)working online, of entertainment with Netflix, of tele-education and tele-conferencing with zoom, a world that no one imagined would actually work, is a world not only of intelligent machines but also of atrophied corporeality. It is a world of distances. Distance and deferral are the two dimensions that mark the current condition of suspension. For Gerasimos Kouzelis, ‘the mutilation of the senses entails the withering away of experience, and in particular the experience of relating to others, the experience of their proximity, of their full, bodily, substance’ (Kouzelis, 2020, p. 26). The (political) management of COVID-19, as a way of managing life [(or) death], ultimately draws the contours of a new subjectivity. One could argue that what has been revealed by this crisis is a new form of control of the body. The subject that COVID-19 ‘constructs’ has no skin, no hands, no touching and no being touched. It does not meet with others, it does not interact and it does not collectivize, and its new form of social relation is a connection to the gaze imprisoned in a spectral screen. Social distancing, as the most ‘effective’ way of dealing with the virus, has resulted in violent restructuring in several areas. As bodies were reduced to a set of biomolecular, micro-projection and digital transmission and information technologies, the notion of locality was reduced to a vast digital system, as perceived through the computer screen. ‘If interactivity is to information what radioactivity is to energy, we are here in front of the extreme limit of political intelligence, since political representation disappears in the instantaneousness of communication, in favour of a mere representation/presentation’ (Virilio, 2004, p. 42). The displacement not only of the concept of place but also of embodied existence is undeniable. We have seen electronic media constitute a new scene driven by people’s need to create groups and situated in an intangible ‘here’. A new aspect of gatherings through digital media is thus detected, which involves the dissolution

The dual nature of the threshold in the pandemic era 53 of strict demarcation and the possibility of shifting the scene, as a transgression of the local circumstance takes place. The key difference according to Samuel Weber (2004) between embodied and digital presence is that there is a significant contrast between presence and absence and proximity and distance in situated bodies, particularly in ‘living’ bodies. However, Judith Butler states that ‘when the scene travels, it is simultaneously there and here, and if it did not extend to both locations – in fact to many locations – it would not be the scene that it is’ (Butler, 2015/2017, p. 116). Watching the suffering of others through the screen, or a process of claiming that is being carried out, creates a bond of engagement with their lives. This created engagement reverses or rather distorts distance and proximity. We are simultaneously here and there without being fully there or fully here. We create bonds with the ‘characters’ we are watching, which are limited by physical time and place, yet during and after the watching event, we are not fundamentally ourselves. Welcome to ‘digital normality’ or the ‘cell home’ The notable change that needs to be emphasised in the condition examined in this chapter is that in the bio-political techniques that characterise the COVID-19 crisis, the personal home appears as the new centre of production, consumption and biopolitical control. The home not only is referred to as a space of containment of the body but also has become the centre of the economy of tele-consumption and tele-production. The domestic space has become an internet-controlled space, a place identifiable on a Google map and a box identifiable by a drone. The domestic space is a ‘soft’ prison. Paul Preciado notes in this regard that we are moving from a society of writing to a society of cyber-verbality, from an organic society to a digital society, from an industrial economy to an immaterial economy, from a form of disciplinary and architectural control to forms of micro-additive technical and medium-governmental control. (Preciado, 2020) In a society of cyber-verbality and cyber-visuality, the contemporary body and subjectivity are not regulated exclusively through their passage through disciplinary institutions but primarily through a set of digital technologies of transmission and information. The planetary expansion of the internet, the widespread use of mobile information technologies, the use of AI and algorithms in big data analysis, high-speed information exchange and the development of global satellite-based information surveillance devices are indicators of this new semiotics-technical digitized management (Preciado, 2020). At the current juncture, we are finally becoming increasingly more controlled in both the physical space and the digital space. The control exercised by video cameras today, via mobile phones, ‘far exceeds any form of control exercised by totalitarian regimes such as fascism or Nazism’ (Agamben, 2020b, p. 58). It has

54  Ioanna Papakonstantinou-Brati already been argued many times that digital normality is the other side of the Stay Home slogan and campaign, which is a new realm of normality justified by the exception imposed. Through the study of the impact of the pandemic on modern life, quite clear conclusions are drawn concerning the ‘alteration’ of the ‘natural’ domestic condition. The domestic space, which before the virus became established was a space of freedom and personal expression and a valve of ‘decompression’ from the tension of everyday life, ‘is transformed into a sterile capsule that protects from the harsh outside, but ultimately burdens its occupant with the discomfort of confinement’ (Tsopanidou, 2021, p. 90). The familiar space of the home becomes intolerable, suffocating and alien, intensifying the introversion of the individual and confronting him with his own limits. At the same time, the material space of the home is being replaced by the immaterial space of the internet. ‘This substitution appears as the new normality’ (Lafazani & Chatzimichalis, 2020, p. 447). The violent and forced familiarization with the new tools offered by the internet was a significant event for a large part of society in an attempt to reassign to the private sphere of the home and the narrow confines of a screen the physical embodied activities that were performed in the public sphere. According to Maria Vrychea-Chaidopoulou, ‘in this process, the technological giants found themselves in an advantageous position and, moreover, they acquired incredible volumes of data’ (Vrychea-Chaidopoulou, 2020, p. 13). However, the quarantine period was also an occasion to strengthen free or opensource software tools, resulting in new fields of experimentation. At this juncture, those who live alone experience the lack of human contact more acutely, while those who live together are forced to find ways to coexist harmoniously, as the lack of space and/or technological equipment can cause disruption and friction. Anxiety and fear about the disease itself and about the future of each person lurks in every corner of the house. These internal processes are suppressed and often turn into anger. Anger spills over into the private home, often can turn into violence, and the familiar eventually gives way to the unfamiliar. The condition of home confinement dramatically changes established relationships and perceptions, with the body being managed and the house of everyday life becoming a prison. Sigmund Freud in his book The Uncanny is unequivocal about the dynamics of the familiar and the uncanny and their constant transformations. The familiar, the canny, can become uncomfortable, horrible, frightening. . . . The uncanny is a form of the terrifying. I propose to collect persons, things, feelings, experiences and situations that give rise to this feeling in us, with the ultimate aim of bringing out the element of concealment, the hiddenness that characterizes it. (Freud, 1919/2009, p. 15) Home is the site of the ‘early cognitive process’, of the formation of the individual, as it embodies the process of learning, the formation of perceptions and the acquisition of experiences; it is therefore tied to an intimacy that refers both to

The dual nature of the threshold in the pandemic era 55 ‘past’ experiences and to everyday use and to the movements of the body that are mechanically performed (Dovey, 1985). Gaston Bachelard recognizes the ‘phenomenology of the hidden’, and his research centred on intimacy comes into focus in its predominantly spatial imprint, on the dwelling, the refuge of the human soul, where man finds the protection that he seeks both physically and mentally. ‘The house where we were born is more than a body of residence, it is a body of dreams. Each of its shelters has also housed a dream’ (Bachelard, 1957/1982, p. 42). The poet goes on to say that for every human being, there is a dream house, a dream dwelling, that even in the whirl of the present emerges from the past to offer reasons or illusions of security and stability; this is the house: a patchwork of such images that lead to a kind of psychology of home. The condition of confinement activates questions about dwelling that we have not thought about and confronted until now. We no longer inhabit homes to which we used to resort for protection and dreaming. The merging of living space, recreational space, educational space and resting space has come to confirm the gradual abolition of the home and all that it entails. As Richard Sennett argues in his study entitled The Fall of Public Man (1977/2003), the private sphere has gradually imposed itself on the public. In revisiting his study presently, we notice that his argument contradicts the changes brought about by the pandemic. The intimate private space of the home is being invaded from the outside and made increasingly visible by the occupation of the public sphere and the more extensive use of digital technology applications. Clearly, the home is being redefined and becoming increasingly public and accessible by outsiders. On the brink of public and private, digital and physical and familiar and unfamiliar, the contemporary subject is called upon to recognize the totality of the threshold space and to preserve it in memory. He is essentially called upon to recognize the wholeness of the impermanent, to focus on the present, to bend down to listen to the experience that is being formed and to then accept the change that he has undergone and carries with him, which redefines him. His consciousness must acquire a new wholeness, something unified that transcends the elements that is not attached to their separate meanings and is not synthesized from them in a mechanical way. Only then does a landscape emerge. The threshold, having neutral properties, is an ideal ‘matrix’ for the development of a ‘landscape’, whether it is a ‘landscape’ of self or of society (Simmel, 1903/2004, pp. 33–34). Quarantine balconies as a backdoor threshold from the ‘cell home’ In the new ‘online’ home, more and more activities have taken on a tele-form. All activities take place via the internet, tele-work, tele-entertainment, tele-education and so much more. Spaces that were once intended for other uses, once used as a place to relax and read, for example, are losing their basic function and are being transformed into a workplace. In this example, the physical boundaries between the workplace and the employee’s personal space are being broken down. In the process of redefining the domestic space as a workplace or a space for entertainment, fitness, etc., the need for ‘connectivity’ increases. But digital ‘encounters’,

56  Ioanna Papakonstantinou-Brati although useful in certain circumstances, establish the trend of personalised connectivity, which means that you are constantly alone but simultaneously ‘connected’ to others. A particularly important element linked to the pandemic condition is the even greater use of the internet to create digital time-spaces of practical solidarity and counter-information. There has undoubtedly been a shift in the concept not only of place but also of embodied existence, such as collective assemblies, as these have also been transformed into digital meetings, even in the form of tele-conferences. Moreover, calls for demonstrations have been transformed into online events on digital platforms with thousands of people digitally declaring their ‘presence’ (via attend), and embodied presences are ‘communicated’ by declaring their location on specific platforms. One of the examples that gathered thousands of digital protesters occurred in Italy, where 400,000 workers (almost 1/3 of all workers) in the education sector gathered in protests on digital platforms from the beginning of the pandemic until 13 May 2020, in order to register their digital ‘presence’ and protest about issues related to their working conditions and the issues raised during the state of exception. In Greece, from which this chapter draws its experiential observations, in an effort of collective escape from capitalist control with the help of ‘bottom-up’ cooperation, a series of solidarity networks such as Stay Active and the health network COVID-19-Solidarity of Thessaloniki are noteworthy. Other examples are the No One Alone Campaign and the Stay Together network, which erupted at the time of the pandemic and acted mainly through the digital world as S. Stavrides explains by ‘promoting practical solidarity action and the physical struggle against unjust policies during the crisis’ (Stavrides, 2020). The internet seemed extremely useful and valuable for those who have access to it, acting as a ‘window’ on the world. Returning to the starting point of this chapter, it is confirmed that the internet is the contemporary threshold for separating or ‘bridging’. It inserts the public into the private and vice versa. But when all of these boundaries need to be renegotiated and engaged, the external public space becomes very important. In the days of quarantine, a new staged spatialisation emerged within neighbourhoods, namely, the (natural) balcony. The balcony, a space that was in disrepute until today (especially in Greece) since it usually functioned as a storage space with its iron wardrobe or as an artificial green environment with pots and plants, is currently a relief valve. The balcony and the terrace of apartment buildings are multi-purpose spaces in quarantine, such as for exercise, play and rest. It is a place where trapped inhabitants ‘rediscover’ their neighbours and sing together and is a place of escape from the monotony of the inside by substituting for the square and the forbidden public space. In this way, they created a sense of extension of the houses since they were shared by the residents, creating ‘threshold’ conditions between public and private spheres. The articulation of the balcony scene was a field that emerged as an ‘automatic necessity’ of embodied communication in the condition of the pandemic and expressed a spatial, performative becoming through ‘tropes of encounters, according to Erving Goffman (Goffman, 1961/1996), as they emerged very quickly from the very first days of the implementation of the universal lockdown. And bodies are

The dual nature of the threshold in the pandemic era 57 now ordered in the urban scene. It started on the balconies of Italy but spread rapidly to other cities around Europe and the world as a condition of public expression and as the birth of the need to meet and articulate demands: people played music and sang, like any other concert, not only as a sign of mutual solidarity with their neighbours but also as a resistance to the pandemic conditions. It seemed as if the squares or public gathering places had been revalued and ‘shared’ on the balconies of houses. The spatiality of this new scene is articulated as a form of thread-like space that is seemingly fragmented, but its parts are run through a relationship that is shaped by the enactment that occurs as a particular environment of public action. The balconies constituted a staged spatiality that emerged through the nonphysical interactions of individuals in the local field of neighbourhoods, defining their social circumstances differently and constituting forms of actions through entertaining means. It could be said that a new kind of performance of encounters emerged, as theatricality is inseparable from the need for social contact and communication. As an attempt to resist the confinement of the life-force of the pandemic condition, people in neighbourhoods go out onto their balconies to draw their own line of escape. A further twist and transformation that the spatiality of the ‘threshold’ balcony received was through applause as a sign of support for health workers. In neighbourhoods in Italy, Spain, Greece, and other parts of the world, at certain times, thanking the people working in the health units, within the difficult period of pandemic and confinement, resounded through a strong movement of applause on the balconies of the houses. The actors on the balconies, through an act that they have repeated many times before (in a concert, in a theatre performance, in a speech, etc.) as a sign of agreement and approval, created a new condition through this gesture, in different circumstances, as a sign of support. There is a ‘condition of exchange’ both between the subjects and between the subjects and their own act of applause. The action of clapping could be characterized as dramatic, according to Richard Schechner, and it ‘transforms a real behaviour into symbolic behaviour’ (Schechner, 2006), as through the symbolic shape, that is, the sound and visual language of clapping, new fields of communication are opened. Finally, it is important to point out that these findings are reported as they complete a ‘circular scheme of thought’ that was the aim of this chapter. From the Naples balconies analysed by W. Benjamin so many years ago, we reach the online threshold of the quarantine that unites the inhabitants with the forbidden outside, and finally, we return to the value of the quarantine balcony that constitutes a new urban scene bringing together subjects who are each imprisoned in their own sphere. In these balconies, utilizing E. Goffman’s words (Goffman, 1961/1996, p.  31), there is ‘an expressive renewal and reaffirmation of the moral values of community’ in those spaces where reality is performed’ (Schechner, 2006/2011, p. 37), thereby promoting social solidarity. Conclusions In this chapter, having acknowledged the dual nature of the (contemporary) threshold and its offshoots, an attempt was made to examine whether the notion

58  Ioanna Papakonstantinou-Brati of a dynamic boundary between public and private space can be renegotiated in the present day, in the age of the virus that affects our ability to breathe, and it was confirmed that it is necessary to revisit it. We began by exploring the concept of the threshold to arrive at what the no-body (digital) subject of our time is experiencing. Unfortunately, it was found that in the cities that we live in today, our familiar spaces, our houses, have been ‘burnt down’ and that people walk around ‘masked’ in the now uninhabitable and inhospitable neighbourhoods. Now, however, there is a difference in the form of the flame compared to that of the past. The flame ‘has changed its nature, it has become digital, invisible and cold, and it is even closer, it is in front of us and encircles us every moment’ (Agamben, 2020a, p. 124). There is no doubt that the first months of 2020 marked a tragic intersection between before and after. At the time of writing this chapter, so long after the start of the social restraint measures, the ‘accounting’ of the impact of the pandemic period is still difficult to analyse in depth, and this article certainly cannot exhaust the topic. However, it turns out that the pandemic has transformed hitherto given aspects of everyday life for human subjects who are ‘physically’ situated in the material geographies of a city. The pandemic has changed the way that we deal with our bodies. Its physical experience is modified, and its possibilities for expression are limited. Our bodies are threatened and endangered. Our body is a weapon if we do not Stay Home when recommended by the ‘experts’. And confinement is actually a way to regulate the power of this weapon. It is on the individual body that border policies and the strict restrictive measures applied to migrants and refugees, who for years have been straddling the gap in detention centres, are currently reproduced. COVID-19 has displaced the politics of borders that took place in the national territory or in the European super-territory down to the level of the individual corpus. The body, your individual body, as a living space, a grid of power and a centre of production and consumption of energy has been displaced in the new territory in which the aggressive border policies, which were planned and rehearsed for years, are expressed and now take the form of a barrier and a war against the virus. The new necropolitical borders have moved from the shores of Greece to the doorstep of the private home. Lesbos now begins at the doorstep of your home. And the border is coming increasingly closer to you, pushing until it is closer to your body. The new frontier is the mask. The air you breathe must be yours alone. The new frontier is your skin. The new Lampedusa is your skin (Preciado, 2020). The coronavirus threatens everyone, so we must all stay home. But we must not forget that it is different when confinement is in the suburbs or a second home in the country and when the home does not even exist. It is one thing to be on the front lines of the ‘battle’ and working in a health centre without a mask and another thing to be on constant teleconferences. This begs the legitimate question ‘What’s next?’ Just as wars leave a legacy of a range of ‘technologies’, it is likely that the same will happen after this health emergency is over. Therefore, it is rather necessary to engage in a deliberate ‘mutation’ and to conceive of the virus and its subsequent crisis as ‘portals’ for the

The dual nature of the threshold in the pandemic era 59 reorganization of a ‘new’ life. W. Benjamin, shortly before attempting to escape from the Gestapo, writes the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of exception we now live in is not the exception but the rule. We must manage to grasp history with this awareness. Then we will see clearly that our task is to create a real emergency, and thus improve our position in the struggle against fascism. (Benjamin, 1940/2014, p. 15) His words, perhaps more useful than ever, invite us to create our own emergency. The way to create it is to invent our own habits, that is, habits that re-claim public space beyond the new normality imposed and habits of unpredictable appropriation. The pandemic is clearly showing us the need for embodied habitation, to coexist and meet in spaces full of freedom of movement, the intensity of natural coexistence, unexpected events and spaces full of life. Acknowledgements This chapter is based to some extent on my thesis for my Master’s degree entitled Bio-medical entries in space: Stay home(?), as it is directly related to my PhD thesis that is currently in progress at the School of Architecture at the National Technical University of Athens. For all that I have learned and am learning every day, I owe a great debt to my supervisor Stavros Stavrides for his support; his passion for spatial and social justice is an inspiration. I also want to thank Simone Pekelsma and Basak Tanulku for their edits of this chapter and the feedback they gave me. References Agamben, G. (2020a). η επιδημία και η πολιτική. (μτφ.) Π.Καλαμαράς. παρέγκλισις (in Greek). Agamben, G. (2020b). ΠΟΥ ΒΡΙΣΚΟΜΑΣΤΕ; Η ΕΠΙΔΗΜΙΑ ΩΣ ΠΟΛΙΤΙΚΗ. (μτφ.) Π. Καλαμαράς και Τ.Θεοφιλογιαννάκος. ΕΚΔΟΣΕΙΣ ΑΛΗΣΤΟΥ ΜΝΗΜΗΣ (in Greek). Agamben, G. (2021). Η ΓΥΜΝΗ ΖΩΗ ΚΑΙ ΤΟ ΕΜΒΟΛΙΟ. (μτφ.) Π.Καλαμαράς. παρέγκλισις (in Greek). Arendt, H. (1986). Η ανθρώπινη κατάσταση [Vita Activa]. (μτφ.) Σ.Ροζάνης, Γ.Λυκιαρδόπουλο. Γνώση (in Greek). (Original work published 1958) Bachelard, G. (1982). ‘IV’και ‘V’. In Ε. Βέλτσου και. Δ. Χατζηνικολή (μτφ.), Η ποιητική του Χώρου (pp. 40–56). Εκδόσεις Χατζηνικολή (in Greek). (Original work published 1957) Benjamin, W. (2013). Για το έργο τέχνης: Τρία δοκίμια. Μτφρ. Α. Οικονόμου. Πλέθρον (in Greek). (1936) Benjamin, W. (2014). Θέσεις για τη φιλοσοφία της ιστορίας. Λέσχη κατασκόπων του 21ου αιώνα (in Greek). (Original work published 1940) Butler, J. (2017). Σημειώσεις για μια επιτελεστική θεωρία της συνάθροισης. (μτφ.) Μ. Λαλιώτης. Angelus Novus (in Greek). (Original work published 2015) Colomina, B. (1996). Privacy and publicity: Modern architecture as mass media. MIT Press.

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The dual nature of the threshold in the pandemic era 61 Tsopanidou, H. (2021). Το δικό μου (;) σπίτι [Research thesis, National Technical University of Athens, School of Architecture] (in Greek). Virilio, P. (2004). ΠΑΝΙΚΟΒΛΗΤΗ ΠΟΛΗ: Το αλλού αρχίζει εδώ. (μτφ) Β. Τομανάς. Νησίδες (in Greek). Vrychea-Chaidopoulou, M. (2020). Χρονοχώροι της καθημερινότητας στην εποχή του κορονοϊού: διδάγματα μετά την καραντίνα. https://poulantzas.gr/wp-content/uploads/2020/ 07/NPI_Covid19_Chaidopoulou-Vrychea.pdf (in Greek). Weber, S. (2004). Theatricality as medium. Fordham University Press.

4 Living on the boundary Interstitial identities in contemporary Burundi Antea Paviotti

Introduction Social boundaries serve the purpose of defining a “them” thanks to whom an “us” can be situated. When a group of people observe difference in another group of people, they establish a boundary between themselves and the others. Thus, a group of people is always identified as “other” in relation to “our” group, which comes into existence through the definition of the “others”. Boundaries delimit “within a defined environment an ‘own’ and a ‘different’ ” (Agier, 2017, p. 23) by separating an “imagined community of ‘people like me’ ” (Lamont, 2000, p. 3) from communities and individuals perceived as different (Wimmer, 2013, p. 3). The establishment of boundaries between “us” and “them” is not unidirectional but “a continuous process of endo- and exo-assignation” (Amselle, 1990, p. 36), and “what determines a person’s belonging to a group is essentially the influence of the others: the influence of the close ones . . . who try to appropriate her, and the influence of the opposite ones [ceux d’en face], who strive to exclude her” (Maalouf, 1998, p. 35). In Burundi, an important social boundary exists between Hutu and Tutsi, two of the country’s amoko (sing. ubwoko), usually called “ethnicities”. Belonging to one or another ubwoko is determined at birth, depending on the father’s ubwoko. The boundary between Hutu and Tutsi derives from repeated episodes of violence in the past that were directed against either the Hutu or the Tutsi ubwoko. This boundary was reinforced through the transmission of the memory of past violence among members of the same ubwoko (Uvin, 1999, p. 258; Chrétien et al., 1989, p. 51). The salience of this boundary is different for different members of the same ubwoko, as not all the members of an ubwoko experienced the same type of violence; therefore, not all of them have the same perception of the members of the “other” ubwoko. Moreover, this salience can vary over time, as it is affected by events and dynamics that happened after the boundary first emerged (Brubaker, 2004, p. 19). In addition, there are never only one “us” and one “them”, the Hutu and the Tutsi: several types of boundaries exist at the same time, either partly or fully overlapping, which separate groups that are defined in different ways at different levels. This is because individuals have “multiple belongings”, which “have not the same importance, in any case not at the same moment” and represent the “constituents of personality” (Maalouf, 1998, p. 19). DOI: 10.4324/9781003354772-6

Living on the boundary 63 Group belonging thus does not have the same salience for all the members of a society. This is very well illustrated by “individuals who are ‘lost to the group’: those who do not maintain ties with co-ethnics, do not belong to ethnic clubs and associations, . . . do not frequent ethnic cafés and shops, do not marry a co-ethnic, do not work in jobs that have an ethnic connotation, and do not live in ethnic neighborhoods” (Wimmer, 2013, p. 42). For these individuals, belonging to what is supposed to be their social group of reference is not fundamental to the definition of themselves and their daily activities. These individuals could be considered marginal, or liminal, within the society in which they live. In this chapter, I focus on the interstitial dimension of the position of these individuals in their social landscape of reference. I build on the findings of my PhD research in the centre of Burundi, where I could identify some individuals who seemed to belong to neither of the two main groups of reference, namely, the Hutu and the Tutsi. These persons seemed to “fit” neither “here” nor “there”, to live in an in-between position between Tutsi and Hutu, and to nevertheless relate to them in different ways in their everyday life. Thus, situated in what resembles an “interstice” in the social landscape, these individuals presented what I call “interstitial identities”. From the boundary-­making perspective, these people were situated on the boundary, at the edge between “us” and “them”. In this chapter, I analyse how the interstitial identity of these individuals emerged in the definition of themselves and the others, and how it was navigated in daily life. This analysis thus shows how boundaries between “us” and “them” can be contested by those who live on those boundaries. After discussing the notions of marginality, liminality, waithood, hybridity, and interstitiality in the first section, I describe the research site and methodology of my study in the second section, and I analyse the identities of people in the interstice in the third section of the chapter. A final section discusses the importance of analysing interstitial identities to better understand how social boundaries can be contested and thus made and remade. On liminality, hybridity, and interstitial identities Boundaries, borders, and liminality represent central topics in anthropology. The “margin” became a topic of interest at the beginning of the XX century with the foundational work of Arnold Van Gennep on the rites of passage (1909). For Van Gennep, the margin represented a period between different phases of life (called “worlds”), during which individuals are separated from the rest of society, by symbolic and often physical boundaries, in a space of transformation at the margins of society. After this period, these individuals, transformed, will be reintegrated into society. In the 1960s, Victor Turner further developed these views on “liminality” and introduced the concept of communitas. In a condition of liminality, what Turner called “liminal personae (‘threshold people’) . . . elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space”: they are “neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial” (Turner, 1977, p. 95). Liminality represented to Turner “a ‘moment in and out of time’, and in and

64  Antea Paviotti out of secular social structure”, during which society assumes a different “model for human interrelatedness”, called communitas. Through the alternation of structure and communitas, according to Turner, society comes into being. While marginality and liminality are situated within a transition process from one social condition to another, notions such as waithood and hybridity present elements that nuance and challenge what would otherwise seem a linear transition between different phases in human life. Alcinda Honwana’s notion of “waithood”, a period during which “youthmen” are “waiting for adulthood” (2013), recalls Van Gennep’s and Turner’s understandings of liminality in that waithood represents the transition between youth and adulthood, two “socially constructed categor[ies] defined by societal expectations and responsibilities” (2013). Nevertheless, in “waithood”, “access to social adulthood is delayed or denied”, and individuals are “blocked in a stage of prolonged or permanent youth” (2013). “Waithood” thus becomes a “neither-here-nor-there position” between childhood and adulthood (2012, p. 20), which, according to Honwana, represents the experience of many African youth. Under these circumstances, youth need to improvise livelihoods to be able to access a new status, sometimes with very creative solutions and yet with no guarantee of success, especially given the socio-economic contexts in which they live. The unpredictability of the outcomes of this position makes “waithood” fundamentally different from Van Gennep’s and Turner’s liminality, as after liminality, the new status in society is more or less predetermined. Homi K. Bhabha’s “hybridity” emerges in “in-between spaces” (1994), liminal spaces that allow for the creation of something new, and reminds of Honwana’s “waithood” because the outcomes of this position are not defined. In-between spaces are to Bhabha “interstitial passage[s]” that emerge in encounters with colonial realities (both imposed and endured) and represent “the connective tissue that constructs the difference” (1994, p. 4). These spaces “provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood . . . that initiate new signs of identity”, and it is in these “interstices – the overlap and displacement of domains of difference – that the intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness, community interest, or cultural value are negotiated” (1994, pp. 1–2). Therefore, in-between spaces are not positioned on a linear trajectory towards a predetermined new status: it is the encountering of differences in these interstitial passages that gives birth to something “hybrid” (Bhabha, 1996, p. 58), which is new and unexpected. The notion of “interstitial identities” that I present in this chapter relates to the notions of marginality, liminality, waithood, and hybridity in different ways. Individuals with what I call an interstitial identity in contemporary Burundi, in between the Hutu and Tutsi social groups, are “between two worlds” like in Van Gennep’s “periods of margin”, “betwixt and between the positions assigned” by society, like Turner’s “liminal personae” (1977, p. 95). In this interstitial position, they need to improvise survival strategies, expressing their agency to the full and yet with uncertain outcomes, like youth in “waithood” (Honwana). What differentiates interstitiality from marginality, liminality, waithood, and hybridity is the fact that the interstitial condition is not situated on a trajectory towards another predetermined status in society, and this condition does not seem to be temporary. As I show in the next sections,

Living on the boundary 65 individuals in interstitial positions are “separated from a clearly defined state in the past” but have few (or no) prospects of being “incorporated . . . into a clearly defined future state” (Bhandari, 2020, p. 79). Thus, they can have the feeling of being “stuck” in the interstice. They are not on their way to adopting the identity of the “other” group but rather are in between the two groups, and they relate to both groups in daily life without really moving from their interstice. In this way, interstitiality actually becomes a new, “other” social identity, in between and at the same time beyond the existing ones. To adopt the boundary-making language, interstitial identities are situated on the boundary, at the edge between “us” and “them”. They distanced themselves from their previous group of belonging but are not integrated into the “other” group either. People in an interstitial position did not cross the boundary that separates their in-group from the out-group, but they remained situated on that very boundary, in an interstitial position. By living on the boundary, through daily survival practices, interstitial identities question the salience of the boundary on which they are situated and thus challenge its rigidity and position. Research site and methodology Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa are Burundi’s three amoko (sing. ubwoko) and are usually referred to as “ethnicities” or “ethnic groups”. Open violence between Hutu and Tutsi has existed in Burundi since independence, which was obtained in 1962. Major episodes of violence took place in 1965, 1969, 1972, 1988, and 1993. Some of the policies implemented by the Belgians during their indirect rule of Rwanda and Burundi (1919–1962), which privileged the Tutsi in the access to power and education to the detriment of the Hutu, provided the groundwork for the development of antagonisms between Tutsi and Hutu.1 After independence, Tutsi privilege was maintained and reinforced. For three decades, every attempt of Hutu revolt has been harshly repressed by the Tutsi ruling class. In 1993, following the assassination of President Melchior Ndadaye, the first democratically elected Hutu president of Burundi after three decades of Tutsi autocratic regimes, Hutu throughout the country started to persecute their Tutsi neighbours, accusing them of killing “their” president.2 The geographical and social landscape of Bugendana, in the centre of Burundi, still shows signs of the episodes of violence that occurred between Hutu and Tutsi in the 1990s. In the area surrounding Bugendana, Tutsi fled their homes and sought refuge in the neighbouring hills, becoming internally displaced persons (IDPs). In 1994, a camp started to be built on state-owned land in Bugendana to gather all the IDPs from the neighbouring localities. Tutsi IDPs were thus allowed to live closer to their fields on the hills, which they had to abandon when they fled. When the intensity of the violence decreased, IDPs started to visit their fields to resume their agricultural activities, returning to the camp at the end of the day to spend the night there. In 1996, an important attack was carried out on Bugendana IDP camp by Hutu rebels (the so-called assaillants), during which more than 600 Tutsi IDPs lost their lives in one night. Today, a graveyard at the entrance of the camp, with a large cross in its centre mentioning the “genocide of 648 Tutsi survivors of 1993 in Bugendana”, represents a daily reminder for all passers-by of this episode of violence and past suffering.

66  Antea Paviotti Bugendana’s “ethno-geographical setting” presents quite clear-cut boundaries between Hutu and Tutsi areas: the IDP camp remains almost entirely populated by Tutsi, while the hills surrounding the camp are mainly populated by Hutu. Interactions between members of different amoko take place in the fields on the hills, where both Hutu and Tutsi cultivate the land, and on two main crossroads at the entrance of the IDP camp, where small shops and restaurants are concentrated and frequented by Tutsi and Hutu traders and customers (centre Bugendana). Within the framework of my PhD research, I analysed reciprocal perceptions and interactions between Hutu and Tutsi in different parts of Burundi, through life histories collected during individual interviews and participant observation. In Bugendana, with the help of different translators, I talked with 45 persons (Hutu and Tutsi, men and women, IDPs, non-IDPs, and former IDPs) in November 2018 and between September and November 2019. The aim of my research was to understand among the interviewees’ “multiple belongings” (Maalouf, 1998, p. 19) which ones were the most salient. I tried to understand how people defined “us” and “them” in order to examine the nature of the boundary between the two communities and to observe when and how these communities corresponded to different amoko. Inspired by Lamont, I aimed to explore how the interviewees concretely defined “us” and “them” by asking them to “describe their friends and foes, role models and heroes, and the kinds of people they like and dislike” (Lamont, 2000, p. 4). Thus, I aimed to avoid an ethnic lens (Wimmer, 2013, p. 38) in the interpretation of data from settings such as Bugendana, where boundaries between the Tutsi and Hutu amoko have particular salience because of past violence and the “others” may be easily defined in terms of ubwoko.3 In an inductive way, I could identify individuals who did not strongly associate themselves with a group and against another group but rather seemed to be in an interstitial position, that is, in-between groups. These were Tutsi former IDPs who had returned to their hills of origin, where mostly Hutu live, and Hutu IDPs living in the predominantly Tutsi Bugendana IDP camp. These individuals (representing a very small minority of my interviewees: five former Tutsi IDPs and two Hutu IDPs) presented what I call an interstitial identity. Like the joints between bones in the human body, they found themselves in an interstice between those who emerged as the two main groups of reference among people’s “multiple belongings”. The interstitial identity emerged in the perception of them as “other” by the two groups between which they were situated and in their awareness of being perceived as “other”. In the following section, I describe how this identity emerged in perceptions and self-perceptions and how it was dealt with in daily life. In between Hutu and Tutsi: interstitial identities in contemporary Burundi Tutsi former IDPs on the hill

On the hills surrounding Bugendana IDP camp, we talked to five Tutsi persons who had returned to their houses after living in the camp. The stories of two persons, Séverine and Zéphyrin (invented names), are particularly illustrative of their interstitial identity.

Living on the boundary 67 Séverine had returned to her house six years earlier because she had health problems, and she was getting too old to easily walk the distance between the IDP camp and her fields on the hill. She still had many relatives and friends living in the camp, to whom she seemed to still be very attached. She told us that every day, she goes to the camp, as her house and her friends are there. When we started our interview and asked when she left the camp, she said that she was still living there. When did you leave the camp? I still live there! The administration [on the hill] does not know that I came back. I still have my house in the camp. Nobody came to help me return to my place of origin. . . . When I am at the hospital, it is people from the camp who come visit me. That is why I say that I still live in the camp. Nevertheless, we never saw her when we were conducting interviews inside the IDP camp, and when we asked other IDPs about her, they told us that she was living on the hill. This already puts her in an interstitial position: while she seemed to identify herself with the Tutsi IDP group, her identification by Tutsi IDPs was not exactly the same. The fact that she did not announce her departure to the other IDPs in the camp underlines her desire not to be rejected (as “other”) by the group that she felt more attached to. What was the reaction of the other IDPs when you returned to the hill? Were they not mad at you? I have never announced it officially. I came back but I had left my clothes and my things in the camp. When I went to the church, I first took my bath on the hill, I went to the church, and then I went to my house [in the camp] to pick up some of my clothes. Little by little, I resettled on the hill. When they asked later on, they were already a bit used to not seeing me around. I explained that it was because of my rheumatisms, and they understood. Now it is ok. So you think that they would not have taken it well? I did not want them to know that I had abandoned them. At the same time, the frustration of not being reintegrated into her community of origin on the hill reveals expectations that were not met. Integration into either the group of those living on the hill (Hutu) or the group of the IDPs (Tutsi) seemed to be understood in economic terms, through access to resources. Social rejection was felt when resources appeared to be kept for the two main groups and not shared with her, who was in between them. I know that when [my neighbours] need to refer to me, they call me ‘the displaced’. Are you still in touch with the camp representative? Yes. But there too, when hail and strong wind had damaged houses, I did not receive any rice or aid, I was not on the list. Aid is distributed on the hill through the chef

68  Antea Paviotti de colline, coming from the commune. I have never received a thing, but I have also never been inscribed on a list. Even [my neighbour], if he gave me his cow for me to take care of, it is only because we go to the same church. No one helped you to resettle? No, and even those from . . . did it in exchange for money. Why did the neighbours here not help? Was it because of the 1993 crisis? That is possible. They do not want me to develop economically. The latter quote actually suggests that the reason for social rejection can be a mixture of motives related to economic development and the ubwoko, or rather the memory of past violence related to the ubwoko. Zéphyrin, the second former IDP interviewed in Bugendana, gave a more explicit explanation of this: People take decisions, sometimes based on the ubwoko. When I returned to the camp [after being on the hill], the others were surprised. Maybe one day they will also change their minds. . . . Since the moment I decided to return on the hill, I became their enemy. . . . When I took the decision to leave the camp, I was considered suicidal: how could I return home, since my father had been killed on the hill? . . . But all the problems that I had had, it was in the camp. They stole my cow, my bicycle, my clothes. Not on the hill! They stole every time. They were jealous of my ability to develop myself. Zéphyrin also decided to return to the hill mainly because of the long distance between the camp and his fields. His separation from the IDP group seemed to be more traumatic than for Séverine. Not only did his IDP neighbours and friends in the camp fail to support his decision; according to him, they even tried to physically harm him. This indicates a more evident rejection from the group, underlining the position of betrayal attributed to those who “left” and ended up between “us” and “them” (Maalouf, 1998, p. 54). When these individuals are perceived as a threat, even physical violence may be used against them (Maalouf, 1998, p. 44). After our first interview, Zéphyrin showed us the place where his former friends in the camp chased after him, allegedly with bludgeons in their hands in an attempt to kill him. He said that he was able to escape death because he was agile and fast. Did someone help you build your new house or did you work alone? I can say that I worked alone. Those who were supposed to help me, that is, people from the camp, did not help me. At the camp, if they get to know that you are leaving the camp, you immediately become their enemy. They can come after you until they even try to harm you. On the hill, relations with Hutu neighbours seemed to be good for Zéphyrin, and this facilitated his return. For generations, Hutu neighbours used to cultivate the fields of Zéphyrin’s family in exchange for part of the crops. Friendship was strengthened

Living on the boundary 69 in 1997, when Zéphyrin allegedly saved the life of a Hutu neighbour by giving him his clothes so that he could flee unnoticed (according to Zéphyrin, some Tutsi IDPs were planning to kill his friend’s father to take revenge for the 1996 attack on the camp). Hutu neighbours on the hill were the only ones who helped him rebuild his house. For these reasons, Zéphyrin seemed to have a stronger feeling of belonging on the hill than in the camp. The fact that he abhorred living in the IDP camp emphasises his effective detachment from his previous (Tutsi) group. I cannot say that I have a house in the camp now, I would say that my only house is on the hill. . . . I sleep on the hill every day. In fact, I feel more secure on the hill than in the camp. What will you do with your house when you leave the camp? If I could, I would take away the doors, the windows, the tiles, and then destroy the house. On the hill, however, Zéphyrin did not really seem to be considered by his Hutu neighbours as “one of them”. Although a couple of Hutu interviewees recognised that they helped Zéphyrin when he was rebuilding his house, they also pointed out that he had another house in the camp where his family lived, and that except for occasional work-based relations, they did not carry out any activity with him. A certain level of trust was acknowledged because Zéphyrin was said to sometimes eat at the homes of his Hutu neighbours. Nevertheless, his life did not seem to be on the hill, or at least not yet. We see him working here; he sometimes comes to our place and eats here, then he goes back to the camp. Does he also eat at the neighbours’ places sometimes? He does not. He trusts us, why would he go to the others. (Tutsi woman, never displaced) The apparent contradiction between the self-perception of Zéphyrin, who feels he does not belong to the IDP camp anymore, and the perception of his Hutu neighbours on the hill, who do not see him as fully reintegrated, highlights Zéphyrin’s interstitial position between the group that he left and the group that he approached again. The feeling of being suspended in the middle of two communities to which they do not belong was also strongly expressed by three other Tutsi women (Fanny, Glenda, and Rose, invented names) who used to live in the IDP camp and had returned to their hill of origin. Today, we are neither in the camp nor on the hill. If they bring [aid] to the camp, we are not informed. The same happens on the hill. We are not involved in the community’s life . . . When they plant hedges against erosion here, we are not invited. It is organised by agronomists, and workers are paid.

70  Antea Paviotti Why do they not invite you? They do not trust us. They keep their anger. . . . It is the Hutu who do not trust the Tutsi. . . . At the camp as well we are not informed [about what is going on]. The Tutsi of the camp also do not trust us. They did not want us to return to the hill. We did not actually inform them, we left the camp without saying a word. (Fanny) If only I could go back to the camp. They do not consider me here on the hill. What about the relations with the rest of the people living in the camp? Oh, we could not go back to the camp. We are not used to living there anymore. (Glenda) The fact that, like Séverine, these women preferred not to announce their departure from the camp to the other Tutsi IDPs because this would have been perceived as abandonment or betrayal, reveals the strength of the bond among Tutsi IDPs. If the damaging of this bond provoked a loss of trust, however, it did not imply the perception of these women as traitors. Contrary to Zéphyrin, who allegedly risked his life to leave the Tutsi IDP group, these women were protected by their former groupmates when they were about to be killed. Another long period of insecurity was during the rebellion. The military sometimes found the door open and tried to shoot, they thought I was a rebel, but the others stopped them. What others? People from the camp, coming from . . . The army used to come with them. (Fanny) This underlines the interstitial position of these women: they were neither members of the previous group, which did not trust them anymore, nor integrated into the “new” group, which did not involve them in the community’s life. In this inbetween position, these women found themselves stuck in an interstice that was “neither a new horizon, nor a leaving behind of the past” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 1). Hutu IDPs in the camp

Two Hutu men (Gabriel and Olivier, invented names) fled to the predominantly Tutsi Bugendana IDP camp after allegedly being persecuted on their hills of origin.4 We identified these Hutu IDPs thanks to information provided by Tutsi IDPs living in the camp with them. Olivier seemed to be quite reticent to tell us his story. He told us that he joined the camp in 1996 after thieves repeatedly stole his crops in the place where he was living on the hill and made threats against his life. Gabriel told us that he joined the camp in 2010, after living in the DR Congo and in other places in Burundi between 1993 and 2009. In 1993, Gabriel suffered violence perpetrated by both Hutu and the military: Hutu allegedly persecuted him because he had married a Tutsi woman, while the military, which was usually perceived as pro-Tutsi, represented a

Living on the boundary 71 threat to him because it targeted the Hutu during operations aimed at restoring order (after violence broke out following the assassination of President Ndadaye). In the camp, there are mainly Tutsi, and Hutu live on the hills. Was it not a bit weird for you to come to the camp? The answer is difficult and easy at the same time. I am married to a Tutsi woman, and in 1993, I was beaten by Hutu and threatened because I did not want to participate in the killings. They even broke my wrist [he shows his wrist]. For this reason, I could not ask any of the Hutu on the hill [to give me a plot of land where I could live]. This is also why I went to my brother-in-law [when I returned from the DR Congo]. And it is thanks to the Tutsi that I have sheet metal for my house in the camp. . . . Other people persecuted on the hill [where I was working] were Tutsi. Myself, as a Hutu, I was targeted because I had a Tutsi wife. When they started to threaten me, I left. Those who were threatening me were Hutu. (Gabriel) Before joining the IDP camp, Gabriel seemed to be in an overlap between categories (Hutu and Tutsi) because he had married a member of the “other” ubwoko; when forced to take sides, he refused to make a choice and mark “ ‘them’ off from ‘us’ ” (Wimmer, 2013, p. 71) through violence in a situation of categorical uncertainty (Appadurai, 1998). The choice made by Gabriel was to turn to those who allowed him to continue to live, regardless of their ubwoko. The possibility to have their life protected in a safe space such as Bugendana IDP camp, along with access to resources and livelihood, seemed to prevail over any type of consideration. In addition to cultivating their fields, these Hutu IDPs were employed at the centre Bugendana, one as a bike-taxi driver and one as a watchman at a kiosk owned by a Tutsi IDP. Thus, access to resources led to and reinforced an affiliation with the group providing resources. Returning to the hill did not seem to be an option because of the lack of resources there and because of fear. Today, I could not go back to the hill. Because of the thieves. I could not sleep there. I will stay at the camp because I do not have the money to buy land elsewhere. (Olivier) I cannot go back to [the hill] because I do not have any land there. But I cannot go there, not even for a short time, I have to manage my time there. If I go there, I need to come back before dark. You never know what might happen during the night. (Gabriel) The fear of the dark on the hill was a recurrent theme in many of the interviews conducted during my PhD research with Tutsi IDPs living in the camp who live

72  Antea Paviotti “entrenched in displacement” (Purdeková, 2017, p. 2). The fact that this was mentioned by a Hutu IDP shows a certain degree of closeness between him and the Tutsi IDPs, which derives from the common experience of violence on the hill perpetrated by members of the Hutu ubwoko. The discomfort felt in the face of those who caused his displacement is similar to that of many Tutsi IDPs who were chased away by Hutu, as well as many Hutu and Tutsi who resort to a “chosen amnesia” as a strategy that is “essential for local coexistence” (Buckley-Zistel, 2006, p. 134). Do you ever meet [the Hutu who threatened you]? Yes, at the kiosks at the centre Bugendana. Do you not feel uncomfortable? Well, I cannot do anything about that. We greet each other, we exchange some words, hatred disappears little by little. But at the kiosks, they cannot kill me. (Gabriel) The common experience of being persecuted by Hutu seems to have made this Hutu IDP join the group of Tutsi IDPs, with whom most of his daily interactions seemed to take place. Some Tutsi IDPs who talked to us about these two Hutu IDPs seemed to consider them part of their group. They asked the former camp representative in 1997/98 to join the camp because of political persecution. They were members of UPRONA.5 These people have the same problems as the Tutsi. (Tutsi woman, IDP) They saved some Tutsi. Those on the hill told them that they had problems because of them. The Tutsi in the camp welcomed them with open arms because they know what they did. (Tutsi man, IDP) However, these Hutu IDPs did not become Tutsi: they might appear to have crossed the boundary between amoko, but they were not perceived by the new group as “one of them” (and this was not their aim either, when they joined the IDP camp). This is what makes their identity interstitial: they seem to have left their Hutu group of origin, but they are not fully integrated into the Tutsi IDP group. The very stereotypical description of one of them given by a Tutsi IDP reveals a perception of this Hutu IDP as “other”. There is one . . . also known by the name Murundi [‘Burundian’]. There is another one who lives next to the road. They are considered IDPs when aid arrives. Why is [he] called Murundi? He is a pure Hutu. He is a brick maker, he likes working. He himself called himself that way. When he has been drinking and he comes back home he says ‘here is the Hutu who comes back home!’ He also calls himself umukozi [‘worker’]. (Tutsi man, IDP)

Living on the boundary 73 According to the anecdote told by this interviewee, this Hutu IDP seemed to be aware of the perception of him as “other”, living among Tutsi IDPs but belonging to a different ubwoko. The use of the names Murundi (“Burundian”) and umukozi (“worker”) by which he allegedly described himself might represent a strategy to ignore his ubwoko in his daily life in a place predominantly inhabited by members of the “other” ubwoko; only when he was drunk and his inhibitions were lowered by the alcohol, his ubwoko would have come out. This echoes the perception of Séverine, a former IDP, who was aware that her neighbours labelled her as “the displaced” to underline her difference from them. Both of these interstitial figures seemed to ignore the perception of themselves as “other” in daily life, although they were aware of it, and they put it forward under specific circumstances – under the effects of alcohol, or before people such as my translator and I, who were perceived as neutral regarding local people’s perceptions and self-perceptions of themselves and the others, and in front of whom it was therefore safe to open up. Living on the boundary The emergence of interstitial identities is an excellent illustration of how ­self-perceptions depend to a large extent on “what is received” from the society in which one lives after displacement or migration, on the one hand, and what is supposed to be her community of belonging or origin, on the other hand (Miano, 2020, p. 14). Individuals with interstitial identities in Burundi perceived themselves as “other” with respect to their ubwoko or group of origin, which they left because of specific historical circumstances and to which they could not return, primarily because they do not feel trusted anymore. They also perceive themselves as “other” in relation to the community where they live at present, especially when they feel that they are not trusted or that access to resources is not granted to them because of the memory of past violence. When this happens, affiliation with the group of origin is felt more strongly, and its loss is regretted. Individuals in an interstitial position find themselves at the edge between “us” and “them”, stuck in a position where reunion with either “us” or “them” is impossible. Thus, they live in an in-between space, in a condition of “unhomeliness”, which does not mean “to be homeless, nor can the ‘unhomely’ be easily accommodated in that familiar division of social life into private and public spheres” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 9). This condition is experienced with bitterness and anger (Maalouf, 1998, p. 54), but it is also faced with determination, as in Zéphyrin’s case, with ambivalence through the employment of “elusive tactics” that make one “difficult to pin down” (Berckmoes, 2014, p. 173), as in Séverine’s case, and with the adoption of a strategy of “chosen amnesia” (Buckley-Zistel, 2006, p.  134), as in Gabriel’s case. These strategies allow for the mental and physical survival of people living in an interstitial position in present-day Burundi. In the interstices, an “interstitial intimacy” exists between “private and public, past and present, the psyche and the social” that “questions [the] binary divisions through which such spheres of social experience are often spatially opposed” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 13). It is by challenging the familiar divisions of social life that interstitial identities bring with them a potential for change, that is, the

74  Antea Paviotti “possibility of a cultural hybridity” that “entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 4). Thus, interstitial identities can represent the beginning of radically new identities beyond what is foreseen in the current social landscape. Staying on the boundary is a radical affirmation of the right to not belong, which is an extremely bold decision in a context such as Burundi, where the memory of past violence has imposed rigid boundaries between “us” and “them”, together with a compelling need to belong, once and for all, to one of the two groups. The existence of interstitial identities thus contributes to overcoming binary conceptions of identity that separate “us” from “them” (Maalouf, 1998, p. 44), as it demonstrates that living on the boundary between “us” and “them” is possible, although with difficulties. While it highlights the binary division of the social landscape, it also shows that those binary divisions are being challenged. Interstitial identities represent a revolutionary statement in Burundi’s social landscape as they defend the right “to feel closer to one [category] than another, and even to feel close to none”, regardless of the position assigned and imposed by others (Thuram, 2020, p. 179). Interstitial identities defy the “thrill of belonging – which implies being part of something bigger than one’s solo self, and therefore stronger” (Morrison, 2017, p. 15). Thus, they challenge the positions adopted by members of the main social groups. They “embod[y] a word, a creation or a political action that emerge at the border and become a factor of disturbance for an existing sedentary order” (Agier, 2017, p. 9). The outcomes of this position, however, are not clear. The awareness that people in the interstice have of their own particularities may push them to construct themselves in alternative, or even transgressive, ways (Miano, 2020, p. 51). These ways are not defined and depend on several factors. Challenging the boundary between “us” and “them” was sanctioned with a lack of trust and violence by the rest of the group members. Nevertheless, this questioned the position of boundaries in the perceptions of these group members. Depending on how successfully they navigate their position on the boundary, individuals in the interstice might invite other individuals to liberate themselves from the imposition of group belonging (Thuram, 2020, p. 213) and join the interstitial position, focusing on what really matters to them to create their own future beyond “us” and “them”. Ultimately, this could bring about a shift in the position of boundaries in Burundi’s social landscape. Interstitial identities may thus give rise to a society that could be less “deeply divided”. Research should be encouraged on the factors allowing people in the interstices to successfully navigate their interstitial positions. The analysis presented in this chapter represents an important contribution to the literature on boundary-making because it does not focus on the movements of the boundaries or their changing meanings and degrees of thickness (Wimmer, 2013) but rather on the way in which boundaries can be challenged by those living on it. Analysis of interstitial identities emphasises that individuals are not always situated on either one or the other side of a boundary but can remain on the very boundary, in an in-between position; from this position, they interact with the boundary itself. By accepting, ignoring, or contesting this boundary in their everyday life, these “border beings” (Maalouf, 1998, p. 13),6 who live on the border between “us” and “them”, can be the pioneers of new forms of identity.

Living on the boundary 75 Notes 1 It is not clear what type of relations existed between Hutu and Tutsi before Belgian colonisation. Some scholars find “little evidence of ancestral hatreds between Hutu and Tutsi” in precolonial Burundi (Lemarchand, 1993, p. 153). Others describe Burundi’s precolonial society as characterised by hierarchy and deep inequalities due to the social division of labour between Hutu agriculturalists and Tutsi herders (Botte, 1982, p. 272). 2 I provide a more detailed account of the dynamics leading to the repeated cycles of violence between Tutsi and Hutu in Burundi in my PhD thesis (Paviotti, 2021, pp. 38–45). 3 My fieldwork lasted 12 months in total between October 2018 and April 2020. During this period, my translators and I returned several times to Bugendana and two other research sites. I describe in length the methodology of my study and its limitations in my PhD thesis (Paviotti, 2021, pp. 54–57). 4 In addition to these two Hutu IDPs, we interviewed three Hutu women who were living in the camp and were married to Tutsi IDPs. These women seemed to be in a less interstitial position than their male counterparts because through marriage they joined their husbands’ families, in accordance with Burundian custom. I discuss this in more detail in my PhD thesis (Paviotti, 2021, pp. 154–156). 5 UPRONA was a predominantly Tutsi political party that ruled the country since the 1960s. In 1993, Melchior Ndadaye won the elections and thus became the first democratically elected Hutu president of Burundi. Following his assassination, many Hutu accused “the Tutsi” of killing “their” president. 6 “Border beings” is my translation of the French expression “êtres frontaliers” used by Maalouf.

References Agier, M. (2017). Borderlands. Towards an anthropology of the cosmopolitan condition. Polity Press. Amselle, J.-L. (1990). Logiques Métisses. Anthropologie de l’Identité en Afrique et Ailleurs. Payot. Appadurai, A. (1998). Dead certainty: Ethnic violence in the era of globalization. Development and Change, 29, 905–925. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-7660.00103 Berckmoes, L. H. (2014). Elusive tactics. Urban youth navigating the aftermath of war in Burundi [Doctoral dissertation, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam]. VU Research Portal. https://hdl.handle.net/1871/53250 Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The location of culture. Routledge. Bhabha, H. K. (1996). Culture’s in-between. In S. Hall & P. Du Gay (Eds.), Questions of cultural identity (pp. 53–60). SAGE Publications. Bhandari, N. (2020). Negotiating cultural identities in diaspora: A conceptual review of third space. Curriculum Development Journal, 42, 78–89. https://doi.org/10.3126/cdj .v0i42.33215 Botte, R. (1982). La guerre interne au Burundi. In J. Bazin & E. Terray (Eds.), Guerres de Lignages et Guerres d’Etats en Afrique (pp. 269–317). Archives Contemporariness. Brubaker, R. (2004). Ethnicity without groups. Harvard University Press. Buckley-Zistel, S. (2006). Remembering to forget: Chosen amnesia as a strategy for local coexistence in post-genocide Rwanda. Africa, 76(2), 131–150. https://doi.org/10.3366/ afr.2006.76.2.131 Chrétien, J.-P., Guichaoua, A., & Le Jeune, G. (1989). La crise d’août 1988 au Burundi. Cahiers du CRA N° 6. AFERA. Honwana, A. (2012). The time of youth. Work, social change, and politics in Africa. Kumarian Press.

76  Antea Paviotti Honwana, A. (2013). Youth, waithood, and protest movements in Africa [Lugard Lecture]. Fifth European Conference on African Studies, Lisbon, Portugal. Lamont, M. (2000). The dignity of working man. Morality and the boundaries of race, class, and immigration. Russell Sage Foundation. Lemarchand, R. (1993). Burundi in comparative perspective. Dimensions of ethnic strife. In J. McGarry & B. O’Leary (Eds.), The politics of ethnic conflict regulation: Case studies of protracted ethnic conflicts (pp. 151–171). Routledge. Maalouf, A. (1998). Les Identités Meurtrières. Grasset & Fasquelle. Miano, L. (2020). Afropea. Utopie Post-occidentale et Post-raciale. Grasset & Fasquelle. Morrison, T. (2017). The origin of others. Harvard University Press. Paviotti, A. (2021). “Us” and “them”: Reciprocal perceptions and interactions between amoko in contemporary Burundi [Doctoral dissertation, University of Antwerp]. UA Institutional Repository. https://repository.uantwerpen.be/docstore/d:irua:8119 Purdeková, A. (2017). “Barahunga Amahoro – They are fleeing peace!” the politics of re-displacement and entrenchment in post-war Burundi. Journal of Refugee Studies, 30(1), 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/few025 Thuram, L. (2020). La Pensée Blanche. Points. Turner, V. (1977). The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. Cornell Paperbacks. Uvin, P. (1999). Ethnicity and power in Burundi and Rwanda: Different paths to mass violence. Comparative Politics, 31(3), 253–271. https://doi.org/10.2307/422339 Wimmer, A. (2013). Ethnic boundary making. Institutions, power, networks. Oxford University Press.

5 Liminality when grounded Micro-mobilities in contemporary art practice during the COVID-19 pandemic Pia Johnson and Clare McCracken Introduction This experimental chapter grew out of Australia’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It brings together four artworks by artist-academics Pia Johnson and Clare McCracken that were made during the first two years of the pandemic. As artist-academics, we are what Natalie Loveless calls ‘maker-thinkers’ (2019, p.  37). Through our artforms – photography, performance, creative writing and mixed-media art making – we make sense of the world and conduct our research. Therefore, the artworks offer a critical lens into the pandemic’s social, cultural and gendered impacts. Grounded in the lived experience of extensive lockdowns, the chapter reveals how we made works intuitively in small snippets of time carved out for ourselves as a method to think through the pandemic. Like many women globally, we were juggling work and significant caring responsibilities. Pia’s daughter started primary school at the beginning of the pandemic and like all students from the state of Victoria, endured online learning throughout the state’s lockdowns. Clare started the pandemic pregnant, gave birth to her first child four days before Melbourne was plunged into a 111-day lockdown and balanced full-time work and caring responsibilities when childcare services closed for 10 weeks in 2021. The chapter brings the artworks into conversation with mobilities, feminist, postcolonial and settler-colonial theories to analyse what they tell us about the experience of being in lockdown and the impacts of significant and long-standing border closures. Ole Jensen argues that we should ‘think with’ COVID-19 by utilising it to help us create ‘more nuanced and deep descriptions of “banal” everyday mobilities practices’ (2021, p. 66). This chapter does this through the presentation and analysis of creative practice outcomes made during the pandemic. As the historian Krista Maglen has detailed, many aspects of colonial Australia closely mirrored that of Britain. However, its approach to the containment of infectious diseases took a different course beginning in the early 1800’s. Australia increased their quarantine requirements as Britain started to wind theirs back. The rhetoric surrounding this decision emphasised Australia’s geographic distance from Britain. This remoteness, it was argued, was ‘not a reason to minimise quarantine in the colonies but rather served to increase it’ (Maglen, 2005, p. 196). DOI: 10.4324/9781003354772-7

78  Pia Johnson and Clare McCracken As Peta Longhurst argued through their analysis of the Sydney North Head Quarantine Station in New South Wales, a colonial quarantine centre built in 1832 (44 years after the first convict ships arrived in Australia), ‘quarantine was utilised as a technology through which the colony and the continent were framed as simultaneously pure and vulnerable’ (2016, p. 590; italics are our emphases).1 That is, the island-continent’s remoteness from the rest of the world meant that the disease could be stopped before it entered, which was important as this same remoteness made it difficult to contain and manage disease if there was an outbreak. This rhetoric of ‘purity’ through remoteness and ‘vulnerability’ can be seen in how Australia approached the management of the COVID-19 pandemic. On 20 March 2020, in response to the emerging crises, Australia closed its international borders to most incoming and outgoing travellers. (Those who did enter, mainly Australian citizens and residents who had been holidaying or working internationally when the border closure occurred, had to quarantine on re-entry, and many were stuck overseas for many months waiting for expensive commercial flights home.) These strict border measures, colloquially called ‘Fortress Australia’ by politicians and the media, kept Australia ‘pure’ as the country followed a suppression approach to the virus. Many Australian states and territories also enforced border closures that remained in place sometimes even longer than the nearly twoyear international border closure. For states with remote populations spread across significant geographic distances, such as Western Australia, these border closures were justified as these communities were seen as more ‘vulnerable’ due to the distance between, and smaller scale of, medical facilities. For the residents of states such as Western Australia, the isolation from the world and the rest of Australia was softened by the quality of life that the measures protected. With very few outbreaks, illness and death, life remained almost normal for the first two years of the pandemic. However, in Victoria, Australia’s second-most populous state, an outbreak caused by ineffectual quarantining saw the state and its capital city of Melbourne plunge into a strict lockdown. In fact, over the first two years of the pandemic, Melbourne spent over 260 days in lockdowns, becoming the most ‘locked down city in the world’, according to Australian newspapers2 (Cassidy, 2021; Miller, 2021; Wu, 2021). To keep the rest of Australia ‘pure’ throughout their lockdown period, Victorians, except for essential workers, were restricted to a 5-km radius of their house, allowed one-hour of outdoor exercise a day, endured a nightly curfew and were only permitted to access essential retail (supermarkets and chemists) once a day.3 For four months, the city of Melbourne was also separated from regional Victoria by what politicians and the media called ‘a ring of steel’: a line of checkpoints manned by police that stopped every car entering and exiting the city of 5.5 million to verify that they had an essential reason to travel. Australia abandoned its COVID suppression policy of lockdowns and border closures in 2022 due to the development of more contagious variants such as Delta and a very successful national vaccination rollout. Although we acknowledge the privilege that we experienced during the pandemic, as our lockdowns were less restrictive and lengthy compared to those living in countries that pursued a

Liminality when grounded 79 zero-COVID policy beyond Delta,4 we argue that thinking about the ways that long lockdowns, border closures and disconnection from family and friends are experienced is of value from both a regional and global perspective. As aforementioned, Australia, since colonisation, has approached the control of infectious diseases with a policy of border closure and strict quarantine so that any future pandemics will most likely be similarly controlled. However, even more pressing are the impacts of climate change. According to the Australian Climate Council director Simon Bradshaw, ‘Australia is one of the most vulnerable developed places in the world’ to the impacts of climate change (2022, para. 8). Although our relative wealth supports our adaptation and recovery, notably, the pandemic was bookended by two significant climatic events: the unprecedented 2019–2020 bushfires, which burnt 5.5 million hectares, killed 26 people, destroyed 2,448 homes (Australian Disaster Resilience Hub, 2023) and killed or misplaced an estimated three billion animals (Legge et al., 2022) and the 2022 floods that displaced communities on the eastern seaboard of Australia, often repeatedly. For example, residents of the Hawkesbury region in New South Wales were flooded four times in 18 months (Rice et al., 2022). For those living near the bushfire front or in and around flooding, climate change means rapid mobility as they flee immediate danger or work to secure properties and townships from rising flood waters or ember attack.5 However, those on the periphery of the disaster often experience immobility like pandemic lockdowns. During the 2019–2020 bushfires, thick and hazardous smoke blanketed Sydney and Melbourne, affecting over 10 million people. N95 masks, air purifiers and warnings to stay at home close the windows and doors were a part of many people’s lives, while the preceding heatwaves slowed and sometimes stopped public transport networks to the point that commuters were asked to limit their travel. Similarly, in 2022, the heavy and often consecutive days of rain associated with the flood events made people immobilised, and they were forced back online to work or to participate in school curriculum. Although the floods and fires were experienced by significant numbers of Australians, we also refer in this chapter to smaller climatic events, which due to their severity, created momentary immobility for smaller sections of the population. In 2021, for example, Pia’s community experienced unprecedented storms that knocked over thousands of trees, many predating colonisation. The storms were so ferocious that the local newspaper The Age described them as ‘like hell on earth: the night the trees fell from the sky’ (Cowie et al., 2021). The Australian anthropologist Ghassan Hage has written about ‘stuckedness’ in crises. In 1997, when there was a landslip at the Australian ski resort Thredbo, 18 people were killed. On day three of the clean-up and rescue effort, emergency services found the sole survivor of the disaster, Stuart Diver. He was wedged under three concrete slabs and lying in freezing alpine water. Hage notes that Diver became a national hero due to his ability to ‘wait it out’, endure and survive. This, Hage argues, is a ‘celebration of the stuck’, which he has seen replicated globally in stories of surviving natural disasters (2009, p. 76). In a world where it feels like we are moving from one disaster to another, ‘enduring the crises becomes the normal mode of being a good citizen and the more one

80  Pia Johnson and Clare McCracken can endure a crisis the more a good citizen one is’ (Hage, 2009, p. 78). Arguably, we saw this rhetoric emerging in the Melbourne press during restrictions, particularly when a small but loud and violent group of protesters took to the street to protest the lockdowns and vaccine mandates, but our interest is not in the heroic immobility or ‘stuckedness’ – to use Hage’s term – of disaster survivors. Instead, we are interested in how immobility was experienced by those living through the pandemic but not considered essential workers. We liken this experience to the experience of living on the periphery of natural disasters, such as significant bushfires, storms or floods. In his reflections on his own experience with a COVID-19 lockdown, Peter Merrimen states that lockdown restrictions do not manifest ‘immobilisation’ but instead localise mobility (2020, p. 53). That is, immobility is not ‘no mobility’ but mobility restricted to a small geographic area. This chapter focuses on two forms of immobility: lockdowns and protracted border closures between urban and rural environments, the states of Australia and the rest of the world. As this chapter highlights, by blocking us from the forms of mobility that normally bookend our days – such as the school pick up and drop off or work commute – lockdowns rendered visible forms of domestic micro-mobilities that we have always performed but not given attention to. Meanwhile, border closures emphasised just how geographically spread our social and cultural networks are in the 21st century and how closing borders can render visible existing tensions. In his research on waiting, David Bissel notes the difficulties of capturing the effect of immobility (2007). By quickly responding to our circumstances using the creative methods that we have developed over the last 20 years, the artworks explored in this chapter convey not only the social and political aspects of these forms of immobility but also their psychological and emotional manifestations. Although we are painfully aware of the existential plight of our Pacific neighbours and the far more deadly flood events of 2022 experienced by countries such as Pakistan,6 we argue that now, more than ever, it is important to understand how long stretches of liminality and disconnectedness shape us as the climate crisis will increasingly create moments and situations of immobility. Chapter framework Inspired by Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project and its collaging of theory, images and creative works, the body of this experimental chapter presents four artworks made during the pandemic. Each artwork sits under a subheading, accompanied by an artist statement and an ‘in conversation’ between us. The artist statements use the formal language of the artist didactic to connect the work to theory and its moment in time. They represent how we frame the work outside the academy when it enters the gallery. In contrast, the ‘in conversation’ has been used to analyse how our experience of the pandemic is reflected in the artwork. More informal in tone, the ‘in conversation’ demonstrates the style of the text messages, endless phone conversations and family Zoom hook-ups that we experienced during the pandemic as we desperately tried to stay connected in a disconnected world.

Liminality when grounded 81 Just as the collaged structure of The Arcades Project mirrors the way that we may explore the city, our own structure is designed to reflect the experience of living, for a lengthy period, in the lockdown. As will be explored throughout the body of the chapter, when you are confined predominantly to your home, the boundaries between the personal and professional slip, along with a slippage among your psyche, your family life and local and global news. In addition, when the days of lockdown turn into weeks and months, you start to lose track of linear time, particularly the days of the week. Readers may choose to read this chapter in a linear fashion or ‘dip in and out’. To dip in and out, we argue, mirrors the effect of the over 260 days of lockdown that we experienced. At the end of the chapter, there is a conclusion that draws out and articulates the key themes and experiences explored in the artworks, artist didactics and ‘in conversation’. We hope that this aids the experience of those who decide to dip in and out. Artwork one: Lisbon Dreaming By Clare McCracken (2020), audiovisual artwork Link to work: https://vimeo.com/520199183

Figure 5.1 Clare McCracken, Lisbon Dreaming, 2020. A black box with white narrative text on it.

82  Pia Johnson and Clare McCracken In conversation – Lisbon Dreaming Clare, I’m interested in how you responded creatively to the first lockdown we experienced. I remember it was about six-weeks long, and the whole country was in lockdown together. CM: Yes – the international borders had been closed. So that lockdown was a circuit breaker to rid our community of undiagnosed cases. Consequently, it was optimistic as we thought we would reopen COVID-free and live normal lives.   However, the international border closure dramatically shifted Australian ideas of global closeness and distance. They not only separated transnational Australians from friends and family but disrupted our sense of global proximity, plunging us back into a protomodern state of international isolation. My Danish relatives sent me a gift for my baby – it took months to arrive – it felt like it must be travelling across the ocean on a sailing ship. Of course, by closing our borders, airfares increased significantly, and plane travel to Australia dramatically dropped. Mail and humans were stranded internationally. PJ: How did you record that sentiment? CM: One night during the lockdown, I couldn’t sleep, I was in my final trimester and experiencing insomnia, so I used Google Street View to ‘visit’ international memories – sites that are meaningful because I made a new friend there or visited family located internationally. As I explored, I found all these glitches in the Google Street View source photos – like the photographer’s shadow, some missing data, or even the AI’s blurring out of faces. These were moments of possibility. Each unmapped or ambiguous section provided a starting point for my longings, and I used them to pause and remember beautiful moments where I connected with people beyond our borders. As I did that, I took screenshots of the glitches so I had a visual record. PJ: Then you cross-stitched those images and took them for a walk around your neighbourhood. Why make them an object? CM: Cross-stich is an international language. It is something that women do right across the world. While ‘Fortress Australia’ kept us safe, it also fuelled existing xenophobia. That rhetoric of ‘pure’ from disease morphed into racism for some sections of the population. So, stitching these images was firstly an act of care because stitching takes a long time and is how women have cared for family historically, however, it was also a crosscultural language that articulates how connected we have always been and, therefore, I hoped, spoke to the need to come together at this extraordinary moment in time. PJ:

Artwork two: Self-portraits in ISO By Pia Johnson (2020), Photographic series

Liminality when grounded 83

Figure 5.2 Clare McCracken, Lisbon Dreaming 2020. Photograph by Andrew Ferris. A woman’s chest can be seen with a baby in a baby carrier, and in her hand is a cross-stitched square.

In conversation – Self-portraits in ISO For me, that initial lockdown was less about missing places and more about missing my life. But that came from living regionally and having a schoolaged kid. There is a whole lot of things that you put on that time – you think, ‘Okay, my kids are about to go to school, they’re going to start this journey. I’m suddenly going to have time’. And then suddenly that got taken away. We were afforded the walk, but the last thing I wanted to do was leave. I’m a homebody, so I wanted everyone else to leave the house so I could have the house to myself.   As we went along, we stopped reaching out to our networks beyond the home, and we became internal. For me, the first series I created was about needing to articulate some of the grief. CM: Yes – I’d moved into this new apartment that I absolutely loved, but I hated it. PJ: Exactly, we were given no choice but to stay in place. CM: And it’s still tarnished, I’m still emotionally getting over that. I’m still learning to love my home. PJ: I found a lot of the labour was around keeping the house clean and tidy, enabling school, work, everything to keep running smoothly as we were suddenly all at home, all the time. Suddenly our lives centred around our houses for everything – work, childcare, domestic chores, loving, playing, sleeping . . . it was all-consuming in a small space. PJ:

84  Pia Johnson and Clare McCracken

Figure 5.3 Pia Johnson, Self-portrait in ISO No. 1, 2020. A woman’s bare legs can be seen with knees touching and hands on either side of the legs on a chair. A wooden cabinet and coat rack are on either side of the body.

Artist statement – Self-portraits in ISO Self-portraits in ISO are a series of photographs that respond to the pandemic landscape that focus on how the extended lockdown and restriction of movement shifted my identity within the home space. The self-portraits became evidence of the immobilities I experienced and reference the trauma and privilege of being ‘safe in place’. Utilising Schewel’s definition of immobility as ‘spatial continuity in an individual’s centre of gravity over a period of time’ (2020, para. 3), this photographic series reveals the consequence of shifting orientations within the lockdown space (Johnson in Barry et al., 2023, p. 355). The portrayal of the body within the home mapped the shifting emotions and heightened awareness of space and identity. The body becomes performative, and with its different shapes and orientations, feelings of liminality, grief and endurance are present within the surrounds of the everyday (Barry et al., 2023, p. 355). The photographs reveal the patterns of micro-mobility that appeared, while ‘normal’ mobilities outside the home were restricted. Drawing upon the photographic language of the self-portrait, the works interrogate the normal subject/photographer gaze, and within the lockdown environment, the performative gaze of myself looking into my life rather than situating my body within an external environment was a critical shift. Self-portraits in ISO present a subjective-artistic experience where immobility enables new spatial reconfigurations of the home space and one’s sense of identity.

Liminality when grounded 85

Figure 5.4 Pia Johnson, Self-portrait in ISO No. 2 2020. A woman in black is lying on her back on a queen size bed looking above her.

In conversation – Self-portraits in ISO continued CM: I distinctly remember the food prep and these enormous grocery orders. The weird thing is I make my lunch when I go to work, but there was something about making every single meal. PJ: And we were paranoid too. We would wipe down everything from the supermarket or anything from outside. CM: And we would wear masks in the lift. Everybody used their key to hit the lift buttons. To this day, these little dink marks are in the lift numbers from our collective key use.   For the second very long lockdown, I was on maternity leave as I had a baby just before it started. Rachel Cusk has this great line in A Life’s Work where she notes that ‘[a] day spent at home caring for a child could not be more different from a day spent working in an office’. ‘Whatever their relative merits’, she says, ‘they are days spent on opposite sides of the world’ (2008, p. 11).   Some mothers I’ve met thought it was great to have their partner at home, but for me, it made that difference of experience so much more acute as I could hear my partners’ workday through the office door. He was connecting with colleagues, chatting and laughing, and I was walking in circles with a newborn. In fact, I longed for conversation so much that I would go daily to the chemist or the supermarket. One day, the chemist turned her back on me mid-sentence saying she simply couldn’t hear what I was saying through

86  Pia Johnson and Clare McCracken my mask. I walked home crying, tears soaking into the top of my mask, as those small snippets of conversations – that small talk – were so pivotal to my mental health. Artwork three: Cruskits and Crows By Clare McCracken (2021), Video essay. Link to video essay: https://vimeo.com/633518821 In conversation – Cruskits and Crows CM: The following work I made – Cruskits and Crows – was about that listlessness of not having anything to look forward to because we never knew when our lockdowns would end or start. However, it was also heavily informed by what I was reading – Virginia Wolf’s Orlando. In hindsight, what interests me about Cruskits and Crows is how it speaks to COVID and climate change – how climate change is reshaping Australia’s geology. The interesting thing about Orlando is that it is also in conversation with climate change, as there is a moment when Orlando experiences the unpredictable weather of the Little Ice Age (Woolf, 2011, pp. 24–26). Artist statement – Cruskits and Crows This audiovisual work was created during an online residency with the Walking Library and the Museum of Loss & Memory. I was partnered with an artist based in London, who was moving about her city freely as Melbourne officially became the most locked-down city in the world. We shared readings from Ursula Le Guin and Virginia Woolf using the audio function on WhatsApp; the sounds of our respective cities were captured in the background. This work was written in response to the recorded readings and the 260 days I spent confined to my inner-city apartment. Cruskits and Crows transcript As I walk around our apartment, I find shards of Cruskit biscuit perched precariously in odd places: on top of the guitar amp, on the bookshelf beside Berger’s Ways of Seeing or beside the cat’s water bowl. These are the forgotten snacks of my one-year-old. Like a cairn on a mountain top, they mark her favourite sites of mischief: spinning the satisfying dials of the amp, pulling books off the shelf and letting them thud on the floorboards and splashing the cat’s water from floor to ceiling. However, they also seem apt, a type of metaphor for what happens to your sense of time and your ability to draw upon your short-term memory in lockdown and quarantine. When every day is confined to your apartment and filled with the same activities, you forget what you ate for breakfast, to answer text messages and to check your personal email. We try our hardest to pin the days down. To help us keep on track, we create specific rituals for specific days. Friday nights it’s

Liminality when grounded 87 takeaway pizza and a bottle of wine from a beautiful, rural region that we long to visit. Sunday is a takeaway breakfast bun and flat white from the local café enjoyed in front of ABC’s Insiders.7 And Wednesdays, hump day, it’s a cookie and coffee for afternoon tea. However, despite these culinarily skewed markers, the days slip, the mind slips, until you are a mixture of here and now, then and there. Life in the most locked-down city in the world slips through your fingers, merges, evaporates, and is intangible and eminently forgettable. Picking the Cruskit up from the amp and delivering it back to the mouth of the babe, I find myself enjoying its rough surface. My apartment is beautiful and clean but also smooth, and I miss the feeling of granite. After bushfires ripped through my childhood home, the extent to which we were surrounded by granite was dramatically revealed. Not a leaf was left, just thick mushy black ash blanketing the ground, broken by deep black stumps and tree trunks, thousands of ancient granite rocks and the odd wombat. Having survived the fire unscathed in their underground homes, they had emerged in shock to discover that black was the new green. The heat of the fire had been so great that a 12-metre aluminium ladder was reduced to a puddle, and small and large scabs of granite cracked off the body of the larger rocks falling to the ground when touched. What seemed immobile before the fire, moving at a time scale beyond my human comprehension, suddenly fragmented and shattered to the touch, washing down the hillside into the creeks and rivers, paving them flat and killing every aquatic creature except for the yabbie,8 which, against all the odds, repeatedly clawed its way to the surface. Yabbies, I decided, would roam the continent of Australia long after human occupation. Possibly drawn to our balcony by a shard of Cruskit perched on the brim of a bright blue ceramic pot holding an entanglement of hoya, a crow, mid-way through our dinner, starts intently looking through our living room window before crowing loudly. ‘Waa waa’, we all instinctively say back to it before rushing to document the encounter. We live on Kulin Country and here, the crow is known as Waa – a far more appropriate name – and Waa is one of two moiety ancestors, the other being the more well-known, at least by settler-Australians, Eaglehawk Bunjil. When the sound of a London crow (or is it a raven), arrives via audio message, I am instantly transported out of Kulin Nation. ‘Ah, the Ravens of the London Tower’, I think, even though I know the recording is not from there. Long before I learnt about Waa and how important they were to this country, I was taught about the ravens of the Tower carefully tendered by their raven master. As a settler-Australian, so much of your life is taken up by the stories of elsewhere. You get to know the places where you don’t live more intimately than the ones where you do. When I tell my undergraduates that Melbourne will be larger than London by 2050 and that just over one-million people live in Copenhagen, they are genuinely shocked. These places sit at the heart of our understanding of the world. They fill our imaginations, skewing our comprehension of the planet dramatically northward. That night, as we checked the Cruskit consumer one more time on the baby monitor and spooned each other to sleep, I sent a request to my mother. ‘Threeminutes of the dawn chorus please’, my text read, ‘that will get me through the next couple of days confined to my inner-city apartment’. Sure enough, the following

88  Pia Johnson and Clare McCracken morning she delivered, and I closed my eyes and listened to her recording, a tear of joy rolling down my cheek and dripping off the end of my chin, staining my grey top black and glossy like the feathers of Waa. In conversation – Cruskits and Crows continued PJ: Your digital residency online gave you an external connection. CM: After the second 111-day lockdown, I realised I’d have to seek connections as my mental health declined. So, I went back to work much earlier than I anticipated. And then, I also sought out that residency because it was online, so I knew I could do it. PJ: Can you talk more about how the final work came into being? Was it shaped by COVID? CM: Immersive installations, large-scale artworks, and fieldwork – my favoured artforms and methods were all off the table during restrictions. So, I had to rethink how I would exhibit my work; so I started, like so many other artists, to use the internet. Cruskits and Crows was released over the internet – ­Instagram and Facebook – as an audio essay. And the first work, Lisbon Dreaming, was released through Instagram as a series of short stories you scrolled through. And both had significant audiences. PJ: One of the critical things that came out of this whole period for me, and probably for this piece, is the liminality of self. CM: We were all things at once and all in the same place. PJ: Even though our bodies were trapped in the house, our minds during lockdowns were constantly moving as all our roles were happening simultaneously and in the same location.   The pictures you had accompanying that audio essay were so relatable. They show these worlds intersecting through objects. Artwork four: Nature is a Tonic By Pia Johnson (2021), Photographic series In conversation – Nature is a Tonic By the second year of it all, I wasn’t dreaming of being elsewhere or overseas, I was just dreaming of not being in my house anymore. So, I created a series of photographs that embedded me in the sites I visited as part of my daily walk, which I did alone or with my dog. I did the same route every day. The work was as much about engaging with the climate, observing the landscape and recognising the shifts in that environment as it was about getting out of the house. CM: So, you became attuned, essentially, to your local ecologies. Because usually, you’d be living in your house, getting in a car, and commuting a long distance, wouldn’t you? So, you would be more aware of what is happening beside the freeway rather than around your home. PJ:

Liminality when grounded 89

Figure 5.5 Clare McCracken, Still from Cruskits and Crows, 2021, 6:31mins. A bird’s-eye view of a playdough cutter, teething toy, broken bits of a cruskit biscuit, milk formula scoop, child’s sock and toy lie in a row on the wooden floorboards.

I mean, you still see it. Just different elements. I always say this time of year – September and October – is terrible because of the large amount of roadkill as animals migrate. They’re journeying to find new territory; we have built roads through it.   And then, of course, the storms happened. That was a significant, traumatic, vulnerable moment for me, so I made another series of work about that too. CM: And the storms were windstorms? PJ: Yes, the windstorms are interesting as they are linked to climate change – so many trees fell! Many people think that these storms are natural, as storms happen all the time and trees fall over. But that isn’t the case. The reason so many trees fell was because the wind direction was different, this was predicted 30-years ago by climate scientists.   We talk about COVID as ‘governments’ locking us down. But that crisis shut people in their homes. They couldn’t leave properties. There was no power, and there was no water. You couldn’t get across roads. So, it was a double trauma. We’re already restricted due to COVID, and then you’re rendered immobile again with the storms.   It was scary. I realised afterwards that I needed to really see what had happened and re-think our sense of place and our impact on the environment. And so, I started to document the fallen trees, as well as photographing my walk as a way of putting myself in the landscape – as a type of solace. PJ:

90  Pia Johnson and Clare McCracken Artist statement – Nature is a Tonic Every day, I walk the same area, taking the same route, and carefully observe how my environment shifts. Amongst the trees, I forget the pandemic, forget that our lives are restricted to our homes and the small radius around them. On my walk, I get to dance, run, sing, ponder and rest within the landscape. I place myself within it, and it holds me and is my tonic. There is solace in its resilience and reliability. In conversation – Nature is a Tonic continued On reflection, perhaps it was about propelling myself forward and into the world. The first series at home was quite drab and tonal, whereas the second series needed more energy and a sense of dissonance between me and the environment. And there is one image in the series where I’m in the bush, and the dress becomes the only evidence of me being there. CM: I was going to ask you about crouching in a bush. It’s a quirky moment. PJ: Yes. And another where I’m literally hugging a tree. Those images are about play. So much of my performativity within the work is about playing and discovering elements about myself within each photograph. PJ:

Conclusions Performative making

The artworks reveal a performative and sensory mode of exploration through experience, making and reflection that enables the work to speak to an array of auto-­ethnographical experiences from both an individual and collective perspective during the pandemic. With each work, the phenomenological is drawn out

Figure 5.6 Pia Johnson, Self Portrait in the Photinia Robusta and Untitled from Nature is a Tonic series, 2021. Digital photograph. Two images sit beside each other. In the first, a red floral dress can be seen in a red and green Robusta tree. In the second, a dark-haired woman in a red floral dress hugs a large trunk of a pine tree.

Liminality when grounded 91 and explored, identities shift and the sense of becoming part of, or separate from, the home environment is amplified. This repetitive artistic process emphasises the subject’s micro-mobilities within the home, and a liminality is realised. In the essay Artistic Research: A Performative Paradigm? Barbara Bolt proposes that a ‘performative paradigm’ enables new perspectives on work that produces a ‘truth as force and effect’ (2016, p. 139). Across the four artworks, the performative approach ‘insists upon immediacy, involvement, and intimacy as modes of understanding’ (Conquergood, 2013, p. 47) that provide a heightened awareness to the lived concerns of the pandemic. The performative and sensory mode of exploration seen in the work that Pia and Clare made during the pandemic has always been a significant part of their practice and research (see Johnson, 2021; McCracken, 2020, 2022), as are most of the other methods and materials they utilised such as walking (see McCracken & Nelson, 2017), self-portraiture (see Johnson, 2021) and cross-stitch (see Eichinger & McCormick, 2016). Clare’s use of the audio essay is the only significant shift in creative outcomes. Although she has used narrative non-fiction writing in previous works (see McCracken & Johnson, 2014), she did not try to record this writing. Clare’s move toward the audio-visual essay was part of a cultural wave toward audio works during the pandemic. Nielson (2022), an audience measurement, data and analytics company, notes that audience engagement with podcasts significantly increased during the pandemic. Some of Clare’s creative methods, such as immersive installations (see McCracken, 2021), were not possible during the pandemic. Therefore, this medium shift was a necessary evolution of her practice. Pia and Clare utilised professional Instagram accounts to share their work with audiences before COVID (see McCracken, 2020, pp. 115–118). However, the value that they placed on the feedback they received through the platform shifted. The peer-review processes that artists use to refine what they make, such as opening night discussions, studio critiques or being shortlisted for a grant or award, were all inaccessible during the pandemic, which increased the value of the feedback that they received on social media. Domestic ‘home’ spaces

Lockdowns grounded Pia and Clare’s bodies within their home environments to be kept ‘safe in place’. These familial spaces transformed into being all-purpose facilities, such as work offices, home school classrooms, childcare centres and Zoom social outings, while still needing to function as a ‘home’ that supported eating meals, sleeping, laundry and recreational activities. The busyness of these spaces, whether large or small, created more domestic work while being around each other all the time created significant emotional labour. Mourning their former mobile lives was also a reality; however, with no clear understanding of a lockdown end date, these desires shrunk in sync with Pia’s and Clare’s worlds. Their bodies within their homes became languid, lethargic and in stasis – constantly waiting without understanding how long for. This can be seen in Pia’s Self-portraits in ISO series, where her body lounges on furniture and

92  Pia Johnson and Clare McCracken is listless. Yet despite this physical stasis, their minds were mobile, stressed and anxious by shifting endlessly among work, caring responsibilities and care for the broader international community and the local environmental crises that occurred during, before and after the lockdowns. Forging new micro-mobilities

The artworks also document the forging of new micro-mobilities due to the pandemic, both within the house and where Pia and Clare walked during their one-hour of allotted exercise. After months of lockdown, Pia finds herself drawn to the world outside her home. At the same time, the impact of a severe windstorm heightens her attunement to her local ecologies by pulling her into the bush and encouraging her to hug a tree. Clare takes nostalgic cross-stiches for a walk through an alarmingly empty city while yearning for a time that she could travel beyond the borders of her city, state and country, a time when cross-cultural connectivity was celebrated, not feared. However, the artworks also expose existing micro-mobilities that we rarely think about, which were rendered visible due to the long lockdowns. Cruskits and Crows maps the micro-mobilities of an infant distributing snacks through a house and how mobile technologies, such as the audio message, fracture our sense of place by taking our mind to a location separate from our bodies. This fractured sense of place mirrors the way that settler-colonialism shapes cultural understanding of the world by emphasising the narratives of the United Kingdom and Europe over those of the local First Nations community. While Pia’s Self-portraits in ISO captures the overlooked everyday domestic micro-mobilities that help us cope – from laying on a freshly made bed to stare at the ceiling to balancing on two toes while sitting on a favourite chair so that we can relax our core and hunch. These moments, preserved in the artworks, poetically capture the liminality of the lockdown experience – that is, the effect of the pandemic. Finally, Cruskits and Crows and the interview reveal how the mobility of the non-human is changing due to climate change. The intense and prolonged heat of bushfires cause rocks to spall and dislodge significant sections of stone that could have remained in place for millennia. Meanwhile, changes in wind direction due to climate change result in the uprooting of trees. The pandemic in Australia was bookended by significant climatic events that attuned the artists to these new forms of non-human mobility. Acknowledgments We acknowledge the people of the Woi wurrung, Boon wurrung and Dja Dja Wurrung language groups on whose unceded lands we live, work, create art and play. We respectfully acknowledge their Ancestors and Elders, past and present. As settler-Australians with Chinese, Italian, Danish, Scottish and Irish ancestry, we acknowledge that this always was and always will be Aboriginal land. We would also like to acknowledge our artist collaborators. Thank you Andrew Ferris for your photographic contribution to Cruskits and Crows and Lisbon

Liminality when grounded 93 Dreaming, two of the works explored in this chapter. Thank you also to Misha Myers, Dee Heddon, Tracy Mackenna and Edwin Janssen for facilitating the Place, People and Time: Wild Ways online residency that led to the creation of Cruskits and Crows. Finally, thank you to Emily Orley for being such a wonderful collaborator during that residency. Notes 1 As will be discussed in the body of this chapter, the rhetoric of ‘purity’ – keeping Australia free from infectious disease – has historically, and during the pandemic, morphed into other forms of exclusions, particularly exclusions linked to race (or country of origin). The White Australian Policy, which was in place from 1901 to 1958, is an example. It was designed to limit the migration of non-white (mainly Asian) migrants to Australia to keep the country ‘British’. We have put ‘British’ in Italics because Australia was never British as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders have never ceded their sovereignty. 2 It is difficult to compare lockdowns globally as the restrictions vary. However, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) Fact Check would later clarify that Iquique, in Chile, was in lockdown for 287 days compared to Melbourne’s 262. Buenos Aires spent 234 consecutive days, while Melbourne endured only 111 days consecutively (ABC). Regardless, the title has been significantly overshadowed by the even more restrictive and lengthy lockdowns experienced by people across Chinese cities in 2023. 3 Notably, each Melbourne lockdown had different restrictions, and they were often eased or increased depending on the case numbers during lockdowns. 4 We also acknowledge the privilege of avoiding the trauma of the unfathomable death toll of other countries. 5 Ember attack is a term used in Australia to describe how burning organic matter is transported by wind ahead of the fire front, creating spot fires. Dousing these embers is a crucial part of stopping dwellings from burning down. Those who stay and defend their property must extinguish embers as they land before taking refuge as the fire front and radiant heat hit their property. Once the fire front has passed, they become rapidly mobile again, extinguishing any fires affecting their property. 6 We also acknowledge Australia’s continuing role globally through our painful and irresponsible inaction on climate change. 7 Insiders, produced by Australia’s National broadcaster, ABC, has run since 2001. It is a political analysis talk show that brings together a panel of journalists to unpack the week’s political news. 8 A yabbie is a freshwater crayfish species native to Australia.

References Australian Broadcast Corporation Fact Check. (2022, November 21). Matthew Guy says Melbourne was the world’s most locked-down city. Is that correct? ABC & RMIT University. www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-21/fact-check-is-melbourne-world-s-most-lockeddown-city/101659926 Australian Disaster Resilience Hub. (2023, January  18). New South Wales, July 2019 – March  2020 bushfires – black summer. Australian Government National Emergency Management Agency with the Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience. Retrieved January 18, 2023, from https://knowledge.aidr.org.au/resources/black-summer-bushfiresnsw-2019-20/ Barry, K., Southern, J., Baxter, T., Blondin, S., Booker, C., Bowstead, J., Butler, C., Dillon, R., Ferguson, N., Filipska, G., Kieslmair, M., Hunt, L., Ianchenko, A., Johnson, P., Keane,

94  Pia Johnson and Clare McCracken J., Koszolko, M. K., Qualmann, C., Rumsby, C., Sales Oliveira, C., .  .  . Zinganel, M. (2023). An agenda for creative practice in the new mobilities paradigm. Mobilities, 18(3), 349–373. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2022.2136996 Bissel, D. (2007). Animating suspension: Waiting for mobilities. Mobilities, 2(2), 277–298. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450100701381581 Bolt, B. (2016). Artistic research: A  performative paradigm? Parse Journal, 3, 129–142. https://parsejournal.com/article/artistic-research-a-performative-paradigm/ Cassidy, C. (2021, October 22). Melbourne freedom day: World’s most locked down city takes first cautious steps to reopening. The Guardian [Australia]. www.theguardian.com/ australia-news/2021/oct/22/melbourne-freedom-day-worlds-most-locked-down-citytakes-first-cautious-steps-to-reopening Climate Council of Australia. (2022, March 3). Australia “in the climate cross-hairs”: New IPCC report outlines dramatic escalation of climate crises [Press Release]. www.climate­ council.org.au/resources/australia-in-climate-cross-hairs-new-ipcc-report-outlinesdramatic-escalation-climate-crisis/#:~:text=Climate%20Council’s%20Director%20 of%20Research,extraordinarily%20intensi%20rainfall%20and%20flooding Conquerwood, D. (2013). Beyond the text: Toward a performative cultural politics. In P. Johnson (Ed.), Cultural struggles: Performance, ethnography, praxis (pp. 47–64). University of Michigan Press. Cowie, T., Preiss, B., & Pearson, E. (2021, June 18). “Like hell on earth”: The night the trees fell from the sky. The Age. www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/like-hell-on-earth-thenight-the-trees-fell-from-the-sky-20210618-p5823c.html Cusk, R. (2008). A life’s work: On becoming a mother. Faber & Faber. Eichinger, H., & McCormick, M. (2016). SkypeLab: Transcontinental faces and spaces. Verlag. Hage, G. (2009). Waiting out the crisis: On stuckedness and governmentality. In G. Hage (Ed.), Waiting (pp. 74–79). Melbourne University Press. Jensen, O. B. (2021). Pandemic disruption, extended bodies, and elastic situations – reflections on COVID-19 and mobilities. Mobilities, 16(1), 66–80. https://doi.org/10.1080/17 450101.2021.1867296 Johnson, P. S. Y. (2021). Being Eurasian: Negotiating identity through photography and performativity [Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), RMIT University]. https://researchrepository. rmit.edu.au/esploro/outputs/doctoral/Being-Eurasian-negotiating-identity-through-photo graphy/9922009505901341#metrics Legge, S., John, C., Woinarski, C., Scheele, S., Garnett, L., Nimmo, D., Whiterod, S., Southwell, D., Ehmke, G., Buchan, A., Gray, J., Metcalfe, D., Page, M, Rumpff, L., van Leeuwen, S., Williams, D., Ahyong, S., Chapple, D., Cowan, M., . . . Tingley, R. (2022). Rapid assessment of the biodiversity impacts of the 2019–2020 Australian megafires to guide urgent management intervention and recovery and lessons for other regions. Diversity and Distribution, 28(3), 571–591. www.jstor.org/stable/48650476 Longurst, P. (2016). Quarantine matters: Colonial quarantine at north head, Sydney and its material and ideological ruins. International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 20(3), 589–600. www.jstor.org/stable/26174311 Loveless, N. (2019). A manifesto for research creation: How to make art at the end of the world. Duke University Press. Maglen, K. (2005). A world apart: Geography, Australian, quarantine, and the mother country. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Science, 60(2), 196–217. https://doi.org/ 10.1093/jhmas/jri023

Liminality when grounded 95 McCracken, C. (2020). Snowman killer: Art, spatial relations & the mobilities turn [Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), RMIT University]. https://researchrepository.rmit.edu.au/esploro/ outputs/doctoral/Snowman-Killer-art-spatial-relations-the-Mobilities-turn/99218934079 01341#details McCracken, C. (2021). Dystopias for discourse: The role of the artist in rapidly reconfiguring city. Global Discourse: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Current Affairs, 11(1–2), 67–78. https://doi.org/10.1332/204378921X16103606047172 McCracken, C. (2022). Killing snowmen: Big things and rural Australia’s existential crises. Mobility Humanities, 1(2), 39–59. https://doi.org/10.23090/MH.2022.07.1.2.039 McCracken, C., & Johnson, P. (2014). Our place. Moreland City Council. www.dropbox. com/s/r1fv68tkjfhxqkn/OurPlace_Fawkner.pdf?dl=0 McCracken, C.,  & Nelson, R. (2017). Travels and tapestries: Possibilities for creative exchange in Melbourne and Phnom Penh. In E. M. Grierson (Ed.), Transformations: Art and the city (pp. 73–90). Intellect Books. Merrimen, P. (2020). Micro-mobilities in lockdown. Transfers, 10(1), 50–56. https://doi.org/ 10.3167/TRANS.2020.100106 Miller, N. (2021, October  3). Proud or mad? Melbourne’s marathon lockdown becomes the world’s longest. The Age. www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/proud-or-madmelbourne-s-marathon-lockdown-becomes-the-world-s-longest-20210930-p58w9w.html Nielsen. (2022, May). U.S. podcast listenership continues to grow, and audiences are resuming many pre-pandemic spending behaviors. Nielson. Retrieved January 18, 2023, from www.nielsen.com/insights/2022/u-s-podcast-listenership-continues-to-grow-andaudiences-are-resuming-many-pre-pandemic-spending-behaviors/#:~:text=During%20 a%20pandemic%20that%20drove,engagement%20among%20llistener%20is%20 growing Rice, M., Cheung, H., Dean, A., Hart, N., Bambrick, H., Shah, V., Arndt, D., Hughes, L., Karoly, D., O’Callaghan, K., Bradshaw, S., Mullins, G., Templeman, D., Keys, C., Dunn, P., & Johnson, L. (2022, November 28). The great deluge: Australia’s new era of unnatural disasters. Climate Council of Australia. www.climatecouncil.org.au/resources/ the-great-deluge-australias-new-era-of-unnatural-disasters/ Schewel, K. (2020). Understanding immobility: Moving beyond the mobility bias in migration studies. International Migration Review, 54(2), 328–355. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/0197918319831952 Woolf, V. (2011). Orlando. Penguin Group Australia. Wu, C. (2021, October  4). Melbourne passes Buenos Aires’ record as the world’s most locked-down city. SkyNews.com.au. www.skynews.com.au/australia-news/coronavirus/ melbourne-passes-buenos-aires-record-as-the-worlds-most-lockeddown-city/news-story/ c59ca9114ea99c930eca57568cd2df35

6 Birds through my Window Photography as Liminal Looking Katrin Joost (text) and John Darwell (images)

Photography can reveal philosophical ideas. By this I mean that photography is such an important medium that it impacts our world and world apprehension, so we need to philosophise about photography as a medium as, for example, Paul Frosh does when he discusses Photography as a Cultural Industry (2020). Some thinkers such as Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida (1993) contemplate photography in general and in individual images to philosophically explore fundamental notions such as memory, mourning and grief. Rather, I point out that there are comprehensive photographic bodies of work that are in themselves philosophical treaties. Artists who use photography to explore the meaning of what they see and what it means to look at the world are arguably philosophers in their own right. John Darwell is such a photographer. His work spans several decades, and he not only explores a wealth of different subjects but also increasingly includes contemplative works that reflect on the nature of how he experiences the world, such as “A Black Dog Came Calling”, an “allegorical, first hand, journey through the experience of depression” (Darwell, n.d.) that grapples with the visualisation of experiences that cannot be directly depicted. This chapter explores one of his works, namely, Birds through my Window. This work, which originates from a period of isolation when he was housebound, initially appears to be a straightforward project on photographing garden birds in an unusual manner, which gives the work a poetic dimension (the work was originally created in colour, which is an important aspect of its aesthetic) (Darwell, 2021, 2023). However, I argue that this is an important work that visualises the complexity of liminal spaces. On the surface, we see exactly what the title suggests, birds through a window, through a window so obscured with condensation that the birds’ presences are more boded than seen. As such, the work is less about the birds themselves and more about the nature of seeing birds, thereby representing a much more complex contemplation. This chapter has three parts that explore how Birds through my Window portrays liminality on three levels. Firstly, we are looking at birds that visit a garden, which is in itself a liminal space that constitutes the boundary between nature and culture. Moreover, birds not only traverse between the garden and other natural spaces but also occupy the sky, a realm that is largely denied to us. Similarly, they are wild creatures, and their dominion is different from our domestic space. DOI: 10.4324/9781003354772-8

Birds through my Window 97

Figure 6.1 

Secondly, the images depict liminality in the sense that the focus is on the window as the boundary between the inside and outside of, in this case, a domestic situation. Yet this focus is more of an intrusion into the image, as the subject of the work is the birds obscured by precipitation. Thirdly, in looking at fleeting birds through a haze of condensation, we become acutely aware of the act of looking, a kind of looking from the corner of our eye that is also liminal. I conclude by remarking how photography can depict the complexity of liminality in a philosophical manner and can invite us to reflect on the way that we look at the world. Firstly, let us think about the subject of the images, specifically, birds as metaphors for liminality. Birds live largely in a different realm than us. The sky is their medium through which they move; it is their habitat. For us, it is merely above our heads, out of reach and essentially an unhomely dimension. Interestingly, then, we are looking at birds in the sky from an outside perspective because we are on the ground. Terri Weifenbach’s (2019) work expresses this beautifully. Her images depict birds fluttering through her garden. The birds in flight are in focus, and the garden blurs into a colourful backdrop only to become the stage for the bird display. However, birds are wild creatures that we glimpse only for moments before they disappear out of sight (unless fixed in photographs such as Weifenbach’s). Although Darwell’s images show mostly birds on the ground, there is still the sense that, as they are wild animals, we are privy to their fleeting presence.

98  Katrin Joost and John Darwell

Figure 6.2 

This means that we cannot necessarily choose to look at them when we want, but they reveal themselves to us when they want to (or rather, when they happen to stumble across us). When we see a fox or a hedgehog, we are delighted and feel privileged that our worlds for a moment overlap, and they grace us with a visit or encounter. To see a domesticated cow or a sheep is not quite as enchanting as they are simply there for us to look at. Seeing birds, namely, common birds in the garden, may not be as exquisite an experience as glimpsing a rare raptor on a walk, but their flighty presence is still an enchanting gift. Wood (2018) relates to this aspect of seeing birds when he points out that the presentation of birds in paintings, bird books and even documentaries “can give a misleading impression that the bird displays itself to the watcher in close-up, as if in a museum cabinet” (p. 500). However, in detailing how we glimpse birds in an instant and catch only facets of their colour and shape of plumage, bills and wings, he describes how “birds disclose themselves to (us) as themselves” and not in “abstraction from the field of experience” (p. 502). Darwell’s work embraces this sensibility of letting the experience of seeing birds unfold. Unlike most wildlife photography of birds, in Darwell’s images, the birds are not clearly identifiable, rather they melt into the environment of the garden, which is equally vague. Consequently, the birds are exactly not abstracted from their environment but immersed into the landscape of the garden. Birds coming to our gardens and settling in trees or on birdfeeders are visiting our home space. In this sense, the garden becomes liminal as the ground that

Birds through my Window 99

Figure 6.3 

is open to the sky in opposition to the house that is a shelter because it precisely separates us from the vagaries of the weather and the outside. Moreover, domestic gardens (as opposed to public green spaces, such as parks) constitute almost a grey zone between the inside of a private dwelling and the public or wild outside. Bachelard (1994) explains how the dichotomy of inside and outside forms a “dialectic of division”, and as much as this dialectic has shaped our history of thought, it schematises experience and thereby clouds the complexity of human existence. But gardens in themselves are interesting spaces that possibly disrupt the absoluteness of this division and maybe indicate the overlapping of the wild outside and the cultivated interior. A garden arguably sits between the absolute inside and outside and can therefore be seen as a metaphor for liminality. It is a private space, and usually the houseowner possesses it, but as a more or less open area, it is exposed to the eyes and even visits of neighbours or the public. It is a buffer zone between public and private and between the domesticated and the wild. Gardens are designed so that even when neglected, they are ‘wild’ only because of the conscious decision of their caretaker. Yet, gardens, notwithstanding those that are controlled to the last blade of grass, are still subject to natural forces and are therefore clearly distinct from the orchestrated space of a sheltered house. Furthermore, birds and other creatures, such as insects, other wild animals and even pets, move in and out of them using the space differently to give gardens a charm, a serendipity that stands in contrast to the completely organised spaces inside houses.

100  Katrin Joost and John Darwell This leads to the second level of liminality portrayed in the images: the delineation between inside and outside. This is a clear element of the work as the perspective and framing of the images are carefully constructed to precisely draw our attention to the threshold between the indoors and the exterior garden. As Darwell’s images portray the birds, as it were, on the same plane as the garden, and we, the observers, are clearly placed inside, the point of view suggests the notion of a hide. Being situated within a hide, the observer is not implicated in the environment but bracketed out of the natural world so that the wildlife and birdlife observed is not influenced. (The bracketing process that facilitates observation and reflection is not unlike the Husserlian epoché which is described in §32 of Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy (Husserl, 1983). Husserl describes the parenthesising of the natural attitude to be able to focus on how the world appears to us. To do this phenomenology, we have to suspend the everyday unquestioned assertion of the world around us that makes it “there for us”, “on hand” as an “actuality”. Only then are we free from assumptions about the world to start philosophising. This separation from the bird world in the garden renders the birds as unaware of the observer, and consequently, they behave freely – free as birds. They do not perform in front of the camera as we do not intervene in their lives; instead, we watch. We are free to observe their behaviour unaffected by our presence. Being in the hide, we are still, and we wait for the movement and commotion outside. But by focussing on the condensation, the images do not really show the outside (again, this is clearly not wildlife photography) but the inside

Figure 6.4 

Birds through my Window 101 of the hide/home that is intruding into the image. The images portray a hiatus, a waiting passively for things to unfold outside. Yet we vaguely see the birds as they move freely, maybe in opposition to the structures of our lives, while we are denied such light-hearted, birdlike freedom. The sense of liminality arising through the visualisation of the threshold between the interior and exterior leads directly to the third dimension of liminality, specifically, liminal looking. The images draw attention to the border between inside and outside since the condensation on the glass of the window is in focus, not the garden or the birds. Thus, the liminality in question is that between inside and outside, and the window is the site of simultaneous connection and separation (Cheung, 2004). The inside of the house is invisible, but the point of view distinctly originates from the interior. At the same time, the outside and the birds in the garden are distorted and difficult to make out. What we see clearly is the condensation that sits between the two sheets of a damaged double-glazed window. It is crucial that the window is compromised. Normally, when looking through windows, the window itself is largely overlooked. Our complete attention is drawn to whatever we look at beyond the window, for example, birds in the garden. The glass, after all, is transparent and therefore, for all intents and purposes, invisible. However, in Darwell’s images, the window is not fit for purpose. We are reminded of Heidegger’s (1962) explication of the difference between approaching a hammer as a tool, ­ready-to-hand (zuhanden), and looking at it just as a thing in the world, present-at-hand (vorhanden). We look at many things just as present for us (vorhanden), just there, without a particular purpose. Yet when we use a tool, we relate very differently to it. In using a hammer, our attention runs, as it were, through the hammer to the task at hand, and we become forgetful of the hammer itself. It is only when the hammer is not working, for example, when it is too heavy, and we cannot perform the task with ease do we become mindful of the hammer itself as present-at-hand (vorhanden). Similarly, windows are objects that facilitate our view. But in Darwell’s images, the window denies us a clear view and thereby forces itself into our field of attention. Again, I point to the title of the work: Birds through my Window. The subjects of the work are the birds, not the window. We are not looking at the window establishing its properties, but our gaze through the window is disrupted enough so that we become aware of it. This is important. The work is not merely drawing our attention to windows that we normally look through and therefore generally overlook. Rather, like Heidegger points out the moment of realisation when the hammer is not fit for purpose and it reveals itself to us as present, Darwell shows us the moment when we want to focus on the birds but cannot, and we become acutely aware of the window as not ready-to-hand. This ultimately allows us to see the window as a window, as a site of liminality. What we end up looking at is not the window or the birds but the act of looking at a bird as it escapes our view. The window itself is liminal. It is meant to show the outside as it is, but instead, in Darwell’s photos, it does not because of the focus on the condensation within the double layers of glass; therefore, it shows the world outside as distorted. Moreover, double-glazed windows protect us not only from the weather but also from noise, and while they are made to show the outside, they fundamentally remove us from the outside sphere.

102  Katrin Joost and John Darwell So, this constellation of an obfuscated view of garden birds evokes not only the fleeting sensibility of the birds but also a momentary glance of looking. The images are precisely not wildlife images taken from a hide but glimpses of birds through a kitchen window. The implication is that we do not stare out of the window intent on seeing the birds but rather we go about our business inside and only notice momentarily what is going on outside. We are almost subconsciously or rather peripherally aware of them (hence, out of focus). This is what I see in these images: they are of another realm or rather, they show that sense of being privy to a view, which is usually out of sight, of a world that goes on behind our backs when we are not looking. Here, a particular type of relationship is described, a relationship of liminal looking. Explaining heterotopias, spaces that combine in a complex manner not only the reality of a physical space but also dimensions of virtual presence and cultural significances, Foucault describes how we must not see space as an emptiness that is filled with objects that we have the same kind of relationship with or the same kind of view of. In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We do not live inside a void that could be coloured with diverse shades of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another. (Foucault, 1967, p. 3) Darwell delineates a site of liminality by showing a sight of liminality. His photographs visualise the act of looking at the other. By this, I mean that we are looking at birds as birds and not as appropriated into our realm and focus of vision. Seeing the birds in the garden out of focus reveals our relationship with them. Darwell’s work therefore not only depicts liminality but also invites the viewer to experience liminal looking. Accordingly, Darwell’s Birds through my Window is a body of work that is photographically and philosophically interesting since it not only exquisitely visualises an array of beautiful birds but also is a contemplation of our relationship with nature. Rather than being a polemic on environmental responsibility, it invites us to ponder the everyday birdlife right in front of us in our gardens. In this chapter, I argue that the work depicts birds in the garden as metaphors of liminality. Moreover, there are several aspects of liminality depicted: the birds are liminal, the garden is a liminal space, the window is a site of liminality and our looking is liminal. Ultimately, the images themselves are in their ambiguity liminal as we do not quite understand what we see: are they birds or not? The philosophical dimension of the images resides in the thoughtful framing of the birds as obscured by the condensation of the window. On the one hand, the positioning of the viewer focusses attention on the window as a threshold, as a site of liminality. On the other hand, the fact that the birds, the subjects of the work, are out of focus emphasises a particular manner of looking, namely, a glimpsing that arguably is liminal looking. This work is, in my view, an example of how photography can be a means to philosophise.

Birds through my Window 103

Figure 6.5 

Photography allows us to think visually and engage with the world via arguably our most important sense modalities (Hutmacher, 2019). As much as photography theory is a wide and varied field, it allows us to look at looking (DeLue & Elkins, 2008) and is therefore intrinsically a reflective discourse. Photography questions not only what we look at but also how we position ourselves in the world. A better way, then, to think about liminality photographically is by looking at Darwell’s Birds Through My Window. (All original images © John Darwell 2019–2022) References Bachelard, G. (1994). The Poetics of Space (M. Jolas, Trans.). Penguin Classics. Barthes, R. (1993). Camera Lucida (R. Howard, Trans.). Vintage Classics. Cheung, C. F. (2004). Separation and Connection: Phenomenology of Door and Window. In D. Carr & C. Chan-Fai (Eds.), Space, Time and Culture. Contributions to Phenomenology (Vol. 51). Springer. Darwell, J. (n.d.). Johndarwell.com. Retrieved February 15, 2023, from https://johndarwell. com/index.php?r=image/default/category&alias=a-black-dog-came-calling Darwell, J. (2021). Birds through my Window. Nu Mini Press. Darwell, J. (2023). Birdwatching. Café Royal. DeLue, R., & Elkins, J. (2008). Landscape Theory. Routledge. Foucault, M. (1984). Of other spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias (J. Miskowiec, Trans.). In Architecture/Mouvement/Continuité. (Original work published 1967).

104  Katrin Joost and John Darwell Frosh, P. (2020). Photography as a Cultural Industry. In G. Pasternak (Ed.), The Handbook of Photography Studies. Routledge. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). Blackwell. (Original work published 1927). Husserl, E. (1983). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy (F. Kersten, Trans.). Kluwer Academic Publisher. Hutmacher, F. (2019). Why is there so much more research on vision than on any other sensory modality? Frontiers in Psychology, 10(2246). Weifenbach, T. (2019). Des Oiseaux. Editions Xavier Barral. Wood, S. (2018). Encountering Birds: A Phenomenology of Jizz. Chiasmus: Proceedings of ANPA, 37–38, 497–533.

Section 2

Liminality and the city

7 Hotel living The contemporary mixed-use gated community in Istanbul Simone Pekelsma

Introduction: changing perspectives on gated communities There is an abundance of academic literature on gated communities. Strikingly, the majority analyses gated communities from an outsider perspective. Sometimes, a researcher goes inside the community to conduct interviews with residents, but generally there is no long-term engagement with life inside the gates. This raises important questions. What is actually happening inside gated communities? What are people doing beyond the gates, beyond the turnpikes or beyond the security guards? What does everyday life in these gated communities look and feel like? What are the everyday rhythms that unfold in these developments? How do people observe, experience and value the everydayness they are confronted with, and how do they interact with the wider urban context around them? These are some of the key questions that pushed me to pursue my PhD research.1 I was very happy and lucky to get the opportunity to dive into the relatively hidden worlds of two gated communities in Istanbul and Madrid. This chapter is an account of the Istanbul part of my journey: a very personal adventure with many unexpected twists and turns that forced me to rethink the way that gated communities are approached, analysed and explained. Ever since my first introduction to the world of gated communities in Istanbul in the early 2000s, I have been fascinated by this particular urban phenomenon. The prevalence of gated communities – residential developments that restrict access to non-residents and include various shared amenities – has steadily risen across the world since the 1960s. Consequently, gated communities have come to form a much researched and reviewed phenomenon (e.g., Blakely & Snyder, 1997; Low, 2003; Caldeira, 2001). After starting from a predominantly Anglo-American and Latin American focus, research now includes gated communities from all around the world, including Asia, the Middle East, Africa and to a lesser degree, Europe. Generally, the increasing number of gated communities around the world is explained by neoliberal economic and political (urban) policies (Sennett, 2018; Xu & Yang, 2008; Kenna & Dunn, 2009), the emergence of new middle classes, the growing international desire for all-inclusive lifestyles within a residential neighbourhood, the perceived benefits of living within such neighbourhoods and geopolitical instability and urban malaise (Kenna & Dunn, 2009). The proliferation DOI: 10.4324/9781003354772-10

108  Simone Pekelsma of gated communities around the world is also believed to originate from a growing sense of insecurity, a fear of crime and the search for a socio-spatial community among residents, often belonging to the middle and upper-middle classes (Blakely & Snyder, 1997; Davis, 2006). Gated communities offer an organised and safe living space along with a wide range of services, including sports facilities, beauty salons and supermarkets. Modern gated communities are also often interpreted as alternatives to the city’s real urban life (Caldeira, 2001), intentionally producing urban segregation. These glooming perspectives are indeed very much visible in past and contemporary research on gated communities, which has pointed out the creation of outsiders, segregation, increased socio-economic polarisation and exclusionary planning. Academic literature has been very critical about the negative role that gated communities play in realising policy goals towards sustainable, diverse and vital communities. In general, it is believed that ‘gated communities are the clearest indication that unimpeded consumer and developer choice threatens wider urban aspirations’ (Atkinson & Blandy, 2006). Alternative interpretations and approaches are not easy to find. A smaller group of scholars, such as Manzi and Smith-Bowers (2005) and Webster (2002), explain the phenomenon of gated communities with the help of Buchanan’s (1965) club goods theory. Gated communities then constitute a type of private club formed to enjoy a kind of living as members that no one person unilaterally could finance. In a similar vein, some see gated communities as a private response to collective issues of crime, vandalism and anti-social behaviour, as recounted by Landman and Schönteich (Landman & Schönteich, 2002) for gated communities in South Africa and Brazil. Only a few studies provide a generally more nuanced picture of gated communities. In the introduction to this book, Tanulku and I explain our own work on gated communities. Xu and Yang (2008) discuss the way that integrative design solutions reduce the segregating effects of gated communities. Wissink (2013) explores how a gated tower development in Mumbai both creates and connects stakeholders in novel and unexpected ways. There is research by Tanulku (2013) on the perceptions of gated communities by residents and the way that they build relationships with ‘outsiders’ on the basis of amenities and services available inside the community (Tanulku, 2013). She also argues that gated communities as processual spaces create tension between the ownership of and access to space and by blurring the boundaries between inside and outside, open and private and safe and unsafe (Tanulku, 2013, p. 4). In addition, there is some research on the positive effect of gated communities on the (suburban) economy and infrastructure (Roitman & Phelps, 2011). However, generally, the debate on gated communities and gating has become a strongly normative discussion of what is supposed to be a ‘good’, ‘inclusive’ and ‘democratic’ city. Gated communities definitely do not seem to fit the norm. They are surrounded by a persistent discourse based on predominantly negative characteristics and effects. The same is true for Turkey, where one of my two case studies (Varyap Meridian) is located. As this chapter dives into my fieldwork in Istanbul, it is interesting to have a short look at the development of gated communities in Istanbul and

Hotel living 109 the way that these communities are treated in the literature. Istanbul (and Turkey as a country) has undergone a very rapid and unimaginably intensive period of urban development in the past 75 years. From the 1950s onwards, both Turkey and Istanbul have witnessed an all-encompassing and accelerated process of privatisation, internationalisation and urbanisation (for a detailed overview of these developments, refer to, for example, Zürcher, 2009 and Keyder, 1999). It is in this revolutionary context – during which Istanbul expanded from nearly 1 million inhabitants in 1950 to almost 16 million today2 – that the rise of Istanbul’s gated communities also took place. Gated communities are definitely not a new phenomenon in the city, but their form and appearance have changed. In the 1930s, they were known as site3 and were primarily inhabited by people working in the same sector such as doctors, lawyers and teachers (Perouse & Danis, 2005). These gated communities were followed by gated summer resorts in the 1960s and 1970s – especially in the Aegean region – that were then followed by a wave of especially low-rise, low-density-type projects from the 1980s onwards (Perouse & Danis, 2005), which catered to the new middle classes looking for novel, safe and luxurious living environments in a rapidly expanding city (Kandiyoti & Saktanber). In the 2000s, gated communities developed into large-scale, mixed-use, high-rise developments. Today, divisions and gates are so prevalent that they seem to have become a key design principle (Islam, 2010). Gated communities are very common in contemporary Istanbul, and most real estate developments that are now being built will include some form of gating or security. Just like in other parts of the world, the rise of gated communities in Turkey has been observed very critically in the academic literature, and most research has approached gated communities from a critical economy or neoliberal perspective (Candan & Kolluoğlu, 2008; Geniş, 2007). Tanulku – the co-editor of this book who is referred to earlier in this chapter – is perhaps the only Turkish scholar who has taken a different approach (Tanulku 2012, 2013, 2016). My own PhD research also focused on the idea that despite the fact that gated communities are currently often treated as one single, uniform phenomenon that exudes all types of negative influences on a city, they might very well be multiform and multicausal (Claessens, 2007, p. 35): lived in and dynamic places that manifest themselves in cities in all kinds of different ways. At least I started my research based on the urge to explore this perspective in greater detail. A relational perspective on gated communities To me, the most important requirement of examining this multiformity and dynamism was to take a close look at everyday life beyond the gates. I wanted to understand how the everyday practices, social relations and effects in and around gated communities shaped the functioning, experience and practice of the community and its gates. Lefebvre’s theories on the production of space and the importance of ‘everyday life’ in this process provided an important theoretical basis for my research.4 In Lefebvre’s work, the mental, physical and social dimensions of space are understood as

110  Simone Pekelsma ‘internally related within an open totality: the triad of perceived, conceived, and lived experiences that are in a constant state of co-production and reproduction, driven by the continuous shifts among the three different moments’ (Schmid, 2008, p. 40). Perceived space denotes its physical dimension and its flow of materials, people and energy: it is space that is generated and used. Conceived space alludes to knowledge and logic: it is the instrumental site where (social) engineers and urban planners develop idealised abstractions. Lived space is socially produced and modified through the use that people make of it: it connotes space that is charged with symbolism and meaning (Elden, 2001). The different ‘moments of space’ are not mutually exclusive but fold onto each other in various ways. This definition allows Lefebvre to understand space as an ensemble of relations and networks that make social action possible. Space is then understood as neither a physical container of objects nor an infinite, discursive field. It is both socially produced and an essential precondition for the reproduction of social relations. (Butler, 2012, p. 42) Applying Lefebvre’s spatial triad to gated communities allowed me to investigate the physical, social and affective components that shape them, while giving equal importance to all three dimensions – which are always in interaction. Lefebvre’s conception of space as socially constituted allowed me to analyse the wide range of components associated with the dynamic character of gated communities. In addition, it provides an illustration of the spatial practices at play in gated communities, which result from complex struggles and conflicts between conceived spaces and perceived and lived spaces. Within these conflicts, gated community residents, users, visitors, and workers are not passive recipients of the space designed for them or the rules imposed on them, but they take an active role in shaping their environment (Hubbard & Sanders, 2003). Lefebvre’s spatial triad and his theoretical exploration of everyday life shift the focus of gated communities’ grand designs and urban plans (conceived space) to a lot of messy basic and everyday practices (perceived space) and experiences (lived space). ‘So much ordinary action gives no advance notice of what it will become’ (Lorimer, 2005, p. 84). At the same time, it makes critical differences to our experiences of space and place. The focus falls on how life takes shape and gains expression in shared experiences, everyday routines, fleeting encounters, embodied movements, precognitive triggers, practical skills, affective intensities, enduring urges, unexceptional interactions and sensuous dispositions. (Lorimer, 2005, p. 84) To be able to understand the shared experiences, everyday routines and fleeting encounters so vividly described by Lorimer, fieldwork was of great importance to my research. My fieldwork focused on two key objectives. First, I aimed to trace

Hotel living 111 how the gates of gated communities were manifested. In which locations were these ‘gates’ shaped? Through which behaviour, beliefs, practices and relations and through which rules, regulations and standards did they come to be? Which actors played a role in the shaping of these ‘gates’? Who guarded these ‘gates’? And could there also be (unexpected) openings in the ‘gates’? Subsequently, my fieldwork aimed to uncover what it is that passes through these ‘gates’. In my research, gated communities were not viewed as impenetrable but rather as the result of the dynamic relation(s) between and among local and global actors, both material and immaterial, and situated on both the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ of gated communities. ‘Through certain vehicles, traces and trails, the world was being brought inside the gates, where it is consequently transformed and pumped back out if its walls’ (Latour, 2005, pp. 179–180). I came to see that the various ways that this process is shaped leads to the construction of multiple forms and versions of gated communities rather than a single ‘gated reality’. ‘New connections emerge from the interactions of various actors and networks, and these generate varieties of gated communities’ (DeLanda, 2006, pp. 4–5). In the next sections, I take you on a short trip5 to Varyap Meridian and its very dynamic, transient and unexpected character. Shaping the gates – the gated community as a hotel My exploration of gated communities took place in two gated communities: one in Istanbul and one in Madrid. This chapter covers the development in Istanbul called Varyap Meridian. Varyap Meridian is an architectural icon that those who have travelled down the O4 Anatolian Motorway will undoubtedly have spotted. Designed by RMJM, it is a so-called mixed-use project consisting of high-rise apartments, shops, services such as restaurants, underground parking, dry cleaning, 24-hour guards and all types of leisure activities, including gyms, swimming pools and playgrounds. Varyap Meridian consists of 1,500 residential units, offices, a five-star hotel, conference facilities and underground parking for 2,500 vehicles. Around 5,000 people live on the premises of Varyap Meridian, which are divided into several blocks (A, B+C and D+E) that are separated by gates and walls and are managed individually (Pekelsma, 2024). Varyap Meridian is located in Batı Ataşehir (West Ataşehir), which has recently undergone enormous urban developments and is now known as the new financial centre of Istanbul, as situated on the Asian side of the city. During my first stay at Varyap Meridian in the summer of 2015 (at the D+E Block), I was deeply amazed by the gated development’s movement of water porters, rental cars, residents, taxis, delivery drivers and security staff. They were all coming and going day and night. This buzz was intensified by the many construction sites around the community. It was dusty, noisy and hot. There were cement trucks, cranes and stray dogs. It was not a quiet summer but a strongly urban experience. The whole city seemed to be seeping into the complex: its sounds, smells, bright colours, behaviours, ideas and emotions. One of the first things that I realised was that the gates could not at all stop all of these stimuli from entering.

112  Simone Pekelsma

Figure 7.1  Varyap Meridian life surrounded by cranes and the wider city.

Staying at Varyap Meridian for a couple of weeks allowed me to practice and experience the many different gating systems first-hand. I  discovered that the gates of Varyap Meridian took on many different forms and shapes and excluded or included different types of people. The gates could be not only flexible but also hard boundaries, depending on the specific situation or context. The most visible gates at work were the walls, booms and security guards. These material gates were regulated by sets of rules concerning entry, visitors and parking. However, in practice, these rules were regularly broken or changed. In this sense, the gates did form a boundary but only to some extent. The boundary was continuously contested at the gates themselves, through the management office or through personal connections. Sometimes special arrangements were even made, for example, with the Halkbank branch next door: their employees could come into the D block to have lunch at Café Pion, the gated community’s own café. Once inside the gated community, there were also certain ‘social’ gates and borders that were also challenged. Residents viewed their living environment at Varyap Meridian as highly diverse and varied. Some residents were inviting so many guests to come over for a swim during the weekend that other residents were getting annoyed by the swimming pool’s overcrowding. As a result, a new system of turnpikes, access cards and swimming pool fees was under discussion. Vedat skillfully described his perspective on the functioning of the gates: If we didn’t have the gates, we would have many problems. We would have a hundred problems. With the gates, we have fifty. We’d have Syrians sitting here. At least it keeps the Syrians,6 or whatever, the gypsies, out. But then of course you have the rich guy who is a drug dealer or has a mistress, he can

Hotel living 113 still come in. It’s like a prison. Some things pass the boundaries and other things don’t. It just depends on what you can tolerate. If you are rich enough and you don’t want to tolerate anything, then you go to Zekeriyaköy and build your own house there.7 (Pekelsma, 2024) That is, the gates (material and regulatory) had the capacity to keep unwanted people or behaviour out to some degree, but they could definitely not keep everything out. This was especially because the gates did not prevent people from buying or renting at Varyap Meridian. Yes, it is not easy (but it is not impossible) to get into Varyap Meridian if you do not know anyone inside, but the option of renting or buying at Varyap Meridian is open to anyone. Of course, there are financial restrictions, and not everyone can afford to live there. However, Varyap Meridian provides a wide range of apartment styles and types: from studio flats to penthouses and family style apartments. As a result, there is also a great diversity in prices. In my interviews, the following ‘resident types’ were believed to be living at the community: highly educated, high-earning professionals, middle-range professionals aspiring to climb the socio-economic ladder, students from outside Istanbul with wealthy parents, professional sports players, high-end criminals, middle-class families, adulterous males and females and escorts (Pekelsma, 2024). At the time of my fieldwork (2015–2018), around 60% of all residents rented their apartments. We even rented our flat through Airbnb ourselves, and we were not unique in this respect. The owner of the community’s café told us that our flat had previously been rented by families from Sweden and the United States. Even today (2024), one can still find multiple Airbnb listings located inside Varyap Meridian or other nearby gated communities. The flat that we8 stayed at in 2015 is also still available. Already a couple of days into my stay at Veryap Meridian, the high level of movement, the impressive number of tenants and the resulting coming and going of taxis, rental cars and other services made me feel like I was staying at a hotel. This appeared to be a shared impression. My interviewees also talked about how Varyap Meridian was currently known as a hotel, while other gated communities in the neighbourhood were characterised as ‘family-oriented’ or ‘bachelor pads’. What is striking about the ‘hotel profile’ of Varyap Meridian was its impermanence, transience and diversity, especially in terms of the people who were living or staying there and the types of behaviour, cultures and practices they were bringing into the community. Most of the people I talked to complained about fellow residents’ behaviour in one way or another. There were complaints about noise, smells, visitors, cars not being parked correctly, loud phone conversations and rudeness. There were complaints about mafia practices and prostitution. Some even considered the developer (Varyap) to be part of the ‘anti-social, non-educated, nouveau riche’ that were particularly disliked by more family-oriented residents. In terms of gated communities, we often look at the distinction between the people inside and outside the community. However, in the case of Varyap Meridian, it was interesting to see that there are also clear distinctions on the inside. By no means is the project a ‘unified’ development consisting only of like-minded people

114  Simone Pekelsma from similar backgrounds. Because of the different apartment layouts, prices and both rental and (short- and long-term) tenancy options, a wide variety of people were living or staying at Varyap Meridian. As a result, the material spaces of Varyap Meridian (i.e., the swimming pool) set the stage for a seemingly strong internal ‘class struggle’. The space of Varyap Meridian was shaped and contested by the relations and interactions among its residents, owners, developer and visitors alike. That is, the inside of the walls of Varyap Meridian was very strongly negotiated. Rather than being a uniform and anti-urban development, I would argue that Varyap Meridian was actually highly diverse and urban in character. Negotiating the gated community Varyap Meridian’s residents were diverse and so were their ideas and opinions about the community. ‘Everybody is running away from here, you’d better save yourself too!’ (Herkes kaçıyor burdan sizde kurtarın kendinizi)), Emre stated on Foursquare (6 December 2014). One year earlier, Sule claimed that Varyap Meridian is ‘Definitely a very good project! Varyap is doing it, well done!’ (Kesinlikle çok iyi bi proje! Varyap yapıyor helal olsun). In the summer of 2015, the residents I talked to still displayed the same ambivalence. Work is nearby, schools are nearby. If you adjust your life, everything is close by. Actually, you don’t have so many choices. You can live outside the city in a villa project, which is expensive, and travelling is difficult. In gecekondu neighbourhoods like the ones around here, there are no good schools, no restaurants, no bars. If you want a certain lifestyle, you cannot live there. For me, living in a community like Varyap Meridian seems to be the only viable option. It’s a matter of balancing your expectations though. (Gökhan in Pekelsma, 2024) The fact that ‘expectations need to be balanced’ and the need to deal with diversity and negotiate difference were expressed a lot. ‘It is clear when people are not from here. With some people, you immediately notice that they are tenants here or that they rent 1-bedroom flats to meet their girlfriends on weekends. You can clearly recognise single men’, Mehmet explained to me (Pekelsma, 2024). Next to our apartment, a young guy was living with his girlfriend. They disturbed us a lot. How? That is a bit private. When they were having sex, they would be very loud. We would be sitting in our living room, but we could not stay there. Our children were with us. We tried to soundproof the walls because they are thin. That is one of the problems of this project . . . it is a very normal and natural thing, but if you are having guests over . . . when my parents come over and want to pray, the sound disturbs them. These kinds of things are a problem for Turkish families. (Pekelsma, 2024)

Hotel living 115 Okan, the owner of Café Pion, was also aware of issues like this. ‘Some people use this place as a hotel, especially single people.9 Sometimes problems occur between families and single residents. They talk to me rather than to the site management’ (Pekelsma, 2024). The issues expressed in the previous quotes were especially framed in terms of a cultural clash. Interviewees stated that in terms of finance and income, residents were perhaps relatively similar, but culturally, they were very different. The ‘deviating’ behaviour that many interviewees described was usually labelled as ‘village mentality’ – ways of doing and thinking associated with a stereotype of Anatolian migrants. Zafer, the manager of the on-site management run by Varyap, thought that these ‘cultural clashes’ were particularly due to the inexperience of many residents with gated community life. He had a firm belief that many people were not yet used to living with gated community regulations regarding noise, pets, trash disposal and public smoking. This type of living required a greater degree of collective compromise, which residents still had to develop. According to Okan, the situation was slightly more complex. He expressed that it was not only about residents’ lack of experience with communal life but also about Varyap’s failure to develop sufficient social facilities for its residents: If you want to be like a 5-star hotel, you must have certain facilities, like a large à la carte restaurant, an aqua park or something. The municipality or central government should set up rules about that, about the social life of people. If a developer does not plan for any social facilities, it should not get planning permission for the project, or something. There are many apartments in these communities, so a developer should also consider social life. However, everything is about money, and they do not consider people much. (Okan in Pekelsma, 2024) In the meantime, Varyap Meridian’s communal life was being gradually but organically organised by individual micro-management initiatives that went beyond complaining to the Management Office. This included residents paying visits to neighbours who were being too loud; the set-up of informal women’s clubs and friendships at the gym; the raising of spontaneous complaints to Okan while having a cup of tea at Café Pion; or sitting with other families at the swimming pool while ignoring bothersome users. Residents were finding ways to negotiate their response to unwanted behaviours and undesirable practices. Sometimes, they acted directly, sometimes, they complained and yet at other times, they chose to simply ignore the sources of their frustration. Sometimes, they organised themselves on social media such as LinkedIn.10 Life at Varyap Meridian was littered with constant negotiation and contestation: a very different reality than the peaceful, tranquil life that one would expect to find in a gated community based on the (academic) literature.

116  Simone Pekelsma Conclusion: the gated community as a dynamic, lived space that is part of the wider city At the time of my first stay (summer 2015), life at Varyap Meridian had many clear hotel-like qualities. The outside neighbourhood was still in a state of construction and impermanence. However, when I returned in 2018, the surroundings of Varian Meridian had changed completely. The cranes, trucks, dust and sand had disappeared, and a new shopping mall (Watergarden) and new office towers had risen from the previous construction sites. Watergarden not only offered a show pool but also had a wide assortment of restaurants, bars, stores and leisure activities such as bowling alleys and a cinema. The whole area around Varyap Meridian had gained a more intimate character, and more people were walking in the streets, coming in and out of the neighbouring gated communities. My interviewees from 3 years ago also described life as far more stable. Listen, for example, to Gökhan, who recalls life in the summer of 2015: It was about construction, muddy roads and dogs. Do you remember the dogs? It was terrible. You couldn’t get off the bus and walk here because there was this large dog community, which you felt might eat you alive. Today, Watergarden is here. Now, I am very happy to live here, because it takes five minutes to decide which cinema to go to or which movie to watch. It takes two minutes to go to DasDas and go to a concert. . . . It takes two minutes to select a restaurant. I am in the middle of all of it. I use it a lot. Watergarden is like my neighbourhood, my mahalle. (Gökhan in Pekelsma, 2024)

Figure 7.2  Swimming pool in 2015 and 2018.

Hotel living 117

Figure 7.3  Swimming pool in 2015 and 2018.

Figure 7.4  View of Varyap Meridian from Watergarden in July 2023.

Gökhan was clearly much happier in his neighbourhood in 2018 than in 2015. However, he also told me that not everybody shared his happiness. The attraction of Watergarden had also created problems relating to noise and traffic, which some residents really disliked. Several interviewees also claimed that the growing attractiveness of the neighbourhood outside Varyap Meridian had discouraged sociability inside the community. People now preferred to go outside rather than spend their free time inside the gates.

118  Simone Pekelsma View of Varyap Meridian from Watergarden in July 2023 Savaş Özbey, a columnist at the Turkish daily newspaper Hürriyet shared the same amazement of the changes that have happened in Batı Ataşehir in a column he wrote in March  2018. ‘If they had told me ten years ago that I  would eat fish and enjoy myself surrounded by skyscrapers, I would not have believed them’, he wrote (Hürriyet, 17 March 2018). He praised his visit to ‘Cibalikapı’, a restaurant located in Varyap Meridian’s A Block that serves classic Istanbul meze and fish. Batı Ataşehir used to be viewed as a distant, uninteresting, high-rise suburb, yet it is becoming a centre in its own right, with the city now starting ‘to perceive it as a defining part of a new ‘self-made’ and authentic form of urban development’ (Lilliendahl Larsen & Brandt, 2018, p. 58). This major change is interesting, especially because most research considers gated communities as stable, somewhat frozen, one-dimensional urban developments. However, the results of my fieldwork seem to suggest that Varyap Meridian is in constant motion. The character of the gated community changes according to adaptations in its surroundings and circumstances. Varyap Meridian is part of the wider urban dynamics of the city. It is therefore not static but in continuous movement. Every time I returned home to the Netherlands after my visits to Varyap Meridian, I felt puzzled.11 The daily realities that I had experienced while I was there did not meet the perspectives of most gated community literature. I had experienced movement, buzz, annoyance, ignorance, dust, noise, loneliness, competition, negotiation, anger, disappointment, friendly chats and heat. All of these elements were entering and leaving the community not only through a wide variety of practices and customs but also through everyday encounters (both wanted and unwanted) and pure chance. John Law has described ‘the world as an unformed but generative flux of forces and relations that work to produce particular realities’ (Law, 2004, p. 7). This is also exactly how I saw the realities of Varyap Meridian take shape. It was through the constant everyday interaction among conceived space (designs, plans and commercials), perceived space (flow of materials and people) and lived space (social practices and meaning) that Varyap Meridian emerges,12changes, develops and adapts. Interestingly, if gated communities are the result of the assembling of material and non-material actors on various spatial levels both in- and outside gated communities, then this implies that they could also be re-assembled otherwise. If gated communities are viewed as social phenomena, then they can never be finished or total (Jorgensen & Phillips, 2002, p. 24). This leaves us with an important question: how could these alternative gated communities be assembled? What new urban imaginaries could be articulated? What is it that gated communities could be? And what is their potentiality for cities (McFarlane, 2011)? In the case of Varyap Meridian, we have seen that gated communities do not need to be homogeneous. They can house a variety of residents. A ­well-functioning management system with close involvement of the residents themselves seems to

Hotel living 119 be essential in this respect. It is also vital that the gated community is part of a neighbourhood that actually provides particular services or attractions, such as parks, public space, shops, restaurants or playgrounds. In the case of Varyap Meridian, we have seen a strong interaction between the community and its surroundings beyond the gates. People use the wider city a lot. For many, home was even described more in terms of where you sleep than as a more emotional type of home. This is a very interesting question in itself. Is the meaning of ‘home’ shifting in the contemporary city? Is the wider city with all its amenities and services becoming more of a ‘home’, while a house simply provides shelter? Or is it that the boundaries between ‘home’ and the ‘outside’ are shifting? Life at Varyap Meridian provided all kinds of interesting perspectives on contemporary city life that can only be seen when one moves beyond the gates to explore what is happening there and when one views the gated community as part of the city. Perhaps this is my key message: we should not take the urban developments – especially the ones that we tend to ‘dislike’ or ‘feel uncomfortable with’ at first sight, such as gated communities – that we see around us for granted. We should move beyond first impressions, beyond stereotypes and beyond what we expect to see into the unknown territory that lies behind the gates. In addition, we could focus on these urban developments as part of wider practices, experiences and beliefs. Varyap Meridian – its residents, materials, emotional charges and practices – were in constant interaction with the wider city through social media, family bonds, shops and restaurants, business visits, history, etc. However, I had to move into the community to witness this. I invite everyone to move into similarly unknown territories with an open view. Notes 1 I started my PhD research in April 2014 at Radboud University Nijmegen (NL). Now (2024), nearly 10 years and half a life later, I have finally submitted my manuscript. 2 According to worldpopulationreview.com on 23 July 2023 3 In daily speech, ‘site’ is still the most common term people use to refer to a gated community. The official term kapalı site – closed community – is rarely employed. 4 In my PhD research, I extended Lefebvre’s spatial triad by adding a fourth ‘valued’ space. I related this to the processual idea of ‘gates’ in contemporary border studies. For a full theoretical discussion of my research, please refer to my manuscript (Pekelsma, 2024). 5 For an extended journey, please refer to my PhD research. 6 Syrians here refers to people coming from Syria/the Middle East as a result of the continuous conflict since the 2010s. Although the word “Syrian” reflects a particular nationality, it has become a generic and stigmatised term to refer to mostly undocumented/ illegal refugees in Turkey. 7 Zekeriyaköy is a village in the Northern Istanbul municipality of Sarıyer known for its high-end residential developments, particularly villas and detached homes. 8 My then-husband and then-6-month-old daughter also joined me for my fieldwork at Varyap Meridian. 9 In 2015, approximately 40% of the residents at Varyap Meridian were married, according to Umut Kerem Yakar, Deputy General Director of Varyap. In contrast, at Uphill Court, another Varyap project nearby, the percentage of married residents was 60%.

120  Simone Pekelsma 10 A group of residents formed a group on LinkedIn to organise their appeal to Varyap to set up a management office run by residents themselves rather than by the development company. 11 The first time I visited was in 2015. I went back to see the development and its surroundings in 2018, 2022 and 2023. 12 In my PhD research, I include a fourth ‘valued’ space. For more details, please refer to Pekelsma, 2024.

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Hotel living 121 Low, S. (2003). Behind the gates: Life, security and the pursuit of happiness in fortress America. Routledge. Manzi, T., & Smith-Bowers, B. (2005). Gated communities as club goods: Segregation or social cohesion? Housing Studies, 2(2), 345–359. McFarlane, C. (2011). Assemblage and critical urbanism. City, Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action, 15(2), 204–224. Özbey, S. (2018, March 17). 19.30 erken, 12.00 geç, 41 yaşlı, 24 çok genç. Hürriyet. Retrieved January 31, 2019, from www.hurriyet.com.tr/yazarlar/savas-ozbey/19-30-erken-12-00gec-41-yasli-24-cok-genc-40774565 Pekelsma, S. A. (2024). Gated communities. The end of civilisation or urban integration beyond the wall? [PhD research, Radboud University Nijmegen]. Forthcoming. Perouse, J. F., & Danis, D. (2005). Zenginligin Mekanda Yeni Yansimalari: Istanbul’da Guvenlikli Siteler. Toplum ve Bilim, 104, 92–123. Roitman, S., & Phelps, N. (2011). Do gates negate the city? Gated communities’ contribution to the urbanisation of suburbia in Pilar, Argentina. Urban Studies, 48(16), 3487–3509. Schmid, C. (2008). Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space: Towards a threedimensional dialectic. In K. Goonewardena, S. Kipfer, R. Milgrom, & C. Schmid (Eds.), Space, difference, everyday life. Reading Henri Lefebvre. Routledge. Sennett, R. (2018). Building and dwelling: Ethics for the city. Penguin Books. Tanulku, B. (2012). Gated communities: From “self-sufficient towns” to “active urban agents”. Geoforum, 43, 518–528. Tanulku, B. (2013). Gated communities: Ideal packages or processual spaces of conflict? Housing Studies, 28(7), 937–959. Tanulku, B. (2016). Gated communities as spatial manifestations of moral differentiation and competition: An example from Istanbul, Turkey. Journal of Cultural Geography, 33(3), 310–338. Webster, C. (2002). Property rights and the public realm: Gates, green belts, and Gemeinschaft. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 29(3), 397–412. Wissink, B. (2013). Enclave urbanism in Mumbai: An actor-network-theory analysis of urban (dis)connection. Geoforum, 47, 1–11. Xu, M., & Yang, Z. (2008). Theoretical debate on gated communities: Genesis, controversies, and the way forward. Urban Design International, 13, 213–226. Zürcher, E. J. (2009). Turkey. A modern history. I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd.

8 Liminality as anti-infrastructure? boundary making and breaking in infrastructure construction Sam Rumé

Introduction: calles abiertas Well, when they opened the streets, we fell ill from all the dust, all the noise, it was madness how they opened in one place, opened in another place, and things didn’t finalise. (Ernesto, shopkeeper) The notion of “open streets,” calles abiertas, constitutes a fitting starting point for my argument, given the profound ambiguity of “openness.” Projects of sustainable mobility, which have become central in the policy discourse in cities around the globe, tend to involve ideals of city streets as open, inclusive, and accessible spaces. Cuenca, a city of half a million inhabitants in the Ecuadorian Andes, has seen the proliferation of urban interventions towards these ideals in recent years. Pedestrianisations, “complete streets,” and bike lanes are being introduced as part of a broader effort to make the city more sustainable, “friendly,” and equitable. Undoubtedly, the largest component of this endeavour, in relation to its costs and effects on the city, has been the construction of a tramway that started in 2013. According to local authorities, the tram would support environmentally and socially friendly mobility in the city by being electrical and more accessible than Cuenca’s old buses. It would also be more efficient by constituting the central axis of a future intermodal transport system that connects different spaces and mobilities. In Cuenca, just like in many other places today, sustainable mobility projects are presented as a means to order chaotic streetscapes in ways that would make public space more inclusive, participatory, and green. In this sense, ideas of sustainable urbanism appear as a response to both modernist city building and neoliberal developments. Modernism first reorganised cities through rigid functionalist patterns (see Holston, 1989), and neoliberalism entailed the splintering of this organisation through privatisations, urban sprawl, and segregation (Graham & Marvin, 2001). In Latin America, there are striking examples of how these tendencies have created cities characterised by social, symbolic, and physical boundaries (Caldeira, 2000). Current ideals of the sustainable city are the proposed remedy to these issues, and they are aimed at overcoming these boundaries, opening up spaces, and bundling the city together again. Concretely, for instance, the Cuenca tram is presented by DOI: 10.4324/9781003354772-11

Liminality as anti-infrastructure? 123 authorities as an instrument for the inclusion of groups (such as the elderly, the disabled, and those not owning a car) disadvantaged by the current transport regime and its discriminatory designs. In addition, the street redesign accompanying the tram included so-called “shared space” (locally referred to as plataforma única) which, in theory, loosened the divisions between car lane, tram lane, bike, and pedestrian space. As a local architect argued in a presentation on the plataforma única, this would break down the modernist segregation of traffic and allow for a postmodern space of encounter and heterogeneity. However, when I undertook my first ethnographic fieldwork on the tram project in 2017, the notion of calles abiertas, open streets, came up in a very different, in fact, opposite sense, as Ernesto’s opening quote suggests. At that time, the tram was still under construction – or more precisely its construction was still halted – exposing inhabitants to the uncertainties of the project. The construction had initially been scheduled to take two years, but various technical and political problems kept prolonging it since its beginning in 2013, which caused a year-long suspension in 2017 and the tram’s late inauguration in 2020. Part of my research focused on the shopkeepers of the area who lamented the calles abiertas that the suspended construction had left. By this, they referred to the unpaving and the large holes throughout the streets dug up by construction works. The long construction years constituted a crisis for the city in political, social, and economic terms. Authorities came under fire for their handling of the project, and inhabitants had to deal with the troubles of a construction that had invaded their everyday spaces. The tram route was drawn straight through the city centre and some of the most vital arteries of the city. Its construction became an obstacle to mobility and all kinds of everyday practices in the surrounding areas. Especially for the small businesspeople and shopkeepers of the area, the construction represented a threat to their livelihoods. The polysemy of “openness” intrinsic in these observations – as, on the one hand, relating to the ideals of an inclusive city and, on the other hand, used to articulate the harmful excavation of streets – helps us to capture wildly different experiences of the city. When shopkeepers lamented the “open streets,” they implied a forceful opening and an unbundling of the material environment that had constituted the taken-for-granted support of their practices and their dwelling, specifically, what had constituted their infrastructures. Along with this material disassembly, the “opening” of streets disrupted embodied practices, bounded identities, and affective attachments. It produced an atmosphere of confusion and of inbetweenness that I started to understand in terms of liminality. I thus first describe in more detail these experiences of in-betweenness. Then, I explore the usefulness of theories of liminality to make sense of these experiences before examining liminality from the perspective of infrastructure debates. Liminality and infrastructure prove to be mutually informative concepts, as both constitute crucial experiential and relational parts of people’s lives. Can liminality actually be seen as antiinfrastructure instead of the classic understanding of anti-structure (Turner, 1969)? I assess the implications of such a conceptual shift that, although stimulating, also challenges the very logic of opposition framing these notions.

124  Sam Rumé Experiences of in-betweenness Akhil Gupta (2018) addresses the temporalities of infrastructures through the figure of the suspended construction. The suspension of infrastructure construction exposes people to the ruination of their environment and offers a glimpse of a temporality that is very different from the “well-worn script of modernity” (2018, p. 62). This type of ruin is not linked to the afterlife of a historic construction but is part of a project to enact the future. The unanticipated suspension of construction hints at the uncertainty of the project and contradicts linear imaginaries of progress. It not only challenges the teleology of planning and the power of planners but also suggests that ruination is an intrinsic aspect of infrastructures instead of simply being their failure. I later come back to Gupta’s general conclusions on infrastructures, including the permanent potential of in-betweenness through ruination. But first, let us dwell on the figure of the suspended construction. “Ruination,” Gupta argues, is “this property of in-between-ness, between the hopes of modernity and progress embodied in the start of construction, and the suspension of those hopes in the half-built structure” (2018, p. 70). I expand on this description, for although it is appealing, Gupta does not focus on people’s actual day-to-day encounters with this kind of ruination. How is ruination experienced as a situated, corporeal event? An ethnographic exploration of this question leads us beyond general notions of “hopes of modernity” and into the complex dealings with uncertainty. The grammar of liminality and its companion concepts will prove useful to describe these developments. Ernesto is a shopkeeper in one of the narrow and busy streets of the old town, right on the tram route. When I met him in 2017, public works on his section of the street had finished, displaying the new “shared space” design (see Figure 8.1). However, down the road, the construction was still obstructing the street, which led to scarce thoroughfare in front of Ernesto’s shop. I asked him how he was experiencing the tram construction. I quote his answer extensively: Well, when they opened [dug up] the streets, we fell ill from all the dust, all the noise, it was madness how they opened in one place, opened in another place, and things didn’t finalise. You need to be patient, because otherwise you get even sicker, when you get angry and things like that. The kind of stress you feel when your business is going bust, because people don’t want to visit an open street. They risk falling, there are holes in the street, and very limited space for people to walk . . . [The construction workers] left a space of about one and a half metres between house fronts and the fences they erected. So it was very complicated; when people came past, we had to give way or enter doorways to let them pass. And there were people passing with merchandise or other things, so you had to step back. And people are thoughtless sometimes, streets are like this and they come on their motorbike or bicycle, so it’s chaos. Several blocks further, the construction was still on hold, so I could observe this “chaos” myself. There, the street completely lacked paving and had been

Liminality as anti-infrastructure? 125 transformed into an irregular stony ground filled with holes, rubble, and fences right at people’s doorsteps (see Figure 8.2). This unsettled space created an atmosphere of opacity and confusion.

Figure 8.1  A finished section of the tram route in 2017. Source: Photograph by the author.

Figure 8.2  Paralysed construction further down the tram route in 2017. Source: Photograph by the author.

126  Sam Rumé Ernesto’s description involves the experience of ruination in affective, corporeal, practical, and organisational terms. All of these aspects are linked to the configuration of the material environment. Ruination thus comes with uncomfortable questions about transience and permanence in the city (see Henneberry, 2017). It unbundles the material components that made up the street as infrastructure and thereby also disrupts everything that the street was infrastructural to: from mobilities and ways of inhabiting the street to work practices and people’s physical and mental states. Ernesto mentions the stress that the construction was provoking, first in the way it inconvenienced everyday life and then, in the way it threatened his business and his livelihood. He and his inner circle felt physically and psychologically ill from the dust, noise, stress, and uncertainty concerning the future of the project, the city, and their place within it. Other interlocutors from the tram route also commented on the smells emanating from excavated tubes and the vibrations caused by heavy machinery threatening their houses. These experiences illustrate the sensuous affectation of suddenly unbundled components of the city, such as dust and sewage, which had previously been contained and black-boxed by infrastructure. A violent infrastructural inversion (Harvey et al., 2017) plunged inhabitants into an uncertain terrain of vibrant materiality (Bennett, 2010) prolonged by the suspension of construction. In sharp contrast to the project of connectivity through a new transport infrastructure, the tram construction disrupted the connections that had made up everyday life in the affected areas – connections underlying people’s sense of place, their practices, and their interactions. Not only was the street as their basic infrastructure interrupted but also other infrastructures such as their water supply and telephone lines were prone to sudden disruption due to the construction. The tram, which had been imagined as the great articulator of the modernised, sustainable Cuenca of the future, became in its half-built form a new set of boundaries in the city. Some commentators, in a rhetorical escalation, came to refer to the fenced-off tram route across the city as Cuenca’s Berlin Wall, dividing the city in two. Instead of resolving traffic congestion, the unfinished tram increased congestion, thereby spreading feelings of being spatially and temporally stuck. Moreover, many of these issues developed on a scale that was not possible for people to act on. This led inhabitants such as Ernesto to argue for patience and a stoic endurance of the uncertain situation, which was much more nuanced than a suspended “hope of modernity:” I live today, I don’t know what can happen tomorrow. We can hope [the tram] will work, or we can be suspicious, sad, embittered that it’s not yet there, that it won’t work, for example. . . . We have to live in reality. We have to wait; the only hope we have is that the gentlemen who represent us in the government do things right. His polite reference to the “gentlemen who represent us” was sarcastic. It implied a strong resentment towards a local government that he considered to have failed the people by blatantly mishandling the construction project and abandoning inhabitants

Liminality as anti-infrastructure? 127 to their fate. But despite this element of impotence expressed by Ernesto, people affected by the construction, including himself, also developed coping mechanisms. For instance, Ernesto increasingly left his shop to sell his products at fairs. Others joined civic action groups, as I detail in the following. At the very immediate level of bodily encounter with ruination, people explored ways to engage this new environment more productively. They adapted their mobility practices by bypassing congested areas or learning to navigate irregular grounds. The fences were repurposed by some street vendors as racks for their products and by children as football goals. (Under)estimating liminality Much social science stops at the diagnosis of uncertainty, seemingly implying that uncertainty is inscrutable, whereas those focused on liminality instead start from such a diagnosis. Hence, the recently expanded literature on liminality (Thomassen, 2014; Horvath et al., 2015) provides useful tools to conceptualise these experiences of in-betweenness. As Thomassen (2014, p. 2) argues, “[w]henever previously existing borders or limits are lifted away or dissolve into fundamental doubt, the liminal presents itself with a challenge: how to cope with this uncertainty?” Based on the pioneering works of Van Gennep (1909/1981) and Turner (1969), liminality is taken as the unstructured, the loss, or the in-betweenness of structure where change occurs. Turner (1969) famously developed liminality as “anti-structure” in opposition to the determinism and schematism of the structuralist anthropology of his time. He thereby wanted to shift the discussion towards a focus on process and related notions of social change, individual experience, and performance. The concept of liminality was first used in relation to rites of passage (Van Gennep, 1909/1981) and how rituals provide guidance from one state of structured relations to another. Turner (1974) later explored the liminoid (liminal-like) dynamics of leisure and play. Liminality scholars following in Turner’s footsteps have continued this expansion of the concept by applying it to wars, natural disasters, consumption (see Thomassen, 2014), or even to modernity in general as an era of constant boundary-breaking (Szakolczai, 2017). I comment on this expansion of liminality later. But for now, let us test its usefulness for the situation at hand, that is, the construction process of the Cuenca tram. The ideas of loosening structures, shifting boundaries, and the loss of solid ground, usually linked to liminality, apply in very literal ways to the experiences of the tram construction in Cuenca. The construction dug up vital spaces for inhabitants’ everyday lives and left them amidst a ruination that caused disorientation and distress. The loosening of structures in this case refers to the physical infrastructures of the city and the organised practices related to them, as we have already discussed. However, it also involves the destabilisation of the identities of 1) the place, 2) the inhabitants, and 3) their political leaders. First, place-making processes in Cuenca generally include, in some way or another, the city’s historic architectural heritage. City dwellers often show a deep affective attachment to and identification with their heritage. Its beauty and historical richness constitute an

128  Sam Rumé important source of pride and sense of belonging. The tram project was therefore perceived by many not only as an aesthetic disturbance but also as a very physical threat to this heritage (Rumé, 2022b). Second, the threat of the construction also spilled over to inhabitants’ belonging to this place. This was especially visible in the case of shopkeepers such as Ernesto whose businesses suffered from the persistent ruination of the construction. Another shopkeeper whom I met in the area, Sandra, made clear how this pressure on businesses and residents could lead to their displacement: If your property was evaluated at 300,000 in the historic centre [before the construction], you had to sell it for 100,000. Because nobody wants it anymore. So it is totally devalued. They say that after the construction, it’s going to be revalued again, but I mean, is it still going to be in our hands? Are we still going to be the owners? Or will we have lost everything? Because they make us wait so much, it’s like the only way you drown more is through a longer waiting time. As the waiting time becomes longer, you have to sell, because you can’t bear it anymore. And those who buy it are real estate agencies. What Sandra describes here could very well involve a process of gentrification, with small businesses not being able to stand the pressure of the construction and wealthier actors benefiting from the eventual revaluation of the area once the tram is operational. Thus, the unsettling of the place by the construction also unsettled people’s belonging to it and a place identity linked not merely to the heritage architecture but also to old-established residents and businesses. Indeed, the construction years saw the closure of many nearby shops. Third, the construction also unsettled political identities, as inhabitants attributed the construction problems to the authorities, withdrew their support from them, and became increasingly suspicious of the local state in general. The initially popular mayor who started the tram project soon fell out of favour and was not re-elected. His two successors equally struggled with the flawed project and arguably made it worse. The uncertain development of the tram translated into the precarious approval of political leaders (see also Rumé, 2022b). But the consideration of politics in the context of loosening structures and identities leads us further. Inasmuch as “structures” are tied to social hierarchies, liminality presupposes the more general destabilisation of power relations. This sets the stage for the inclusion of two complementary concepts of liminality, namely, communitas and tricksters. The idea behind communitas, as developed by Turner (1969, 1974), is that by stripping people of their previous identities and social status, which leaves them in a state of indefiniteness, liminality allows people to encounter one another as individuals who are equal and free from categorisation. Although heightening their vulnerability, this state also bears the potential of intense solidarity and creativity within the liminal community. A comment by Sandra hints at the equalising effect of the tram’s ruination: “We are frentistas; in the end, we all suffer from the same evil.” The term frentista is deeply significant here. It is a vernacular Spanish word

Liminality as anti-infrastructure? 129 that came up during the tram construction to designate people living or working “in front” or “at the front” (al frente) of the construction site who are thus the most immediately affected by it. For our discussion, this proves to be very suggestive as it quite literally denotes a threshold experience. This term, which I had not heard before, suddenly became prominent in daily conversations and in the media and attracted an increasing number of people who came to self-identify as frentistas or who cared about the frentistas. A new group identity thus emerged of people sharing their affectedness by the ruination. Moreover, many frentistas, including Sandra, engaged in mobilising their peers to con-front the issues of the construction in creative ways. Various civic groups formed from this mobilisation, the most notable being the tram veeduría. A veeduría in Ecuador is a civic group that acquires legal recognition as a supervisor of a specific public sector project. The tram veeduría was an open group for citizens to critically assess the tram project. Its members were mostly businesspeople affected by the construction, but they ranged from humble market vendors to owners of large restaurants. Again, as Sandra said, “in the end, we all suffer from the same evil.” I perceived their weekly meetings as a space in which social hierarchies were flattened due to their shared suffering. Meetings were not clearly structured or guided, and anybody could voice their concerns and ideas about how to collectively cope with the situation. People got to know one another better and empathise with one another’s problems. Some told me that the veeduría felt therapeutic to them. It gave them support and the feeling that they were not powerless. They did run up against a municipality that was unwilling to share information or even concede them legitimacy. Yet the veeduría fought on many levels to win allies for their cause and put pressure on authorities. They came up with different initiatives to help struggling shopkeepers, for instance, by organising fairs and raffles, and they drew attention to their problems and the inconsistencies of the construction through protest marches and press conferences. On the basis of the disconnections caused by the tram construction, frentistas thus created new connections. These were spontaneous at first and then became increasingly institutionalised in groups such as the veeduría. In this sense, the liminal disruption of infrastructured networks encouraged new networks to develop by reassembling social relations and identities (see also Rumé, 2022a). The veeduría shares characteristics with the concept of communitas in the way that it regrouped people from different backgrounds whose social positions had been undermined. It offered them a space for solidarity and agency. This leads us to the other complementary concept of liminality: the trickster. Because of its zealous activism, the veeduría also faced accusations about some of its members being politically motivated or distorting the aims of the group for personal benefit. Those expressing such criticism were not only authorities who felt threatened but also sceptical inhabitants such as Ernesto. The trickster figure can be of use to frame these accusations. In a liminal moment in which structures, hierarchies, and identities are rendered uncertain, scholars have argued that tricksters are likely to intervene and try to benefit from the confusion by winning over those who look for guidance and charismatic leadership (Szakolczai, 2015). Tricksters are described as ambiguous outsiders who aim to deceive people and who

130  Sam Rumé pretend to put an end to uncertainty while actually thriving on liminality. I do not wish to accuse any participant in the conflict at hand of being a trickster. Rather, what we can observe is how the participants themselves accuse one another of trickery. Among the frentistas, a recurring suspicion was that the tram construction was being purposefully sabotaged by the same authorities who were claiming to be the saviours of the people. Among authorities (and some inhabitants), in turn, the veeduría was commonly perceived as driven by the personal interests of its members, whether it was for commercial gain or for future careers in politics. Both types of accusation hinge on a disbelief of the other’s stated intention to work for the common good. The discrediting of the other simultaneously involves one’s own legitimation. A final point on the tram construction inspired by liminality thinking involves the question of ritual. The classic theorisation of liminality, as mentioned, focused on rites of passage, from one state of structured relations to another – rituals of birth, death, marriage, initiation, etc. These studies argued that through rites of passage, societies provide the necessary guidance for liminality to be controlled, for people to find their way back into society and to be transformed as necessary. Although Turner’s focus on liminality as an anti-structural process deviated from the then-dominant structuralist ideas (Thomassen, 2014), early conceptualisations of rites of passage still remained rather structural-functionalist. Recent revivals of liminality only partly shift away from this, as I argue in the following. However, the classic perspective may actually help us to understand the local state’s approach to infrastructure construction in Cuenca. This is because the authorities’ discourse on the tram project involved two clearly demarcated states: the city as it had been until then and the city that was to come with the tram. At the beginning of the project, the mayor solemnly spoke of the before and after. The present city was represented as disorderly and unsustainable, and the future city was described as orderly, sustainable, modern, and efficient. Things that were considered status quo, such as the dominance of car mobility, privately operated public transport, and generally aggressive, competitive mobilities, were contrasted with an ideal future of rationalised, inclusive transport and pacified streets. The tram was the catalyst that was supposed to lead the city from the present into the future. However, the in-between of these two states, the transition, remained underspecified in the official discourse. The construction was presented in reassuringly technical terms at the beginning but ignored the unpredictability that comes with a destabilisation of the sort. That is, liminality was underestimated. If, in a loose interpretation, we take as liminal rituals any organised effort to counter feelings of uncertainty, then the veeduría meetings would certainly qualify. But what did the municipality, as the initiator of the project, do to handle liminality and guide people through it? The municipality organised town meetings, for instance, in which inhabitants were informed about the state of the construction. It also offered workshops for shopkeepers to become more successful and adapt to the situation. These workshops included advice on digital marketing, window dressing, and English language training. An authority in charge of these workshops told me that people needed to look forward and be proactive instead of lamenting their losses. With

Liminality as anti-infrastructure? 131 the tram, a “radical change” was awaiting them, he said, and people needed to be prepared for it. Considering the topics of these workshops, the future was thus imagined by authorities as marked by a globalised, modernised economy thanks to the tram. The workshops conveyed the sense that in this period of change, citizens also needed to change, redefine their identity, and be guided therein by these kinds of “rituals.” Nevertheless, these official efforts to reduce uncertainty were ad hoc attempts that in fact showed the municipality’s lack of preparation for and insufficient response to the liminal in-between. They did little to calm people’s anger and anxieties. Infrastructural complication Liminality has thus given us a useful conceptual toolbox to frame the uncertainties of infrastructure construction signalled by Gupta (2018) in relation to matters of place, affect, everyday life, identity formation, sociality, and political engagement. It allows us to deepen Gupta’s understanding of ruination and take it beyond physical ruins. Ruination becomes the process of undoing the taken-for-granted, including the built environment and everything that it supports, from inhabitants’ practices and livelihoods to a variety of identities. Particularly shopkeepers have had to confront not only the material ruin at their doorsteps but also the (potential) ruin of their businesses. For many inhabitants, the affected spaces have lost their traditional identity, as forms of sociality are reconfigured and old-established shops and residents abandon the area. Gupta argues that the ruination of infrastructure construction challenges the linear progress temporality of modernity and suggests that ruination is intrinsic to infrastructure. What is commonly understood as the “completion” of construction would be a fragile containment of ruination – a containment henceforth dependent on maintenance and repair. However, in the case of the Cuenca tramway, and in adopting the broader understanding of ruination proposed here, the shopkeepers’ ruination was not contained by the “completion” of construction. Their struggle continued to contradict ideas of progress. In my second fieldwork in 2020, when the tram was finally launched, many shopkeepers around the tram route hardly felt relief. Their financial ruin had been bound up with the material ruin. However, the former was not in a causal relationship with the latter, in that the financial ruin outlived the material ruin. These businesses did not experience the working tram as the promised cause of their economic recovery. They were still struggling, and they blamed the tram project for it. To make sense of this ongoing struggle, I now focus more closely on the concept of infrastructure and what it, in turn, can bring to theories of liminality. The tram had been imagined by its proponents as crucial infrastructure for the future of the city and the central axis of a sustainable intermodal transport system. It would transport thousands of passengers daily and offer accessibility to people who had been disadvantaged by the design of the existing transport system. The tram, with its inclusive design, would allow people to move through the city comfortably and safely. It would connect people with some of the most visited places (the city centre and market halls) and with other mobilities (buses, public

132  Sam Rumé bikes, pedestrian zones, the coach station, and the airport) within the intermodal system. The tram project’s goals aligned with infrastructural ideals as described by Star (1999), that is, infrastructures that seamlessly intermesh to produce the functional backdrop for everyday life. Seamless collaborative work would allow these systems to become truly “infra” and to recede from people’s consciousness while coordinating their actions. Following Star’s insights, infrastructure scholars have discussed the constant tension between infrastructure as an object and infrastructure as a relation (Larkin, 2013; Harvey, 2018). The material object that is commonly called infrastructure – a tram system, for instance – does not always become “infra” in the previous sense for everyone and certainly not in the same way. Infrastructure thus becomes relational, partial, and multiple. Since its launch, the Cuenca tram’s plans to become infrastructure have only partially been fulfilled. On the one hand, the municipality did not manage to create seamless connections between different mobilities. Especially the private bus companies resisted being integrated into an intermodal system that would undermine their autonomy. On the other hand, the tram, once operational, appeared not to be as user-friendly and inclusive to passengers as it had been imagined, with many user experiences involving confusion and technical glitches. These issues contributed to the tram carrying far fewer passengers than expected. This, in turn, gave shopkeepers an explanation for why their businesses were not recovering. With the construction officially “completed,” the tram was supposed to enhance Cuenca’s modernity, sustainability, order, beauty, efficiency, and economic success. But its infrastructural seams and glitches contradicted the ideas of completion and were blamed for impeding the fulfilment of the project’s goals. Although aimed at bundling the city back together, overcoming boundaries, and enhancing accessibility and inclusion, the tram entailed new kinds of boundaries. After the more flagrant barrier of the construction site, the operating tram started to reveal design flaws and shifting infrastructural limits. The effect, at least as perceived by the residents and shopkeepers along the tram route, was that of prolonged isolation, ruination, and looming gentrification. What does this tell us about the supposed “before and after” of the tram construction? What has changed? At first sight, we may observe that rather than undoing urban boundaries, the tram project has merely redrawn them. Perhaps the tram is more inclusive of certain people, but others feel more excluded than before. Importantly, infrastructural inclusion and exclusion are relative, that is, relational, which attests to the shifting multiplicity of infrastructure. Therefore, instead of speaking of in- or exclusion, it may be more useful to return to Gupta’s (2018) description of infrastructural in-betweenness. We find people being torn between different mobilities and accordingly, objects fluctuating between constituting boundaries and infrastructures. These in-betweens do not only concern everyday practices but are also linked to people’s livelihoods, places, and identities. If an infrastructure is always also a set of boundaries, then the archetypal moments of infrastructure construction and breakdown need to be relativised. Unlike the model of structure and anti-structure that underpinned the development of the liminality concept, considerations of infrastructure are not as binary or dialectical. Although we can

Liminality as anti-infrastructure? 133 ask when something is an infrastructure and when it is not, this question becomes complicated by further asking the extent to which, for whom, and for what it is an infrastructure. As infrastructure thereby multiplies and oscillates, clear-cut binaries become increasingly untenable. In Cuenca, this infrastructural complication (Harvey et al., 2017) cannot simply be taken as the result of the tram construction, this sudden liminalisation. To what extent had Cuenca streets really been infrastructural before the tram construction? For whom and for what? Fights over street use and the small everyday ruinations of streets through erosion and tinkering had already made the street a multiple, partial, and contested infrastructure before. This is not to deny the significance of the tram construction. The latter’s impact was far greater than the impact of such everyday tensions. Experiences of liminality went much deeper. However, the complications introduced by the infrastructure concept seem to make its linking to binary ideas of liminality more problematic. Liminality has been defined in relation to social order, that is the ­taken-for-granted and the fixed that are classically understood as “structure.” Liminality only makes sense in opposition to these notions as the unstructured, “anti-structure,” ­destabilising social order and simultaneously constituting of the source of its restructuring. Similar to Douglas’ (1966/2002) idea of dirt, liminality becomes that which escapes and challenges classification and that which engenders social change. Although liminality introduces process as a counterweight to structure, it thereby also becomes functional to the (re)structuring of society – it is the escape valve, so to speak, of an otherwise too rigid structuralism. It is true that recent discussions on liminality have shifted the balance towards a more open-ended, nonfunctional liminality by identifying liminality in more diverse, often uncontained situations that do not necessarily entail restructuring. It has even been suggested that modernity as a whole is a liminal era, given its core characteristic of constant boundary breaking in the name of progress, art, and capitalism (see Szakolczai, 2017; Thomassen, 2014). This kind of argument is often accompanied by a sense that modern society misses structures to contain liminality and offer people certainty, meaning, and order. Therefore, although the balance has indeed shifted from structure to process, liminality and structure are still understood as the two necessary but contradictory parts in a dialectical relationship. The construction of the tram in Cuenca offers a situation that can be productively explored through the lens of liminality, as taken-for-granted orders are shaken and large-scale change is initiated. However, not only does this liminality exceed the “completion” of the construction but also we should doubt that things were completely orderly in the first place. The liminal might thus come in degrees, as suggested by Thomassen (2015). It may be more controlled and distributed in everyday conflicts and suddenly heightened and more collective with the shared issue of tram construction. But there is more. We could argue that conceptualisations of infrastructure bring a novel analytical richness to conceptualisations of structure (see Röhl, 2020) and, consequently, to those of liminality. “Structure” has tended to suggest idealist constructs operating on society from above to create lasting social order. Structuralism conceives of society within an abstract space of closure (Massey, 2005). Instead, infrastructure as a concept implies a sociotechnical assemblage

134  Sam Rumé (Harvey et al., 2017) that is immanent to society. It always comes in plural and is understood as partial, material, changing, and political. To think of liminality in relation to infrastructure instead of structure, I argue, thus liberates it from a dualist logic. Liminality and infrastructure can still contradict and inform each other, but in their multiple, shifting forms, they also coexist in relationships that are non-linear (Suboticki & Sørensen, 2021), non-contradictory, non-teleological, and non-dialectical (Cheah, 2010). Infrastructure is always simultaneously order and disorder, connection and boundary, thereby offering liminality a new dynamic. Conclusion In the Indian megacity of Mumbai . . ., residents of informal settlements actually use the water pipes which distribute drinkable water to affluent gated condominium complexes as perilous footways for transportation. But they have no access whatever to the water supplies within the pipe. (Graham & Marvin, 2001, p. 2)

In this chapter, I have brought together ideas of liminality and infrastructure by focusing on the in-betweens of infrastructure. The tram construction in Cuenca proved to be fertile ground for conceptualisations of liminality, given the experiences of uncertainty that it entailed by unsettling not only the built environment but also the practices, orders, meanings, and identities linked to it. Liminality and related concepts turned out to be helpful to understand the experiences and effects of and reactions to uncertainty. Like Gupta’s (2018) description of ruination, the liminal in-between offers valuable insights into the relations and politics of infrastructure. Beyond the focus on material ruin, we have taken ruination deeper into the lives of city dwellers by dissolving the separation between the material and the social. However, conceptualisations of infrastructure as ever partial, multiple, and relational urge us to nuance the clear-cut distinctions between order and disorder and between infrastructure and its inversion. The before and after of the tram construction cannot be seen, following the planning logic, as clearly structured states, with the transition constituting a contained liminal phase. After the construction, problems of connection and inclusion demonstrate the tram’s partiality as an infrastructure. Moreover, the street as the basic infrastructure that was suddenly interrupted by the construction has, in fact, never been an absolute infrastructure either. In relation to liminality, these observations push us beyond dualist and mutually exclusive categories. Infrastructure always comes with its in-betweens and boundaries both when it is suspended or faulty and when it works as expected. Star’s much-cited phrase “[o]ne person’s infrastructure is another’s topic” (1999, p. 380) also implies that any infrastructure both connects and limits, in relation to both its users and its non-users. Thus, in the epigraph, Graham and Marvin (2001, p. 2) show how an infrastructure designed for water supply excludes informal settlers from this network. However, the infrastructure’s physical limits – the metal pipes enclosing the water – simultaneously become a different infrastructure for these settlers, namely, footways for their own mobility. The pipe’s inner surface constitutes one infrastructure that is designed and exclusionary; its outer surface

Liminality as anti-infrastructure? 135 becomes a different, unplanned infrastructure without ceasing to be a boundary. It simultaneously connects, limits, directs, and demarcates different movements. I would argue that the liminal in this case involves the experience, transgression, and modification of infrastructural boundaries. It is intrinsic to the process that simultaneously makes and unmakes infrastructure. It can be a fleeting moment of confusion when faced with a tram ticket machine that does not work as expected or a more collective and durable uncertainty in the case of the stalled construction. It involves creative responses, such as when children started using the construction fences as football goals – a boundary-made infrastructure for a limited time, a limited purpose, and a limited group of people. The fence remains a boundary, as much for the playing children as for other people, but it partly shifts in meaning and function, and it becomes infrastructural to the football game. The liminal lies within this partial shift: a practical, creative, open-ended exploration of the boundary. It does not result in an absolute stabilisation; as the practice continues to shift, materials respond in unexpected ways, and other people interfere with their own boundary explorations. In this way, the liminal and the infrastructural coexist in degrees, in multiplicity, and in the infinitely complex interplay of what is and what can be. References Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter. A political ecology of things. Duke University Press. Caldeira, T. (2000). City of walls. Crime, segregation, and citizenship in São Paulo. University of California Press. Cheah, P. (2010). Non-dialectical materialism. In D. Coole & S. Frost (Eds.), New materialisms: Ontology, agency, and politics (pp. 70–91). Duke University Press. Douglas, M. (2002). Purity and danger: An analysis of concept of pollution and taboo. Routledge. (Original work published 1966) Graham, S., & Marvin, S. (2001). Splintering urbanism. Networked infrastructures, technological mobilities and the urban condition. Routledge. Gupta, A. (2018). The future in ruins: Thoughts on the temporality of infrastructure. In N. Anand, A. Gupta, & H. Appel (Eds.), The promise of infrastructure (pp. 62–79). Duke University Press. Harvey, P. (2018). Infrastructures in and out of time: The promise of roads in contemporary Peru. In N. Anand, A. Gupta, & H. Appel (Eds.), The promise of infrastructure (pp. 80–101). Duke University Press. Harvey, P., Jensen, C. B., & Morita, A. (2017). Introduction: Infrastructural complications. In P. Harvey, C. B. Jensen, & A. Morita (Eds.), Infrastructures and social complexity. A companion (pp. 1–22). Routledge. Henneberry, J. (Ed.). (2017). Transience and permanence in urban development. John Wiley & Sons. Holston, J. (1989). The modernist city. An anthropological critique of Brasília. The University of Chicago Press. Horvath, A., Thomassen, B., & Wydra, H. (Eds.). (2015). Breaking boundaries. Varieties of liminality. Berghahn. Larkin, B. (2013). The politics and poetics of infrastructure. Annual Review of Anthropology, 42, 327–343. Massey, D. (2005). For space. SAGE.

136  Sam Rumé Röhl, T. (2020). From structure to infrastructuring. On transport infrastructures and sociomaterial ordering. In O. B. Jensen, C. Lassen, & I. S. Gøtzsche Lange (Eds.), Material mobilities (pp. 16–30). Routledge. Rumé, S. (2022a). The contradictions of sustainability: Discourse, planning and the tramway in Cuenca, Ecuador. In J. Alderman & G. Goodwin (Eds.), The social and political life of Latin American infrastructures (pp. 199–222). University of London Press. Rumé, S. (2022b). The legitimacy of urban things: Cuenca between heritage and modernisation. Urbanities, 12(1), 49–64. Star, S. L. (1999). The ethnography of infrastructure. American Behavioral Scientist, 34(3), 377–391. Suboticki, I., & Sørensen, K. H. (2021). Liminal technologies: Exploring the temporalities and struggles in efforts to develop a Belgrade metro. The Sociological Review, 69(1), 156–173. Szakolczai, A. (2015). Liminality and experience: Structuring transitory situations and transformative events. In A. Horvath, B. Thomassen, & H. Wydra (Eds.), Breaking boundaries. Varieties of liminality (pp. 11–38). Berghahn. Szakolczai, A. (2017). Permanent liminality and modernity. Analysing the sacrificial carnival through novels. Routledge. Thomassen, B. (2014). Liminality and the modern: Living through the in-between. Routledge. Thomassen, B. (2015). Thinking with liminality. To the boundaries of an Anthropological concept. In A. Horvath, B. Thomassen, & H. Wydra (Eds.), Breaking boundaries. Varieties of liminality (pp. 39–58). Berghahn. Turner, V. (1969). The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. Routledge and Kegan Paul. Turner, V. (1974). Liminal to liminoid, in play, flow and ritual: An essay in comparative symbology. Rice University Studies, 60(3), 53–92. van Gennep, A. (1981). Les Rites de Passage. Éditions A. et J. Picard. (Original work published 1909)

9 Childhoods on the move An ethnography of a Brazilian school bus Fernanda Müller and Luiz E. Abreu

Introduction This chapter explores the daily experiences of school children from the peripheries of Brasilia as they commute to schools in the Plano Piloto of Brasilia, Federal District, Brazil. Although there is a government-run school nearby, many parents prefer to send their children to Plano Piloto schools, resulting in a lengthy journey of up to two hours for some children. Our study involves accompanying the children on their daily trips for two semesters, observing their anxieties, conflicts, and the development of their identities in the context of the school bus. We argue that the journeys not only are spatial movements but also involve symbolic transition, where the children move between two vastly different imagined worlds. This transition highlights the socio-economic and cultural disparities that exist in Brasilia and their effects on the lives of school children from peripheral areas. The primary objective of this study is to examine the social dynamics and rules enforcement on Raul’s school bus, which serves the peripheral and underprivileged region of Vereda. To demonstrate the significance of the bus route and its impact on children’s lives, we divide the argument into four parts. The first describes Brasilia and its symbolic foundation. In the second, the school bus belonging to Raul, the driver, is the focus. It also explores the story of his family and their life in Vereda. In the third section, we provide a description of eight rules that are enforced on the school bus. We propose an exercise of contrasting and comparing these rules, which allows us to categorise them into two classifications. The first classification includes rules that pertain to external factors outside the bus, such as those that influence the route. The second classification comprises rules that relate to the children’s behaviour, language usage, and material possessions while on the bus. Our analysis supposes that the meaning of one rule depends on its relationship with the others. For this reason, they are all demonstrated with examples in this subsection. The fourth section shows the various layers of significance of the rules. We argue that Raul’s school bus trips are also rituals that aim to connect the imagined worlds of Plano Piloto and Vereda. From civilising projects to exclusion Certain symbolic relationships have been present in Brasilia since its foundation. Although it is true that currently, the relationships are put to other uses, this does DOI: 10.4324/9781003354772-12

138  Fernanda Müller and Luiz E. Abreu not mean that they no longer have “family resemblances” (as Wittgenstein would put it) with the symbolic structure present in the city’s very origin. We do not suggest that this is the case everywhere, but it certainly is in Brasilia. In this highly brief ethnography necessary for establishing the context of our hypotheses, we consider the work of Aragão (2018), whose data came from the 1980s, and complement it with our observations in more recent times. He calls attention to the impossibility of thinking of Brasilia without placing it in the dilemma that constituted it, one that the city’s history represents in a manner that is sui generis. The most synthetic formulation of this dilemma lies in the opposition between, on the one hand, the set of utopic, messianic ideas that Brasilia incarnates and, on the other hand, the urban practice that reintroduces “the real working principles founded on an ideology of apparently irreconcilable social separation and social distancing”. That is, “the social actors activate social closeness and social distance strategically and alternately, according to the specific situation, the historical moment, or the political persuasion” (Aragão, 2018, pp. 170–171). “The singularity of Brasilia’s urbanistic and architectonic expression” demonstrates “the intellectual maturity of the people who envisaged it”, argued Lucio Costa (who conceived Brasilia’s plan and was also its first ideologist and idealiser). “A people consecrated to the construction of Brazil, who by all means facing the future wanted to become the master of its destiny” (Costa, 1970, p. 7). So much could be told about this little excerpt. It reproduces some of the current images in Brazilian social thought (or part of it), including the desire to construct a national identity, an obsession with the future, and a tendency to forget the past. It also contrasts with the right-wing political discourse prevalent in the middle class. These ideas are not without controversy, and their implications for the construction of Brazilian society are complex and multifaceted. However, they remain an important part of the cultural and political landscape of Brasilia and Brazil more broadly. For Lucio Costa, “the people” were an active subject, whereas for the Brazilian middle class, the people are an amorphous mass, with nothing to their name, who seek a guide, like a poor hanger-on whose outstanding feature is to be subject to the actions of its rulers. The three years of feverish activity during Brasilia’s construction (between 1957 and 1960), as Costa put it, were an active collective effort to create a utopian vision. Specifically, there was “a kind of collective mise-en-scène of the utopic imagined ideas of social fusion and convivial equality; that type of phantom that has persecuted us, like the depths of a collective memory, ever since the very beginning of colonisation” (Aragão, 2018, p. 210). As must be apparent to any observer familiar with the convoluted turns of our Brazilian elites, the utopia could not last. Thus, “the construction of the superblocks (superquadras) and the arrival of federal civil servants from Rio de Janeiro in January 1962 resulted in re-establishing the class structure of Brazil at large” and consequently, the disappearance “from then on, in a gradual way, of the primitive and matrix-type pattern of that convivial universal fusion so valued to numerous utopians” (Aragão, 2018, p. 213). As a result, our “Candango brothers” (meaning the low-class people who constructed Brasilia) were expelled to an area 25 km

Childhoods on the move 139 away, where today sits the “satellite city” of Taguatinga. As Oscar Niemeyer put it in the early 1970s, Brasilia disappointed us showing, with its poverties and contrasts, that it had not added anything new to the other cities of our country. Our worker brothers who flocked to it as if the promised land were calling them, continued to be poor; poor and without hope. (Niemeyer, 1970) Indeed, the poor who came to Brasilia seeking work opportunities and a place to live were systematically expelled from Plano Piloto and its floodlit lawns. Their “proper place” has been in “satellite cities”, all of which began as invasions of public lands. Joaquim Roriz, who governed Brasilia for four mandates, the first time appointed by then-President José Sarney in 1988, then via election in 1990, 1998, and 2002, became famous for distributing plots of public land to poor immigrants coming from all over the country. The city’s utopic ambitions guided its architecture. Lucio Costa conceived its urbanistic project by using the shape of a bird, which, pursuing the metaphor, may have landed elsewhere and could retake flight unprovoked. It is amidst the vast Cerrado savannah lands of the Centre-West macro-region, approximately 100 km away from the Veredas that feature in Guimarães Rosa’s classic “The Devil to Pay in the Backlands” (Grande Sertão: Veredas, 1956). It is worth remembering that, for Brazilian social thought, the construction of the nation would require conquering the frontiers of the vast, sparsely populated backland, which, paraphrasing Aragão (2018, p. 279), was far from everything and from which one has only vague and uncertain news. As shown in the subsequent figure, the bird is also a system of Cartesian coordinates. Along the body’s centre line passes the ordinal axis (the y-axis corresponds to the Eixo Monumental). Along the centre line of the wings, the abscissae, the x-axis corresponds to the Eixão roadway. Instead of city blocks whose buildings face the streets, Brasilia has “superblocks”. Most of them are 308-m2 areas with 11 residential buildings identified by alphabet letters and surrounded by parking lots. The numbering of the superblocks begins on either side of the ordinal axis and increases along the abscissae. Instead of positive and negative values, they have only cardinal numbers. In what would be the negative abscissa is the South Wing (Asa Sul), and inversely, on the positive side is the North Wing (Asa Norte). Superblocks on roads parallel to the abscissae and above it in the (obviously incomplete) diagram have their hundreds expressed in 100, 300, 500, and 700, and below it, in 200 and 400. See Figure 9.1. In Plano Piloto, unlike the urban experience of every other Brazilian city (even the planned ones), one knows his/her whereabouts through a kind of navigation system. Locating oneself in Brasilia depends on the individual’s ability to internalise the Cartesian abstraction translated into Wings and numbers and not on the concrete experience of the differences in the occupation of the urban landscape. For example, in Brasilia, the gas station, the bakery, or the church do not help find one’s way.

140  Fernanda Müller and Luiz E. Abreu

Figure 9.1  Layout of Brasilia’s Plano Piloto. Source: Public Archives of the Federal District (2021)

In Brasilia, the monumental architecture lives side-by-side with the ordinary of everyday life. It also incarnates an egalitarian and community-orientated utopia in the largely homogeneous form of its residential constructions, as if its architectural proposal could produce “the connection of the disjointed parts of the national society” and the equality among different social classes. Brasilia’s architecture intends to translate “the messages that operate at each one of those different levels and planes” (Aragão, 2018, p. 200). Although each superblock is slightly different, they all have a family resemblance that reveals itself in some of the characteristics that they have in common. All of them have a single-entry point, and the trees planted at the beginning of the city reach up to the sixth floor of the buildings and ward off the inclement sun of the former Cerrado savannah backlands. Except for a few squared ones, the residential buildings are rectangular and six stories high. Lucio Costa’s reason for the six stories comes from the idea of conviviality and community mentioned earlier. From the sixth floor, a mother can call her children in for lunch or dinner from her window. The most notable feature, however, is that the ground floors of the buildings are legally public areas where children can play or get into mischief. Passing freely through the spaces underneath, one sees both the utopia and the everyday life practices: the pilotis that support the buildings in their modernist pretensions; lifts and stairs protected by electronic locks; concierges who seem to have always been there sitting inside of bunkers of varying dimensions in which nothing seems to happen during the day and at night, serve as

Childhoods on the move 141 a kind of sleepy reservoir of distant humanity in the absence of everything else that the night seems to bring to the city’s open spaces. In the superblocks of the 400s, the buildings are more modest. Most have just four stories with no elevators, and many have apartments on the ground floor. Adjacent to each superblock is a local commercial area that ideally would supply all of the residents’ immediate needs. However, with the city’s growth and the advent of more cars, many have become specialised as a consequence of capitalist rebelliousness and spontaneous planning: blocks occupied by shops predominantly selling electrical materials, electronics, and clothing or mainly occupied by restaurants, etc., albeit, in most of them, there is usually at least a bakery, a bar, and a drugstore. Few people use the city’s many empty spaces covered by lawns for conviviality or socialising with other residents. One hardly ever sees a football game on the grass, with improvised goals marked by stones, cans, or somebody’s sandals. Instead, the residents’ leisure and pleasure activities end up adapting to the city’s conception of exclusion and restricted spaces, driving them to the clubs of the middle class or the luxurious houses around the lake. Although each superblock has children’s playgrounds, currently, they are mainly used as congregating spots for babysitters watching over young children, as parents are hesitant to leave them there alone. Accordingly, Brazilia’s architectural conception has fallen short of its communitarian promise. The most notable absence in Brasilia is the urban density that typifies the central streets of other cities, that is, their profound humanity, meeting places, and commercial establishments that incorporate themselves into the neighbourhood’s identity. Strolling around means walking over empty lawns among similar buildings and indistinguishable passages. Most people do not pass through the superblocks. Instead, they prefer using the sidewalks that surround them on which their inhabitants take their dogs for a walk, jog, or pass through on their way to somewhere nearby. Despite still acknowledging one another through greetings, these interactions are often perfunctory and lack depth, even among individuals who are acquainted. The greetings have a double meaning: they acknowledge that one is entitled to occupy that space and that one does not represent a danger to the other. Those who do not belong are rendered invisible by the silence of the others whose gaze does not acknowledge their existence or by averting their eyes altogether. The government-run schools are either inside the superblock or in the spaces between one another. They were originally intended to be vibrant centres of social transformation that fostered the sociability of recently arrived children from different social strata and regions of Brazil. However, it remains uncertain whether they ever fulfilled this purpose. Today, the residents view them as a nuisance: the noise of the children that starts at seven in the morning, the roar of the school buses, the loudspeaker announcements of the principals, and the singing of the national anthem disturb the sleep of those who live nearby. The practices of social distancing between different social classes so pervasive all over the country have reasserted themselves in the social utopia of Brasilia urban planning. Inside open spaces and public areas that cast out those who do not belong, the government-run

142  Fernanda Müller and Luiz E. Abreu schools do not serve their neighbours but attract the kids of low-income classes that live far away. Schools’ entry and leaving times block the superblock traffic and delay residents, most of whom take their children to and from private schools elsewhere. The children who attend a government-run school seldom live nearby. They usually arrive by collective transport maintained by private entrepreneurs or their parent’s vehicles. From the perspective of its inhabitants, the cars that park inside the superblock to pick up the children do not belong, and the large and clumsy school buses take up too much space and block the roadways. The result is a generalised lousy temper, a kind of epidemic in which those who suffer are the children of the inhabitants who come back from the private schools and the children of others who go back to their homes. Both groups have to put up with the adults. Vereda is one of the various surrounding towns created after the irregular occupation of public lands. It is a city without a plan, monuments, and public lawns, much like most Brazilian urban spaces. Situated on the outskirts of Brasilia, Vereda is a complex area that falls under the category of “peripheries” and is regarded as a “satellite city” amongst the 33 Administrative Regions of the Federal ­District.1 Its average monthly income is roughly 155 US dollars (GDF, 2018). We are careful to use terms such as “peripheries” with apostrophes to show that it is a restricted and complicated classification of the regions external to Brasilia’s Plano Piloto (Patriota de Moura, 2012). However, the 1,386 children aged up to 12 years old represent 16% of Vereda’s population. Of these children, 49% attend the local ­government-run school, 29% attend schools in an adjacent region (average monthly income US$ 1,200), and 21% study in Plano Piloto. The means of transportation that the children use to get to school are as follows: 47% go on foot; 31% use a free school bus service; 10% use regular buses; 5.5% go to school by car; and 4.6% use a private school bus service (GDF, 2018). The bus: routes and rituals The setting for our narrative is the school bus belonging to Raul, who travels the route between Vereda and the North Wing (Asa Norte) of Brasilia’s Plano Piloto. Before we discuss the significance of the route, let us take a closer look at Raul and his family. Raul was orphaned and then adopted. In Vereda, he spent his childhood, made friends, met his future partner Amanda (when they married, he was 22 years old, and she was around 15 years old), and had two children. Raul has spent most of his working life transporting children. His career began at age 17 as a supervisor on a school van, where he carried out the role typical of that position: controlling the children and their moods. Later, after what he calls “great sacrifice”, he bought his first van, a used vehicle in awful condition. The business did not prosper. There were so many setbacks, he explained, that he preferred to work as a motorbike delivery man until he could manage to buy a better van. Later, Raul and Amanda opened a little bus company. Until 2017, Raul drove a reasonably old 44-seat bus. The non-automatic seat belts always stayed closed with or without children on board, a technique Raul invented himself to save time

Childhoods on the move 143 with settling in. In the 2018 school year, Raul was able to offer his clients a more comfortable bus, albeit a second-hand one, that he had bought in São Paulo. The bus had air conditioning and 36 reclinable seats. Raul proudly stated that his bus continuously circulates with the maximum number of children on board, and there is always a waiting list for vacancies. Raul drives the new one, and Amanda continues to drive the older one. Buses are not just modes of transportation; they also represent the dreams, projects, and life stories of their owners, as suggested by Miller (2010). Raul and Amanda take great pride in their buses, treating them almost like family members. For example, Raul keeps spare parts for the buses in the cupboard under the kitchen sink, which symbolically represents the tension between the domestic and work spheres. The sink, which cleanses the dirt of the outside world, is also a site where the civilizing process of cuisine takes place. Amanda, however, complains about the lack of space for her cooking appliances and utensils. Raul and Amanda’s service runs from Monday to Friday. It picks up the first child at 6:10 am for those who study in the morning and 11:15 am for those who study in the afternoon. On the bus, there are children and adolescents aged four to 14; some have always been transported to school by Raul. For each child, the route begins at the child’s or some relative’s home, the mother’s or father’s workplace, or the institution that they attend during off-school hours. On boarding the bus, the children can sit anywhere they like except for the front three rows, which are reserved for the four and five-year-olds. Ada, who has worked with Raul since 2013, stands in the front facing the children and helps to organise the sequence of the “route”, especially regarding the addresses in Vereda. Raul had struggled to find someone with the desired profile for the school bus supervisor job before hiring Ada. In 2017, Ada no longer lived in Vereda but in a low-income housing complex in the urban area of the nearby region from where she commuted daily to Vereda. Among her duties, she controls the children’s attendance, organises their boarding and disembarking, keeps watch, reproves their actions, and authorises or dismisses the children’s requests, especially concerning sitting elsewhere. Raul expects Ada to enforce the bus rules while he is driving. However, to the children, the rules are Raul’s, and they infiltrate the materiality of the space and the objects that the children bring with them (such as backpacks, mobile phones, toys, snacks, and bottles of water). Being loyal to Raul, Ada oversees the children and reprimands anyone who threatens to rebel in any way. Raul declared that the “route” in Vereda is not for any lesser drivers. Most of the streets are very narrow (unlike the broad, spacious streets and roads of the Plano Piloto) and require considerable skill in manoeuvring the vehicle. The term “corner” expresses the tribulation of getting the bus to negotiate the curves of Vereda’s slim streets. The left and right sides of the bus’s rear end require special consideration when passing from one street to another. Before heading to the North Wing, Raul meets with Amanda at a point outside Vereda for some children to change buses because of their different destinations. The idea is to save time and ensure the children’s punctuality. On reaching Plano Piloto, Raul takes the children

144  Fernanda Müller and Luiz E. Abreu to four schools and one kindergarten. He stops the bus, and Ada accompanies the children to the school gates. Raul’s uniform shirt, which is just like the bleached white covers on the top of the seat backs, has an abbreviation of the company name on the front and the telephone number for contacting it on the back. Before a trip begins, Raul goes to the bus, which is usually in a free public parking spot on the other side of the road in front of his Vereda home. He remains in the parking space with the air conditioning on for a few minutes, waiting for a comfortable temperature. At the end of each trip, Raul inspects the bus, collects any forgotten objects, and checks to see whether the bus is still clean and in proper condition for the next trip. Thus, he puts everything into its proper place. Neither the children nor their vestiges can be left behind. The opposition between Plano Piloto and the “satellite city” permeates the consciousness of all. It is with repulsion that Amanda, speaking as a mother, refers to the local school in Vereda. There, she stated, children learn foul language and become aggressive and disobedient in less than three months. The teachers, who unwittingly agree to work in Vereda, immediately regret their decision. She also proclaimed that the occasional criticism against the schools in Plano Piloto from some local mothers results from prejudice and a lack of information. In her view, the parents fail to establish limits and impose rules for their children; therefore, they criticise the teachers who do just that in the Plano Piloto schools. One can argue that her defence of the Plano Piloto schools contains a certain degree of rationalisation insofar as Amanda also defends the idea that her business is necessary. The argument, however, makes sense not just for Amanda. It establishes the relation between rule and enlightenment, which echoes the need for a civilising process, namely, the conquest of anomie (as emptiness) by civilisation (as the imposition of adequate social rules). This notion is somewhat similar to Durkheim’s argument (2002), which is that societies require rules to maintain social order and prevent a breakdown in social norms and values. In this syndrome of ideas, the periphery represents a degradation compared to the centre, in this case, the Plano Piloto. The number of families that seek transportation services for their children corroborates the pervasiveness of Amanda’s discourse. From this standpoint, “families that want the best for their children” need to practically exile them from their origins, alienate them from their local sociability, and take them into distance and estrangement. Plano Piloto residents are accomplices of this kind of folly. People coming from Vereda are accustomed to being treated as someone of a lesser value by the locals or, as Raul feels, treated as “animals”.2 Raul goes so far as to park his bus some way off from the schools and kindergarten entrances because he does not want to be ill-treated or insulted by fathers or mothers who pick their children up by car.3 Although, as we argue, the rules of the buses are part of a civilising process, Raul justifies them with the economic side of his enterprise. The rules, he argues, guarantee the “quality”, “comfort”, “safety”, and “punctuality” of the transportation services. For Raul, his school bus is a place of repeated, obeyed, and broken but never totally suppressed rules. The parents must attend a preparatory event to

Childhoods on the move 145 hire Raul and Amanda’s services. From an economic-juridical aspect, the objective is to sign an annual service provision contract. The event is also a ritual whose main goal is to introduce parents and their children to a different world. The meetings take place in Raul’s home kitchen in Vereda, which plays the role of both an office and a threshold for a new life. In the sociability among ordinary, working-class folks, the host receives his/her friends in the kitchen. The metaphorical centrepiece of this symbolic banquet is the explanation of the rules that govern children’s behaviour on the bus. Attendance is mandatory either for signing new contracts or renewing existing ones. Although the presence of younger children is optional, it is expected of adolescents, who are, in turn, required to help younger children and newcomers understand the rules and their underlying sacredness. In the context of the previous situation (as Malinowski would put it), the rules of the bus take on their specifically sociological meaning. As we have seen, the rules synthesise the various aspects in play: the juridical, the rational, the identity, and the difference between their service and that of their competitors.4 However, our overriding interest is in the transition between the worlds of Vereda and Plano Piloto and overcoming the symbolic distance that separates and differentiates them. Raul’s bus produces a spatial and symbolic transition between Vereda and Plano Piloto, school and family, and public and private spaces. The pilgrimage catalyses, conveys, and produces social ascension projects and pursuits for status and distinction (Bourdieu, 1979; Velho, 1994).5 The rules of the game The rules of Raul’s bus have juxtaposed layers of meaning. They address Raul and Amanda’s perspectives of what a process of social ascension should be. Hence, the rules echo the personal experiences and moral expectations of the bus-owning couple, such as the prohibition of conversations about dating and romance inside the bus. Raul and Amanda also fear precocious sexuality and the harm that pregnancy during adolescence can do to the projects of vertical mobility. The criticism that the Vereda families do not impose enough rules on their children to civilise them is also embedded in the rigor by which they apply the rules. As we have already seen, they are also susceptible to a rational justification. The rules, as Raul argued, ensure the efficiency of the service, the maintenance of the assets, and the profitability of the business. Some are mandatory because of traffic authority enforcement of traffic laws. Finally, they restrain the children’s naughtiness. Furthermore, as we point out, the daily bus commute from Vereda to Plano Piloto represents a transition from the periphery to the centre, from a dangerous, illreputed place to a safe and developed one. The connection, the transition between these two worlds, albeit imperfect, is realised every day on and by the trip on Raul’s bus. As the passage between worlds, the trips gain a ritual dimension, which states, expresses, and communicates meanings that only complete themselves as a totality (a system) in the unconscious.6 We now present eight such rules. They are not the only rules, but we believe that they are sufficient for our argument. (1) The children must call Raul and Amanda

146  Fernanda Müller and Luiz E. Abreu by their names. They make a point of not being members of the children’s families. From the outset, they insist on not being addressed with terms other than their names. In effect, most children do just that, but some of the little ones tend to call them “uncle” or “aunt”. They may refrain from correcting the youngest ones, leaving it to the older children to teach them or allowing them to learn for themselves. (2) The children must be timely. Children or adolescents must be waiting at the pick-up point (for instance, in front of their home or on a street corner) when the bus arrives. Raul and Amanda blow the horn once if the child is not at the point. If no one appears, then the trip continues. Raul does not wait. Exceptions to this rule are an immense problem: on two occasions, there was no one at home to receive the child returning from school, and Raul ended up taking the child with him to his own home. It is unusual, but there have been cases of suspending the contract because of repeated lateness. (3) The children must use their seat belts. In Raul’s old bus, the children would find the seat belt folded on the seat. They learned to unclip it, pull it across their waist, clip themselves in, and leave it folded when the time came to disembark. Even very young children quickly learned to handle the system. If anyone forgot, then the supervisor or another child would require them to use the seat belt. In the current bus, the seat belts are automatic. (4) The children may not change places or stand up inside the bus. On the old bus, Raul forbade them from opening the windows thoroughly and sticking an arm or a head out of it. The child is not allowed to raise and lower the armrests on the present bus. Ada controls the mobility of the bodies, and Raul keeps watch over them in his internal rear-view mirror. (5) The children should keep their voices down. They can converse inside the bus but in a low tone. The topics of conversation, however, are the object of concern and control. Raul and Ada interfere when the subjects are, in principle, more suitable for other places, especially family matters, such as romances, mischief, and quarrels among cousins. (6) One cannot consume food on the bus, even though the return trip occurs at lunchtime or the afternoon’s end. Children can take a bottle of water with them to drink during the trip, but they are not allowed to eat, suck sweets or lollipops, much less chew gum. This is because all the remains are difficult to remove. However, there are often crumbs and messy remains of secretly eaten snacks, evidence of the earlier transgressions and the children’s ingenuity, and this mess has to vanish in the intervals between trips. (7) Schoolbags have to be left beside the engine casing or kept on the child’s lap. Children can take nothing out of them during the trip except for cell phones and books or notebooks on the days leading up to tests or exams. However, toys, gifts, and treats circulate whenever Ada is not looking. If she finds out, then the objects are “confiscated” and returned later to the parents. (8) The children can use their cell phones with headphones but only individually, with no sharing of headphones. These rules pertain to two main categories: (i) rules that concern things external to the bus and influence the trip, and (ii) rules concerning the circulation of the children, words, and objects. Rules two and three regard punctuality and meeting the traffic authorities’ requirements on board the bus. In Brasilia, drivers and owners of

Childhoods on the move 147 school buses complain of the traffic agents’ great prejudice against them. The seat belt requirement is also part of the relationship Raul establishes between his firm and the ever-present (imagined to be) possibility of inspection. In turn, punctuality relates to the schools’ timetables. By arriving on time, Raul passes a message to the school principals. He shows them that despite coming from so far, his service incorporates a civilising project. Raul is not just the school bus driver, an activity that only encompasses journeys to and from schools and homes. He also has carefully constructed relationships with the principals who have enabled him to conduct the mediation between parents and schools. Raul can negotiate on behalf of parents for a vacant spot in the Plano Piloto schools for their kids. However, this relationship is asymmetrical as the value of the two sides is not the same. Although Raul does gain prestige in the eyes of other drivers and his neighbours in Vereda precisely due to his capacity for such negotiations, he knows his place vis-a-vis the principals. Thus, the insistence on punctuality gains the additional meaning of acknowledging the hierarchical differences among places, people, classes, and things. These differences, whose most visible expression is economic, only gain their broader sociological meaning in the symbolic domain. The second category, prohibiting circulation, involves mechanisms for controlling the children on board (rules four, five, six, seven, and eight). They articulate the transition from the adults’ perception of childhood, where things, ideas, and behaviours merge, to the adult world characterized by distinct identities, belongings, and status asymmetries. There is no small amount of irony here. The adults forget what being a child entails while idealising their identities as if what they are originates from their possessions. Therefore, their projects of social ascension intermingle with the fantasy of what would be the well-behaved children of one’s betters. Together, projects and fantasies create a pathway that should lead the children to become more promising. Thus, the personal idiosyncrasies of the bus business owners, the morality of children’s bodies, the value of objects, the children’s personal property, the adults’ conceptions of identity and childhood, and the distinction expressed in objects are mixed up together. Raul’s rules signify a safe transition between worlds (poor/rich, child/adult, and Vereda/Plano Piloto) thought of as opposites whose relationship is hierarchical (one has more value than the other). The previous classification is incomplete; it lacks rule number one, according to which the children cannot call Raul or the supervisor uncle (tio) or aunt (tia) as young children usually call adults who are not family in Brazil. This rule is quite peculiar. It represents an estrangement from the typical Brazilian sociability, which, when successful, exports the language of kinship to the public realm and endows anonymous interactions based on economic interests with the contradictory characteristics of personal relations. The rule also conflicts with how Raul and Amanda’s firm establishes relationships with its clients, given their long time in Vereda. The clients are personal acquaintances and neighbours. All of them belong to the same community. Furthermore, teaching, especially the youngest ones before the absurdities and confusions of adolescence, involves a whole dimension of affection that Brazilians would also hope to find in any classroom (and when this is not the case, we immediately imagine that there is something wrong with the teacher).

148  Fernanda Müller and Luiz E. Abreu Therefore, the first rule plays a crucial role in establishing a clear differentiation among the interconnected spheres of Vereda, the schools, and the bus. It effectively delineates a distinct world within the bus and separates it from the familiar social dynamics of the children’s everyday experiences. By deliberately refraining from using familial terms, the children are introduced to the professional aspect of their relationship. When Raul and Amanda reject this sign of proximity, they produce the route as a space of liminality. We can now see why this rule does not belong to the other categories. It is a meta-rule that establishes the rupture and emphasises the course as a rite of passage (Van Gennep, 1981). We hypothesize that all of the rules that regulate or prohibit the circulation of children, words, and things are complementary to the first one. Hence, as with the first rule, they oppose Brazilian sociability and, therefore, the world outside. Raul’s rules are just some of the many alternatives available for whoever comes from Vereda to study in Plano Piloto. Other school buses reproduce other ideas: children call the drivers uncle (tio) or aunt (tia); some drivers run late; some do not worry about rowdy behaviour; and others install a television to amuse the little ones. Children can also travel by regular bus lines. We can argue that, although it is true that there are alternative ways to commute, it does not undermine the symbolic or ritualistic significance of Raul’s chosen method. By following his preferred way of commuting, at least the children are guaranteed to arrive at school on time. Furthermore, the rules can be seen as a means of sociability that aims to guide children on how they should behave, act, interact, and relate to others. They are a representation of Raul’s perception of the appropriate conduct that a child should have in Plano Piloto. The rules in play The rules possess multiple layers of significance. Raul justifies their existence by emphasizing that they serve to safeguard the well-being of the children, prevent issues, and embody the principles of quality, security, punctuality, and comfort. However, despite his pride in the rules that he has established on his bus, which he considers a personal creation with a long history and grants him a sense of uniqueness compared to his competitors, Raul is simultaneously burdened by complaints from others. This burden prompts him to feel the constant need to justify the rules’ existence, often by highlighting the negative practices observed among his competitors. However, the strictness of the rules also seems to bother the adults. Ambiguity, however, is constitutive of this context. The parents argue that the rules should be more flexible and subjected to the kind of negotiation so usual in Brazilian sociability, that is, the famous “Brazilian way of sorting something out” (jeitinho). Still, at the same time, they admire the service, which is based precisely on those very same rules. The result is a permanent conflict between the adults’ rules and the children’s resistance. It is present in the most banal situations. Good examples are the

Childhoods on the move 149 nicknames and the swearing used not only to ridicule and insult but also to create relationships of belonging and hierarchies among the groups of boys and girls, younger and older children, and adolescents; the nicknames that children bestow on adults always express reproval. When they call Ada owl-eyes or snitch (dedo duro), it is because she is the front line of the reiteration of the rules and controls the children. Raul may keep watch in his rear-view mirror, but she is the one who interacts with the children and adolescents. Under Ada’s watchful eye, the children learn to stay seated, motionless, during the two-hour trip. On a single occasion, we observed a ­four-year-old child who, for one of those errors of calculation only small children can make, urgently needed to go to the loo and asked to do so as soon as he boarded the bus. Children’s physiological needs should not hamper the trip, so they must learn to use the bathroom before leaving home. The supervisor took the child to use the toilet of a nearby house while Raul continued on his way. The two caught up with the bus at another pick-up point on the route. Sometimes the adults determine where a child must sit down to avoid violating the rule on the circulation of words and objects. As we argue, the trip is a ritual, as are also the subtle and spontaneous pranks that the children get up to every day. Children reveal that the rules are not solely the unattainable gaze of authority but rather a game with its fundamental principle being to partake in children’s activities and behaviors. However, as Gluckman (2004) demonstrated, an inversion of the rules only anthropology admires legitimises the order and authority of the adult world. In this sense, the game of rules, or playing with the rules, signifies accepting their truth. Notes 1 These are the 33 territorial subdivisions of the Federal District. In this classification, Plano Piloto is the first Administrative Region. 2 This context is that of impure, savage, and dislocated. 3 Like Plano Piloto schools, the superblocks were not planned to receive so many children from outside or the large number of vehicles that transport them. In most of them, there are no parking spaces; in some, the parking spaces barely support the residents’ cars, and none of them have any parking provision for school buses. 4 This is how Raul and Amanda refer to other operators of school bus services from Vereda. The idea of “competition” is not limited to Raul and Amanda’s view. In a research stage before this school bus ethnography, other Vereda children transported by other drivers whom the children called tio and tia were interviewed. We have records of drivers selling sweets on board, late arrivals, and even children being left at school after being forgotten by some drivers. 5 Velho considers crucial the notions of “project” and “field of possibilities”; the former is “organised conduct to achieve specific finalities”, and the latter is “the sociocultural dimension, that is, a space for formulating and implementing projects” (1994, p. 40). Velho (1994, p. 40) argues that these two notions would be overcome as “agonistic, individualistic voluntarism”. In addition, an equally “rigid sociocultural determinism” analyses “trajectories and biographies in their aspect as the expression of the socio-historical framework without arbitrarily emptying it of its peculiarities and singularities.” 6 Pires (2010, p. 157) calls attention to how much ritual is based on a principle centred on adults insofar as it assumes that a ritual symbolises something and may have different

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meanings for adults and children. In this work, we presented the interpretations of both adults and children concerning the ritual. On rituals, see Peirano and Souza (2001), Peirano (2003).

References Aragão, L. T. (2018). Coronéis, candangos e doutores: por uma Antropologia dos valores aplicada ao caso brasileiro. Appris. Arquivo Público do Distrito Federal. (2021). Núcleos de apoio. Retrieved August 20, 2021, from www.arquivopublico.df.gov.br/nucleos-de-apoio/ Bourdieu, P. (1979). La distinction: Critique sociale du jugement. Minuit. Costa, L. (1970). O urbanista defende a sua Capital. Revista Acrópole, 375, 7–8. Durkheim, E. (2002). Suicide. A study in sociology (J. A. Spaulding & G. Simpson, Trans.). Routledge Classics. Routledge. GDF. (2018). Pesquisa Distrital por Amostra de Domicílios 2018 (PDAD). Governo do Distrito Federal/Secretaria de Fazenda, Planejamento, Orçamento e Gestão/CODEPLAN. Gluckman, M. (2004). Order and rebellion in tribal Africa. Routledge. Guimarães Rosa, J. (1956). Grande Sertão: Veredas. José Olympio Editora. Miller, D. (2010). Stuff. Polity. Niemeyer, O. (1970). Brasilia 70. Revista Acrópole, 375, 10–11. Patriota de Moura, C. (2012). Condomínios no Brasil Central: expansão urbana e antropologia. Letras Livres/Editora UnB. Peirano, M. G. (2003). Rituais: ontem e hoje. Zahar. Peirano, M. G., & Souza, E. (Eds.). (2001). O dito e o feito: ensaios de antropologia dos rituais. Relume Dumará. Pires, F. F. (2010). Tornando-se adulto: uma abordagem antropológica sobre crianças e religião. Religião e Sociedade, 30(1), 143–164. Retrieved August 22, 2021, from www.scielo.br/ scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0100-85872010000100008&lng=pt&nrm=iso&tlng=pt van Gennep, A. (1981). Les rites de passage: étude systématique des rites. E. Nourry. Velho, G. (1994). Projeto e metamorfose: antropologia das sociedades complexas. Zahar.

10 Digital magic and the disappearing city Shannon Jackson

Introduction: the new digital magic A fresh set of technological “signs taken for wonders” (Bhabha, 1994) has been working its way through cities and changing bureaucratic culture in the form of data collection and decision-making in its wake (Sadowski, 2020). One American city, Kansas City, Missouri, has become a model for others of its size by adopting innovations in data capture, data management, and predictive analytics at early stages in their development. With the help of high-speed broadband, sensors, smart meters, and devices that now communicate more directly with one another than with humans, officials inside its City Hall have come to believe that they can depend on big data to direct less biased routes to the “hearts and minds” of citizens (González, 2015a, 2015b), improve efficiency, and ensure the equitable distribution of scarce resources. But what many such strategies actually deliver are blurred distinctions between data points and the lived experiences of citizens. They do this by changing the standards of accuracy and challenging the ground rules of governance, that is, what counts and how it is counted. Because communication among digitally networked objects has now supplanted networked connections among humans, the same ghosts that haunt his discipline, anthropologist Samuel Collins (2015) claims, haunt urban dwellers in the form of “magic begetting magic.” These are networks that further foster “deep confusion over just what ‘things’ will do, and who (or what) is ultimately at the root of doing them” (p. 430). As digital magic becomes increasingly ordinary, urban scholars must find ways to “push the question of causation and agency further, identifying the powerful actors who remain above the fray of dividualization, weaving a web of forces that increasingly constrain the time and space of city dwellers” (Sadowski & Pasquale, 2015, p. 10). They must also tease out the beliefs and techniques of actors who can make decisions without being accountable for them. Many of the officials and entrepreneurs collaborating on innovations in data-driven decisionmaking interviewed for this study believe that technology can reduce the weight of bureaucracy and the impact of human error. However, accuracy is not the only problem with modern bureaucracy. Bureaucratic technique takes the ends of action as a given and seeks the most efficient route to the accomplishment of such ends so that the actions and beliefs of agents tend to disappear into standards. When these DOI: 10.4324/9781003354772-13

152  Shannon Jackson standards are digitized, the socio-material ground of decision-making becomes more elusive, more tangled in the promises of what Christo Sims (2017) calls “techno-idealism.” Fresh fantasies of purified social relationships forged through network-facing devices, big data, and enhanced mathematical realism move without resistance. The result is cities that are more vulnerable to the skilled concealments of a range of experts, engineers, and platform owners who are like magicians promising everything yet delivering nothing. This is not the traditional, humancentred magic that enchants audiences with skills of prestidigitation and sleight of hand; it is a magic that decentres humans and levels suspicion at human skill by activating a type of intelligence that only machines can achieve. During the early stages of the deployment of digital platforms for cities, innovation was driven and controlled by a few large tech companies looking to extract valuable digital surplus from dense populations of users. As the case of Google’s Sidewalk Lab initiative in Toronto illustrates, however, this top-down, transparently extractive approach to “smart” urban development has been rejected in favour of applying the same tools to different ends. In this case, city officials look to smart devices themselves to facilitate economic growth and the smooth functioning of governance, but it is not clear that such devices deliver what they promise. The dual purposing of digital platforms draws “innovation speak,” which is described by Lee Vinsel and Andrew Russell (2020) as a discursive frame that fetishizes the new while ignoring or obscuring the old into collaborations with private platform owners and data wranglers. As one telecommunications consultant described it to me, Salesmen and boosters successfully seduce officials with revolutionary stories about big data, dazzling them with slick gadgets they don’t understand, that will do nothing to shore up decaying infrastructure, and will further saddle cities with the installation costs of devices that will likely stop working in a year or two. (19 November 2018)1 Adding to the problem of infrastructural neglect are the tactics of lobbyists who successfully convince legislators to reduce the costs that companies pay cities for access to utility poles and easements, which lead to a confluence of local and federal policies, such as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)’s Small Cell Order 18–133, that favour private incursion in public rights-of-way. These regulations give companies such as Verizon the ability to extract value from legacy infrastructure and public space, while doing nothing to protect or enhance public rights-of-way.2 Legislators who push against these incursions encounter a particularly “savage semiotics,” wherein “all innovation is treated as inherently good in itself, regardless of its social or political consequences” (Morozov, 2013, p. 167). Importantly, some of the more breathless hype sweeping digital innovation speak through American cities has started to dissipate and has been replaced by what Agnieszka Leszczynski (2016) refers to as an “algorithmic governmentality.” This is an ideal that ensures decisions “appear to be knowledge-based, objective,

Digital magic and the disappearing city 153 and free of the fallibility of human judgment” (Amoore, 2013, p. 163) through the use of mathematical abstraction. What we must now consider is whether appearance can ever correspond to reality. This case suggests the broader context of market magic, or global development premised on dematerialising money and wealth production, and the depoliticising of decision-making (Mirowski, 2013; Graeber, 2016) is moving into less visible, less contested technological territory with even more capacity to obfuscate the social relations of economic development (Hornborg, 2015). At one end of the new digital magic is the Internet of Things (IoT), which entails network-facing devices such as sensors and cameras embedded in updated street-facing assets, namely, streetlamps, parking meters, and manhole covers. At the other end are privately owned infrastructures and properties that extract rents through the scarcity of urban land and a confluence of municipal, state, and federal subsidies. Somewhere in the middle are decision-makers turning to platforms, apps, and dashboards to guide resource distribution. In many cases, cities receive data in exchange for their use by entrepreneurs; sometimes cities must purchase their own data from the companies collecting it, and sometimes they have to contract with yet more companies to help turn raw data into intelligible analytics. All of this makes it difficult to discern where private extraction ends and public interest begins. This chapter focuses on the use of digital magic to turn non-decisions3 into good decisions. Connections are drawn among a digitally enhanced ethics of bureaucratic impartiality, the foundations of mathematical realism, and the recent diffusion of platform capitalism into one city to address the ways that these shape beliefs about the limits of human decision-making. A guiding question is how does the new digital sublime support the image of data-driven ­decision-making as disruptive while obscuring urban ground truths and the lived realities of residents? Unifying subjects and objects Kansas City, Missouri4 is a mid-sized American city that has been aggressively rebranding itself “Silicon Prairie” in the hopes of becoming the most “connected” city in the nation. What this means depends on the beliefs and understandings associated with networked devices and digital data. A tech-driven form of gentrification began in Kansas City after the 2008 recession, pulling urban pioneers and real estate developers in the shared direction of cheap rents, blighted buildings, and good broadband. Rent-seeking, or the manipulation of scarcity as a means of extracting value, is fundamental to any capitalist economy, but tech-driven gentrification has become a particularly regressive form of rent-seeking (Moskowitz, 2018). It has the capacity to extract and distribute value exclusively to owners of platforms and properties, while slowing, limiting, and distorting the output that supports ordinary economic growth. The public subsidies and supports successfully leveraged by tech companies for their own competitive benefit have thus led to an overall reduction of competition in regulated sectors such as infrastructure and urban land use (Lindsey & Teles, 2019).

154  Shannon Jackson Platform capitalism is unique for its capacity “to rapidly scale . . . by relying on pre-existing infrastructure and cheap marginal costs [which] means there are few natural limits to growth” (Srnicek, 2017, p. 45). In the case of the centralised platforms that support IoT for cities, control is typically concentrated among a small group of owners who embed fibre optic cable and proprietary services in the public sphere to unobtrusively manipulate and extract value. According to Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, “ ‘Almost nothing short of a biological virus, can scale as quickly, efficiently, or aggressively as . . . technology platforms, and this makes the people who build, control, and use them powerful too’ ” (cited in Zuboff, 2019, p. 180). Such owners and the pioneers who expand in their wake promise to help cities “learn previously unknown things . . . based on an idea that the collective behaviour of a city can be compiled and analysed by machines to reveal profound trends in . . . social behaviour” (Halpern et al., 2013, p. 288). Any argument that portrays platforms as politically neutral routes to accuracy, however, is compromised by the fact that a platform “positions itself between users, and as the ground upon which their activities occur, which thus gives it privileged access to record them” (Srnicek, 2017, p. 44). What so-called “test bed urbanism” actually tests, then, are the capacities of platform builders and owners to control rather than reveal behaviour and extract rather than produce value. Scholars further warn that digital platforms are weaponizing math (O’Neill, 2016), propagating discriminatory “synthetic intelligence” (Kaplan, 2015), seamlessly manipulating desire and taste (Finn, 2017), normalising ambient digital pollution (McCullough, 2015), and “mathwashing” inequality with “data-based hocus-pocus” (Eubanks, 2017, p. 192). Awareness of the sinister side of platform capitalism and artificial intelligence (AI) have not, however, led to their rejection or the ability of users and developers to push back against the ongoing refinement of machine learning. Because machines can be trained to assemble cascades of atomistic observational units into meaningful patterns, cities have simply shifted to the use of platforms to lower the costs of personnel, to make data management more efficient, and to provide presumably more reliable information about the behaviour of residents. But by automating assemblages of observational units into patterns of meaning, we more fully bypass the human senses and the perceptual learning that is unique to human-centred decision-making. According to Robert Lake (2017), “Underlying the ‘bigness’ of Big Data’s high volume of observational units . . . is the assumption that each of those myriad observational units” has an ontological identity that precedes its inclusion in a dataset (p. 4). A logic of unity thus presumes an identity between symbolic units and the material realities that they represent. Mathematician David Spiegelhalter (2020) warns that a “truly trustworthy algorithm should be able to communicate its own limitations,” so we don’t trust it too much (p. 7). However, confusion over how digital algorithms work, who or what is doing the communicating, and the fantasies that flourish where machines are tasked with “seeing” what humans cannot compel instead a sort of blind trust. The tendency to treat human observation and situated judgment as irrational amplifies the value of machines considered to be more trustworthy. According to political philosopher Iris Marion Young (2011), the logic of unity is an orthodox

Digital magic and the disappearing city 155 bureaucratic technique that “flees from the sensuous particularity of experience, with its ambiguities, and seeks to generate stable categories” as it works to bypass the uncertainty inherent in human judgment (p. 98). She further argues that “Insistence on the ideal of impartiality in the face of its impossibility functions to mask the inevitable partiality of perspective from which moral deliberation actually takes place” (ibid. p. 115). When machines deliver a perspective more fully decoupled from situated human judgement, they deepen a conviction that abstractions can stand in for concrete experiences. Mathematical realism treats abstractions as more representative of experience than situated judgement. David Bloor (1973) reminds us, “The trouble with [mathematical] Realism does not lie in the puzzling nature of its ontology but in the circular character of its epistemology. It presupposes precisely what it sets out to explain” (p. 182). Thus, it is not a more direct or accurate route to knowledge. The symbols or digital data points that are assembled into the stable yet circular classifications inform an “algorithmic governmentality,” which routes behaviour to “material objects set over against the knowing subject who moves (in thought) amongst and through them” (ibid, p. 176). The result is a knowing subject less trusting of their own judgement. Another way that AI changes the ground rules of decision-making is to decontextualise data. Machines can now be designed or “taught” to generate and then learn from their own contexts. Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson (2008) famously boasted that machine learning makes theory obsolete because it “forces us to view data mathematically first and establish context later” (www.wired. com/2008/06/pb-theory/). Such formal indifference to context can generate accidental correlations treated as routes to new knowledge. Critical data scientists such as Rob Kitchin maintain that machine learning does not offer a breakthrough in the ways we make sense of cities. He argues that it embeds epistemological weakness into the data that is collected and analysed because there is no contextual test of validity. This originates, in part, from the fact that machines learn from and then propagate purely inductive patterns; they build abstractions into inferences, which can never be explained. Why or how something works or connects becomes less interesting than the fact that it simply does – it is magic, but without the skill or the trick that can be replicated by others. In this way, “correlations supersede causation,” and “meaning transcends context” (Kitchin, 2014, p. 4). This raises concerns about the way that technical fictions now mediate lived actions (Winner, 1997; Mosco, 2005). According to Shoshana Zuboff (2019), confusion about who is pulling the strings in the design of network-facing devices serves to separate the world into two asymmetric electronic texts – one publicfacing and the other a “shadow” text collected for us and about us but without our ability to challenge its validity. This shadow text can further shape public action through mathematical probabilities built on past behaviour, enabling platform owners and data wranglers to engineer future behaviour (feedforward) more fully, and control webs of transactions that favour the predictable consumption of everything from electricity to cheap hotel rooms.

156  Shannon Jackson Disappearing the city Although Kansas City fashions itself as a less expensive, less congested alternative to its coastal counterparts, it embarks on tech-driven gentrification that aligns with the rent gaps and uneven development that have historically shaped urban land use in the United States (Smith, 1996; Logan & Molotch, 2007). Real estate developers and place entrepreneurs have taken hold of the decaying corridors that once connected industrial zones at the confluence of the Kaw and Missouri Rivers with formerly bustling commercial centres. As they do this, they weave images of themselves as mavericks, or urban progressives, who rescue the city from blight. One local developer claimed in an interview, “it’s not about real estate. I’m creating an economic development model” (4 April 2018). In its blog, one start-up company describes Kansas City as itself a pioneer, a city that “has always been a harbinger of amazing things to come” due to its willingness to take the lead in risky technological experimentation (www.xaqt.com/blog/end-of-smart-cities). Google chose the city to launch its new Internet service, Googlefiber, because, as it claimed, the city was willing to do what it takes to lower barriers to innovation (Jackson, 2017). Moreover, Bloomberg Philanthropies recently rewarded the city with a gold standard certificate through its “What Works Cities” program (https://whatworkscities. bloomberg.org) for the tech-driven growth that has dramatically transformed Kansas City’s downtown. An early public-facing initiative now copied by many cities titled OpenData KC is an innovative data collection program installed in 2008 by the City Manager in partnership with GovEx, a non-profit affiliated with Johns Hopkins University. In the words of the Director of the City’s Communications Office, “We want people to re-imagine the city through data.” One of the data scientists hired to facilitate this re-imagining told me that the OpenData platform allows her to turn “inscrutable numbers into stories the public can understand” (31 August 2017). This widely hailed and successful initiative resulted in the city’s passing of an Ordinance (190080) in 2019 codifying the responsibility of the City Manager to “develop, maintain, and utilize data and performance management reporting infrastructure” (p. 2). The commitment to collecting and circulating performance indicators through the OpenData platform is also a commitment to restructure offices and personnel inside City Hall. In an interview with the city’s Chief Engineer of the Water Services Department (9/26/2017), he described some of the ways that new digital technologies such as sensors help him predict water-main breaks. However, he noted, finding the experts necessary to manage all the digital data has been an ongoing struggle. He claims that data scientists are too expensive for his department, so the city has no choice but to hire private vendors to perform the work. One of Kansas City’s Chief Innovation Officers confirmed this difficulty: “I need to have a third party that I can use outside the typical contracting or procurement process, because you’ll never find data scientists or dudes from Harvard to work for the peanuts the City is willing to pay” (5 September 2017). By “typical contracting and procurement,” he is referring to the city ordinance that requires vendors to openly bid for contracts so

Digital magic and the disappearing city 157 that it can give special preference to women- and minority-owned businesses. Few such experts can be found in these populations. Going outside the General Services Office for procurement means supporting an exclusive group of creatives, who, in turn, gain privileged access to city data that they can then utilize to develop their own products and services. This further “displaces critical debate on the why of ‘less’ governmental resources and employees” (Sadowski & Pasquale, 2015, p. 8) in addition to the promise that an invisible layer of private vendors will improve actual performance while reducing personnel costs inside the city. In 2009, Kansas City’s City Manager further reduced the number of departments responsible for data collection and analysis from 21 to four. According to the current Chief Information Officer, the city lost roughly 200 staff in the process. The City Manager then created a new Office of Performance Management (OPM) to coordinate the central nervous system that assembles data into narratives that can guide and legitimise the mayor’s development agendas. He claimed that the disruption in the organization of City Hall would ensure that decision-making moved “from personality-driven to data driven.” Fewer personnel, of course, gave the illusion of less waste, but decentralization of the control and analysis of data introduced new security risks and new paths for manipulation of the value of public data. According to the current Chief Information Officer, “third-party vendors often have more access to the city’s data than staff, so it is increasingly difficult to regulate” (30 April 2022). The city’s 311 call system then became a way to test the accuracy of big datadriven decision-making. As part of the OpenKC initiative, two vendors, Socrata (now Tyler Tech) and Kansas City-based mySidewalk (a data services company), helped the city build and design a dashboard that collects data from its 311 nonemergency call system. The feedback loops that can then be automated through 311 are used to develop performance indicators to measure and improve basic service delivery. From their inception in the mid-1990s, 311 systems have provided cities in the US and Canada tools for recording, tracking, and now automating non-emergency municipal services. Residents dial 311 to lodge complaints about dangerous animals, water-main breaks, illegal dumping, etc., and as they do this, they leave digital breadcrumbs that are valuable to analysts looking to measure both citizen satisfaction and the city’s ability to respond efficiently to the needs of residents. Technology historian Steven Johnson (2006) celebrates the 311 system for its “genuinely two-way” transfer of information. The government learns as much about the city as the 311 callers do. You can think of 311 as a kind of massively distributed extension of the city’s perceptual systems, harnessing millions of ordinary “eyes on the street” to detect emerging problems or report unmet needs. (p. 223) The reciprocal exchange of information, however, is no longer simply between resident and city. Xaqt, a vendor contracting with Kansas City to help automate its 311 system, developed a Missed Trash Voicebot in exchange for the opportunity to

158  Shannon Jackson test and refine a range of proprietary voice software services. It did this by gaining access to the city’s data and building out its cloud-based services, which now include reporting on potholes. They are using Kansas City as a test bed to grow proprietary chat services in the hope of automating entire reporting systems. According to a Kansas City analyst who spoke at a Code for America Summit in 2015, the combined effect of predictive analytics with the enhanced 311 system and services developed by vendors such as Xaqt in exchange for access to data results in a city that now has an “unbiased” understanding of the otherwise “invisible minds” of citizens. This presumably makes predictions of the needs of citizens more accurate (Julie Steenson, Oakland, CA, 30 September-2 October, emphasis added). A data scientist profiled on Socrata’s blog further claims that big data delivers a more reliable science of society. “Data is fodder for modern-day anthropology, revealing our values, biases, and priorities. It’s the [archaeological] trails we leave behind” (tylertech.com/resources/blog/articles – Govern Hidden Biases with Data). Local journalists Tammy Ljungblad and Bill Turque are less sanguine: “the Smart City blueprint, if fully realized, would give corporations an unprecedented role in the delivery of municipal services” and unprecedented access to the city’s data (The Star 30 September 2018). One way that the automated 311 feedback loop has been deployed in Kansas City is in the prediction of potholes. Calls to 311 to report potholes have been correlated with climate data and road conditions to create an algorithm to inform decisions about personnel, equipment, and the procurement of the self-sealing “goop” used to fill the holes. As the Chief Innovation Officer at the time explained it to me, goop is expensive and has such a limited shelf life that it is vital that the city purchase and store only as much as it needs. He boldly claimed that he had succeeded in predicting potholes with the help of the 311 platform and the algorithm it inspired. This makes potholes a useful test case, particularly since two scholars from New York University decided to measure this official’s claim against actual road conditions. Kansas City has more impermeable surface than any city in the US, so potholes are a serious matter in the general functioning of the city. Constantine Kontokosta and Boyeong Hong (2021) used Kansas City’s “Overall Condition Index” to determine whether resident reporting and city responses to potholes accurately corresponded to actual road conditions. What they discovered is that residents living in proximity to the worst road conditions simply reported potholes less frequently than those in more affluent neighbourhoods. The predictive algorithm thus became distorted by the available data points. The city’s understanding of ground conditions resulted in under-allocation of resources to the areas that needed them most. Moreover, because Kansas City procured less goop and hired fewer public works personnel based on the algorithmic predictions, it was met in 2019 by what one local radio journalist referred to as a “pothole war.” Sonia Schlesigner described a war unfolding on two fronts: wounds to the streets and drivers suing the city for damages. All over the country, cities are experimenting with innovative data and technological approaches to fighting pothole wars. Last year Kansas City made news for its use of a predictive pothole program, one that used data to spot

Digital magic and the disappearing city 159 potential potholes before they appeared. Last week, public works announced that the city had scrapped it . . . because the pilot program identified locations the city already knew needed repair. (Schlesinger, KCUR, 6 March 2019) The predictive analytics developed by the city to improve efficiency with one of its more critical non-emergency services failed because a decontextualised feedback loop fostered an illusion of accuracy. The following year, the city had to hire a lot more “troops,” purchase a lot more goop, and then embark on a multi-year plan to fully resurface rather than just patch roads. Furthermore, the new mayor embarked on a restoration of faith in local government by repaving streets in the marginal neighbourhoods first. Pushing envelopes As a feature of its new tech-driven development trajectory, particular streets in Kansas City have become innovation zones, kitted with updated streetlamps, parking meters, and, on one street, a new form of public transit. Changes to key streetscapes reflect a shared desire to push beyond the material limits of traditional infrastructures. When residents of Kansas City voted to invest in a much-needed public rail transport in 2012, what they got was a quaint streetcar on a two-mile stretch of commercially dense Main Street equipped with sensors, screens, and free Wi-Fi designed to “enhance the quality of the experience of riders” (Executive Director of the Streetcar Authority, interview 29 August 2019).5 This north-south streetcar does not, however, improve commute times for the residents who most need it to get to work. Commute times for workers in Kansas City remain some of the longest in the nation.6 Before the city broke ground on its signature streetcar project, Cisco, one of the world’s largest technology corporations, peered inside the plan and saw opportunity: By combining the ability of the next evolution of the Internet (IoT) to sense, collect, transmit, analyse, and distribute data on a massive scale with the way people process information, humanity will have the knowledge and wisdom it needs not only to survive, but to thrive in the coming months, years, decades, and centuries. (Cisco Internet Solutions Business Group, 2011, p. 7) Cisco not only wedged itself into the streetcar project, but it also forcefully shaped the way that officials guiding the project interpreted its purpose. During an interview with the Executive Director of the Streetcar Authority, he described the way the mayor and key stakeholders embraced Cisco because it enabled them to “explore the envelope of our streetcar objective to stretch the benefit and the impact of the investment further” (29 August 2019). The company’s pay-as-you-go Civic Dynamic Platform (CDP) specifically supports IoT for cities. The platform

160  Shannon Jackson enhances parking meters and streetlights while feeding informational kiosks, which double as advertisement space along the route. In a New York Times article about Kansas City’s new “smart” development trajectory, journalist Timothy Williams quotes a Cisco executive who claimed that the CDP would “help City Hall understand how the city behaves in an unobtrusive way, and at relatively little cost” (1 January  2019). As one city official said to me, it will provide the “true pulse of the city to its civic leaders.” There are now two digital platforms deployed to collect Kansas City’s data, one owned by Cisco and the other owned by Amazon Web Services. As of 2018, these two platforms supported 178 streetlight sensors, 328 Wi-Fi access points, and dynamic watersystems data from Advanced Metering Infrastructure. As a result, Cisco boasts that “Already, IoT projects are under way that promise to close the gap between poor and rich, improve distribution of the world’s resources . . . and help us understand our planet” (Evans, 2011, p. 2). Another platform-based initiative looking to push the envelope of traditional infrastructure is a local iteration of the broader co-working movement. A small group of real estate developers and place entrepreneurs in Kansas City has been snapping up cheap properties within or close to the new “smart” corridor and repurposing them to accommodate the next creative class of “tech bros.” Co-working spaces allow “pioneering citysteaders” (Moskowitz, 2018) to participate in entrepreneurial startup culture while sharing couches, espresso machines, and conference tables. One local developer who created the largest co-working business in the region describes it to me as “Uber for office space” (4 April 2018). Another, who made his initial fortune in the payday loan industry and was cut in on the deal with Cisco, collaborated with the city to build a Living Laboratory in an aging building on Main Street. His company, Think Big, restored the building while providing much of the event space that helped accelerate local innovation speak. As soon as the Laboratory became operational, one of the Think Big business partners proudly announced, “We have turned the city into a smart phone” (Blake Miller, Digital Trends, 2017). When I asked about the problem of protecting the privacy of users, the Executive Director of the Streetcar Authority responded, “It’s a great question. Our focus was so much on implementation . . . we just had to trust the City’s lawyers to do their job and figure it out for us” (29 August  2019). The Mayor did approve a Smart City Advisory Board (SCAB) made up of officials, experts, and entrepreneurs who doubled as gatekeepers.7 But as one vocal member confessed, efforts to slow development, to coax the Board to adopt something similar to San Francisco’s “Precautionary Principle” (Resolution No. 102–18), which stipulates technology innovation undergo “thoughtful regulation .  .  . to ensure that social benefits are maximized” (p. 1), were dismissed or ignored.8 The former Chair of the Board admitted that there was nothing in place to test whether public interests, particularly in terms of privacy, were being protected or whether the public was actually benefiting in any measurable way from the initiatives they approved. Another feature of the Main Street development agenda is a new type of streetlight, which can be retrofitted with more efficient bulbs and sensors to save energy while extracting information from the environment. The city started replacing its

Digital magic and the disappearing city 161 traditional streetlights in 2010 when the Mid America Regional Council, a federal transportation policy agency, received a block grant to cover the costs of installing a new generation of LED-equipped streetlights. The project inspired other cities in the region to purchase rather than lease updated streetlights from the local private electrical utility company, Kansas City Power & Light (KCP&L, now Evergy). KCP&L sold its streetlights to municipalities until it discovered that the complex wiring of LED-equipped streetlights supports sensors that yield valuable data. The sensors installed on updated streetlights in the Main Street corridor were intended to convert information into cost savings that could be passed on to the public, but now, cost savings only benefit the city’s private utility company. The Executive Director of the Streetcar Authority admitted this feature of the plan failed because his team did not know that keeping the data would violate the city’s lease with KCP&L. In this case, the city lost access to its “own” data. Shortly after the streetcar became operational, the city’s Chief Innovation Officer drafted a request for proposals (RFP) titled “Comprehensive Smart City Partnership with Kansas City, Missouri” that extends from a 2017 ordinance (No. 180393) authorising the city to establish private leases of its public digital assets. The request was for a corporate partner that would “provide the capital necessary to scale existing systems and infrastructure.” The list available for “purchase or lease” includes public Wi-Fi infrastructure, smart parking meters, traffic controllers, and sensors and optics embedded in water and sewer infrastructure. This RFP was put on indefinite hold because the city is not confident that it can ensure that public data is protected when a digital common becomes privately controlled. Another similar proposal from a local non-profit materialized on the heels of this RFP. It claimed that streetlights could be converted into “pieces of real estate” that would enable the city to create an aggregated database of streetlights . . . and an online portal for city officials, residents and private sector partners to understand how this critical resource is being leveraged now and how it can be better leveraged going forward. (“Streetlights Data Project,” KC Digitaldrive) Although this proposal similarly did not come to fruition, it demonstrates the ways in which digital innovation speak pushes the envelope of traditional infrastructures. To what extent, then, does this dual purposing of platforms to collect data from “smart” corridors for the purpose of improving user experiences simply deepen confusion about how data is collected and who owns it once it is sent cascading through devices embedded in the environment? Digital magic, in this way, serves to soften the material barriers to the value that can be extracted from public behaviour and from the use of public assets. Removing the gates Urban gatekeepers are the elected officials and appointed staff tasked with protecting the interests of residents. In the U.S., their primary legal tools include zoning

162  Shannon Jackson regulations, rights-of-way, building codes, and ordinances. In 2014, two Cisco executives published an article for Foreign Affairs titled “The Internet of Everything,” wherein they pressed cities not to be afraid to rethink the traditional “contract with citizens” by challenging traditional gatekeeping (Chamber and Elfrink cited in Sadowski & Pasquale, 2015). In some respects, such rethinking entails shifting the obligation of gatekeeping to digital platforms. However, because platforms provide seductive “access to a multitude of data from different areas of our life” (Srnicek, 2017, p. 95), they render the data of private citizens more visible and more vulnerable to innovations that shape their access to resources. In a policy paper titled “A New Deal for Big Tech: Next-Generation Regulation Fit for the Internet Age” (Institute for Global Change, 2018), author Chris Yiu enhances Cisco’s challenge to cities by drawing a stark contrast between traditional and progressive models of governance. He describes “traditional gatekeepers” as suffering from an inability “to reconcile their mental models of how things ought to work with the reality of the modern economy” (p. 3). He claims traditional gatekeepers foster a “backward-looking turn against technology” (p. 8), which can only be resolved if “the boundary between corporation, regulator and community” (p. 7) is more aggressively blurred by officials who can “get to grips with technology outperforming people for a growing number of tasks” (2018, pp. 32–33). In interviews with key entrepreneurs working in the wake of Kansas City’s digital initiatives, a similar mistrust materialized in the innovation speak they advanced. Traditional gatekeepers were variously described as too biased, too lost in bureaucratic webs, and too mired in special interests to enable cities to respond efficiently to growing infrastructural crises. The city’s Chief Innovation Officer at the time proudly declared that he had just “mathematized what the City’s goals are” by using big data to bypass the “knuckleheads [City Councilors]” and the “fiefdoms that multiply within city government” (5 November 2017). He then pointed to the exterior wall next to his desk and claimed that “there are dead bodies hidden inside,” which I took to mean that there are spirits of past officials still casting long shadows on his progressive agenda. He also described City Councillors as distracted by the “customs and ethnic culture” of their local district and that the subject matter experts (SMEs) who show up to City Council meetings rely too heavily on “anecdotal data.” He further claimed, “If we go to a more data-centric culture, everyone just goes to the authoritative data set,” adding the problem I have to solve is that Kansas City has a nineteenth century model of governance and decision-making. I  see the City Government of Kansas City as not dissimilar to the tribes I had to deal with in Iraq. This official’s strident sentiments regarding traditional gatekeeping were shared by a local entrepreneur, a civil engineer who spent years working for the Department of Transportation who then decided to channel his frustration into an innovative business model. He claims that federal regulation has become “a form of tyranny that needs to be aggressively disrupted” and that the only viable “weapon”

Digital magic and the disappearing city 163 in the fight against regulatory perfidy is the “data that can push past the constraints of bureaucracy” (16 February 2018). “We monetize data as best we can . . . and then we use the public right-of-way to deliver connectivity in ways that are not currently available” (ibid.). Rethinking gatekeeping also entails rethinking the traditional contract between gatekeepers and citizens. In 2016, Kansas City drafted a white paper that explicitly embraced these challenges. It proposed collecting dynamic data that would foster “a new type of citizen – a ‘digital citizen’ ” described as “a person or business who expects fast and efficient delivery of government services that leverage the power of social media, mobile, analytics, and cloud-based technologies” (City of Kansas City, 2016, p. 16). The white paper claims that entrepreneurs looking to design services that promise “efficiency” through “data driven technologies” (ibid), will help the city honour its obligations by “harnessing” the resources necessary to improve service delivery (p. 13). The engineering of obligation in this way resembles “herding,” or the design of transactional space to support maximal data extraction disguised as service delivery, a tactic intended to move “behaviour along a path of heightened probability that approximates certainty” (Zuboff, 2019, p. 295). According to urban planner Adam Greenfield (2017), the new digital citizen then becomes “an urban subject active only to the extent that he or she shoulders responsibilities the public sector has withdrawn from” (p. 10). Once herded into transactional relationships with cities, some researchers find citizens perform “within the bounds of expected and acceptable behaviour, rather than transgressing or resisting social and political norms” (Cardullo & Kitchin, 2018, p. 10). That is, by lowering barriers to innovative information extraction disguised as serving the interests of residents, cities increase reliance on devices to collect the information necessary for data extraction. Therefore, who is accountable if innovative infrastructures do not actually support the needs of residents? Conclusion The boundaries that are of most concern in this chapter are those between the digital and the physical and between the private and the public and the ways that their blurring further affects the practices of urban governance. One of the primary effects of an automated use of big data in the development of cities is the deterioration of traditional infrastructure and gatekeeping. What we further learn from documenting innovation speak as it unfolds in one city is that the technical actions following from tech driven gentrification and rent-seeking further amplify mystifications of the material effects of digital development. A rethinking of the city’s traditional contract with citizens thus creates a new orthodoxy in service delivery and accountability. In his classic analysis of magic, Marcel Mauss (2001) famously concluded that a “magician does nothing, or almost nothing, but makes everyone believe that he is doing everything, and all the more so since he puts to work collective forces and ideas to help the individual imagination in its belief” (p. 175). But the magic he refers to is human-centred, and the trick is to enchant (Gell, 1988)

164  Shannon Jackson rather than deceive. This new form of magic dematerializes the magician’s ability to stimulate the imagination and to consider what is possible through action and experience. In this way, it shifts enchantment to machines that can do what humans cannot do. Notes 1 Although many of the interviews conducted for this project were with public officials, all interview data are anonymous. 2 The FCC’s 2018 Small Cell Order lowers entrance barriers such as costs charged to private companies by municipalities for 5G infrastructure, ensuring that the outlay of small cell telecommunications can no longer be controlled locally or deliberatively. 3 In an interview with Richard Beardsworth, Jacques Derrida reminds him that a decision “must advance where it cannot see” or “advance towards a future which is not known, which cannot be anticipated” (1994, p. 38). The exchange of a partially blind decision for the promise of an all-seeing one is dangerous because “If one anticipates the future by predetermining the instant of decision, then one closes it off ” (ibid.). 4 There are two Kansas Cities, one in Kansas and one in Missouri. Although these are separate and very different cities, Kansas City, Missouri is referred to in the rest of the chapter as simply Kansas City. 5 Sprint (now T-Mobile), Kansas City’s homegrown telecommunications corporation, also saw opportunity in the project, so it agreed to install Wi-Fi hotspots, which enable it to collect zip code and search data from users who log on to the free network. 6 “Missed Opportunity: Transit and Jobs in Metropolitan America,” Brookings Institute, May 2011. 7 The SCAB was recently disbanded. Efforts are underway to create a more effective mechanism for reviewing and regulating emergent technologies before the city adopts them. 8 This individual tragically died during the course of this research. Others in the community have taken up his challenge to ensure better stewardship of public data and more deductive approaches to decision-making.

References Amoore, L. (2013). The politics of possibility: Risk and security beyond probability. Duke University Press. Anderson, C. (2008). The end of theory: The data deluge makes the scientific method obsolete. Wired Magazine. www.wired.com/2008/06/pb-theory/ Bhabha, H. (1994). The location of culture. Routledge. Bloor, D. (1973). Wittgenstein and Mannheim on the sociology of mathematics. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 4(2), 173–191. Cardullo, P., & Kitchin, R. (2018). Being a “citizen” in the smart city: Up and down the scaffold of smart citizen participation in Dublin, Ireland. GeoJournal, 84(1), 1–14. City of Kansas City, Missouri. (2016). Beyond traffic: The vision for the Kansas city smart city challenge. Collins, S. (2015). Networked spirits and smart séances: Aura and the Anthropological Gaze in the era of the internet of things. History and Anthropology, 26(4), 419–436. Derrida, J.,  & Beardsworth, R. (1994). Nietzsche and the machine. Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 7, 7–66. Eubanks, V. (2017). Automating inequality. St. Martin’s Press. Evans, D. (2011). The internet of things: How the next evolution of the internet is changing everything [IBSG White paper]. Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group. Finn, E. (2017). What algorithms want. MIT Press.

Digital magic and the disappearing city 165 Gell, A. (1988). Technology and magic. Anthropology Today, 4(2), 6–9. González, R. (2015a). Seeing into hearts and minds. Part 1. The Pentagon’s quest for a “social radar”. Anthropology Today, 31(3), 8–13. González, R. (2015b). Seeing into hearts and minds. Part 2. “Big data”, algorithms, and computational counterinsurgency. Anthropology Today, 31(4), 13–18. Graeber, D. (2016). The utopia of rules. Melville House. Greenfield, A. (2017). Practices of the minimum viable utopia. Architectural Design, 16–25. Halpern, O., LeCavalier, J., Calvillo, N., & Pietsch, W. (2013). Test-bed urbanism. Public Culture, 25(2), 273–306. Hornborg, A. (2015). The political economy of technofetishism. HAU, 5(1), 35–57. Institute for Global Change. (2018). A new deal for big tech: Next generation regulation fit for the internet age. http://institute.global/insight/renewing-centre/new-deal-big-tech Jackson, S. (2017). Cyberinfrastructure and the right to the city. Technology, Knowledge, and Society, 13(1), 27–40. Johnson, S. (2006). The ghost map. Riverhead Books. Kaplan, J. (2015). Humans need not apply. Yale University Press. Kitchin, R. (2014, April–June). Big data, new epistemologies and paradigm shifts. Big Data and Society, 1–12. Kontokosta, C., & Hong, B. (2021). Bias in smart city governance: How socio-spatial disparities in 311 complaint behavior impact the fairness of data-driven decisions. Sustainable Cities and Society, 64, 1–10. Lake, R. (2017, January–June). Big data, urban governance, and the ontological politics of hyperindividualism. Big Data and Society, 1–10. Leszczynski, A. (2016). Speculative futures: Cities, data, and governance beyond smart urbanism. Environment and Planning A, 48(9), 1691–1708. Lindsey, B., & Teles, S. M. (2019). The captured economy. Oxford University Press. Logan, J., & Molotch, H. (2007). Urban fortunes. University of California Press. Mauss, M. (2001). A general theory of magic. Routledge. McCullough, M. (2015). Ambient commons. MIT Press. Mirowski, P. (2013). Never let a serious crisis go to waste. Verso. Morozov, E. (2013). To save everything, click here. Public Affairs. Mosco, V. (2005). The digital sublime. MIT Press. Moskowitz, P. E. (2018). How to kill a city. Bold Type Books. O’Neill, C. (2016). Weapons of math destruction. Crown. Sadowski, J. (2020). Too smart: How digital capitalism is extracting data, controlling our lives, and taking over the world. MIT Press. Sadowski, J., & Pasquale, F. (2015). Spectrum of control: Social theory and the smart city. First Monday, 20(7), 1–28. Sims, C. (2017). Disruptive fixation: School reform and the pitfalls of techno-idealism. Princeton University Press. Smith, N. (1996). The new urban frontier. Routledge. Spiegelhalter, D. (2020). Should we trust algorithms? Harvard Data Science Review, 2(1), 1–12. Srnicek, N. (2017). Platform capitalism. Polity. Vinsel, L., & Russell, A. (2020). The innovation delusion. Currency. Winner, L. (1997, September). Cyberlibertarian myths and the prospects for community. Computers and Society, 14–19. Young, I. M. (2011). Justice and the politics of difference. Princeton University Press. Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism. Public Affairs.

11 Border research  from design cultures Cyprus Pavilions at the Venice Architecture Biennale as transformative proposals for Nicosia’s borderscapes Alice Buoli Introduction Academic and cultural debates within the field of design disciplines on international political boundaries and border territories have seen a significant acceleration in recent decades, leading to inter-disciplinary streams of research focused on a crucial question: How to design for/with borders?1 The intersection between borderlands studies and design research – the main background and source of scholarship for this chapter – represents a growing interdisciplinary arena that has expanded since the late 1990s. Designers and researchers have contributed to building an “in-between” research space that includes interpretative methods to read and represent the spatial forms of geopolitical dynamics and design-oriented approaches to transform such spaces (Buoli, 2015). Among the most recent examples, the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale 2021 saw a remarkable presence of exhibitions devoted to margins, borders, and frontiers from various perspectives and scales (Sarkis, 2021).2 Such a multiplicity of cultural productions and curatorial projects provided a fertile environment for the emergence of novel attitudes and methodological approaches towards border research from a transformative perspective by integrating multi-dimensional and provocative readings of border territories’ spatial and symbolic dimensions. This chapter examines an exemplary case study in border research: the divided island of Cyprus and its capital city, Nicosia. The spatial/symbolical partition that has cut through Cypriot landscapes and urban areas since the 1960s – the so-called Green Line – was explored through the lens of the curatorial projects for the Cyprus Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale between 2006 and 2021. These exhibitions are used as examples of how curatorial approaches – understood as possible “designerly ways of knowing” (Cross, 2006) – can offer fresh perspectives on the past, present, and future of divided territories. The chapter particularly examines four different exhibitions – “Porous Borders” (2006), “Anatomy of the Wallpaper” (2014), “Contested Fronts: Commoning Practices for Conflict Transformation” (2016), and “Anachoresis, Upon Inhabiting Distances” (2021) – and discusses the (geo)political and material characteristics of the DOI: 10.4324/9781003354772-14

Border research from design cultures 167 island and its border conditions according to powerful allegorical narratives and architectural archetypes. These four curatorial projects offered multifaceted visions and representations of the island and Nicosia, critically engaged with their audiences, and provided platforms for the discussion with and the performative involvement of visitors and other designers and scholars. In this way, they created new co-produced meanings and images around the initial body of work displayed at the exhibition venues by activating different spatial scales and dimensions: from the geographical to the urban sphere, down to the 1:1 architectural detail exhibiting the inherently multidimensional spatial and trans-scalar nature of borders. The chapter is organised into three sections. The first part is devoted to setting the main theoretical background related to the study of borders from the perspective of design disciplines. Secondly, it proposes a synthetic narrative of the socio-spatial conditions of Cyprus and Nicosia’s everyday urban borderscapes – intended not only as spaces of conflict and resistance but also as places of imaginative exchange – that has emerged from recent fieldwork and academic research on-site.3 Finally, the chapter engages with the main contents and outcomes of the Cyprus Pavilion curatorial projects reconsidered as transformative “scenarios” for the island and the Green Line. 1.  Border thinking and design cultures

In the recent volume “Design Struggles”, edited by Claudia Mareis and Nina Paim (2021), a community of design educators, practitioners and theorists gathered to address urgent questions such as “How can we write design histories otherwise? How can we teach design differently? How can we think and practice design in new ways?” (Mareis & Paim, 2021, p. 19). The editors began their collective conversation by providing an understanding of design as a powerful ontological tool that can transform social and cultural realities and shape human experiences, subjectivities, lifestyles, and environments (2021, p. 12). At the same time, design disciplines are currently undergoing a radical reconsideration (particularly in the academic sphere due to a growing critical discourse on persistent hegemonic power structures, such as patriarchal, Western, modern, white, etc.) that has extensively influenced design histories, pedagogies, and practices. This has led to a growing demand for design to be substantially rethought to include other voices and other perspectives (indigenous, female, queer, etc.) that have historically been forgotten or explicitly excluded by the mainstream design discourses. These interdisciplinary movements are known as “decolonial design” or “critical design studies”.4 As suggested by Eleni Kalantidou and Tony Fry, “[t]he creation and occupation of space by design cannot but be ideological and known in relation to other places, hence knowing where you are designing, or are going to design, is always geopolitical” (Kalantidou & Fry, 2014, p. 6). The proposals emerging from the debates on decolonial architecture/design provide an invitation to re-start from the “margins” of the discipline and re-inhabit

168  Alice Buoli them (Boano & Di Campli, 2022) and to adopt (geographical/material/symbolical) borderlands5 as “strategically important spaces for the reconstitution of an ethics and praxis of care in relation to what ought to be designed and how” (Escobar, 2018, p. 312). Within this realm, architectural and urban design disciplines retain a rather relevant role for the specific transformative function over space and society and for their role as problem-defining disciplines rather than problem-solving activities (Kalantidou & Fry, 2014, p. 5). Thus, designing with/for borderlands not only implies a radical reconceptualisation of borders themselves but also requires “thinking along, within and about borders” (2014, p. 6) in space and time. As an inherently “projective” practice, the design of space implies considering the future as a crucial variable that opens new possibilities of imagination and transformation over borders as potential sites of pluriversal visions (Escobar, 2021). However, imagining alternative futures becomes particularly challenging in disputed or conflictual contexts, where the scope for transformative action is limited, and operating conditions are highly uncertain. Therefore, specific tools of strategic design and planning can be particularly effective from a methodological perspective as they can help deal with uncertainty by projecting certain trends or anticipating diverging events. One such tool is scenario-building, which enables envisioning alternative trajectories of change and can facilitate collective discussions about potential visions for a particular space, territory, city, or neighbourhood. Architect and educator Socrates Stratis (2016) argues for the role of architecture as a transformative practice over space with its political role as a tool for negotiation within a contentious arena. In this sense, architecture as practice “shifts the focus from the static object to the moving project, evolving around non-linear processes. It is about communication tools to adapt, means of representation, and regulations that are the baseline of negotiations among the actors’ conflictual agendas” (2016, p. 16). Moreover, “controversy is a synonym of architecture in the making, pointing to a series of uncertainties that a design project, a building, an urban plan, or a construction process undergoes” (ibidem). In the third part of this chapter, the “Hands-on Famagusta”6 collective ­research-by-design project and interactive web platform, initiated and curated by Stratis and other Cypriot architects, is explored more in detail to understand the use of “controversies” as prompts for the development of alternative visions over a highly contested territory (the city of Famagusta in North Cyprus). Scenarios are used here instrumentally (and politically) to propose different futures for the city, providing the platform for a more inclusive debate among different actors across the divide. From a similar perspective, architect and urban designer Anna Grichting (2015) has provided an understanding of borders, on the one hand, as the “scars of history” – especially those that have been sites of long-term conflicts, such as the Berlin Wall or the Korean Demilitarised Zone, and the Cyprus Green Line – and, on the other hand, as potential bio-diversity hotspots after decades of abandonment and consequent re-naturalisation processes of the “no man’s land”.

Border research from design cultures 169 In this sense, borders are envisioned as ecological and cultural assets for implementing new visions for the future that can “induce positive developments between the divided communities” (2015, p. 110). This is the case of the German Green Belt that “has become the longest ecological corridor in Germany due to the value of the biodiversity that has emerged from its marginal conditions” (ibidem). Long-term research conducted by Joshua Bolchover and Peter Hasdell on the Hong Kong-Shenzhen Frontier Closed Area develops a set of different strategies to intervene in the complex border ecologies of the buffer zone created in 1951 by the British. The project suggests a set of “tactical scenarios” to address current challenges and pressures in the area and to re-metabolise the existing cross-border natural, social, and economic interactions (Bolchover & Hasdell, 2017). In this context, Cyprus and its partition represent a fertile terrain for borderland design research to examine the new imaginaries and narratives that architects, designers, activists, and citizens have (co)produced across the partition. The following section aims to provide a better framework for the trajectory that has led the Green Line/ Buffer Zone to its current state by highlighting a series of spaces and socio-spatial dynamics that characterise it when intersecting with the cityscape of Nicosia. 2.  Nicosia’s everyday urban borderscapes

Social anthropologist Yannis Papadakis suggests five paradoxes to reveal the socio-spatial dynamics occurring along the Cypriot partition, envisioning it as a site of division and contact, conflict and cooperation, security and anxiety, extreme expressions of nationalism and its contestation, and creativity and oppression (Papadakis, 2018, p. 288). Embracing the paradoxical nature of the Green Line thus requires a “multifocal” interpretative approach that moves away from “binary” understandings to comprehend the complex realities that have been stratified around and across the divide. The notion of borderscapes/borderscaping provides such a “kaleidoscopic” richness (Brambilla, 2015) and offers an operative framework to address the multiple dimensions of the “Cyprus problem”.7 Borderscapes, according to a broad multi-disciplinary literature,8 can be synthetically considered through three main meanings as circuits of images and ideas about borders, sedimentations of political decisions in space, and ways of perceiving and representing the areas around borders (Dell’Agnese & Amilhat Szary, 2015, pp. 2–5). In addition, Brambilla (2015) and Strüver (2005, 2018) emphasise the performative character of borderscapes in everyday practices that affect people’s minds and lives on a micro-scale. Combining all these connotations, the partition’s socio-spatial, political, and symbolic effects on Nicosia’s urban environment emerge as interdependent bordering dynamics in space, time, and collective imaginaries. In this context, public spaces offer a relevant terrain for observing such interactions. In the following paragraphs, I provide some personal notes about the city’s borderscapes around and along the Buffer Zone.9

170  Alice Buoli Cyprus’ Green Line/Buffer Zone spans over 180 kilometres across the island, ranging from a thickness of a few meters to various kilometres and crosses rural areas, the city of Nicosia, and other medium-sized and minor urban centres on both sides. The phrases “Green Line” and “Buffer Zone” are frequently used interchangeably in the literature to describe the line and land surface that divide the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) and the Republic of Cyprus (RoC).10 However, it is necessary to make clear that the Buffer Zone is made up of three lines, as pointed out by Bakshi (2017, p. 90): the Green Line itself, which has separated the island since 196311; the cease-fire line (CFL) of the Turkish forces, and the GreekCypriot National Guard CFL. Following the 1974 conflict, both sides were prohibited from crossing the Green Line, and as a result, the military forces restricted access to their respective areas. Since the end of the armed conflict, the Buffer Zone has been controlled by the UN Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP), except for the British Sovereign Base Area of Dhekelia (on the eastern side of the island) and the ghost town of Varosha near Famagusta, which is now under the control of the Turkish military.12 In Nicosia, the area where the Green Line is located used to be the city’s main marketplace, Ermou Street, which hosted a mix of Greek, Turkish, and Armenian businesses (Bakshi, 2017, p. 89). The morphological configuration of the street was directly influenced by its former use as the bed of the Pedieos River, which once ran through the city centre but was later diverted by the Venetians when they built the city walls in the 16th century. The area within the Buffer Zone cannot be accessed, except for occasionally with the authorisation of the UN. As a result, “buildings cannot be altered or demolished, and the effects of time can clearly be witnessed on their scarred figures” (2017, p. 89). Due to this state of “crystallisation”, the built environment inside and along the Buffer Zone has been experiencing progressive material decay and frequent collapses over the years, which have recently been accelerated by seismic events.13 Bakshi describes the current condition of the area within the Buffer Zone as “a place that has been ‘set aside’ from the life of the city” (2017, p. 140). When walking along the Buffer Zone, the very notions and perception of “proximity” and “distance” are disrupted, along with the common sense orientation through points of visual reference. Such confusion can be experienced when looking at important landmarks in the city on both sides, such as the minarets of the Selimiye Mosque in the north or the new high-rise buildings in the Eleftheria square area in the south (see Figure 11.1). As a result, navigating through the city’s public spaces can become a complex and disorienting experience, as it is a process that requires constant revision and “re-drawing” of the observer’s mental map. This is the case of Victoria Street – now known as Şehit Salahi Şevket Sokak, on the northern side of the city – which used to run between Paphos Gate and the Arabahmet neighbourhood, one of the most diverse areas in the city. It was home to worship spaces for Catholics, Maronites, Armenian-Catholics, and Muslims, all located just a few meters away from one another. Although buildings still stand and

Border research from design cultures 171

Figure 11.1 The new marketplace square in south Nicosia: the Selimiye mosque minarets, on the other side of the city, are visible in the background. Source: Photo by Alice Buoli, 2023

are visually present, the physical connection and the richness of the social interactions that used to occur here have been completely lost. Due to the effects of the partition – including controversies over property rights – buildings and plots located along and near the Buffer Zone have become less desirable to residents, especially those in direct contact with or cut through by its perimeter. Over the years, this has resulted in a progressive abandonment of the most central neighbourhoods. Although political reasons play a role, this process is rooted in the traumatic past of the two communities. The perception of the old town’s spaces as a void, coupled with the ongoing heavy militarisation and feelings of a lack of safety reported by Cypriots on both sides, have contributed to the decay of the material heritage of the walled city (Casaglia, 2020, pp. 62–65). Because of its reduced “desirability” and low real estate values, in recent decades, the city centre has been attracting populations in need of cheap housing solutions. In fact, along with internal refugees’ displacement that resulted from the conflict, Cyprus and Nicosia have become transit or arrival places for many international migration flows since the 1990s (Demetriou, 2021, pp. 92–93). As mentioned, the impact of the migratory phenomenon over the city has primarily been related to the housing demand (Casaglia, 2020, pp. 60, 64) and the emergence of a network of temporary or more stable spaces and services devoted to asylum seekers and other populations.

172  Alice Buoli These range from support facilities for refugees and migrants – managed by international and local NGOs and religious orders and groups – to a series of “transnational social spaces” (Faist, 2000)14 in the city (shops, temporary markets, worship spaces, and internet cafes) that provide a network of services for a variety of different inhabitants. Religious practices and social/commercial spaces are a significant presence in the city centre, where various groups on both sides of the city use a series of storefronts or vacant warehouses as spaces for cultural and social interactions and weekly rituals. The influx of “new” populations in some neighbourhoods within the walled city has changed not only their demographic composition but also their visual “landscape”. This is also evident in the presence of non-Cypriot residents and cultures, such as the Filipino and Southeast Asian communities on the southwestern side or the Turkish nationals15 and sub-African university students on the northern side of the city. One interesting example is, again, the area around Paphos Gate near the Catholic Church of the Holy Cross and the Maronite Church of Our Lady of Grace, where on Sunday mornings, Asian women sell typical products from their home countries both in the public spaces around the churches or in hybrid domesticcommercial spaces facing the main streets. On the other side of Pafou Street, on the walls of the former UN 65 headquarter building (now abandoned), a series of posters advertise services and meetings for prospective entrepreneurs and for migrant women. Just a few meters away to the south, a billboard advertises the presence of a religious order, the Sri Lankan Sisters of Our Lady of Perpetual Help Nicosia. Outside the walls, the Nicosia Municipal Park has become a leisure meeting point for many international communities. They gather in the garden to enjoy food and other social activities on their only day off. In this diverse urban landscape, the Venetian Walls16 have become an important physical “platform” for a variety of different social interactions and spaces. They host along their 5-kilometre-long circuit a series of public amenities, both on top of the bastions or inside the moat, including football fields, parks and gardens, and playgrounds.17 Out of the twelve football clubs in the city, at least three are hosted within the spaces of the walls: Olympiakos Nicosia and Orpheas Nicosia in the south and Çetinkaya Türk Spor Kulübü in the north. Additionally, the moat between the Roccas/ Kaytaz and Mulas/Zahra bastions, just behind the Ledra Palace Hotel crossing, hosts a new football field. Above the moat, on the northern side of the city, a row of newly opened cafeterias and restaurants occupy the ground floors of the recently refurbished, beautiful Ottoman-era houses along Zahra Street overlooking the Buffer Zone. This area is part of the Arabahmet neighbourhood, one of the city’s most important architectural heritage sites. In recent years, the neighbourhood has been progressively and partially regenerated within the framework of the Nicosia Masterplan (NMP).18 When walking to the end of Zahra Street, one can encounter the Sınır or Yiğitler Burcu Park – “sınır” means border in Turkish – which stands on the top of the Roccas/Kaytaz bastion.

Border research from design cultures 173 Until 2003 – with the opening of the first crossing at the Ledra Palace hotel – the park was the only point on the whole city where Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots could look at one another from different viewpoints. Here, the Green Line between North and South Nicosia comes up to the city walls, where the Buffer Zone disappears for about 200 meters: this is the thinnest (almost nonexistent) section of the Green Line. Along the walls in the opposite direction, towards Kyrenia/Girne Gate, the moat hosts a sequence of kitchen gardens, public promenades, and playgrounds. On the eastern side of the walls in south Nicosia, close to Famagusta Gate, one can encounter the same sports facilities and gardens on top of and inside the moat. Along Athinas Street, local coffee shops provide crucial social sites for inhabitants, especially older men and football fans. Because of the opening of the first crossing of the Ledra Palace Hotel in 2003 and the bi-communal efforts implemented by the two city administrations leading urban regeneration projects under the NMP, the quality and level of “urbanity” of the public spaces and buildings in the areas along the Buffer Zone have started to improve – especially on the commercial north-to-south axis along Ledra street/ Arasta neighbourhood. This improvement is also due to the presence of bottom-up and spontaneous renovation initiatives by local organisations or young entrepreneurs, which have started to re-claim the areas along the Buffer Zone on both sides. These spaces are imbued with a variety of meanings, memories, and images that have suggested diverse uses and practices of habitation by Turkish and Greek Cypriots and non-Cypriot nationals. These range from small cafes and shops to spaces for creativity, artistic expression, leisure, and sports. The presence of these spaces and their progressive re-habitation by diverse populations can provide the foundation for everyday, ordinary encounters between strangers (Raco, 2018) to trigger mutual recognition and cohabitation processes. However, forms of “enclaving” between communities persist, which lead to the exclusion or self-segregation of certain populations. 3. Cyprus Pavilions at the Venice Biennale: engaging with the island’s partition through architecture and urban design

The Venice Architecture Biennale has become, in the past five decades – starting from the first exhibition curated by Italian architect Vittorio Gregotti in 1975 – one of the leading international platforms, forums, and institutions for contemporary architecture discourse. It engages from time to time with the most pressing disciplinary, social, political, or environmental issues and with the city of Venice itself. As suggested by Brett Steele in his preface to the book “Architecture on Display: On the History of the Venice Biennale of Architecture” (Levy et al., 2010), published by the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, “The biennale has itself become a kind of living record – of architecture’s own contemporary struggle as a form of cultural production on the one hand, and that production on (and not only of) display on the other” (2010, p. 7).

174  Alice Buoli Table 11.1  Curatorial Projects for the Cyprus Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2006–2021). Year

Curatorial theme

Curators

2006 2008 2010

Porous Borders. The Green Line of Nicosia Relax in Cyprus Encounters: A Walking Movie

2012

Customizing Tourism

2014

Anatomy of the Wallpaper

2016 2018

Contested Fronts: Commoning Practices for Conflict Transformation I Am Where You Are

Morpho Papanikolaou and Irena Sakellaridou Sir Peter Cook Christos Hadjichristou and Aimilios Michael Spyros Spyrou and Charis Christodoulou Michalis Hadjistyllis and Stephanos Roimpas Socrates Stratis

2021

Anachoresis. Upon Inhabiting Distances

Yiorogos Hadjichristou, Veronika Antoniou, and Alessandra Swiny Marina Christodoulidou, Era Savvides, Evagoras Vanezis, and Nasios Varnavas

Along with the main curatorial themes assigned every two years to an outstanding figure in the field, national pavilions have become key moments of representation of participating countries’ architecture culture and disciplinary debates and increasingly more frequently, key occasions for producing research and advancements in the architectural discourse. Since 2006, the RoC has participated in the biennale with eight different curatorial projects (see Table 1) until the last one for the 2021 edition.19 Similar to other national participations, the Cyprus pavilion is commissioned by the Ministry of Education and Culture of the RoC and organised by the Cyprus Architects Association. Despite being the institutional representation of the RoC and not of the whole island (and, thus, of the TRNC), the pavilion exemplifies an interesting observation on how Cypriot architects and critical thinkers have been engaging with the partition by addressing its spatial, material, and symbolic qualities – with different degrees of realism or utopia – to support or suggest other ways of inhabiting it. Most of the proposals have adopted an “archetypical” spatial approach by referring to foundational elements of architecture or urban design: the wall, the table, the labyrinth, etc. This is the example of the 2006 participation “Porous Borders. The Green Line of Nicosia”, when ten Cypriot architects were asked to read the Green Line within Nicosia’s walled city and interpret it through their projects. According to the curators of the pavilion, the proposal suggests an open, experimental approach of exploring the nature of the border and its dead zone, and the possibility of its negation by means of architectural projects that restore porosity. The scope of the proposal is to examine the

Border research from design cultures 175 intermediate space and its interfaces and to explore the competence of architecture in interpreting the dual, alternating character of the area, its exclusive idiosyncrasy as an urban reality and as the sole ground in the world map that offers such experience.20 Interestingly, the 2006 pavilion came shortly after a series of key events in the recent history of the island: the opening of the first border crossing in 2003, followed by the failure of the UN Annan Plan referendum and the joining of the RoC to the European Union in 2004,21 which kicked-off a phase of growing uncertainty towards the (common) future of the island and the city. This period also marked the moment at which, according to Papadakis, the Green Line became the easternmost border of the European Union (Papadakis, 2018, p. 287). The curators defined this newly reframed border as a space with a “double” nature where various contradictions coexist: “yesterday/tomorrow, two communities, presence/absence, city as a living reality/memory land, subjective/objective”. Again, the words of Papadakis resound here: “in the border, one is in touch with both sides yet is located neither just in one nor the other” (2018, p. 298). The spatial form that the curatorial manifesto adopted is the labyrinth, where different degrees of porosity and permeability, visibility and accessibility are explored through light paper walls to provide spaces in between to be inhabited by the visitors. A similar approach was embraced in 2014 with the “Anatomy of the Wallpaper” exhibition curated by Michalis Hadjistyllis and Stephanos Roimpas. Here, the architectural archetype (or “fundamental” as per the main theme of 2014 biennale) adopted is the wall(paper) intended as a spatial device where different layers of meanings about the City of Nicosia and its spatial and visual identity (“a polyphony of diverse paradigms of architectural forms and cultures”22) are juxtaposed and then revealed through a collective imaginative and performative action. The Green Line is here never explicitly mentioned but is allegorically narrated through the presence of a “character”, the Wallpaper, “an immaterial and intangible element, to symbolise Nicosia’s divisions. A crossing line, dated from the medieval to the contemporary period, keeps mutating in time, absorbing the city’s history and collective memory.”23 The first stage of the exhibition production was performed through the collection of an archive of images related to Cyprus’s architectural culture. In this way, the pavilion also exposed the complexity of Cypriot national identity in architectural terms and particularly in its modern stage, in which the curators recognise “a single modern language, and a single repertoire of typologies, as the first moment when architecture in Cyprus was detached from the influential sphere of its rulers.”24 The exhibition was built through a collective process of production of the Wallpaper in Nicosia by first layering the printed images to form a series of thick cardboard walls and later shipping them to and assembling them in Venice. The performative “revealing” of the images occurred during the exhibition opening and throughout the biennale. The image revelation allowed the audience to contribute to transforming the Wallpaper “into Space.”25

176  Alice Buoli The 2014 pavilion occurred ten years after the events previously mentioned, namely, the opening of border crossings and the RoC joining the EU. It also took place shortly after the global financial crisis and just a few months after the Cyprus financial crisis. All of these events formed the background onto which the pavilion was conceived and pushed the curators to deal with the financial collapse as a shock that could lead to a new phase in the history of the island: this is mirrored in the concept of the layered Wallpaper that could be scrubbed away to reveal something new. In 2016, the curatorial project “Contested Fronts: Commoning Practices for Conflict Transformation”, coordinated by Socrates Stratis, moved the focus from Nicosia to another city on the island’s northeast side, Famagusta. Formerly a renowned tourist area till 1974, the city’s territory is fragmented into different exclusive or forbidden “enclaves” because of the conflict. The pavilion drew on the “Hands-on Famagusta” project,26 a collective research project and an interactive digital platform curated by a team made of both Greek and Turkish Cypriot experts and activists, that aimed to provide “a smart archive that advocates the commons of a unified Famagusta by introducing a playful mode of designerly knowledge exchange. It introduces modes of reconciliation deep into potential urban reconstruction processes”.27 The pavilion hosted different participations from other countries (Northern Ireland, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, etc.) and for the first time, involved Turkish Cypriot architects, among which members of the bi-communal group, “Imaginary Famagusta”, an informal team of architects and urban planners, committed to produce a new platform for the future of the city (which was more recently constituted in the “F.U.T-U.Re Famagusta” group, an acronym for the Federal Urbanism Team for Unified Reconstruction of Famagusta28). The exhibition provided the testing grounds for three main processes at the core of the “Hands-on Famagusta” project: a) Counter-mapping, “involving the use of the mapping practice to problematise the civil society in regard to dominant, divisive, mental geographies”29; b) Creating Thresholds, concerning “practices of exchange across edges, transforming limits to alive thresholds, encouraging the opening up of urban enclaves to the city commons”30; and c) Introducing Urban Controversies,  regarding the “unfolding of the positive aspect of conflict within the making of the architectural and urban projects where the urban actors are in constant re-alliance and dispute”.31 The pavilion thus provided a repertoire of urban design tools and visions for Famagusta’s common future by moving the focus from the current partition and fragmentation of its urban landscape to explore pluriversal scenarios (Escobar, 2018) in which the city would regain its relationship with the sea and its hinterland. The 2021 pavilion, “Anachoresis. Upon Inhabiting Distances”, was curated by an interdisciplinary team including Marina Christodoulidou, Evagoras Vanezis, Era Savvides, and Nasios Varnavas (Urban Radicals) (Christodoulidou et al., 2021). The project started from the notion of anachoresis (“distance” in English), as adopted by Roland Barthes and used as the main topic of the 2021 biennale “How will we live together”. According to the curators, “In the Cyprus Pavilion,

Border research from design cultures 177 anachoresis is introduced as an act that takes place on the convergence of urbanpublic and domestic-private space, where the distance between the two is blurred and inhabited.”32 The curatorial team envisioned and designed a composite and mobile table as a trigger for conviviality, juggling between proximity and distance and between urban-public and domestic-private dynamics, to become a “public place” for serving the diversity and complexity of the Cypriot landscapes. In this sense, the table – another archetypical element – was designed as a “portal” where distances can be inhabited, becoming “an open-source framework, with multiple departure points into new rhythms of sociality. The table’s moving parts suggest a negotiation between cohabiting subjects, forming different proxemic patterns”33 (see Figure 11.2). The public quality of the exhibition was underlined by curators Marina Christodoulidou and Evagoras Vanezis34 also in response or as an “antidote” to the conditions under which the pavilion was conceived during the Covid-19 pandemic. In this sense, the very meaning of “distancing” assumed a completely different connotation throughout the project. “Inhabiting distances” thus became another productive paradox in relation to Cyprus’s partition: this was particularly interesting during the biennale opening, considering the progressive fading of the pandemic-related restrictions.

Figure 11.2  Cyprus Pavilion at Venice Biennale 2021. Source: Photo by Alice Buoli, 2021

178  Alice Buoli Moreover, the pavilion worked as a space for hosting performative arts (dance and music) by interacting with and simultaneously activating, temporarily transforming, and adding new meaning to the spaces and objects of the exhibition. The design process of the pavilion also becomes a kind of “proposal” for the Green Line, as suggested by curators, which is conveyed by the horizontality and eventfulness of the table as a device enabling sociability and bridging a multiplicity of landscapes, memories, and languages. Conclusive remarks The space and relevance that design disciplines are building within the large “family” of border studies are yet to be fully recognised inside and outside the academic arena. Still, the examples explored in the context of this chapter, as in the case of the curatorial projects for the Cyprus pavilion, demonstrate a rich and growing body of work that by starting from a genuine transdisciplinary curiosity, is bringing a viewpoint – one of scholars and practitioners engaged with the transformation of space, its shape and qualities – that has been scarcely influential in the consolidated debates within border research. However, intervening in contested spaces that are either crystallised in the status quo or where the conflict is still ongoing calls for a profound reconsideration of the tools and the agency of design cultures to better frame their role in providing alternative viewpoints in such unstable and uncertain conditions. The case of Cyprus and the design-based research produced by Cypriot architects and curators to envision alternative proposals and scenarios of change for the Green Line – which activate debates on potential new shared meanings and public uses for its borderscapes – provide a robust argument for the need to introduce “the future” as a transformative variable in the production of knowledge around borders, not only as barriers to be transgressed or erased but also and mostly as providing spaces for collective imagination. Acknowledgements Alice Buoli is an assistant professor in Urban Design and Planning at the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies, Politecnico di Milano, Italy. The ideas and contents presented in this chapter were developed through research conducted as part of the inter-doctoral research workshop “Territorial Fragilities in Cyprus”, organised by the Urban Planning, Design, and Policy and Preservation of the Architectural Heritage PhD programs at the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies (Politecnico di Milano) during the academic year 2020–2021. The main results of the workshop have been recently published in the collective volume “Territorial Fragilities in Cyprus. Planning and Preservation Strategies” edited by Alice Buoli and Oana Cristina Tiganea (Springer, 2023). Additionally, the author conducted further research at the Department of Architecture of the University of Cyprus (UCY) in March-April 2023 under the guidance of Prof. Socrates Stratis.

Border research from design cultures 179 The author would like to express gratitude and appreciation to all colleagues, PhD candidates, guests, and friends who participated in these research activities. Special thanks are also due to Marina Christodoulidou, Evagoras Vanezis, and Michalis Hadjistyllis for their generosity in sharing and discussing their curatorial approaches and projects for the Cyprus Pavilion and to the Department of Architecture of UCY (Prof. Socrates Stratis and other colleagues) for kindly hosting the author at UCY. Notes 1 The reference is to the seminal book by McHarg, I. (1969). Design with nature. Natural History Press, recently recalled by Italian urban designer Paola Viganò in her lecture “Design with Territorial Fragilities” on November 22, 2022 at Politecnico di Milano (Italy). The key contribution of the “with” in the title is the recognition of the conditions from which any design operation is performed, accepting these conditions as inherently part of the context that are thus to be respected in any transformative process. 2 See also the statement by Hashim Sarkis, Curator of the 17th International Architecture Exhibition. Source: Retrieved December  5, 2022, from www.labiennale.org/en/ architecture/2021/statement-hashim-sarkis 3 Please see the “Acknowledgments” section for more details. 4 This multifaceted movement is led by prominent design educators and thinkers coming from contexts beyond the dominant “geographies” of design, particularly from Latin America and the African continent. For a more comprehensive discussion, refer to the essay by Arturo Escobar “Autonomous design and the emergent transnational critical design studies field” in Mareis and Paim (2021; Escobar, 2021, pp. 25–38). 5 “Borderland” refers to a specific portion of land surface influenced by the presence of an international border. The term also relates to the tradition of cultural and social studies, which use it to define a specific identity found in border areas. This understanding draws on the work of Gloria Anzaldúa. 6 Source: Retrieved December  5, 2022, from www.handsonfamagusta.org/about-theproject 7 A proper literature review on the Cyprus case is not possible in this context. Among the most influential body of work produced on this case, I have mostly referred to Papadakis, 1998, 2006, 2018; Strüver, 2018; Casaglia, 2019, 2020; Bakshi, 2017. 8 For example, see Appadurai, 1996; Harbers, 2003; Dolff-Bonekämper & Kuipers, 2004; Strüver, 2005; Rajaram & Grundy-Warr, 2007; Eker & Van Houtum, 2013; Brambilla, 2015. Please, also see Buoli, 2015, 2020 for a more complete discussion on the interactions between border studies and design cultures. 9 The photographs presented in this chapter are not meant as professional images but instead as notes taken on site during two different visits to Nicosia in September 2021 and March-April 2023. Please see the “Acknowledgments” section for more details. 10 The TRNC is currently only recognised by Turkey. The RoC has been a member of the European Union since 2004. 11 The Green Line is in fact named after an actual line drawn by a British Major with a green chinagraph pencil on a map in 1963 (Strüver, 2018, p. 7). Initially conceived as a temporary measure to de-escalate ethnic clashes among the Greek-Cypriot and TurkishCypriot communities, once it was traced on the map, this line became permanent with long-lasting consequences (Bakshi, 2017, p. 120). 12 Source: Retrieved December 5, 2022, from https://unficyp.unmissions.org/about-bufferzone#:~:text=The%20buffer%20zone%20%2D%20also%20called,is%20a%20 few%20kilometres%20wide

180  Alice Buoli 13 The tragic February 2023 earthquake in Syria and south Turkey also had broad psychological reverberations in Cyprus, without major physical damage. 14 Thomas Faist defines “transnational social spaces” as the “sustained ties of persons, networks and organizations across the borders of multiple nation-states, ranging from weakly to strongly institutionalised forms” (Faist, 2000, p. 2). 15 Due to its political relations with Turkey, the TRNC has focused on encouraging the resettlement of Turkish nationals since 1974. This policy has had a range of effects on Turkish-Cypriot society over time, leading to concerns and criticism from ­Greek-Cypriots. For a more comprehensive analysis of this phenomenon, please refer to Demetriou (2021). 16 Nicosia’s walls were built in the 16th century by the Republic of Venice and designed by engineers Giulio Savorgnan and Francesco Barbaro. They are considered the most important common heritage for the city by both communities. 17 It must be mentioned, however, that the majority of the spaces around and on top of the walls is used for parking cars, which testifies to one of the most pressing common issues between the two sides of the city: traffic congestion. 18 Under the umbrella of the Nicosia Masterplan (NMP), a bi-communal initiative implemented since the mid-1980s by local and international technical teams to deal with common challenges for the city and to plan for a future reconciliation. This is one of the most relevant examples of technical cooperation on urban planning matters in a divided territory. The NMP allows for the cooperation between the town planning departments of North and South Nicosia on joint projects and gives priority to the old town and the rehabilitation of neglected historical neighborhoods inside the city’s wall. The first implementation phase of the Masterplan started in 1986. This included twin projects for the rehabilitation of two areas located along the Buffer Zone: Arabahmet in the northern part of the city and Chrysaliniotissa in the south (Petridou, 1998). 19 The 2023 edition of the Biennale has yet to open its gates as of the time of writing this chapter. 20 Cyprus Pavilion 2006 – Press Kit. Source: Retrieved December  5, 2022, from www .artecommunications.com/images/esposizioni/2006/PRESS%20RELEASE_CPR.pdf 21 Anke Strüver clearly synthesised this chain of events: “While 65% of the Turkish Cypriots accepted the Annan Plan and thus voted in favour of reunification, 74% of the GC voted against it. One week later, on 1 May 2004, the RoC entered the EU without the TRNC – although Turkish Cypriots technically became EU citizens and their territory is now part of the EU” (Strüver, 2018, p. 8). 22 Cyprus Pavilion 2014 – Press Kit. Source: courtesy of the curators. 23 Source: See previous note. 24 Source: See previous note. 25 Source: See previous note. 26 Retrieved December 5, 2022, from www.handsonfamagusta.org/ 27 Cyprus Pavilion 2016 – Press Kit. Source: Retrieved December  5, 2022, from www .cy-arch.com/contested-fronts-commoning-practices-for-conflict-transformation/ 28 Source: https://archive.cyprus-mail.com/2020/11/20/bicommunal-group-denounces-par tial-opening-of-varosha/ 29 Source: See note 27. 30 Source: See previous note. 31 Source: See previous note. 32 Cyprus Pavilion 2021 – Press Kit. Source: Retrieved December 5, 2022, from https:// cypruspavilion.org/ 33 Source: See previous note. Proxemics is the study of personal space and the degrees of separation that individuals maintain among them. A seminal contribution in this field is the book “The Hidden Dimension” by Edward T. Hall, Anchor Books, 1969. 34 Based on a conversation between the author and the curators in July 2022.

Border research from design cultures 181 References Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. University of Minnesota Press. Bakshi, A. (2017). Topographies of memories: A new poetics of commemoration. Palgrave Macmillan. Boano, C., & Di Campli, A. (Eds.). (2022). Decoloniare l’urbanistica. LetteraVentidue. Bolchover, J., & Hasdell, P. (2017). Border ecologies: Hong Kong’s mainland frontier. Birkhäuser. Brambilla, C. (2015). Exploring the critical potential of the borderscapes concept. Geopolitics, 20(1), 14–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2014.884561 Buoli, A. (2015). Borderscaping: Design patterns and practices on/across borderlands. Territorio, 72, 85–94. https://doi.org/10.3280/TR2015-072014 Buoli, A. (2020). Borderscap-es/-ing: Reading the Moroccan-Spanish borderlands constellations. In L. Gaeta & A. Buoli (Eds.), Transdisciplinary views on boundaries towards a new Lexicon (pp. 21–45). Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. Casaglia, A. (2019). Northern Cyprus as an “inner neighbour”: A critical analysis of European Union enlargement in Cyprus. European Urban and Regional Studies, 26(1), 37–49. https://doi.org/10.1177/0969776418756933 Casaglia, A. (2020). Nicosia beyond partition. Complex geographies of the divided city. Unicopli. Christodoulidou, M., Vanezis, E., Savvides, E., & Varnavas, N. (2021). Anachoresis. Upon inhabiting distances (exhibition catalogue). Archive Books. Cross, N. (2006). Designerly ways of knowing. Springer. Dell’Agnese, A., & Amilhat Szary, A.-L. (2015). Borderscapes: From border landscapes to border aesthetics. Geopolitics, 20(1), 4–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2015 .1014284 Demetriou, O. (2021). Migration, minorities, and refugeehood in Cyprus: A view of the citizenship regime through the lens of displacement. In A. Driver, H. Alzheimer, S. DoeringManteuffel,  & D. Drascek (Eds.), Jahrbuch für Europäische Ethnologie (pp.  91–120). Brill/Schöningh. Dolff-Bonekämper, G., & Kuipers, M. (2004). Des frontières dans le paysage et dans la ville. In G. Dolff-Bonekämper (Ed.), Patrimoine européen des frontières: Points de rupture, espaces partagés (pp. 53–72). Council of Europe. Eker, M., & van Houtum, H. (2013). Border land: Atlas, essays and design. History and future of the border landscape. Blauwdruk. Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the pluriverse. Radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds. Duke University Press. Escobar, A. (2021). Autonomous design and the emergent transnational critical design studies field. In C. Mareis & N. Paim (Eds.), Design struggles (pp. 25–38). Valiz. Faist, T. (2000). Transnationalization in international migration: Implications for the study of citizenship and culture. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 23(2), 189–222. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/014198700329024 Grichting, A. (2015). Boundaryscapes: A digital and dynamic Atlas for collaborative planning in the Cyprus Green Line. Territorio, 72, 108–116. https://doi.org/10.3280/TR2015072017 Harbers, A. (2003). Borderscapes: The influence of national borders on spatial planning. In R. Broesi, P. Jannink, & W. Veldhuis (Eds.), Euroscapes (pp. 143–166). Must Publishers. Kalantidou, E., & Fry, T. (Eds.). (2014). Design in the borderlands. Routledge.

182  Alice Buoli Levy, A., Menking, W., & Gregotti, V. (2010). Architecture on display: On the history of the Venice biennale of architecture. Architectural Association. Mareis, C., & Paim, N. (Eds.). (2021). Design struggles: Intersecting histories, pedagogies, and perspectives. Valiz. Papadakis, Y. (1998). Walking in the hora: “Place” and “non-place” in divided Nicosia (Cyprus). Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 8(2), 302–327. Papadakis, Y. (2006). Nicosia after 1960: A river, a bridge and a dead zone. Global Media Journal: Mediterranean Edition, 1(1), 1–16. Papadakis, Y. (2018). Borders, paradox and power. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 41(2), 285– 302. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2017.1344720 Petridou, A. (1998). Nicosia: Perspectives for urban rehabilitation. Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 8(2), 350–364. Raco, M. (2018). Living with diversity: Local social imaginaries and the politics of intersectionality in a super-diverse city. Political Geography,  62, 149–159. https://doi.org/ 10.1016/j.polgeo.2017.11.003 Rajaram, P. K., & Grundy-Warr, C. (Eds.). (2007). Borderscapes: Hidden geographies and politics at territory’s edge. Borderlines Series. University of Minnesota Press. Sarkis, H. (2021). How will we live together? Participating countries and collateral events (catalogue). La Biennale di Venezia. Stratis, S. (2016). Guide to common urban imaginaries in contested spaces. Jovis. Strüver, A. (2005). Stories of the “boring border”: The Dutch-German borderscape in people’s minds. LIT Verlag. Strüver, A. (2018). Europeanization in Cypriot borderscapes: Experiencing the Green Line in everyday life. Geopolitics, 25(3), 609–632. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2018. 1550390

Section 3

Liminality across and beyond the country

12 Landscape, liminality, lament Ann Carragher

Introduction The landscape in and around the Gap of the North, near the Hill of Faughart, belies an area that for some, is a retreat, a safe haven. Secretive, untouchable, and mythical, it is also referred to as a lawless place of danger and has evocatively been given the ascription ‘bandit country’ (Harnden, 2000, pp. 68–69). The area has been referred to as being both geographically and socially liminal and understood as a place of hybridity and instability (Nash et al., 2016, p. 7). Steeped in history and trauma, the political and physical landscape of the area was active, bloody, and turbulent. Strangeness and fear exude from the political human horror and mythological endeavours that are entwined in the fabric of the area, in the layers of colonial history, and in the evidence of a once highly militarised panoptical zone by a dominant discourse of occupation, control and surveillance. The aim of my research is to conduct a practice-based enquiry of the cultural, social, and political resonances of the area. It is therefore necessary to provide regional, historical, and geographical contextualisation. It is not necessary to provide piecemeal historical accounts of Irish and British history, which is lengthy and complex. I, however, provide a ‘temporal mapping’ of events and activities relative to the Gap of the North and the construction of the border in a broader sense as a site of contestation. This contextualisation also allows me to position the Gap in proximity to my own personal unfolding narrative, against a backdrop of the more recent history of the ‘Troubles’ (the Northern Irish conflict from the late 1960’s to 1998). Methodology The research title ‘Landscape, Liminality, Lament’ explores ways of thinking about the Irish border and the development of visual and textual research in response to place and landscape. It has been extended and developed from a close personal engagement and relationship with the area and has derived from resonate subjective and objective perspectives regarding landscapes’ capacity to disrupt and reassure. Engagement with established paradigms of landscape study and an ‘evolving’ immanent conceptual framework have assisted in the complex analysis of the site and its subsequent affective, temporal, and political resonances. DOI: 10.4324/9781003354772-16

186  Ann Carragher The research has led to both written and practice-based outcomes and has addressed (and continues to address) notions of loss, memory, and diaspora. Histories and entanglements with home and place have assisted in constructing a neo-narrative that draws on a variety of voices, including both personal narrative (subjective voice/voices) and critical engagement. I grew up on the outskirts of Newry, a ‘frontier town’ (Canavan, 1990) in Northern Ireland, close to the border (and the Gap of the North) and close to the Troubles. The border is integral and symptomatic of the complexities of the Irish/Northern Irish narrative, and it epitomises my own complex diasporic relationship with home. The stresses and anxieties of the past keep manifesting in the present, and rather than keep them internalised, I feel that they can be explored through my practice, both visually and textually. I now live in Northwest England and return home regularly to Northern Ireland; such ‘diasporic visits’ have enabled me to fully engage and immerse with the physicality of the site and to carry out fieldwork (and in a sense, perform the physical and psychological state of ‘transitioning’). ‘Walking’ as process and the experiences encountered during my walks in the Gap of the North have become an integral method of practice that assist in reflective responses to inform the production of subjective writing and studio practice. In addition to exploring theories of liminality, ongoing methodological approaches applied to wider socio-political and cultural concerns, for example, intersectionality, auto-ethnography and Borderscape studies, have informed the established and emerging conceptual and theoretical analysis. The interdisciplinary field of Borderscape studies or Borderscaping (Dell’Agnese & Amilhat-Szary, 2015) presents a wide range of discursive research, demonstrating a multi-dimensional, complex and sustained critical approach. This interdisciplinary field and approach has been used to assist in critically examining the multi-level complexity of the area and recognises that artistic imaginaries (Brambilla, 2015, pp. 111–121) and cultural production provide valuable contributions to border research, with the artist able to engage in and provide insight into very real experiences and challenges (Schimanski, 2016). A ‘Gap’ in the drumlins1– the Gap of the North (Bearna Uladh – Gap of Ulster)2– became the precursor of much contention throughout the history of the island and provided the backdrop of the province of Ulster being seen or understood as ‘a place apart’ (Bardon, 1999, pp. 1–10; Hughes, 1993, p. 4) geographically, culturally, and politically. In this context, the Gap itself becomes a place/zone/space of open-ended cultural inquiry to signify the broader context of the area (regarding the contested status of Northern Ireland); it is a site to investigate spatial relationships, topography, geography, and religious and cultural history. The site and reputation of the area has endured throughout history, and although the research focuses on a mere ‘gap’, the lens/lenses through which I explore widens to include the broader political context of the surrounding area. The historical approach is less chronological than spatial and temporal. The site has a deep and turbulent history as does the surrounding area; the fault and folds on the surface of the landscape unfold through a series of events that, compounded with injustices, created an identity of endurance and resistance.

Landscape, liminality, lament 187 Historical context Faughart Hill on the Louth/South Armagh border is strategically located across the Southern entrance to the ‘Gap of the North’, which was at one time, the only true pass between Ulster and the rest of Ireland. The main road in Ireland passed here, and whoever controlled this Hill also controlled the road and pass. The southern edge of the province of Ulster, in North Ireland, is populated by an undulating rippling landscape of drumlins, spreading from County Down in the east across to Donegal in the west. Slow shifting glacial ice sheets thousands of years ago created this variegated landscape; geographically, the area has one of the clearest natural borders and the largest range of drumlins in Western Europe. The tightly packed, interlocking hills in earlier times provided routes along their ridges, where people descended only when necessary to cross marshy valleys (Johnston, 2018, p. 204). The geological formation of this variegated and hilly landscape provided a natural border and demarcation of the province of Ulster from the rest of Ireland; it created a naturally occurring boundary formation of closely knit hills and mounds that proved to be a formidable frontier that in some way, demonstrates how geography and landscape can determine history. The entwining of Irish and British history is long, arduous, and complex and goes back centuries. England’s claim of sovereignty over Ireland in 1171 has resulted in a relationship mainly based on conflict, with numerous battles and uprisings continuing for hundreds of years that to an extent, still continue today, as ‘the war to subjugate them was a prolonged, brutal, fragmentary affair that never wholly succeeded (Solnit, 2011, p. 136). The province of Ulster was a last bastion of Gaelic traditions and very much a native Irish stronghold. For centuries, it was ruled mainly by the O’Neill Dynasty (from 1232–1616). Although earlier Norman-English invasions gradually conquered the lands, the province of Ulster was always difficult to occupy and subdue, partly due to the strength of the clans who ruled it; however, the natural boundary of the drumlin belt shielded it to an extent. A break in the drumlin belt occurs in the mountains of South Armagh (on the southern peripheral edge of the province), and this break became known as ‘The Gap of the North’. The ‘Gap’ was a narrow pass through a marshy valley flanked by forested, steep slopes on either side and was renowned as a treacherous and dangerous place. Invading forces were easily ambushed whilst passing through the Gap, and for centuries, it was a flashpoint of conflict that played a significant role in the political history of the island, as control of the Gap determined who controlled the area. The Gap became a precursor of much contention throughout the history of the island; strategically, it was of paramount importance, as it marked the route and threshold into the Kingdom of Ulster. It was the site of continuous never-ending power struggles between warring chieftains and British forces and was understood purely as a strategic asset to enable an aggressive assertion of the area and control the route through it. The boundary line of the manmade border (1921/22) runs through it today.

188  Ann Carragher From the south, the drumlin belt marked the edge of the Pale,3 where during the high to the late Middle Ages, a number of Irish counties were under the rule of the English Crown (1300–1500) based in Dublin. Faughart (at the southwest upper part of the Gap) was a battleground on many occasions, and in the 16th century, Faughart figured greatly in the struggles between the O’Neill clan and the British forces of Lord Mountjoy (last viceroy to Queen Elizabeth I). Lord Mountjoy secured the pass through Faughart, and in 1601, Moyry Castle was built by acquiring stones from the dissolved Kilnasaggart Monastery at the eastern lower part of the Gap next to the Kilnasaggart Pillar/ Ogham stone. Mountjoy now had a permanent foothold into the Northern province of Ulster, and he consequently renamed the Gap ‘Moyry Pass’. A few years later, the O’Neill’s were defeated and subsequently fled the island, thus resulting in the massive scheme of the Plantation of Ulster from 1607–1609.4 The Gap of the North is an in-between place in a rural location a few miles south of the frontier town of Newry,5 north of the border,6 and near the once-English garrison town of Dundalk7 south of the border. It is approximately 1.5 miles southwest from the village of Jonesborough and 1.8 miles from the Hill of Faughart. It lies between the southeast slopes of Slieve Gullion Mountain and the Cooley peninsula of Carlingford Lough. The Gap straddles both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Within a few mile radius of the Gap of the North, there are castles, portal dolmens, court cairns, ring forts, mythical lakes, shrines, holy wells, ancient graveyards, churches, convents, monasteries, and an inscribed Pillar stone/Ogham stone. The landscape also has traces of nearby custom houses, British army watchtowers, and monuments to the dead, attributed to the more recent Troubles from the 1960’s to 1998. There is a more sinister side to the area and in light of the more recent Troubles, the thirty years of conflict and atrocity in Northern Ireland, ‘a small group of people stood apart: they were ‘the missing’, ‘the Disappeared’,8 absent yet somehow still present, and their fate and whereabouts remained shrouded in misinformation’ (Farrell, 2000, para 1). The border territories figured large in the search for the bodies of the disappeared, as did Faughart, where so far, one body has been discovered. It is rumoured that others may be buried there or in the vicinity. In 1977, the British undercover officer Capt. Robert Nairac also disappeared from the area; he was allegedly abducted and never to be seen again. Members of the so-called ‘Real IRA’9 were arrested in the area following the 1998 Omagh bombing. Pilgrimage The ancient pilgrim route, historically known as the Slighe Midluachra, passed through the Gap (parts of which are still present). The road was one of the five preChristian routes from the sacred Hill of Tara in Co Meath, the once political capital of pre-Christian Ireland. The course continued along a twisty winding route west of Faughart Hill down into a marshy valley to the monastic settlement at Kilnasaggart (Johnston, 2018), past the Kilnasaggart Ogham/Pillar stone, then on to Dunseverick on the North Antrim coast.

Landscape, liminality, lament 189 The area, although one of conflict, is also synonymous with pilgrimage and ritual. Religion is interwoven in the topography of the landscape, which is mythical and sacred. It is epitomised through the birthplace of Brigid/St. Brigid, born 454 A.D on the Hill of Faughart, at the southern end of the Gap of the North. St. Brigid was the first female patron Saint of Ireland (second in esteem to St Patrick). She is regarded as the Liminal Saint (born on a threshold) and symbolises Ireland’s transition from Celtic Pagan traditions to Christianity. Her shrine consists of a holy well and sacred stream, where pilgrims flock to bathe and partake in the superstitious ritual of dipping a piece of cloth into the well and leaving a votive offering at the site. Annually, numerous processions, pilgrimages, and vigils are held in her honour at the site. St. Brigid’s feast day in the Catholic calendar is on the 1st of February. The 1st of February also marks the Pagan feast of Imbolc, signifying the half-way point between the Winter solstice and the Spring equinox – a time of transition (National Museum of Ireland.i.e, 2023). This date is no coincidence, as such syncretism and meshing of beliefs and customs were not uncommon in Ireland, where Celtic Pagan traditions were absorbed and adapted into Christian practices. The Celts worshipped Brigid, and whether this is fact or myth, the pre-Christian incarnation of the Goddess Brigid needs to be understood as both a pagan goddess and a Christian saint. The area of Faughart is described in Celtic mythology as a ‘thin place’ (Bradley, 2003, p. 182) where one may experience a palpable sense of intermeshing of the visible material and invisible spiritual phenomena (Silf, 2005, pp. 13–14). In the deepest part of the Gap stands the inscribed Kilnasaggart Pillar stone or Ogham stone10 (‘Cill na Saggart’ means the ‘church of the priests’). Importantly, this stone is next to the site of what was once an early monastery and burial site. The stone is almost two metres high, and it bears both Ogham, Gaelic, and Latin inscriptions. The stone is thought to date from 700 A.D and is seen as one of the oldest Christian monuments in Ireland. There are disputes as to whether it originally was an Ogham Stone and that some of the inscriptions are not authentic Ogham language but early marks and scarring. Ogham stones existed long before Ireland formed a unified nation-state, but the lack of a centralised identity did not exclude feelings of cultural unity. The Ogham stone engages with the past and the landscape embodying it; it has a mnemonic value, and the materiality and permanence create meaning in place. Pierre Nora’s influential Lieux de Memorie explores the concept of site as a symbolic element of memory or memorial heritage (Nora, 1989, p. 10). To think of it (or them) as both a pagan and/or a Christian memorial makes sense, as this place, in a gap, on a threshold, embodies features and stories of temporal disruptions, transitions, and shifting positions. Time here is palimpsestic and is laden with multiple readings of liminality that interact with one another, where the past is visible and acts on the present. The palimpsest is recognised as an important means in ‘understanding the developing complexity of culture, as previous “inscriptions” are overwritten yet remain as traces within present consciousness’ (Ashcroft et al., 2000, p. 160). Such interactions and transitions demonstrate a longevity and connection to events that occurred on the landscape, where the ancient past is present and is exerted through features and myths. These stones ‘mark an

190  Ann Carragher ancestral presence embedded in the landscape inviting remembrance of deep time’ (Künzler, 2019, p.  2). The Gap represents a meshing, where Pagan and Christian values meet, where old worlds meet new orders, and where clan dynasties succumb to colonial and church rule. The Gap, although regarded as a threshold, a site of transformation, a gateway, a portal, and a space between, also paradoxically presents an ambiguous state of in-betweenness, neither here nor there, betwixt and between. The Gap of the North marks an area whose identity is very much entangled with memory, mythology, landscape, and resistance. The unique landscape of this area constitutes a collective assemblage of geology, topography, and mythology; between the sweeping valleys around Slieve Gullion and the undulating drumlins, an entwining of culture and landscape emerges. The fields, ditches, hills, glens, bogs, forests, and fens form a rich tapestry that reveal links to history and place; this entwining demonstrates how the landscape of the area contains a narrative and memory that reveals stories of time, human endeavour, and loss. The landscape helped create an identity and culture that was very much embedded with ‘place’. Creation of the border The British occupation of Ireland resulted in centuries of conflict and turbulence; this came to a head during Ireland’s revolutionary period (1910’s–1920’s) culminating with the bitter Irish War of Independence (1919–1921). The Irish War of Independence concluded with the Anglo-Irish Treaty, resulting in the partitioning of the island and the creation of the British border on the island of Ireland (1921–22). Partition did little to quell the conflict, which continued in the province of Ulster, north of the island, mainly in the occupied six counties that remained under British rule and part of the United Kingdom. However, the border territories remained a flashpoint of conflict, and subsequently, over the years, the landscape in the area was dominated by the British army, with sophisticated fortified watchtowers and checkpoints at border crossings. Geographically, landscapes exist through and of many layered sections, that is, provinces, counties, baronies, towns, parishes, and wards. Territorial divisions derived from ancient and modern administrations create a patchwork of segments that interlock to form a landmass. Through the creation of the border and the partitioning of the country, the island was fragmented; the fragmented landscape comes to represent a place apart (Hughes, 1991, p. 4), as it is fragmented and not whole. Opposing perspectives regarding the legitimacy of the creation of the Northern Irish state and the reunification of Ireland have been entwined with the inception and creation of the border, whose function was to protect the interests and subjects of the British Empire and Union. Within the landscape, domination and power were performed and perpetuated through the Protestant Ascendancy and mutated through the landed gentry (resulting in the Plantation of Ulster in 1609 and earlier plantation schemes). As the constitutional outcomes of the revolutionary period evolved over time, partition remained a constant. The construction of the British border on the island of Ireland and the creation of the Northern Irish state had radical implications,

Landscape, liminality, lament 191 socially and politically, across the island. This deeply political product of partition was and is seen in relation to the contested political status of Northern Ireland today. The symbolic significance of the border for both unionism and nationalism alike was not translated into any sustained effort to ameliorate its negative effects. The island’s complex history as a site of contests for power and control was thus dramatically over-simplified and reduced into the division of the Irish border (Hayward, 2017, pp. 1–2). The Good Friday Agreement in 199811 provided the impetus for peace, and the de-bordering of the province ensued. Its physical dissolution conveyed a sense of hope, renewal, possibilities, and potentiality. The relationship of the border now ‘invisible’ (since 2005/6)12 to that presented in the past ‘visible’ has been the topic of much consternation. At a time of global, economic, and political instability, specifically, the impact and ramifications of the United Kingdom (UK)’s departure from the European Union and its open border policies, the area and the border emerge yet again as a site of contestation: a signifier of national political and cultural anxiety. The border is integral and symptomatic of the complexities of the Irish/Northern Irish narrative. History and lived experience bear witness to the unstable, ambiguous, physical, and psychic landscape of the area, and at a time of global political instability, the dialectical nature of borders can act not as solutions but as problems. Recent fears regarding the Northern Ireland protocol, Brexit, and the potential rebordering of the province of Northern Ireland could signal/s a disruption and return to competing power structures and struggles on a constitutional and economic level (currently being played out in Stormont13). The material presence of the border may be gone, but the possibility of its re-emergence on the landscape (as opposed to an Irish Sea border) and its political symbolism have provoked concern and dissent, personally and politically, due to its practices and policies and its regulatory restriction on the movement of people and goods. The bordering, de-bordering, and potential re-bordering of the Northern Irish province reinforces cultural and geopolitical complexity and ambiguity, and in light of recent political developments in the UK (Brexit), a state of uncertainty and confusion prevail. The research comes at a time when borders dominate public, national, and global debate, and the focus of my practice intends to provide a better understanding of the pluralistic perspectives of the area/place. The traumatic fracturing and dividing of the landscape through partition explores notions of identity on an individual and collective level. Beyond the territorial divisions of colonialism and nationalism, a third space emerges and becomes a place of enquiry, which is the border territory and the Gap of the North, on the peripheral marginal edge of the province of Ulster. Betwixt between The term and concept of liminality (Turner, 1967; van Gennup, 1909) is very much associated and applied to borders, border territories, and the construction and fluidity of identity (Bhabha, 2004, pp. 199–245). The concept is also firmly rooted in

192  Ann Carragher anthropological and religious discourse, with recent emergent application in sociopolitical and cultural studies as evidenced in the ‘Spectral Turn’ (Blanco & Peeren, 2013, pp. 29–89). Liminality is a useful lens to explore social marginalisation, both physically and psychologically, and on an individual/personal and collective level. Liminality is applicable both temporally and spatially and both psychologically and physically – it is often discussed in terms of space, place, memory, and identity regarding transitional spaces, frontiers, border zones, and contested territories. Places existing on the margins possess a tangled and complex history, as they gesture and explore reconfigurations of identity through unfolding, fragmenting, splitting, and doubling. Othering and doubling can also be applied to fragmenting and psychic splitting (Dawson, 2007, p. 64), where identity is complicated and ‘haunted’ by spectres of past trauma, displacement, and diasporic experience, which is understood as a ‘case of strange dualism’ (Jackson, 1963, as cited in O’Byrne, 2016, p. 21) and/or ‘schizophrenic experience’ (O’Sullivan, 2009, p. 31). Being unable to reconcile the past with the present is also a pervasive aspect of Irish cultural identity due to a legacy of colonialism and post-colonial discourse (Holmsten & Gilsenan Nordin, 2009, pp. 7–17). In gothic literature, horrors beyond (Hughes & Smith, 2003, p. 1) is a reference to peripheries, borderlands, outlands, marginal places, and places on the edge. Such places are posited against the homely, comfortable familiarity of metropolitan and urban life and all that is familiar. The violation of cultures by an external interference, the colonial encounter, acts to corrupt, confuse, and redefine power structures. The negative consequences of empire through control and subjugation are performed via numerous personifications and metaphors; the gothic therefore endeavours to reveal such uneasy power relationships. The historical relationship between the gothic and the colonial extends to the disruptive relationship of identity between the self and the other and between the controlling and repressed (Hughes & Smith, 2003, p. 1). Familiar gothic conceptions of ghostly spectres, disembodied souls, doubles, and repressed others return to haunt, torment, and lament in the present. These conceptions are also symptomatic of a suspended condition; poised and aggrieved, they are (residual) reminders and remnants of past trauma, subjugation, oppression, and unfinished business. Williams suggests ‘the gothic returns, in sum, as an enduring term, particularly serviceable in periods of crisis’ (Williams, 2007, p. 19); she also suggests that the gothic is ‘more atmospheric than neatly defined’ (Williams, 2007, p. 14). Postcolonial theory also uses the notion of ‘haunting’ to represent an inherent anxiety manifested from the past into the present (O’Riley, 2007, pp. 1–15). Skewed and uneasy colonial contexts expose uneven and unstable power arrangements; such unstable arrangements are recognised and replicated through binary notions of the self and other, the colonised and coloniser through submission and possession. Here, contradictions are at play; this ambiguity, to an extent, is relational and constitutive of a liminal state that can either be transformative or paradoxically, defer conclusion. Othering applied through the colonial/postcolonial lens is Pagan/ Christian, visible/invisible, urban/rural, innocence/corruption, etc. Who or what is haunting who? Who is the ‘Other’ in this case? Othering is also applicable through

Landscape, liminality, lament 193 a variety of perspectives – through socio-spatial Othering – where ‘bordering . . . and identities are fetishized’ (Passi, 2020, p. 20). In ‘Being a Border’ 2021, Nuit Banai refers to Dubois’ theory of double consciousness, that is, of seeing the world through a veil; the veil, in this instance, becomes an analogy to describe occlusion and a colonial ‘hegemonic power structure regarding the acquisition of profit to the exploitation of black bodies’ (Banai et al., 2021, p. 38). Thus, the veil-enabled ‘twoness’ – double consciousness housed in one’s body – is portrayed in language straddling occlusion and transparency (Banai et al., 2021, p. 38). This theoretical stance (though initially observed from a racial perspective) can be used to animate different histories and experiences and is an example as to how postcolonial theories that are developed in relation to blackness can often be applied to Irish bodies. In Theorising from the Border (2006), Mignolo and Tlostanova also refer to the term ‘double consciousness’, where they argue there cannot be border thinking without double consciousness – an unavoidable condition of colonial domination (p. 211). The veil silences and represses; it can therefore allow for an articulation of traumatic emotional states and subjectivities, such subjectivities being the voices and memories of Others, outcasts, the repressed, and those existing in the margins. The veil as a gothic trope is used to represent sexual repression, desire, and virginity (Kosofsky-Sedgwick, 1980, as cited in Williams, 2007, p. 95), however, in this sense, veiling is used here to consider the spatial articulation of its use through doubling, double consciousness, dissociation, and splitting as a means to explore Othering. Notes to self The Gap, although a place, is also a spatial term to assist in locating practice topographically and psychologically. Jane Rendell (2010) utilises Freud’s conceptualisation of repression and its links to repetition – on the threshold between conscious and unconscious. Elements of past conflict include the ways that the repressed seeks to ‘return’ to the present, whether in the form of dreams, symptoms, or acting out (Rendell, 2010, p. 62). Active engagement with a site by returning and walking as a method and process has become integral in assisting subjective writing and new perspectives. Attempts to understand my perambulations in the context of practice has allowed self-reflexivity and ideas regarding affect and embodiment and attempts to articulate such responses through practice, that is, as an affective assemblage. I am reminded of Cixous’ theoretical writings where she explores the self (herself) as an affective ‘assemblage’ in relation to new ‘materialism’ (Bennett, 2010, pp. 21–38) and where the singular subjectivity of self becomes fragmented and altered as an ‘altobiography’ (Hanrahan, 2000, pp.  282–295), as articulated through different virtualities of repetition, revisiting, and reimaging. Through alterity, a sense of fluidity deters and suspends time to promote a state of ­in-betweenness or in between time. Aspects of research have been extended to include fragments relative to the body, psyche, and landscape. Methods of practice through/of a fragmentary approach are regarded through intermittent physical access and memories, and application

194  Ann Carragher and reading of the works in binary form (fragmented form – see ‘Notes to Self’ in the following) are integral to the research. Spatial and temporal layering comes into being through the subjective text, and the specifics of place and memory comingle and converge. The subjective text creates a new emerging voice and narrative. A meshing of past and present folds and unfolds through temporal junctures of time, space, and material affects. A myriad of creative manifestations and textual assemblages emerge, presenting ideas regarding the fragmentary/fragmentation of the self, memory, and place. Notes to Self, ‘Landscape Liminality Lament’ – Between the Stones and the Stars. A glen, a gap, a fold – such places are dialectical and contain an inward and outward tension and ambiguity, betwixt and between, a liminal third space, a heterotopia14 (a complex and contradictory place). In and out, here and there, folding – unfolding; a place, a space, a non-place.15 A space time shift . . . I feel detached, I try to recall the familiar. I’m in the lowest part of the glen, the gap; it’s boggy, rocky, and eerily quiet. With the Kilnasaggart stone monument behind me, I head west towards Moyry Pass. The old coach road finds its tiresome way around the relenting steep incline of Claret Rock, at the northern end of Faughart Hill. The temperature drops, and the ditch and thick bracken smell musty. Carnagore and Slievenabolea cast a permanent shadow on the lower pass, and I quicken my step. ‘Who controls the pass today?’ I ask myself. Soon, the grey granite of Moyry castle appears on my right, and head down, I dig deep. I feel the weight of history on my heels, I resist glancing over my shoulder. Before I know it, I’m on the flat, it’s brighter, I feel relieved, and I continue along Faughart upper, past the convent on my left, where eventually the road dips, and I know I’m not far from St. Brigid’s Shrine. The border was dark, and it created an ability to dwell in uncertainty. Unstable, in-flux, wavering, nuanced, uncertain, ambiguous, intricate, complex, changeable, speculative. The border is no longer visible, the army and custom house have gone – traces mark and scar the landscape. The trace is a productive theoretical tool for unearthing layered histories and divergent narratives. Oscillating between the ‘hidden and familiar’, visible/invisible, material/ immaterial, this landscape involves essential ambivalence and evokes uncertainty and suspicion. The landscape is a physical archive, and I have just walked the ‘international boundary line’. I stand here alone, between the stones and the stars, while dusk begins to powder the landscape with an alluring grey blue tinge – soon it becomes oppressive/intense. Nothing is clear as the darkness comes. I feel untethered. I am between things, night and day, on a hinge between darkness and light. I am between worlds, between voices, so many voices. I struggle to keep hold of the shapes before me, they slide and shift. They move, dissolve, bleed, fracture, and re-emerge, shape shifting and shifting shape. Finally, as

Landscape, liminality, lament 195 darkness arrives, they seem to settle. The meagre light from the moon illuminates the railway bridge ahead of me. I pass under it. The sky is close, and the fixed stars twinkle relentlessly against the deep void of space. Faint light from the waning moon competes with the dark brooding silhouette of Feed Mountain. I am reassured abruptly by the gargling river beneath me; reshaped and tethered from bog to ditch, it travels south, relentlessly moving through time and space towards Dundalk Bay. The past sits heavy here. It curdles in places, leaving marks and deep scars. I stand where many fell. A marshy treacherous bog, where pilgrims, armies and others have passed. Is the past locked here in the Earth forever, emitting sensations and disrupting time? It presses close; we can’t return but we can lament. The ‘fragments’ in my work, are recognised and performed through relational and emotional occurrences and interruptions. As a diasporic subject, the experience of home is fragmented and discontinuous; a cycle of loss, restoration, and recovery is performed and enacted through circular migrancy and memories. This feeling of a fragmentary existence prevails, and it stays with me (until I return). The Irish landscape, like most, is fragmented through the meshing density of urban development, expansion, and infrastructure, where impervious surfaces interrupt parts of our natural landscape. This meshing belies a palimpsest of ancient connections between places, trajectories that leave traces and contours, roots and routes. The material place also functions as an indexical marker or archive. The border space, the Gap, is posited as a place of encounter on a physical and psychic level. Material inflection acts to deconstruct and present a range of considerations that illuminate and allude to concerns (regarding identity). The re-appropriation of fragments from an array of sources and materials creates a new formation and reading that are used to challenge and resist and destabilise and deconstruct a unifying narrative. The idea of fragments and collage as a feminist/ political consciousness (Lippard, 1995, p. 168) is recognised. Fragmentary effects can promote the construction of new ways of seeing, meaning, and understanding; therefore, my practice promotes the fragmentary. I adopt a methodological framework of fragments/fragmentary responses in textual and visual form. The process and method of collage is also constitutive of fragmentation and is widely adopted for its oppositional potential in questioning the traditional, the political order, mainstream culture, and conventional perceptions (Cran, 2014, as cited by Garcia-Lazo et al., 2020, p. 3). I attend to fragmented memories, entangled with place, performed through a subjective voice and text. History and its interactions with geography are precarious where a sense of belonging may lie. The reference to place in the text acknowledges a local topography, gesturing to historical past material relevant to an unfolding context of trauma, violence, and loss. This semi-autobiographical mode is reflective and grounded in the materiality of place and its affects. The gothic emerges through aesthetic renderings and applications (doubling and filmic tension/a dark brooding sensitivity). My writing and practice are constitutive of spatiality: I am absent and present in a specific landscape; thus, this absence and presence is reflected and articulated through (post) phenomenological and affective experiences that find a tangible projection through writing and practice.

196  Ann Carragher The fragmentary nature of my research has become a central theme to assist in reflecting and presenting the physical and psychic connections with the site and landscape in and around the Gap of the North. Home This short film explores the notion of home for the (returning and departing) diasporic subject. Memories and material traces in the landscape are partially revisited and re-enacted through a Rückenfigur16 (evoking doubling and twoness) who acts to create a sense of tension and displacement within the frame. The film fluctuates between absence and presence, stillness and flux and aims to conjure a sense of loss.

Figure 12.1 ‘Home, 2019/2020’. Still taken from short film, depicting the inscribed Kilnasaggart Pillar stone/Ogham stone and young girl beside it with Feede Mountain in the distance. Co. Armagh, Northern Ireland.

Figure 12.2 ‘Home, 2019/2020’. Still taken from short film with figure looking west from St Brigids Shrine on Hill of Faughart. Co. Louth, Ireland.

Landscape, liminality, lament 197

Figure 12.3 ‘Home, 2019/2020’. Still taken from short film with figure standing on the road looking towards St Brigid’s Shrine on the Hill of Faughart, Co. Louth, Ireland.

Figure 12.4 ‘Home, 2019/2020’. Still taken from short film. View from the ferry as it departs from Warrenpoint harbour in Carlingford Lough, on the Irish Sea with Clermont mountain and Anglesey mountain in background. Northern Ireland/Ireland.

Am: bush A variety of discursive elements and fragments have assisted in constructing and informing practice. Each individual element can be read independently or immanently tracked through (invisible) threads that bind or textural fragments that connect. The entanglement of practice, place, and text is where indexical objects, that is, the artwork, are used as signifiers of past incursions, diasporic episodes, and temporal disruptions. This image from the short film loop Am: bush 2019/20 encapsulates the memory and material remains evidenced in the colonised/post-colonised landscape; where the Rhododendron bush acts as signifier of the past and its relationship to the present, and the Gap becomes a haunted, spectral, and uncanny site.

198  Ann Carragher

Figure 12.5 ‘Am:bush’ 2019/2020. Still taken from short film loop of Rhododendron bush in the Gap of the North, Hill of Faughart, Northern Ireland/Ireland.

Conclusive remarks The social and political realities of growing up in close proximity to this very contested delineation on the landscape helped me understand the complicated terrain and context and instilled in me the notion (from an early age) that this was not normal (though it was normalised to an extent). The complicated everyday restrictions experienced both psychologically and physically confounded questions of identity and belonging; if anything, it helped reinforce and appraise any questions I had regarding my nationality and identity. I have considered, analysed, and introduced specific elements associated with the topography of the Gap of the North to create a range of interdisciplinary works, and these have become indexical provocations relative to past trauma on the landscape. The metaphorical treatment of the materials and images I use seek to perform tension, ambiguity, and a liminal and paradoxical state where the past still haunts the present. Notes 1 Drumlins are elongated, teardrop-shaped hills of rock, sand, and gravel that formed under moving glacier ice. They can be up to 2 miles long. The word originates from the Irish word droimnín meaning smallest ridge. 2 Literal translation from Irish Gaelic – Gap of Ulster. 3 The Pale represents areas of Ireland that were directly under the governance of the English. 4 The Plantation of Ulster – 1609, organised colonisation of the province of Ulster by the British. 5 The town of Newry and the surrounding area of South Armagh was very much associated with being a battleground during the troubles; South Armagh was described as ‘Bandit Country’ (Harnden, 2000, p. 68) by then Secretary of State for NI, Merlyn Rees in 1974, as it was synonymous with outlaws, militia activities and terrorist atrocities.

Landscape, liminality, lament 199 6 The man-made border division created in 1921–1922. 7 Dundalk had for centuries been a loyal bastion of Anglo – Norman power and influence in the North marches of the Pale (O’Sullivan, 1977, p. 24) 8 These were people suspected of being secretly abducted and murdered by paramilitaries during the Troubles in Northern Ireland (1960–1998). Retrieved December 2022, from www.iclvr.ie/en/ICLVR/Pages/TheDisappeared 9 RIRA – The real IRA are a dissident Irish republican paramilitary group. 10 Ogham is an early Irish medieval language (4th century) inscribed onto large pillar stones. 11 The Good Friday Agreement, 1998 (also known as the ‘Belfast Agreement’) was a peace deal brokered to bring an end to the 30 years of conflict and to establish power sharing and self-governance to the province. 12 In line with the Good Friday Agreement 1998. 13 This is the Parliament building and seat of the Northern Ireland Assembly. 14 Heterotopia is a concept introduced and elaborated on by the philosopher Michel Foucault as a counter site, that is, Other, intense, and contradictory, by way of contrast to a utopia. https://foucault.info/documents/heterotopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en/ 15 Non-place was coined by anthropologist Marc Augé to describe a contradictory place, an in-between place that is transient, interchangeable, and vague. It is also a generic place, relative to super-modernity (Relph, 2016). www.placeness.com/overview-ofanti-place-terms-and-processes-placelessness-non-place-rootshock-etc/ 16 The Rückenfigur is a German term meaning ‘figure from the back’. It is a compositional device primarily used to create a sense of longing. It also provides a metaphorical bridge with the viewer by simultaneously creating a sense of unity and detachment. ­www.artshelp.com/the-mysterious-appeal-of-the-ruckenfigur/

References Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G.,  & Tiffin, H. (2000). Post-colonial studies: The key concepts. Routledge/Psychology Press. Banai, B., Long, D., & Halsall, F. (2021). Being a border (transmission sites). Paper Visual Art. Bardon, J. (1999). Northern Ireland a place apart or a variation on a theme. The Irish Association for Cultural, Economic, and Social Relations. Retrieved November  2022, from https://irish-association.org/assets/uploads/publications/Northern-Ireland-a-place-apartor-a-variation-on-a-theme.pdf Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter. Duke University Press. Bhabha, H. (2004). The location of culture. Taylor and Francis. Blanco, M. del P., & Peeren, E. (2013). The spectralities reader. Bloomsbury Academic. Bradley, I. (2003). The Celtic way. Darton, Longman and Todd. (Original work published 1993) Brambilla, C. (2015). Navigating the Euro/African border and migration nexus through the borderscapes lens: Insights from the LampedusaInFestival. In C. Brambilla, J. Laine, J. W. Scott, & G. Bocchi (Eds.), Borderscaping: Imaginations and practices of border making. Ashgate. Canavan, T. (1990). Frontier town: Illustrated history of Newry (1st ed.). Blackstaff Press Ltd. Cran, R. (2014). Collage in the twentieth century: Art, literature, and culture. Routledge. Dawson, G. (2007). Making peace with the past (1st ed.). Manchester University Press. Dell’Agnese, E., & Amilhat-Szary, A. (2015). Borderscapes: From border landscapes to border aesthetics. Geopolitics, 20(1), 4–13.

200  Ann Carragher Farrell, D. (2000). The disappeared: Innocent landscapes. Retrieved December 2022, from https://davidfarrell.org/landscape-as-witness/the-disappeared/intro/ Foucault, M. (1967). Of other spaces (Des Espace Autres). Retrieved May  2023, from https://foucault.info/documents/heterotopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en/ Garcia-Lazo, V., Locke, K., Rupcich, N., O’Connor, G., Yoon, C., & Longley, A. (2020). Pedagogy and social critique in the era of fragmentation: A collective writing experience as Cadavres Exquis. Video Journal of Education and Pedagogy, 5(1), 1–22. Hanrahan, M. (2000). Of altobiography. Paragraph, 23(3), 282–295. Harnden, T. (2000). Bandit country. Hodder & Stoughton. Hayward, K. (2017). UK in a changing Europe. Part 1: The origins of the Irish border. QUB. Retrieved March  2022, from www.qub.ac.uk/brexit/Brexitfilestore/ Filetoupload,737794,en.pdf Holmsten, E., & Gilsenan Nordin, I. (2009). Introduction: Borders and states of in-betweenness in Irish literature and culture. In Liminal borderlands in Irish literature and culture. Peter Lang. Hughes, E. (1991). Culture and politics in Northern Ireland 1960–1990. Open University Press. Hughes, W., & Smith, A. (2003). Defining the relationships between Gothic and the Postcolonial. Gothic Studies, 5(2), 1–6. Jackson, J. A. (1963). The Irish in Britain. Routledge. Johnston, D. (2018). The development of the road system in North Louth and South Armagh. Journal of the County Louth Archaeological and Historical Society, 29(2), 204–235. Kosofsky-Sedgwick, E. (1980). The Coherence of Gothic Convention. Arno Press. Künzler, S. (2019). Sites of memory in the Irish landscape? Approaching Ogham stones through memory studies. Memory Studies, 13(6), 1284–1304. Lippard, L. R. (1995). The pink glass swan: Selected feminist essays on art. The New Press. Mignolo, W. D., & Tlostanova, M. V. (2006). Theorizing from the borders. European Journal of Social Theory, 9, 205–221. Nash, C., Graham, B., & Reid, B. (2016). Partitioned lives. Routledge. National Museum of Ireland. (2023). St. Brigids day: 1 Marking the quarter day. Retrieved 2023, from www.museum.ie/en-IE/News/St-Brigids-Day Nora, P. (1989). Between memory and history: Les Lieux de Mémoire. Representations, 26, 7–24. O’Byrne, D. (2016). “You’re not in Ireland now”: Landscape and loss in Irish women’s poetry. In C. Berberich, N. Campbell, & R. Hudson (Eds.), Affective landscapes in literature, art, and everyday life: Memory, place and the senses (2nd ed.). Routledge. O’Riley, M. F. (2007). Postcolonial haunting: Anxiety, affect, and the situated encounter. Postcolonial Text, 3(4). O’Sullivan, H. (1977). The Cromwellian and restoration settlements in the civil Parish of Dundalk, 1649 to 1673. Journal of the County Louth Archaeological and Historical Society, 19(1), 24–58. Retrieved December 2022, from https://doi.org/10.2307/27729438 O’Sullivan, M. (2009). Limning the liminal, thinking the threshold: Irish studies approach to theory. In I. G. Nordin & E. Holmsten (Eds.), Liminal borderlands in Irish literature and culture: Reimagining Ireland (1st ed.). Peter Lang UK. Passi, A. (2020). Problemising bordering, ordering and othering as manifestations of sociospatial fetishism. Geography Research Unit. Relph, E. (2016). Placeness, place, placelessness. Retrieved May 2023, from www.placeness. com/overview-of-anti-place-terms-and-processes-placelessness-non-place-rootshock-etc/ Rendell, J. (2010). Site writing: The architecture of art criticism. I. B. Tauris.

Landscape, liminality, lament 201 Schimanski, J. (2016). Border culture. Retrieved 2020, from https://bordercult.hypotheses.org/ Silf, M. (2005). Sacred places: Stations on a Celtic way. Lion Hudson. Solnit, R. (2011). A book of migrations. Verso. Thipphawong, L. (2020). Arts help: The mysterious appeal of the Rückenfigur. Retrieved July 2023, from www.artshelp.com/the-mysterious-appeal-of-the-ruckenfigur/ Turner, V. (1967). The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. Cornell University Press. van Gennup, A. (1909). The rites of passage. Chicago University Press. Williams, G. (2007). The Gothic (documents in contemporary art). Whitechapel Gallery.

13 The Lake District Liminal landscape between North and South Basak Tanulku

Prologue The North meant merely a cardinal direction on the compass and cold weather to me. It became something else when I became a student at Lancaster University in the North-west of England. Old and smelly lanes, plants growing on dry stone walls, dark and rainy weather mixing day and night, fog mixing Earth and Sky, red fells visible on a clear day, whose names I would learn when I travelled, modest people ready to help you whenever you ask for it, and more animals than people. Collies, ponies, sheep, foxes, ducks, deer, and squirrels roam on or next to our campus, made of brick. Terraced houses are made of slate and limestone instead of concrete. And everywhere was green covered with native beech, oak, hawthorn, yew, and chestnuts. My experience of the North advanced with daily visits to the Lake District. There were no mountains but these red fells. There were no lakes but waters and tarns.1 Everything was small: homes, packhorse bridges, and chapels, like red fells and waters. Throughout the years I lived in Lancaster, the bus service number 555, connecting Lancaster and the Lakes, also transformed into a journey to my inner self, as I looked for some escape and solitude far from everyday duties. I started to lose myself in this famous landscape, which has become a part of my life ever since. A Dual Nation Divided between The North and the South The North/South divide is a central topic in the fields of economic, political, social, and cultural geography. In this context, North and South not only indicate physical locations but also economic, cultural, and symbolic differences between geographies across the world, such as in the current Italy, Europe, or the USA during the civil war in the 19th century. More simply, they symbolise the centre and periphery around the world. The term “North” describes both a physical and a symbolic realm (Davidson, 2005; Goldie & White, 2018; Jorgensen & Langum, 2018), and its meaning has changed according to the historical and cultural context, as represented through different images and values (Davidson, 2005; Jorgensen & Langum, 2018). During premodern Europe, the North was viewed as the social other by the South, DOI: 10.4324/9781003354772-17

The Lake District 203 which was considered the centre of civilisation, as noted by Jorgensen and Langum (2018). Davidson also argues that the meaning of North has changed over time. For some, the North represents refinement. For others, it symbolises deprivation or isolation. North can also be associated with wilderness (regarding nature or people) attaining different values. To certain individuals, “North” connotes a pristine nature devoid of human intervention. However, for others, it suggests a barren terrain inhabited by “wild” people deemed uncivilised (Davidson, 2005). What is the significance of the North/South divide in the UK, and how has its meaning evolved? In the UK, in some studies, the North/South divide applies to England; in others, it applies to the whole of the UK. As Taylor explains, although Scotland and Wales belong to the North, Northern Ireland’s position is usually ambivalent (Taylor, 2000).2 The North and the South are regarded as opposites, which created a dual geography or “two nations”. Despite extensive discussions on the topic, scholars cannot agree on where to draw the line between them (Dorling, 2010; Goldie & White, 2018; Taylor, 2000; Montgomery, 2015; Pidd, 2015; Rawnsley, 2000). Different criteria define the North and the South economically, culturally, and politically. The South has been the centre, whereas the rest have been regarded as the periphery and categorised and judged by the values produced in the South, particularly in London (Maconie, 2008; Shields, 1991; Spracklen, 2016; Riches et al., 2016; Russell, 2004; Lee, 2018). The North was usually regarded as negative (the wild, desolate, poor, uncultivated, cold, peripheral) and the “other” by the powerful and wealthy South (Spracklen, 2016). Spracklen adds that “the North is a symbolic wilderness for the hegemonic elites of England” (Spracklen, 2016, p. 10). Shields also explains that the South was considered sophisticated and cultured, while the North was associated with outdoor activities (Shields, 1991). Citing Massey (1988), Shields also adds that the North, particularly its rural realm, was colonised by Southerners who moved to the region because of its beauty and low cost of living (Shields, 1991, p. 242). Over decades, the North has been re-created as the myth of the working class landscape in TV, cinema, and documentaries (Shields, 1991; Spracklen, 2016) and it has been fetishised as a masculine and working-class landscape in the media, TV, and cinema (p. 9). However, a different reading of the relationship between the North and the South comes from David Matless, who argues that they complete each other as different parts of a united English Nation, one corresponding to wilderness and the other corresponding to civilisation (Matless, 2005). Many writers and painters have focused on the hills and moorlands of the North, which contribute to the region’s distinct identity. For instance, the Pennines’ moorlands are considered England’s last wilderness and are promoted as a tourist attraction for visitors across the country (Lee, 2018, p. 133). According to Helen M. Jewell, the North/South divide in the country can be traced back to its geomorphological formation. The North had difficult weather and soil, making it a more suitable place for pastoralism, while agriculture thrived in the South due to its appropriate weather and soil. This division also influenced the lifestyle of the people in the two regions. Pastoralists relied on animals for their

204  Basak Tanulku livelihood and had more freedom of movement, resulting in smaller hamlets and greater independence. Instead, agriculture required working on the land, making people more dependent on the land and one another, leading to larger and more permanent hamlets (Jewell, 1994). For some, the North and South symbolise different economic sectors and classes. The North represents the working/lower class, and the South represents the upper classes. Montgomery adds that the North and the South are defined according to financial resources or their absence. In this context, Devon, Cornwall, Scotland, and Wales also belong to the North (Montgomery, 2015). Voting behaviour further reflects this division. The North generally votes for the Labour Party in England. In contrast, the South votes for the Conservatives, although this habit has changed because of Brexit.3 According to Dorling (2010), economic, social, and cultural differences exist between the North and South. Dorling highlights five aspects – life expectancy, poverty, education and skills, employment, and wealth – to illustrate how the North is at a disadvantage compared to the South (ibid.). Rawnsley argues that defining and bordering the North has always been a challenge for political authorities and historians alike. Whether it is mapping the Northern counties, the Northern region, the North of the country, or simply the North, there has been a continuous debate about which counties are included in the North. According to Rawnsley, the North’s identity was shaped by various processes that happened simultaneously, including the mapping and formation of cartography of county boundaries. Its identity was also influenced by economic activities, namely, craftsmanship and industrialisation, which gave rise to the working-class landscape of cities such as Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, and Bradford (Rawnsley, 2000). Their respective cultures also reflect the division between the North and South. Ian Jack explains that the North is associated with industry, reason, and urban life, while the South is characterised by the archaic, conservative, romantic, aristocratic, and the rural life (Jack, 2019). In England, language is also used to distinguish between the North and the South. Montgomery’s study on perceptual dialectology shows that non-linguist participants of the study identify the boundaries between the regions based on dialect differences (Montgomery, 2015). Martin also adds that the North has distinct cultural traits, including food, style, sports, and humour that reflect a friendly and genuine way of life not commonly found in the South (Martin, 2008). Like Scotland and Wales, the North is considered a Celtic landscape. One of the most important figures, King Arthur, the symbol of Celtic or pre-Christian England who fought against Anglo-Saxon invaders, is a disputed figure. Although he was a symbol of non-English, or pagan, Celtic, and Brittonic people, England was the primary place of his birth (Tintagel) and death (Camlann) (Watson, 2016, 2017). King Arthur is a hero symbolising the conflict and rivalry between defending Brittonic people and the invaders, the Anglo-Saxons. Currently, there is a debate about whether the North is the actual location of the Arthurian legend. This sparked a dispute between the North and South regarding which one could rightfully claim King Arthur (Wood, 1981, 2005).

The Lake District 205 The blurring boundaries between the North and the South According to Shields (1991), the North and South in England are not uniform or static. In recent years, England’s North has undergone significant shifts, with the service sector making up a larger portion of the economy and continuous urban renewal projects altering its physical landscape and affecting the working-class communities (Shields, 1991). These developments have led to blurring boundaries between North and South, particularly economically. As a result, Shields argues that some parts in the North, such as Didsbury in Manchester, Bearsden in Glasgow and Hallam in Sheffield, can be regarded as parts of the South (Shields, 1991, p. 239). A more recent argument came from urban planner Dr. Mark Tewdwr-Jones, who deconstructs the well-known contrast between the two geographies. He argues that some cities, such as York, Manchester, and Sheffield, can be considered part of the South. He suggests considering how far London’s influence extends by asking, “Where does London end?” He describes how a simple boundary between the North and South is difficult to draw in the complex geography of England.4 The “London effect” across the North can be seen in the developments in large cities such as Manchester.5 These developments symbolise de- and ­post-industrialisation processes, which reduced the working classes and the associated economic sectors. A working-class landscape of pubs and mills made of red brick and steel completed its built environment, as seen in large structures, specifically, train stations, bridges, and arcades across the North. However, this built environment has been abandoned and left to rot, waiting to be transformed into hubs for “creative classes”. Moreover, glass has replaced steel in the high-rises, shopping malls, and business complexes catering to transnational service sectors. It is also important to recognise that the South is not a uniform region consisting solely of wealthy, white, and highly educated individuals. There are inner tensions and divides within the area. Recent developments are challenging the power imbalance between the North and South. One is devolution, which is about the transfer of power to the North regarding some economic and political aspects, albeit not fully corresponding to a separatist rationale. In this context, there are some alliances such as “Northern Powerhouse” and “Northern Powerhouse Partnership” aiming at providing economic independence to the North of England (particularly large cities such as Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Hull, and Newcastle). However, several political alliances, such as the “Northern Party” (now defunct) and “Northern Independence Party”, established in October 2020, were also formed to create a Northern country independent from the London-dominated “South” (www.freethenorth.co.uk/). Some argue that creating a separate North is necessary for the working classes who have lost their jobs and homes due to the systematic deindustrialisation of the area. The North needs clearly defined borders to claim independence from the South.6 Moreover, in 2015, a petition on Change.org was launched about the North of England joining Scotland to be independent of London and the South (Pidd, 2015).7 The second challenge comes from the works written on the North by writers such as Stuart Maconie (2008) and Dave Russell (2004), who extend the discussion

206  Basak Tanulku to the affective aspects of this divide, particularly to an understanding of a “deep North” only kept by the true insiders, the Northerners. In this context, instead of being seen as a mere object of study or a backward region, the North represents an independent identity not defined by any other centre of economic or socio-cultural power.8 A subject that needs to be investigated is the position of the rural realm in the North/South divide which has rarely been studied. Also, the rural realm is not uniform. Instead, there are variations within it, such as the rural realm has been regarded as an essential actor in defining a proper English national identity, as a symbol of a white, puritan, and traditional way of life (Lowenthal, 1991; Mandler, 1997; Mischi, 2009; Readman, 2018). However, some rural areas have also been subject to “rural deprivation” and studied in relation to the urban (the “urban/rural gap”). As explained widely in the literature, urban areas are often seen as positive (prosperous, modern, and advanced) in contrast to rural areas, which are viewed negatively (less developed, poorer, and traditional) (Aalen, 1992; Williams, 1973; Schorske, 1998; Thurgill, 2019). This opposition between the urban and the rural has become strengthened, especially in the process of capitalist accumulation. The urban realm is considered more advanced than rural areas economically, technologically, and socio-culturally. In addition, the urban realm has exploited the rural by extracting its resources, such as water, wood, food, and energy, at the cost of the rural folk. This has made the rural more dependent on the urban, causing them to abandon their traditional industries in favour of tourism. Additionally, city dwellers have moved to rural areas, leading to changes in the population and higher housing costs, ultimately resulting in increased poverty widely studied in the academic circles (rural gentrification) (Phillips, 1993; Phillips et al., 2023; Smith et al., 2018; Shucksmith, 2020). What is the position of the rural North in the North/South divide? Is it part of the North or the South? An interpretation comes from Robert Edgar (2022) who suggests that urban areas in the North are isolated, deprived, and have a sense of nostalgia and horror. Drawing upon recent works that explore several authors’ memories of the 1970s and 1980s, Edgar argues that these themes continue to haunt our present. Edgar also notes that the escape to the past is more commonly experienced in isolated and forgotten Northern towns rather than in rural areas (ibid.). This demonstrates that some rural areas do not fit a Northern stereotype and require further investigation. The Lake District as a landscape of culture(s) From cultural to bodily consumption of the North

The Lake District is one of the fifteen national parks in the UK and is visited by approximately 20 million tourists annually.9 The Lake District has a diverse and vibrant topography, with its lakes, fells, tarns, rivers, and the coast of the Irish Sea. It is a symbol of the idyllic rural lifestyle and the starting point of the conservation movement in the 20th century. Today, it is a national park that offers diverse amenities and activities for tourists, particularly outdoor activities. The area also attracts

The Lake District 207 art enthusiasts with various festivals and events featuring past artists such as the Lake Poets. Additionally, it is a popular location for movies and TV shows, further adding to its image as a picturesque rural setting. Where does the Lake District belong – in the North or South? The Lake District’s ambivalent position in the country has been widely discussed in academic circles; it is unlike other national parks such as Peak District, Yorkshire Dales, Dartmoor in England, Snowdonia in Wales or those in Scotland, such as the Cairngorms, which are easier to define and contextualise. The Lake District has been defined by contrasting concepts. For example, some, like John Murdoch, refer to it as a “Northern Arcadia” (Cooper, 2008), while others view it as outside the North (Ashmore, 2010; Shields, 1991; Urry, 1995; Whyte, 2007). The Lake District has also been a contested landscape in the past and present between different actors, such as the farming and tourism sectors, insiders and outsiders, and conservationists and profit seekers (Whyte, 2002). This chapter looks at the Lake District through the lens of culture to understand its position in the North/South divide.  This section reads the Lake District as a “landscape of culture(s)” created by and promoted to the upper classes. It examines the transformation of the Lake District from a landscape of cultural consumption into a landscape of bodily consumption by the upper classes, reflecting the power of the South of the country in shaping the area. The making of the Lake District as a rural idyll can be traced back to the 18th century to the emergence of the Picturesque and Romantic movements, which made the area a target of artists, such as Wordsworth and Ruskin, and travellers and tourists from the South of the country (Ashmore, 2010; Darby, 2000; Usherwood, 2003; Tolia-Kelly, 2007). William Wordsworth wrote that the Lake District was “a sort of national property, in which every man has a right and interest who has an eye to perceive and a heart to enjoy” (Wordsworth, 1835, p. 88). The Lake District became a site for the upper classes searching for refuge in the 19th century. However, individuals such as Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley and Beatrix Potter initiated conservation and protection efforts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As Ashmore argues, the Lake District addresses a particular group of people with a particular cultural capital. Ashmore also points to the role of the subject who provides this identity to the Lakes: the South. As Ashmore adds, mapping and the mapmaker’s identity are more important than what is mapped. The mapping by the South reflects the urban middle classes’ political control of England (Ashmore, 2010, p. 343). Ashmore indicates that although some of the promoted amenities and attractions may not necessarily reflect English culture and identity, this diversity appeals to tourists with high cultural capital who seek to experience a range of physical and cultural offerings (Ashmore, 2010). However, according to Usherwood, the Lake District has recently become a popular tourist destination for younger generations who want to express themselves through physical activities (Usherwood, 2003). This shift from a traditional English landscape to a more generic landscape of consumption is evident in brand names that target this new type of tourist and promote an American outdoor lifestyle. According to Usherwood, new tourists view nature as something to conquer

208  Basak Tanulku rather than appreciate. This was different from the perspective of Wordsworth, Ruskin, and Joad. The Lake District is no longer just a place to admire visually but to engage with physically. These activities also prioritise aesthetics and taste that focus on nature and protecting the environment (ibid.). Many outdoor activities, for example, hiking, trekking, wild swimming, and camping (including glamping), appeal to the middle and upper classes interested in exploring the world and achieving personal success through survival. Even if the area has transformed from a landscape of culture(s) into a landscape of bodily consumption, those who consume the area have always been the upper and middle classes. Its visitor profile reflects this exclusivity to particular sections of society, namely, white, educated or older people (Ashmore, 2010; Urry, 1995; Barr, 2019; Tolia-Kelly, 2007).10 The area’s exclusivity can also be seen both in recent gradual changes in its housing market. First, regarding the housing market, the Lake District has experienced the continuous construction of new developments and renovating or converting the old building stock; regarding the area’s partial, if not complete, gentrification, housing prices are expected to rise.11 Second, between 2011 and 2021, the average age of residents increased, and the share of residents aged between 65 and 74 years increased.12 Moreover, the percentage of retired people in South Lakeland rose from 30.2% to 32% in the same period. The Lake District as a cultural landscape Hill Farming of the North

Things were different for the Lake District before the popularisation of the area due to tourism. This section focuses on hill farming and the cultural heritage of the Lake District, which made the area a “cultural landscape” instead of a landscape of culture(s). A “cultural landscape” refers to a unique culture and related practices, whereas a landscape of culture(s) refers to the role of diverse and conflicting cultures in making a landscape. The Lake District is a cultural landscape shaped by hill farming and associated practices, which has been an essential and traditional economic activity in Cumbria. In 2017, the Lake District became a UNESCO World Heritage Site (“cultural landscape” category), mainly due to the impact of hill farming, which is characterised by farms, enclosures, fells, and valleys hosting many SSSIs (sites of specific scientific interest), nature reserves, and rich wildlife. First, to comprehend the Lake District’s position in the North/South divide, it is necessary to examine Cumbria – the county where it is situated – well before it was divided between the national park and the wider Cumbria region. In 1974, Cumbria was formed as an administrative county by combining the former counties of Cumberland, Westmorland, and parts of Lancashire and Yorkshire. However, as of April 2023, Cumbria no longer exists as an administrative area and has been split into two counties: Westmorland & Furness and Cumberland. Cumbria now only holds the status of a ceremonial county. Cumbria has created debates regarding its identity, borders, and connections with the country. Its ambivalent position in the country has been a subject of

The Lake District 209 interest among scholars. For example, Walton argues that Cumbria is rarely considered a region with a particular identity. It has no common language or dialect, economy, sports, media, or culinary tradition while its borders are disputed (Walton, 2011). Scholars such as Marshall (1981) and Ashmore (2010) say Cumbria is not a uniform county. Instead, it is symbolically separated into various parts, each representing specific economic sectors and cultures.13 According to Ashmore, Cumbria is split into separate regions – West, North, East, and the Centre – each with a unique identity. The West is known for its ship and submarine industry and is considered a working-class area. Meanwhile, North and East Cumbria, which are remote and difficult to reach, are primarily known for farming. Both regions are part of the larger Northern landscape, with the West having an industrial and working-class history and the North and East having a wild past (Ashmore, 2010). The central area of Cumbria hosts the Lake District, which caters to visitors from England and other parts of the world. As explained in the previous section, Ashmore describes how the Lake District is viewed as a tourist destination or a space for consumption and argues that the Lake District appears to lack a distinctive identity, resembling a “void” (Ashmore, 2010). Historically, Cumbria was regarded as wild and dangerous. Its people were considered outlaws, and it was a suitable site to hide from the authorities (Bates, 1907; Carruthers, 1979; Marshall, 1981). An essential element of the area is its heritage from the Neolithic or Early Bronze Ages, with items such as cairns, stone circles, barrows, or howes. The place names reflect this diversity, while local lore is packed with Celtic culture. The area has many sites associated with supernatural creatures such as elves, fairies, ghosts, and giants. The Cumbric language is now considered extinct and a part of the Common Brittonic language. However, it survives in the local sheep counting system and some place names. The area has many sites (battlegrounds, castles, and graves) and legends associated with King Arthur and the Dark Ages. During the Early Mediaeval period (sub-Roman), the Kingdom of Rheged ruled Cumbria and Southern Scotland. Cumbria has been regarded as an important Arthurian landscape by historical and contemporary scholars (Collingwood, 1924; Miller, 1975; Breeze, 2015; Wood, 1981, 2005; Glennie, 1869; Watson, 2018). Some sites around Hadrian’s Wall and Carlisle, such as Birdoswald, have been important candidates for the heritage of King Arthur. In addition, some sites, namely, Pendragon Castle, have been directly associated with King Arthur. Hill farming is an essential activity in the area and has heavily influenced the shaping of Cumbria, including the development of farmsteads, enclosures, commoning, and local dialects. The region is known for its local breeds, with the Herdwick sheep being the most famous. Over time, farming in Cumbria has transitioned from self-sufficient and small-scale to more commercial and large-scale, brought about by the arrival of the Normans. This resulted in a feudal baronial system and monasteries that heavily influenced land ownership and management. The Cistercian Monks of Furness Abbey later became the largest landowners in different parts of Cumbria. In the 14th century, Cumbria was in turmoil caused by the border reivers and the Black Death. However, by the 17th century, farming had settled down, and yeomen emerged as farmers with the right to work on common lands privately

210  Basak Tanulku owned but used by tenant farmers. According to Whyte and Winstanley (2016), farming in Cumbria primarily relies on sheep and cattle instead of crops due to the harsh climate and poor soil. The yeomen and their customary tenure created a rural landscape that is still characterised by vernacular architecture.14 Hill farming is an essential element that makes the region a q­ uasi-semi-autonomous realm separate from England. The small-scale farmers of Cumbria (yeomen) have been relatively independent of any form of authority (political or religious). This relative independence has given them more isolation and Cumbria a particular identity (Marshall, 1981). Olwig argues that the area can be regarded as a “body politic” due to the impact of hill farming and associated practices such as hefting and commoning, which provided the Lake District with a strong place identity and a Christian pastoral community ideal bound to the North Atlantic Archipelago that still survives against England’s landscape and culture prioritising private ownership (Olwig, 2018). By separating the Lake District from England, Olwig argues that the Lake District symbolises pre-capitalist culture and practices. Cumbria’s self-sufficiency is not solely reliant on hill farming. The region boasts a unique geographical position as a historic borderland between the Roman Empire and the North, with Hadrian’s Wall dividing the two. This area has been subject to centuries of conflict, known as “border reivers” and “Scottish Marshes”, due to its strategic location between England and Scotland. A small section near the borders was once called “debatable lands” because of the disputes between the two countries. Urry also notes that the Lake District can be seen as a transition between England and Scotland and as an anglicised, tamer, more accessible version of Scotland (Urry, 1995, p. 200). Cumbria was regarded as a “country in itself”, and its identity was relatively kept separate from the broader social and cultural context (Parker, 1977). The locals were called “Men of the North” (or Northern Welsh) and were isolated from the rest of the country (Carruthers, 1979).15 The ambivalent position of the Lake District and Cumbria has recently been debated on BBC Cumbria. Skelwith Bridge near Ambleside (a town in the central Lake District) is considered part of Lancashire instead of Cumbria, while many people in Furness peninsula think the same. Moreover, the borders have an identity different from Cumbria or England. In contrast, many claim to feel Scottish, and some feel as borderers instead of English or Scottish.16 Over time, the farming industry has diversified its actions to include tourism (bed and breakfasts, campsites, equestrian uses, and country sports) and forestry. Farmers are also responsible for tasks related to woodland and wildlife management, coppice working, carbon storage, water quality improvement, and renewable energy production. Currently, hill farming has created some debates in the region. First, it is regarded as reducing Cumbria’s wildlife and biodiversity (Monbiot, 2013, 2017). In this context, rewilding Cumbria’s hills has been advanced as a solution, which, as argued by Mansfield, can provide farmers with extra duties and income while reducing the number of livestock that rely on traditional farming (Mansfield, 2014). Second, farming is also seen as a victim of the contemporary museumisation of the region. A recent example is the purchase of the Thorneythwaite Farm by the National Trust in 2016, creating debates on its transformation into an inept farm.17

The Lake District 211 The vilification of hill farming and related practices may result in increased tourism and a population change in the area that would primarily benefit the wealthy. This could turn the area into an outdoor museum for them while forcing locals to give up their land. Furthermore, rewilding could worsen the situation by restricting access to the area for locals and those with lower incomes.18 The vilification of hill farming is similar to that of the North: hill farming symbolises a traditional way of life in the modern world. The recent steps of adapting farming and its practices can be seen as efforts to make farming a part of the tourist economy, transforming it into a sector dependent on tourists. Neither North nor South, somewhere in between the two Physical and symbolic borders divide, exclude, and create tensions. However, they create their ultimate enemy, liminality, something belonging to neither side. Liminal is dangerous and uncanny because it is difficult to define: neither good nor evil, neither here nor there. Tanulku and Pekelsma argue that liminality does not mean hybridity, which is formed by mixing different things. Instead, liminality is uncanny because it is unidentifiable and cannot be categorised. It is not a thing, person, or place. It is also not nothing. It is on the border, bridge, or threshold or it is the bridge, border, or threshold itself (Tanulku & Pekelsma, 2024). This chapter analyses the Lake District to determine its position in the North and South divide by analysing its identity and culture during a time of decreasing borders between North and South, urban and rural, and global and local due to globalisation processes, economic and technological changes, leading to increasing mobility of people, things, and cultures. It has become difficult to define a landscape solely as Northern or Southern. The chapter also seeks an answer to the broader question of the North/South divide and their role in the formation of a national identity and unity. Is there another North challenging this divide and change its position in this power imbalance? The chapter shows that the ‘Lake District’ is an ambivalent landscape left in between a symbolic South and a material and cultural North. Throughout history, the South has had the ability to shape the area to its liking, often resulting in a landscape that reflects its elitism and exclusivity. This has created a social and economic imbalance often portrayed as beneficial for the locals, but in reality, it extends inequality in the region. The Lake District can be regarded as a landscape made and remade by and for the upper and middle classes. Its landscape reflects their taste and way of life, particularly in the last two centuries, and has transformed the area from an isolated wilderness into a popular destination for the national and global upper and middle classes. Furthermore, its wilderness is preserved, conserved, and introduced by and for the upper classes. The Lake District can be regarded as an area constructed and consumed primarily by the South (and currently by a more global group of tourists). However, the symbolic representation of the South in this landscape creates conflicts with its Northern material and cultural reality. The area faces conflict as a result of the South reflected in a touristic landscape of consumption and the North reflected in

212  Basak Tanulku a farming landscape of production. The Lake District and the broader ceremonial county of Cumbria remain a Northern landscape. Also, the area’s topography, language, local lore, and historical heritage are all distinctly Northern. It is a Celtic landscape with remains from the Early Bronze and Neolithic Ages and with essential Arthurian cultural and physical heritage. Its hill farming and commoning are very peculiar to this landscape and different from the rest of the country. Does the Lake District belong to the North? This is not easy to answer. Historically, the Lake District’s position as a boundary among different empires, cultures, and people created a unique and transitional landscape in the North. In addition, its border positionality is fuelled by other divides existing simultaneously and intersecting with the North and South divide, such as farming/tourism, working-class/upperclass, English/non-English, and more recently, local/national/global. In his blog piece on Alderley Edge, by citing Alan Gardner, Edward Watson writes that crossroads are liminal sites where boundaries between different realms are blurred. Alderley Edge, famous for its hauntings and associations with the Wizard of Alderley, contains crossroads and boundaries; it is a liminal, holy, or haunted landscape (Watson, 2011). The Lake District (and Cumbria) has always been a no man’s land, debatable land, an edge with elements from diverse cultures which has held an ambivalent position in the country. Perhaps its liminal position makes the area admired and fallen in love with. Acknowledgements I thank the reviewers, Dr. Christopher Donaldson, Dr. Michael Winstanley, and Dr. Joe Ravetz, who made valuable comments on my chapter. I also thank people living in the Lake District and Cumbria who gave me essential information about the area. Finally, I thank the Lake District, which welcomed me every time I visited, with its dangers, mystery, beauty, tranquillity, and friendliness. Notes 1 “Fell” means “hill” or “mountain”, and “tarn” refers to a lake/small lake in the North of England, Lake District, and Cumbria. 2 The literature cited in this chapter also reflects this difference: some deal with England, and some deal with the UK. 3 Halliday, J. (2019). www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/dec/13/labours-red-walldemolished-by-­tory-onslaught   Voting behaviour is different in Scotland because of the Scottish National Party (SNP). 4 www.thetimes.co.uk/article/leeds-isn-t-in-the-north-says-academic-it-s-in-londonb6l0cgtcw 5 Instead of a working-class industrial city, Manchester is a more diverse city; please see my blog “Manchester: one city with many names” (2016). http://particulations.blogspot.com/2016/04/manchester-one-city-with-many-names-and.html 6 www.panopticmedia.org/post/northern-independence-the-answer-to-the-english-northsouth-divide 7 www.change.org/p/the-uk-government-allow-the-north-of-england-to-secede-­fromthe-uk-and-join-scotland 8 The terms North and South are too simplistic to understand the variegated nature of the UK and its relationship with different geographical scales. P. J. Taylor (2000) discusses

The Lake District 213 the identity of Britishness, Englishness, and Northernness and their relational meaning vis-a-vis nation-states, regions, cities, and networks globally. In this context, “Northern” is not a unified and monolithic realm but rather diverse and conflicting. 9 The number is taken from the web page www.lakedistrict.gov.uk/learning/factsandfigures. In addition, the number of overseas tourists has risen dramatically, and according to the 2015 figures, Cumbria as a region received 10  million foreign tourists.  www. choosecumbria.co.uk/news/record-number-of-foreign-visitors-to-lake-district 10 www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/lake-district-diversity-visitorsnational-park-white-bame-mobility-a9263181.html 11 https://cumbriacrack.com/2021/03/15/house-prices-soar-in-north-lake-district-as-buyers-from-out-of-cumbria-swoop-in/. For the data on Cumbria housing market; please see www.plumplot.co.uk/Cumbria-house-prices.html 12 www.ons.gov.uk/visualisations/censusareachanges/E07000031/ 13 J. D. Marshall’s book “Portrait of Cumbria” is an in-depth analysis of Cumbria’s history, people, culture, and everyday life. Marshall also argues that Cumbria does not consist of a unified landscape but different parts, with each reflecting its way of life, culture, etc. 14 www.lakedistrict.gov.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0012/729678/2.b-History-and-Develo pment-of-The-English-Lake-District.pdf 15 Future research should focus on the area’s Celtic or non-English culture, history, aristocracy, and connections with the South. 16 www.bbc.co.uk/cumbria/sense_of_place/prog_1a.shtml 17  Parveen, N. (2016, August 31). Teenage farmer attacks national trust over Lake District land purchase. The Guardian. www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/31/ teenage-farmer-national-trust-lake-district-land-george-purcell-thorneythwaite 18  For a debate on wilderness or national parks (more broadly protected areas) and how rewilding can lead to partial or full gentrification reserved for the few, see Smith et al. (2018).

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216  Basak Tanulku Walton, J. K. (2011). Cumbrian identities: Some historical contexts. Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, 3(11), 15–28. Watson, E. (2011). The legend of Alderley Edge. https://clasmerdin.blogspot.com/2011/10/ legend-of-alderley-edge.html Watson, E. (2016). The hunters of banna.  https://clasmerdin.blogspot.com/2016/10/thehunters-of-banna.html Watson, E.  (2017). The road to Camlann. https://clasmerdin.blogspot.com/2017/09/theroads-to-camlann.html Watson, E. (2018). King Arthur lives in Merry Carlisle.  https://clasmerdin.blogspot. com/2018/01/king-arthur-lives-in-merry-carlisle.html Whyte, I. (2002). Whose Lake district? Contested landscape and changing sense of place. North West Geography, 2(2), 1–11. Whyte, I. (2007). The Lake district and Yorkshire dales: Refuges from the real world? In C. Ehland (Ed.), Thinking northern: Textures of identity in the north of England (pp. 239– 255). Brill Press. Whyte, I.,  & Winstanley, M. (2016). Chapter 6 Landscapes of farming: Agrarian history. In M. Winstanley (Ed.), Revealing Cumbria’s past: 150 years of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and archaeological society (pp.  199–222). Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society. Titus Wilson & Son. Williams, R. (1973). The country and the city. Chatto & Windus. Wood, M. (1981, March 14). In search of Arthur, in search of the dark ages. BBC2. Wood, M. (2005). Arthur: The once and future king (Season 1, Episode 3) [TV series]. In Search of Myths and Heroes. BBC. Wordsworth, W. (1835). Guide through the district of the Lakes in the north of England (5th ed., p. 88). Hudson and Nicholson.

14 Euroscapes Negotiating National and European identities through imagined boundaries Jeroen Moes Introduction An early and persistent question in the study of European identity has been whether European and national identities are mutually exclusive or antagonistic towards one another, with evidence to support both sides (Carey, 2002). There are certainly groups in European societies who are more likely to regard Europe and the nation to be at odds, while others conversely consider one a prerequisite or a catalyst for the other. These perspectives correlate with how different groups imagine “Europeanness,” geography, and their relation to power dynamics (Moes, 2017). Rather than considering just correlation, the central question should focus on the contextual interplay between national and European identity. Analysing 95 qualitative interviews from Italy, the Netherlands, and Estonia, this chapter assesses the link among imagined geographies (Aase, 1994; Said, 1979; Smith, 2002; Anderson, 2006), identity, and their influence on the symbolic construction of Europe and nation. Several models exist for examining the relationships between European and national identities. One common approach is to apply social psychological theories, such as Social Identity Theory (Tajfel, 1981), which emphasises European identity as an individual worldview instead of just territorial identification. Other models look at these identities structurally, such as “nested identities,” suggesting a hierarchy where local or national identity typically forms the core, while European identity is an outer layer (Herrmann & Brewer, 2004). The “marble cake” model posits that different identities “mesh and influence each other” (Risse, 2004). According to this model, Italian identity can affect one’s European identity and vice versa. Herrmann and Brewer (2004, p. 8) also propose cross-cutting identities (having overlapping secondary identities within a group) and separate identities (distinct groups that a person belongs to). Although European identity studies often accept national and European identities as a given, they do not necessarily account for the fluidity inherent within these entities. This applies to both overlapping and distinct identity models (Herrmann & Brewer, 2004, p. 8), which presume a certain entitativity to identities (Campbell, 1958). Only if national identity is a distinct category, it can be embedded within, cross-cut with, or be separate from another identity. There is more DOI: 10.4324/9781003354772-18

218  Jeroen Moes room for permeable boundaries of such identity categories in the “marble cake” model, despite similarly using the nation and Europe as set references. There is a space where the two (or more) “flavours” of the metaphorical cake blend into each other. If one were to slice the cake thin enough and take a sample of the space “inbetween,” then this would make it possible to qualitatively describe its flavour in its own right. It is limiting, then, to only describe this space in terms of its two or more main constituents. If national identity and European identity are social constructs, then any reference point in this ambiguous space is arbitrary from an etic1 (Moes, 2017; Pike, 1967) perspective. To assume a fixed perspective risks promoting methodological nationalism, which could impede a comprehensive understanding of this specific identification domain. From an emic perspective, the nation and Europe are often used to describe this space. For the interviewees in this study, when asked about their identities, terms such as “nation,” “state,” and “Europe” were easily invoked but often ambiguous, with vocabulary and language becoming the limiting factor; the spaces in-between did not have words. Language shapes the way people see the world (Whorf, 2012), and the interviewees often struggled to describe the relationship between how they saw their nation(s) and Europe and how they themselves identified within this. This is not to say that they felt this space was irrelevant or non-existent. There are two central mechanics through which they attempted to approximate their views: first, by reflecting on cultural similarities and differences within Europe and its associated geography in “cultural areas” and second, by suggesting varying “degrees” of being European. The second mechanic places the cultural areas from the first mechanic in the context of perceived centre-periphery dynamics and power relations. Both mechanics are fluid, and both the “contents” of these groups and their Europeanness were seen as changeable over time. The concept “cultural area” can be a loaded term and holds numerous connotations in the social sciences. Historically, anthropologists and geographers used it as an etic term to refer to a geographical space with similar cultural practice (Kroeber, 1931). However, this was critiqued for using essentializing culture markers, which introduces “orientalist logics” and power dynamics (Gupta & Ferguson, 1997, p. 247). In this chapter, cultural area is taken as an emic concept, however, and as such, it examines such orientalist logics and power dynamics as an object of study instead of (re)producing it. Nonetheless, the central concept under consideration needs to be broadened beyond cultural areas. The concepts that interviewees referred to were informed by culture, history, and customs, but within this dynamic, territory and geography played an important symbolic role. For Appadurai, “deterritorialization,” as a general process of detachment from territory, applies specifically to certain social groups such as transnational migrants (Appadurai, 1996, p. 49). I argue that, for Europe, this concept applies not only to specific actors but also to the idea itself. To “be European” refers to a social classification rather than a territorial entity. Echoing Urry (2007, pp. 262–263), I argue that while nationality once depended on a homogeneous territory, today’s frontiers are permeable, and cultural life is globally interchangeable (pp. 262–263). Building on Maier’s point (1994, p. 149), territory is decreasingly central to self-definition.

Euroscapes 219 However, territory remains relevant, serving as a communicative signifier within Europe – “Eastern,” “Central,” “Western,” and “Northern” – and possibly factors more in border regions (Kohli, 2000, p. 132; Kuhn, 2012). The study reveals a perception of transnational but sub-European areas not exclusively defined by culture – which counteracts the idea of a cultural area. Politics, history, and economics proved crucial in these definitions and underscored these areas’ temporal fluidity. Therefore, instead of cultural areas, I  refer to the confluence of economic, linguistic, political, and cultural flows and imaginaries as Euroscapes, drawing from Appadurai’s five2 “-scapes” (1996). Although Euroscapes may draw from all five, this study mainly emphasises people’s identifications in this context, and as such, Appadurai’s ethnoscapes and ideoscapes feature more prominently in the analysis. That is, the idea of Euroscapes in this chapter is an etic construct that refers to the emic notion of cultural areas constructed based on perceived ethnoscapes and ideoscapes. Appadurai’s -scapes open the analysis for deterritorialised (Appadurai, 1996; Scholte, 2000) “flows” and perspectives, whereas Euroscapes often mediate between national identities and are simultaneously partly deterritorialised and partly rooted in territorial notions. This application of Euroscapes allows an examination of the significance of both territoriality and deterritorialization and the symbolic role of geography in identity formation (Aase, 1994; Said, 1979). This chapter is based on qualitative data from 95 interviews conducted in Estonia, Italy, and the Netherlands between 2010 and 2016. Interviewees were chosen by using maximum variation sampling across multiple demographic variables (Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2009, pp.  51, 187–188). The selected countries provide diverse contexts due to differing membership trajectories in the European Union, diverse historic and cultural backgrounds, adoption of the euro currency, and language.3 Three sub-regions in each country were selected for interviews, based on their historical, cultural, and linguistic attributes (see Figure 14.1). Demographic variation was ensured in age, gender, and education. Data examination and validation resulted in the inclusion of 95 interviews. Interviewees were aged 20 to 89 years (average 38), and gender was evenly divided in the sample. An average of 10 interviews were conducted in each sub-national region, with a total sum of 29 interviews in Estonia, 30 in Italy, and 36 in the Netherlands. Given the wide geographic and linguistic scope of this methodological design and the large number of in-depth interviews, local interviewer teams were established in each country. All interviewers were native speakers, had a background in social science, and received training in interview techniques. An English semistructured interview guide along with supplementary materials was tested and improved with local teams’ assistance before finalizing it into English, Italian, Dutch, and Estonian versions. Interviews were conducted in Italian, Estonian, Dutch, German, English, Russian, and local dialects. Audio recordings were made unless objected to by interviewees. The guide included a topic list, visual aids such as photographs, currencies, flags, and maps and was followed by closed survey questions providing context. Transcripts and cartographic data were inductively analysed through Atlas.ti using open, axial, and selective coding.

220  Jeroen Moes

Figure 14.1 Regional divisions in the sampling frame within country cases: Estonia, Italy, and the Netherlands.

The following section describes the Euroscapes within Europe as the interviewees saw them and the perceived boundaries of Europe as a whole. I argue that these are important vehicles for establishing and communicating different kinds and layers of identification with Europe and the power relations at play within that space. Afterwards, the place of the nation and national histories within and between these cultural areas are discussed. Euroscapes As part of the interviews, the interviewees were asked to discuss the subdivisions within Europe that they deemed relevant and draw this on a map.4 During and immediately after this activity, their choices were discussed. The exercise aimed to understand the motivations behind their perceptions of European geographical space rather than merely capturing their identified areas. Interestingly, there was notable similarity within each country case and even across the three countries, despite the semi-structured interviewing style and wide variation in interviewees’ demographics. Nonetheless, there were also notable dissimilarities, which are addressed in the following. Understandably, considering the complexity and ambiguity of identity (Brubaker & Cooper, 2000), many interviewees found it challenging to articulate the important yet implicit or socially-inexpressive aspects of this elusive concept. Here, the map drawing exercise served as a tool for them to express their worldview by using a wider “bandwidth” of communication (Burgoon, 1995). It also allowed varied expressions and interpretations due to the infinite points on a map compared to language usage. The emphasis for analysis was not on the drawings but on the interviewees’ viewpoints and how the visuals helped in constructing language and expression5 to articulate their views. The interviewees often started with cardinal directions, which also structured the analysis. Before addressing how people symbolically expressed North, South, East, and West, it is helpful to examine the combined map of all interviewees (see Figure 14.2). The aim here is not to review these superimposed maps as quantitative information but to provide an overview and context for the following detailed discussions.

Euroscapes 221

Figure 14.2  Overlay of all maps across all interviews in the Netherlands, Estonia, and Italy.

At first glance, such a superimposed view makes it challenging to reliably infer patterns in the Euroscapes. Variations in which colour(s) of pencil they chose, line thickness, and whether annotations were included obfuscate which views were more salient or what they meant. This map is therefore not very helpful to see where these symbolic boundaries do exist, but it reveals where they generally do not. Between the Nordic countries, almost no divisions were made by any of the interviewees. Similarly, Portugal, Spain, and Italy were rarely divided from one another, with only a handful of lines separating Greece from this area. There was more contention around the eastern border of Europe, with many people placing boundaries in Russia, but most interviewees drew this line further west. The real battlegrounds of defining Euroscapes are in the large centre of Europe. In the east, few divisions exist between Belarus and Ukraine,6 few exist between Romania and Bulgaria, and few exist between these two spaces. Similarly, the Baltic countries were rarely divided, except for Estonia (mainly due to Estonian interviewees). In the centre-west, ­Germany was cause for considerable disagreement, with some interviewees grouping it into a Central European Euroscape, others grouped it into Western Europe, and still others saw it as a space unto itself. Interestingly, Germany was never split into an eastern and a western part, while the interviewees did intentionally split up other areas, such as Ukraine, Poland, Italy, Estonia, Turkey, and France.

222  Jeroen Moes When asked about splitting up certain areas, the interviewees would often respond that they were drawing a map that represented the current state of Europe and its on-going transitions. Even so, many Euroscapes that they described were rhetorically based on historical experiences and path-dependencies according to the same people. The previous superimposed map also reveals that usually, people neatly followed the state boundaries to draw boundaries between Euroscapes. On this, people cited the historical experience argument for defining Euroscapes: historical narratives were usually seen as situated within nation-states. There was no such thing as a unified European historical narrative according to most, although they often did see somewhat collective and transnational views on history within Euroscapes. In fact, some aspects of historiography were considered to be at odds or in competition within Europe (Melchior, 2015). Similarly, most interviewees considered the areas as culturally similar because the nations they encompassed were similar (not only historically but also culturally and institutionally). These nations for the most part coincided with the state boundaries, and as such, nationstates seemed like sensible “natural” boundaries for these Euroscapes for many (but not all) interviewees. After this description of the general tendencies across all interviews, looking particularly at where divisions were notably absent, our attention now shifts towards where boundaries were drawn in an attempt to understand the “boundary that defines the group” (Barth, 1969, p. 15), both literally and figuratively. Nonetheless, this approach must also include some of the “cultural stuff that it encloses” (Barth, 1969, p. 15) when the interviewees considered this “stuff” essential in the symbolic boundary construction. Subsequently, I  first describe the main Euroscapes as defined by the interviewees. Both North and West were comparatively uncontroversial categories and seen as static, relatively clearly defined entities that formed the definitional “core” of Europeanness. Accordingly, I provide a concise and synthesized overview of these categories. The South and East Euroscapes were considered as rather redefining Europe and were much more fluid in their construction. These are discussed together in more detail because they allow for a deeper analysis of how such symbolic imaginations function in constructing boundaries and identities. After this, a more analytical section follows that examines how the interviewees saw the dynamics between Euroscapes and what they “do” in the context of European integration, Europeanness, and power. Defining Europe: The North and West Euroscapes

The North Euroscape was the easiest to define geographically for most interviewees and was often their starting point when beginning this exercise. It consisted of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and usually Denmark and Iceland. In addition to “Northern,” other common labels to describe it were “Nordic” and “Scandinavian.” This space was seen as geographically, culturally, and economically distinct from other parts mostly due to its advanced economy and progressive politics. Specific aspects cited often included in particular “prosperous,” “free education,” and “social safety.” Northern Europe was seen as well-organized, “finished,” and

Euroscapes 223 perhaps a little boring. For some, it was put forward as a model towards which Europe should aspire, even if it rarely was considered the actual contemporary “core” of Europe or Europeanness. Estonia (but not Lithuania or Latvia) was almost always tentatively included in this category by Estonians but rarely included by the Italian or Dutch interviewees. For Estonians, there were always some critical qualifications as to whether Estonia was currently seen as belonging to the same cultural area as the other Northern cultures, and usually, this grouping was described as a shift that was on-going or would happen. For some Estonians, their Northernness was motivated through historical ties to Sweden. However, more often, this connection was instead argued via Finland due to similarities in language and culture. This inclusion of Estonia is one example of how such Euroscapes are employed in the negotiation of Europeanness, which is expanded upon later. Continuing with an overview of the West Euroscape, this geographically always included the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany7 across the interviewees from all three countries. Usually, (the north of) France, Austria, and Switzerland were also included, and more infrequently, the north of Italy and Denmark were included. The occasional liminality of states such as Poland and the Czech Republic is examined in some detail in the following. Lastly, the United Kingdom and Ireland were usually included in Western Europe too but were heavily debated. Only a few Italian interviewees were unequivocal about their own country also belonging to the West Euroscape, and they cited the classical influence of Italian culture on Europeanness. Overall, the most remarkable thing to note about the West Euroscape in the imagination of the interviewees was how unremarkable it seemed to be. Out of all descriptions of the Euroscapes, the Western European one was mentioned the least. This is not because it was irrelevant to the interviewees but rather because it was the reference category for all other areas. The West was where a modern (as opposed to classic, cultural) view of Europeanness was situated for most interviewees. It appeared so obvious, mundane, and immutable to the interviewees that it became all but invisible. Consequently, for many interviewees in the Netherlands, Europeanness was often a logical and taken-for-granted extension of their own identity. By contrast, most Italian and Estonian interviewees also saw this Euroscape as “default Europe,” but instead, this was seen as something that was external to their own experience. This dynamic can be understood through the interplay of power and politics. For some, their geographical imagination of Europe was influenced by the political integration of the continent over time instead of geography or history. In the Netherlands, the old “EU12” would often be seen as a somewhat singular area, even though Greece (which was in fact a member of the EU12) was still generally outside of this imagination due to either simple geography or more commonly, the impact on this imagination from the economic crisis at the time. Overall, there was substantial convergence on the idea that the core of Europe and Europeanness is situated in the West Euroscape, even though they noted that the North Euroscape (particularly Scandinavia) was both more wealthy and

224  Jeroen Moes progressive. These observations have implications for the meanings and teleology associated with Europeanness, as addressed later in this chapter. Redefining Europe: The South and East Euroscapes

We move on to the Southern and Eastern Euroscapes, and afterwards, we discuss the symbolic construction of these boundaries in more detail within their own respective sections. The South Euroscape, often labelled Mediterranean Europe, was consistent across the interviewees and between the three country cases in terms of its geography. It always included Italy and Spain and for most people, also encompassed Greece, Malta, and Cyprus. To a somewhat lesser degree, (the south of) France was included as well. This depended largely on how influential the interviewees felt that France was within the broader context of Europe. If France was seen as a core European power, then it was usually excluded from this imagination of Southern Europe or divided into a northern and southern part. A similar dynamic happened for the decision to include Greece into Mediterranean/Southern Europe or not. When Southern Europe was seen by the interviewees as defined by relatively lagging behind Western Europe in terms of economic development or political development, then Greece would typically be included in this imagination. If, to the contrary, Southern Europe was not considered economically or democratically weaker, then Greece would typically be excluded precisely to make this distinction. In other imaginations, Southern Europe was primarily defined based on cultural and historical terms, which would then tend to include Greece and would often extend further to the west of Turkey. Several Italian interviewees also included some of the northern African states, but interestingly, these people excluded these same areas from their definition of Europe. For them, the Mediterranean area constituted a space that straddles Europe and northern Africa. Examples are “We share a sea with North Africa . . . we cannot forget them, even though we are European” (Benedetta, Italy) and “The Mediterranean . . . is divided [between] Europe, Africa, and Middle Orient. . . . because of the common history [and] sea” (Eleonora, Italy). Such views expose some of the liminality that these Euroscapes negotiate in the face of European integration and power inequalities. Here, Southern Europe, or the Mediterranean, is constructed as a space that is simultaneously European and not European. It functions as a permeable and changeable gradient between (Western) Europe and non-Europe (Africa and Asia). Sometimes, this was presented as teleology or even aspirational; the South is on a historical trajectory towards the core. In other cases, and often expressed by the same individuals, it was positively contrasted against the comparative “blandness” of the West Euroscape. Such qualifications were not universally considered either positive or negative, and many would also self-identify with this liminality. This “play of similarity and difference” (Herzfeld, 2001, p. 663) within the Mediterranean area was one of the defining characteristics of this Euroscape, which makes it particularly important to emphasize that this area should not be reified as a monocultural area from an etic perspective (Herzfeld, 2001).

Euroscapes 225 If the South Euroscape was characterized by permeability and a sense of culture and identity, then the East Euroscape was instead defined by fracturing, transition, and teleology. Out of the four organizing Euroscapes presented here, the East was the most contested in terms of its geography and seen as the most malleable and transitory category. Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria were almost always included in this grouping, which was sometimes called “Central Europe.” Those who considered Belarus and (parts of) Ukraine as being “in Europe” in the first place would also include these areas. The Balkan countries, particularly former Yugoslavia and sometimes Bulgaria, were mostly seen as a category unto themselves but were occasionally included as well. The arguments for excluding them were political (non-EU)8 and historical. For many Dutch and Italian interviewees but for very few Estonians, the Baltic countries were also part of Eastern Europe. Some interviewees additionally included the western part of Russia. Countries such as Greece, Turkey, Austria, and Finland were never included by the interviewees, despite being on a similar longitude. None of the interviewees in this research felt that “their” nation was really part of the East Euroscape. Perhaps obviously, none of the Italian and Dutch interviewees considered this at all. In the Estonian interviews, the Eastern Europeanness of Estonia was usually a more extensive talking point. Most of the Estonians felt that this was how Estonia was seen externally, particularly by the West Euroscape, but this was not what it actually was. This alleged clash of understanding was part of a larger perceived fundamental misunderstanding, which is the Western European and, thus, hegemonic view of history versus the suppressed Eastern European view. Many differences in perspectives on history that emerged in these interviews related to the (Western) European lack of understanding of the Soviet occupation and its severity. Relatedly, the central place of World War II and particularly the incomparability of the Holocaust encompasses what they saw as the hegemonic European historical narrative, which was considered problematic (Melchior, 2015; Wulf, 2016). Historically, European political integration finds its roots and early narrative in World War II. With the inclusion of states that were once territories of the Soviet Union or under its influence, there has also emerged a battle of historiographies, which is being played out on both cultural and political levels (Melchior, 2015). In this sense, many Estonians conceded that they shared this historical fate and contemporary struggle for recognition with the area that they described as Eastern Europe. As Jaanika, a retiree in her mid-70s from Central Estonia said, this shared Eastern European historical and contemporary historiographical experience “makes it easier to understand . . . where you come from, why things are like they are,” while from a Western perspective, “it is difficult to understand what it meant to be in Soviet Union; they have not experienced it.” In the East Euroscape more than anywhere else, people would see clear fractures and subdivisions. In addition to the Balkan and Baltic countries, there was a perceived division between the current EU members and the non-EU members (Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia) within this space. This last division is emblematic of the influence that institutions have on identities and the geographic imagination. These sub-categories reveal that for most interviewees across all three country

226  Jeroen Moes cases, Eastern Europe was presented as an inherently temporary and mostly undesirable condition; a category that states and nations were expected to leave in the future. Within it, different states were considered to be at different stages of this process. This is the reason that countries such as Poland, Ukraine, and Estonia were often split between Eastern Europe and one of the other main Euroscapes, and the sub-categories represented such different pathways. The Baltics were en route to become part of the Northern Euroscape, while Belarus and (the east of) Ukraine were “stuck” under the Russian sphere of influence and were therefore outside of the general conception of Europe (these interviews were conducted well before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022). Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary were usually seen as on the way to becoming part of Western Europe, often by invoking Central Europe as an intermediary category (see also Moes, 2009). The Balkan states were often presented as “intrinsically” liminal (see also Lindstrom, 2003) or alternatively, as on a trajectory to join the Southern Euroscape. These general descriptions point to Eastern Europe as a transient condition between a disrupted “abnormal” history that has caused contemporary delay in its development (Smith, 2002), democracy, and bureaucracy relative to the end goals of their respective teleological pathways. The Eastern Euroscape and its constituent parts are the vessels of change (Moes, 2009) that take these territories from a past under Soviet domination “back” towards a future that is European. A defining characteristic of Eastern Europe, therefore, was post-socialism, or post-Soviet, which in itself was seen as a temporary condition. Particularly amongst the Estonian interviewees, “Sovietness” as a collective historical burden was seen as “not normal” versus a “normal” European future. “Sovietness is not Europeanness” (Rasmus, Estonia), and “being European is a very natural thing,” while “the Soviet past is not” (Reeta, Estonia). Russia was often seen as the bulwark of “contemporary Sovietness,” which placed it squarely outside or in opposition to Europe for many interviewees. In Estonia, people routinely call the Soviet period the “Russian era,” connecting this historical burden to present-day imaginations of geography and geopolitics. In the Netherlands and Italy, the interviewees would also recognize the impact of the Soviet period, even if they did not share the same collective memory and experience: “they still have to deal with the Soviet heritage” (Vincenzo, Italy). For them too, the current Eastern European ‘predicament’ was due to an unfortunate history – not an inherent cultural difference. For instance, according to Camilla (Italy), “Their history creates differences, not so much the people,” and “if Eastern Europe would have had another history, we would not speak about Eastern Europe in this sense today.” Instead, because “people have been educated in a different way, they are more rigid-minded than us.” With proper investments, according to her, Eastern Europe can “flourish and grow and they can become more Western than you would ever imagine. . . . In the end everything is very similar.” Sam (Netherlands), also felt that “it is all about history . . . if the Iron Curtain had not been there, and one of the powers had control over all of Europe, we would have had more in common today.” This “return to Europe” (Garton Ash, 1989, p. 179) was thus seen as an inherent quality of what it means to be Eastern European, mobilised through its constituent parts (Baltic, Central, Balkan, etc.). This presents the geographical dimension of

Euroscapes 227 the process of Europeanisation and again situates the core in the West and North Euroscapes. Much like the North and South were often seen as each other’s defining polar opposites, a similar dynamic was true for the East versus the West. Here, however, this usually emerged as a one-way mirror: Western Europe was often presented as Eastern Europe’s Other but not the other way around. For a few Dutch interviewees who would actively Other Eastern Europe, this was generally through negative stereotyping, which aligned with far right political narratives in the country during this time. Finally, the symbolic construction of Eastern Europe focused not only on geography and (inter)national politics but also on generational and individual differences. Within Estonia, the carrier groups of Sovietness and Europeanness were respectively considered the older, conservative, and rural people, particularly the Russophone minority versus the younger, higher educated, and urban individuals. For instance, “Russians who live in Estonia are not European. . . . The Soviet heritage is very much stuck in them, and they are not able to adapt to the European mentality” (Sandra, Estonia). This also illustrates that within the construction of Eastern Europe as a transitory space, concluding such a shift is not a matter of implementing the right policies at the state level, but particularly, a generational shift in mentalities is also required. This notion of carrier groups of Sovietness and Europeanness was especially prevalent amongst Estonian interviewees (see also Melchior & Moes, 2023) Boundaries of Europe The Euroscapes described earlier are neither neatly bound nor permanent in the imaginations of most interviewees. The states and geographies grouped within these regions have their own perceived trajectories within and across areas over time and according to context. For the political conceptualization, this is rather obvious; when states enter (or exit) the EU, they become part of this imagination (or leave it). More interestingly, the much more prevalent cultural imaginations of North, South, East, and West (and their respective sub-regions) are also fluid based on political, cultural, historical, and economic shifts. This dynamic led the interviewees to group some states into multiple areas or to describe how they would “move” in the future or had done so in the past. The fluidity of Euroscapes and the place of nation-states within these spaces soon became a common theme and talking point during the interviews. This revealed how these supranational but sub-European geographical imaginations can play a negotiating role in the Europeanization of certain parts of Europe and how people imagine Europe’s future trajectories. Divided Nations

Analogous to how Europe was seen in terms of different Euroscapes, the interviewees also divided certain nation-states into different areas to symbolize culturalpolitical shifts or actual geographic differences. For the first type, examples include

228  Jeroen Moes Estonia being divided between East and North or Poland divided between East and West. Here, states are seen as indivisible units spanning different Euroscapes. This does not refer to geography but to more intangible aspects such as the age, income, or social class or to different characteristics associated with different Euroscapes (e.g., Estonia’s culture is seen as Northern but its economy is seen as Eastern). Examples of the second type include geographic lines such as Ukraine’s division into an “Eastern European” west and “Russian” east or Italy and France’s split into “Western” north and “Southern” south. These divisions were based on linguistic, ethnic, or historical differences within countries that resonated with Europe’s Euroscapes. Exactly how individual interviewees would conceptualize such splits depended on two factors. First, some countries were consistently split with similar arguments across all three country cases. This includes particularly Ukraine; as tensions between Russia and Ukraine were rising during the period of fieldwork (culminating in the 2014 Russian occupation of Crimea), the “real” geographic split between Ukraine’s east and west became especially salient. Other similar often split-up states included Italy (particularly by Northern Italians) into a geographically and culturally distinct northern and southern part and Turkey along the Bosporus following a more formal geographic division. Second, the way that individual interviewees would split up states (or whether they would) depended on their political views and worldview. Those with a predominantly “national” outlook were much less keen on splitting up nation-states either symbolically or geographically, while conversely, those with a more cosmopolitan inclination often used this possibility to communicate their political convictions on the out-datedness of (national) borders. For Estonians in particular, Euroscapes and the geographic imaginaries within them presented a narrative through which they expressed the societal shift that they perceived Estonia to be experiencing. This expressed “how Estonia is situated in the intermediate space, what it means to us and how we come from EasternEurope” (Rasmus, Estonia). Within this communication, the concept of “Baltic” meant little to most Estonian interviewees. Nonetheless, Baltic was a narrative tool to distinguish Estonia from the rather negatively perceived Eastern Europe. This offered a conceptual vessel upon which they would transition from post-Socialism and Eastern Europeanness towards being Baltic and ultimately arriving at their destiny: to be Nordic. This was often visualised by drawing overlapping circles and arrows, as shown in the examples in Figure 14.3. Demographically, in each of the three countries, many interviewees felt that there was an urban/rural divide in terms of the degrees of Europeanness. As one Estonian interviewee remarked, “Estonian culture is kept in villages and smaller towns. Bigger towns like Tallinn are not Estonian any more, they are normal European towns. National culture is kept in smaller places.” Additionally, Europeanness was often attributed to different degrees to different types of people and carrier groups, as discussed previously. For some, to be European was an aspirational personal identity. Several interviewees mentioned that they saw themselves as European, but they knew of other people who were even “more European,” such as Francesco (Italy): “I feel European

Euroscapes 229

Figure 14.3 Cut-outs from Estonian interviewees’ maps visualizing “Baltic” as a vessel of change.

but I know other people are more European than me.” These “other people” who are more European were particularly seen as those who were spatially mobile, as Liisa (Estonia) explains: “When people travel more in Europe they do not become more European [“Eurooplane”] but more like Europeans [“Euroopalikum”].” In this quote, Eurooplane simply means European, while Euroopalikum means more European, indicating a degree of being European or Europeanness. Regarding identification on the level of Euroscapes, this generally followed a pattern that one might expect based on Social Identity Theory (Tajfel, 1981). For instance, Italians would often emphasize the value of what they described as “warm” and big-hearted cultural traits in the South while downplaying the value of the economic prosperity and progressiveness associated with the North and disidentifying (De Swaan, 2001) with what they saw as “cold” and detached ways of life. Likewise, Estonians who identified with the North would employ a similar but inverted dialectic. Here, “cold and detached versus warm and big-hearted” would become “rational and well-organized versus irrational and chaotic.” In the grand scheme of European identity, such distinctions may be an instance of the narcissism of minor differences (Blok, 2000); the interviewees who expressed these views simultaneously saw the differences between these Euroscapes as much smaller

230  Jeroen Moes than those between Europe and non-Europe. Finally, for the most cosmopolitanminded interviewees, this diversity within Europe was often presented as precisely one of the defining characteristics of what Europeanness means in the first place. Europeanness

When interviewees had mapped their Euroscapes, they were also asked where they would draw the boundaries of Europe as a whole. To answer this question, some fell back on what they remembered from their high school geography classes, which would typically place the border of Europe along the Ural mountain range and the Bosporus in the east, on the Mediterranean Sea in the south, and would include Iceland in the west. The Caucasus countries did not always come up naturally during the interviews. When they did or when the interviewer inquired about them explicitly, they were often cause for confusion and ambiguity. Italian and Dutch interviewees were not always familiar with these countries, but Estonian interviewees usually included them in their broader conception of Europe based on a perceived shared history with these countries as post-Soviet states. For them, they were usually seen as “more European” than Russia. This geographic definition was always a very unemotional description, and those who defined Europe as such saw no form of cohesion that would span this entire territory. Much more often, however, the boundaries of Europe were placed significantly further west, making a clear distinction between what the “official” geographical definition would be and how they experienced it themselves: “I don’t consider Russia to be Europe[an] although geographically part of it is” (Reeta, Estonia). This view on the boundaries of Europe was of course much more varied across all interviews but nevertheless showed striking similarities across the interviews in all three cases. The most common pattern would place the eastern boundary of Europe along the border of Russia to Finland, Estonia, and Latvia in the northeast. Going south from there, the boundary of Europe became more ambiguous, but usually excluded Belarus. Ukraine was one of the most contentious states, and how interviewees dealt with it when thinking about the boundary of Europe was either to exclude it entirely, to include it entirely, or – most commonly – to split the country into two parts roughly along the middle. Some expressed that Ukraine was neither European nor Russian but instead both European and Russian, pointing to some degree of permeability reminiscent of the South Euroscape. Some examples from the maps that represent these perspectives are shown in Figure 14.4. Although this visual representation of Ukraine was uncommon, the argumentation for it was not. Many interviewees viewed Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova as being simultaneously European and non-European, and for the Italian and Dutch interviewees, the Baltic states also often fit this description. This identifies a larger point: the boundaries between different Euroscapes and between Europe and non-Europe were not static. Instead, they were seen as membranes through which Europeanness is negotiated. The concept of Eastern Europe as a whole acted as a mediator between an involuntary and abnormal exclusion from “Europe-proper” due to a history involving Soviet occupation or domination and

Euroscapes 231

Figure 14.4  Ukraine as both European and Russian.

would (or perhaps ought to) become Europe-proper again in the future. The mechanism for this return was through conceptual fractures within the East Euroscape such as “­Baltic,” “Central,” or “Balkan,” which provided the teleological routes to European futures. EU membership was also seen as a precondition for such a return, and countries such as the Baltics, Poland, and Romania were rarely excluded from the interviewees’ definition of Europe because of their EU membership. When asked directly, however, the interviewees were divided on the notion that being an EU member makes a country “more European.” Many Dutch interviewees defined Europeanness in this way, because they framed it largely as adopting Western European (i.e., “their”) values and political traditions. For Estonians, this was different, and they emphasized the role of the EU in this boundary making as a means to an end (namely, overcoming the Soviet past and current Russian influence and “returning” to their European “destiny”). All non-EU countries in the east of Europe, except for Russia, existed in an in-between state for most interviewees. Mostly, Russia was imagined as Europe’s main “Other.” This was especially true for Estonians, who obviously have a very different historical relation to Russia and a politically relevant large and symbolically impactful domestic Russophone minority (Melchior & Moes, 2023; Cheskin, 2015). Following this, Russia’s

232  Jeroen Moes influence on various parts of Eastern Europe was decisive for how “European” the interviewees considered these areas to be. This non-Europeanness of Russia was simultaneously a source of cohesion within Europe and cemented the Europeanness of Eastern Europe even if at other times during the same interview it was considered somewhat “less European.” The point here is not to emphasize Russia as Europe’s Other. This has been discussed at great length in earlier publications (Diez, 2004). If European identity construction is assumed to function through the mechanism of Othering in the first place, and if we assume that this takes place vis-à-vis a territorial or geopolitical Other (as opposed to its own past, for example, see Diez, 2004), then Russia is an obvious candidate for the position. Instead, this shows how the image of Russia as non-European dynamically constructs Eastern Europe as moving from a history of disrupted non-Europeanness towards a European present and future. Southern Europe was sometimes presented as being in a similar liminal stage as Eastern Europe. However, it was also often seen as a positive category with its own strengths and rich self-determined history and identity. This view of what the South Euroscape represents is much more open-ended than the view on Eastern Europe. Although the latter had a clear teleology and had in it the promise to deliver the states and cultures in the east from history into Europeanness, this view of Southern Europe was undecided and could move either closer or further away from contemporary “core Europe.” When reflecting on such a possibility, the interviewees were divided on the desirability of such a shift or what it would mean exactly. Economic developments were an important driving force of this uncertainty, and in this sense, two interpretations of “crisis” intersect here. First, the interviews took place during the tumultuous highpoints of the European debt crisis that started at the end of 2009. Southern European states were at the core of these financial woes, including Greece, Portugal, Spain, and Italy. This context led many interviewees in all three countries to conflate terms such as Mediterranean or Southern Europe with being economically weaker and with not living up to their Europeanness. But this was not the only narrative on Southern Europe. For many, Southern Europe’s rich cultural history and influence on European societies made it more central to what it means to be European than any other part of Europe. Paradoxically, however, these two narratives were not mutually exclusive. To be “European” can mean several things simultaneously to the same people. Rasmus (Estonia), when discussing the European debt crisis, expressed this dynamic between economy and culture by saying that “in terms of culture, the countries of the Mediterranean [are] the most European, but currently, that shine has faded.” The second meaning of crisis that intersects with this view of Southern Europe lies in the etymology of the word itself. “Crisis” has its root in the ancient Greek krínō (to decide) and krísis (a decision, or to separate). This connotation of crisis is open-ended rather than a “temporary malfunction of a perfectly well-balanced economic, social and political order” (Boldt et al., 2012, p. 3). These definitions intersect here. On the one hand, the financial crisis threatened the essential Europeanness of Southern Europe due to the defining characteristic of prosperity of “core Europeanness.” On the other hand, “crisis” in a broader sense (as an open point

Euroscapes 233 of decision) opened the way to possible alternative definitions or futures of Europeanness that may ultimately compete with the currently hegemonic one, specifically, a Europeanness that is less reliant on economic development and neoliberal economics and instead emphasizes human-centric ideals such as solidarity, human rights, and democracy. In this sense, the people who saw Europeanness in this way were contesting the dominant notion of what defines Europe on the point of economy-first. Such alternative visions for Europe were expressed by a specific demographic: those who most enthusiastically declared themselves European above anything else. They were typically young, higher educated, politically left-wing, geographically and socially mobile, and wanted “another Europe.” In the words of Rasmus (Estonia), “predatory capitalism isn’t European. [I want] a Europe that includes a lot of diversity that shapes the individual,” and he added that Northern Europe is emblematic of this vision. Such views decoupled the notions of European identity from the political and institutional integration of Europe. In general, many interviewees often conflated Europe as a cultural entity with the European Union, but those who saw the financial crisis as a breaking point that required a redefinition of Europe would clearly make this distinction. Combined with their generally strong personal sense of European identity, this is essentially contrasting cultural and civic experiences of Europeanness (Bruter, 2005; Moes, 2009). Concluding Remarks This chapter embarked on an exploration of how European geographic space is imagined as derived from the empirical data of 95 qualitative in-depth interviews conducted in Estonia, Italy, and the Netherlands. Seen through the lens of Euroscapes, a term that encapsulates the intricate interplay of economic, linguistic, political, and cultural flows and imaginaries in Europe, it showed how such imaginations work to symbolically construct and reconstruct boundaries and identities. It shed light on meaning-making around centre-periphery relations, power dynamics, and history. Particular conceptualizations of “Europeanness,” and where these are situated are part and parcel of those dynamics. The fluidity of Euroscapes, especially how some (East and South) are more fluid than others (North and West), emerged as a central theme. Similar to, and in dialogue with European identity itself, these imagined geographies are subject to constant negotiation and redefinition following historical experiences and shifts in contemporary historiography, political dynamics, and economic realities. This underscores the importance of considering these factors in any analysis of European identity and integration. Boundaries of specific Euroscapes function in varying ways. They can be simultaneously deterritorialised and rooted in territorial notions and in either case, provide a space for the negotiation of identities and construction of a sense of Europeanness of both people and spaces. Such boundaries define groups and identities, as per Barth (1969), but given the constant fluidity and permeability of boundaries in this case, an inversion of sorts of Barth’s thesis is also true; the reconstruction

234  Jeroen Moes of the “cultural stuff” enclosed by these boundaries is itself subject to change and cause active renegotiation and consequently a redefining of boundaries. A classic case of the boundary that defines the group was most evident in the case of the North Euroscape not only culturally but also even in a literal, topographic sense. The West Euroscape was perhaps less defined topographically, but as the perceived “core” of Europeanness, its boundary was perhaps the most clearly defined through notions of modernity, cosmopolitanism, prosperity, democracy, and the uncontroversial conflation with institutional Europe – so much so that the definitions of these boundaries made its “cultural stuff” mundane and all but invisible. However, the interplay between boundaries and the things that they enclose were fundamentally different for the more liminal South and East Euroscapes. Here, the cultural stuff notion of Europeanness – which is uncontested in the North and West – was part and parcel of the continuous renegotiation of these boundaries. The East Euroscape represented transition and teleology. It was a category considered to have “happened to” nations and people due to an unfortunate disruption of the normal course of history. It was seen as a temporary fate and one that would be resolved by jumping on a patchwork of “life rafts,” particularly vessels named Baltic, Balkan, or Central European, which would ultimately deliver its peoples to their destinations in the North, South, or West Euroscapes. The South Euroscape was just as dynamic and fluid, but rather than being defined by a teleological transition, it instead represented permeability and its own identity rooted in history and both classical and contemporary culture. If there was any perceived disruption from its “rightful” historical path, then this would be its exclusion from the core of today’s definitions of Europeanness as defined through prosperity, bureaucracy, and democracy. There were no perceived regional shifts that would one day deliver parts of the South to the West or North but instead a stronger sense of self-confidence that may instead aim to redefine Europeanness as such. Ultimately, the exploration of Euroscapes in this chapter reveals an intricate tapestry of European identities and how this is continuously shaped and reshaped. The fluidity of Euroscapes, particularly in the liminal South and East, underscores the ongoing symbolic negotiation of boundaries, identities, and power dynamics within Europe. As we navigate these complexities, the concept of Euroscapes offers a lens through which we can understand these shifts. I hope that this study may support further research into the complex interplay of economic, linguistic, political, and cultural flows and imaginaries in shaping our understanding of Europe and its ever-evolving identities. Notes 1 Emic and etic are linguistic terms appropriated by anthropology, and they distinguish insider and outsider viewpoints, respectively. They are pivotal in translating emic to etic accounts in anthropology and sociology (Pike, 1967). 2 Ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes (see Appadurai, 1996)

Euroscapes 235 3 The different languages are Germanic (Dutch), Romance (Italian), Finno-Ugric (Estonian), and Slavic (Russian). See also Whorf (2012). 4 The interviewees received maps with bordered and labelled countries to assist in orientation. The interviewers also had a complete set of coloured pencils for use. 5 Performatively, some interviewees hastily drew lines, while others deliberated. This varied per person and per map area. This also cued the interviewer’s further inquiries. 6 Note that these interviews all took place well before the Russian invasion of Ukraine that started in 2022. 7 The exception is when Germany’s categorization was contested through the notions of Central or Eastern Europe, as discussed subsequently. 8 Although already EU members, Croatia and Slovenia were predominantly categorized alongside other Balkan nations.

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15 Stepping off the wooden path A Visual Essay Gintarė Kudžmaitė

The Curonian Spit – a small piece of land widely surrounded by water and only barely holding on to the mainland – is a fascinating multifaceted place. It has wonderful nature and a multi-layered political and cultural history. Furthermore, although it stretches just short of 100 kilometres, it is divided in half by a political border between Lithuania and the Kaliningrad region (Russia). These features have placed this geographically peripheral land at the centre of a multidisciplinary inquiry. It has been a hub for different scientists, such as biologists (especially ornithologists and botanical scientists), coastal researchers, geographers, tourism researchers, spatial planners and architects, cultural and natural heritage scholars, and social scientists. Due to the unique merging of culture and nature on the Spit, it has also attracted artists, writers, and thinkers throughout the years for shorter or longer inspirational stays and for creative and collaborative practices. The town of Nida (German: Nidden) has grown into a so-called “artist’s colony” since the 19th century and has hosted many famous figures, including Thomas Mann, Walther Heymann and Lovis Corinth. The inspirational value of the Curonian landscape was later noted by such visitors as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Sigmund Freud, and numerous contemporary practitioners and students working and dwelling in the Thomas Mann Cultural Centre and the Nida Art Colony. This chapter is an appreciation of the Curonian Spit’s richness and a reflection on one of the many intriguing aspects of the well-admired merging of its nature and culture: the nature-border nexus. Within the scope of this nexus, this chapter touches upon a collage of subject matters as complex as the context in which it is situated. It is rooted in my fieldwork experiences and observations, which for a long time, stayed visually captured but not systematically verbalised. In time, it has weaved into meaningful discourses and created new patterns; it resembles a loosely connected assemblage rather than a logical network. The less rigid format of a visual essay facilitates the articulation of these thoughts and prompts a reflection on my own images, accompanying noncaptured experiences and their extended interpretations. My chosen visual essay design has a strong narrative component, allowing me to both visualise and voice my observations. The reflexive story, which goes back and forth among spatiotemporally detached places, moments, and ideas, ultimately follows the plot, or the sequence of events, of one specific episode of my fieldwork conducted in 2019. DOI: 10.4324/9781003354772-19

238  Gintarė Kudžmaitė The episode in focus is a guided group tour to the Grobštas Nature Reserve on the Lithuanian side of the Curonian Spit. Different from the rest of my structured fieldwork in the region, during this tour, I allowed myself to follow and to be guided, to opportunistically observe and capture, and to take in everything that unravelled before me. Reaching the border zone, which is located in this reserve, was an expectation but not a promise. For a couple of hours, I abandoned my vigorous attitude as a systematic and provident researcher and became a hopeful open-minded touristparticipant, equipped only with an autoethnographic mindset and a camera. In another study based on this fieldwork, I described and analysed how the border at the Curonian Spit manifests itself in the semiotic landscape and how it impacts dwellers of the area (Kudžmaitė, 2022). I spoke about “silent borders” and “border silencing” as a strategy and a practice to maintain a specific attitude of disinterest in the border and in what lies behind it. By documenting and examining the signage in the Spit’s semiotic landscape (advertisements, billboards, written announcements, and publicly displayed visuals), engaging in unstructured short conversations with locals and analysing official websites and documents related to the Spit’s management, I got an impression that the everyday life on each borderland mainly runs without thinking about the geopolitical division of the area. The border and the other side behind it appear to be concealed to varying degrees in the landscape, in local lives and in most of the official rhetoric. Different cross-border community and governmental collaborations often remain unfulfilled, even when this collaboration is officially required by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). Since 2000, the Curonian Spit has been a UNESCO-accredited cultural landscape, representing the “combined works of nature and of man” and embracing “a diversity of manifestations of the interaction between humankind and its natural environment” (UNESCO, 1994, pp. 13–14). Lithuania and Russia are the two State Parties jointly maintaining this cultural landscape in addition to separately managing their own protected national parks of Kurshskaya Kosa (in Russia) and Kuršių Nerija (in Lithuania). Different attitudes towards the shared pasts in the region (Baltic/Curonian – Prussian – German – Lithuanian – Soviet Russian/Soviet Lithuanian – Russian/Lithuanian, in this order) and the relatively recent formation of the current political model of neighbourhood and bordering in the 1990s fuel recurrent miscommunication. Previous collaborations have stalled further or ceased entirely since the onset of Russia’s war in Ukraine in 2022. My approach in the previous study was anthropocentric. I was interested in people and in the cultural landscape they inhabit. I also approached the border from the geopolitical and sociocultural perspectives and asked how it functions for nation-states opting to maintain channels for collaboration. However, having observed the immense impact of the natural environment on many aspects of life in/at the Spit, I knew that this border(ing) case undoubtedly deserves a discussion within the nexus between borders and nature. With the recent movement towards broadening and opening (critical) border studies to new multidisciplinary theories and methods (see, for instance, Brambilla, 2015; Brunet-Jailly, 2005; Paasi et al., 2022; Peña, 2023), researchers have suggested to revive the lens of “posthuman” or “more-than-human” when considering border politics (a Special Issue titled “More Than Human Borders” was recently dedicated to

Stepping off the wooden path 239 this topic in Geopolitics; see, for example, its introductory paper by Ozguc & Burridge, 2023). The underlying aim of this approach is to deconstruct the prioritised “human” position in order to problematise the violent binaries between “human” and “non-human”, which are inherently linked to other types of hierarchical and colonial thinking, such as “othering” (Ozguc & Burridge, 2023; see also Sundberg, 2014). The border at the Curonian Spit is perfect material for such a transformative reflection, as it hosts a variety of non-human agents that influence and form border(ing) practices. Looking from the Lithuanian side of the Spit, most of the border zone (an already inaccessible area stretching before the border) is in the national Grobštas Nature Reserve. The reserve cannot be officially visited without an accompanying tour guide. The guide is authorized to lead tours as far as the border zone. The Lithuanian border zone ends with the international border, which is followed by the border zone on the Kaliningrad side and continues further in the Kurshskaya Kosa National Park. Next to the nature reserve, there are two other ways to reach the border zone on the Lithuanian side: first, by walking by the sea towards Kaliningrad up to the border zone and second, by taking the only car road leading directly to the official border crossing point at Nida-Morskoye. Before taking the exclusive route – the one that is accessed with a tour to the reserve – I visit an openly accessible dune area not far from urban village settings. While observing the surroundings (Figure 15.1), I am astonished by the excessiveness of human footprints in the sand, and I witness how those multiply because of two strollers walking in the dunes. Dune reinforcements are often creatively used by visitors as support for sitting, but deeper dunes also seem to be equally vulnerable to human activity. Trespassers are discouraged from freely walking across the dunes (particularly on protected dune ridges) by occasional warning signs (which are easily destroyed by those resisting restrictions or by nature itself), patrolling officers, intended fines and “common sense” education tactics. Standing on a wooden path – the only “authorised” way of moving around the dunes – and looking into the distance unexpectedly evokes dormant feelings of inner approval of my own “accepted” behaviour. At the same time, I am being lulled by a nonconsequentialist feeling nurtured by peer influence, and the majestic, spectacular landscape feels so inviting. No material barrier is stopping me. And yet, I stay on the path, leaving no footprints. This experience provokes thinking about the duality of protection and restriction – the first extended connection to border discourses. Protection is accompanied by restriction in many facets of society. The object of protection can be the same as or different from the object of restriction (an example of the former is the Covid-19 pandemic restrictions meant to protect all individuals, including those who they restrict; an example of the latter is restricting some aspects of human behaviour to protect natural or cultural sites). All restrictions are met with resistance in some way, and the sites of the Curonian dunes are no exception – people keep sliding down the majestic sand hills notwithstanding the precautions that this is dangerous to them (the same object of protection-restriction) and to others and that it destroys the dunes (different object of protection and restriction).

240  Gintarė Kudžmaitė

Figure 15.1 Innumerable visible footprints in sand dunes and two hikers in the distance. Usually, trespassing beyond specially built dedicated wooden paths and observation viewpoints is not allowed and could in principle be fined. Source: Photograph by the author.

The duality of protection and restriction especially resonates with border contexts through the “humanitarian border” (Kallio et al., 2019; Walters, 2010) concept. The humanitarian border happens when one is protected or helped and restricted at the same time. Humanitarianism and borders seem to be intuitively contradictory, but they work as two sides of the same coin. The target of protection and the target of restriction of the humanitarian border are most often not the same, but due to common generalizing and simplifying strategies to manage migration, they are often presented as such (e.g., all deserving migrants get protection). The humanitarian border generally protects migrants by restricting and managing their movement, but selectivity is also part of this process – some migrants are restricted and refused entry in order to protect and allow the “authorised” crossing of other migrants (usually a much smaller selected group). In addition, the humanitarian border, as any other border, also protects national and supranational actors. The reasoning and strategies of heritage site protection undoubtedly substantially differ from the principals of border protection. However, some parallels emerge between the protection of the dunes and protection of the border when concurrently thinking about them and the aspect of restriction. The ultimate object of protection is not the person whose actions are restricted but the idea of safeguarding that which might be destroyed by the acts of this person, that is, the (integral) “nation” (also including those who are “legal” within it) and the “heritage site”, respectively. Humanitarianism focuses on a person in both cases to some extent

Stepping off the wooden path 241 (e.g., at the border, basic human rights should in principle always be respected), but a person often emerges as a secondary target of protection. One might argue that dune protection involves more straightforward physical and scientific evidence of direct destructive consequences of human behaviour at natural sites, although this can be negotiable due to context- and time-specific understandings and definitions of cultural and natural heritage, its value and protection standards (see, for example, a discussion on heritage from the European perspective in a volume edited by Ashworth and Larkham (1994)). The rigid protection of the border and the nationstate against selected border crossers relies on even more deeply rooted politicoideological, largely discursive and artificially manufactured narratives, such as the irreversible equivalency between nation-state and land occupancy, lawful control of human movement, extensive social differentiation, and others. Joining an official tour gives me the illusion that I am acting in the best possible and the least invasive way when entering the protected area. In the case of meeting an official patrolling at the reserve, the presence of an accredited tour guide also serves as a shortcut to justifying my behaviour as socially acceptable according to the social agreement. That is, I enter the nature reserve “legally”. The tour includes interesting factual and practical information about the area. I learn that the inhabitants of the Curonian Spit have been in a constant dynamic with the surrounding dunes. First, they massively cut the forests occupying the Spit, causing uncontrollable movement of bare sand, which resulted in multiple buried villages. This prompted experimenting with innovative, systematic ways to control, stabilise and reinforce the dunes in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, including reforestation (see Bučas, 2007; Tutkunkardes, 2008). However, when the people opted to control the dunes more, they became stagnant more quickly. The Curonian Spit dunes are currently differentiated according to the vegetation growing on them. Certain plants gradually stop sand from moving, consequently creating the grey “dead” dunes. The white “living” dunes, which are now threatened and thus protected, travel and shapeshift with the help of the wind and other natural forces. These are the sparse remaining unplanted dune landscapes that convey esthetical value and educate the public about the consequences of unregulated deforestation (see Armaitienė et al., 2007; Bučas, 2007). The scenery captured in Figure 15.1 communicates a whole array of unique and ever-changing dune aspects, which usually come together as one complete experience of the observer: moving from the closest towards more distant landscape, we see traces of dune fortifications, sandy white dunes, overgrown grey dunes, the Curonian Lagoon (significantly polluted and mostly used for various shipping purposes), and when looking very attentively, the mainland shore. The further and longer we walk, the more dimensions of life in/of the dunes unravel in front of us. One of the more impressive elements evidently flourishing farther away from human activity are animals. I observe numerous footprints of different species (Figure 15.2). Birds openly flock to our proximity, and smaller insects, such as butterflies, grasshoppers and various bugs, thrive in bushes and tufts of grass. The footprints of a moose interest me the most. The trail stretches from the north to the south, towards the direction of the border. Heading east, we step over the footprint and leave it behind (Figure 15.3).

242  Gintarė Kudžmaitė

Figure 15.2 Footprints of several different species in a sand dune. The moose footprints are the most prominent. Source: Photograph by the author.

Figure 15.3 The continuation of the moose footprints towards the direction of the border and vague human shoeprints moving to the left and away from the moose trail. Source: Photograph by the author.

Stepping off the wooden path 243 Being exposed to the evident presence of animals in the dunes so close to the border encourages me to question how wild animals prevail around human borders. How does the border, which orders the lives and movement of humans, impact the trajectories and well-being of local moose? In many cases, political borders do not significantly influence wild animal migration itself, but they complicate its monitoring and information sharing across these borders. Existing research on wildlife crossing borders suggests to minimize the reliance on jurisdictional boundaries when tracking wild animals (Bischof et al., 2016). In the context of the Curonian Spit, scholars have emphasized an overall demand for the better transboundary integration of methods on and data of environmental management (Gasiūnaitė et al., 2008). Such reports place humans and potentials to organize their knowledge (which also can undoubtedly benefit animals) at the core of the issue. In other cases, physical border manifestations and exposure to humans have a great impact on wildlife (see McCallum et al., 2014). Some borders have an overwhelming effect on animals, for instance, disrupting original migration routes, which potentially leads to poorer diet and mating possibilities. Physical border manifestations, such as border fences, also threaten the lives of wild animals more severely and instantly if they get stuck and entangled in or electrocuted by them. More heavily guarded borders in different places and times could also cause the destruction of any living crosser, human or animal. However, even though potentially disarranging, borders undoubtedly do not attach a whole array of social meanings to wild animals in the ways that they do to humans (this does not apply to domesticated animals when it comes to crossing borders, as strict rules are imposed on them and on their handlers, including documentation, passports, obligatory vaccinations, etc.). The consequences of and at the border for wild animals are caused not by the border specifically but rather by humans generally, especially by the tendency to prioritize geopolitics over biopolitics. Geopolitical borders do not usually intrinsically intend to harm trespassing wild animals because they are generally not meant for them. The local Curonian moose most likely will continue its journey undisturbed. Due to the special locality of this border, there are very few physical border obstructions in this landscape, leaving the path open for the lone wild traveller. The tour guide explains that even the few present physical border markers are not easily visible in this setting. In fact, they are so scarce that multiple unintentional border violations (by humans) have been reported throughout the years. Tourists without guidance or those who wander across the beach simply miss the border signs. Trespassers are detained by the officers on either side of the border and fined for illegally crossing it. Nature also plays a role in such unintentional border violations. The constantly changing protected natural environment is the main reason behind the scarcity of border signage at this otherwise highly guarded borderland. Border demarcations in the Spit are intentionally sparse but taller – some border markings are standalone three-meter-high poles (Kumetaitis, 2020, p. 119). The sand lives through spatiotemporal movement, and it threatens and changes the border, compelling humans to find alternative ways to maintain it. This reminds us that borders sit in place, not only phenomenological, anthropological

244  Gintarė Kudžmaitė and sociocultural place but also biogeographical place occupied and operated by non-human agents. These actors of nature use and change this place intentionally or reactively (as a reaction to external forces) in ways that often are no less impactful than human behaviour on local and extended environments. All of these agents cause borders to fluctuate to various degrees, thereby challenging the idea of border fixity. Walking along the animal footprints, we slowly approach the furthest point of our tour – the border zone. A  warning sign announces the beginning of the restricted area in three languages (Lithuanian, English and Russian) (Figure 15.4). The excitement is apparent among us tourists. Everyone wants to take a picture with the sign. The border reveals its innate potential to elevate human emotions, for better or for worse. Country borders are not an everyday matter in many people’s lives. As such, they retain their promise of something out of the ordinary. Their inherent liminal character, challenging to transition and (quite ironically) “liberation from the regimes of normative practices and performance codes of mundane life” (Shields, 1991, p. 84), fascinates and worries at the same time. For many, crossing borders fundamentally means leaving home, entering a new place and a new community and coming back changed. Amid our joint excitement, we see an approaching four-wheeler (Figure 15.5). Soon, a border guard welcomes us with a warning that we crossed into the border zone while taking pictures with the sign. The tour guide has the required permissions

Figure 15.4 A “stop” sign listing the following information: “State border protection zone. Enter only upon authorization by state border guard service” (in Lithuanian above English, followed by Russian below). One border pole is somewhat visible on the horizon to the right. Source: Photograph by the author.

Stepping off the wooden path 245

Figure 15.5  A border guard on a four-wheeler leaving wheel trails in the sand. Source: Photograph by the author.

to only be in the reserve stretching before the border zone and receives a reminder not to come so close to the border next time. When the guard turns back to leave, the excitement in the group is replaced by adrenaline-provoked nervous laughter. Being confronted by an officer of the regime is an exceptional event, bringing feelings of fear, guilt and eventually relief for many. Following the officer’s trail, I notice thin observation towers peaking from behind the sand hills on the horizon. We were being watched the whole time. It is time to turn back, away from the border and the nature reserve. I no longer notice the landscape and instead think about the experiences near the border. We were warned – not because we caused any observable damage to the surroundings (some level of impact on the dunes due to our presence was inevitable), but because of our embodied human presence near the border. The four-wheeler did not come to chase the moose wandering about the border, but it did come to warn us about our minor misdemeanour in the eyes of the border regime. In its view, our presence (potentially) threatens the border more significantly than it impacts the nature. Borders are primarily human, by human, and for human. Still, we must continue to rigorously think about how they affect everything and everyone in the biosphere, where human is connected to every other, post-, non- and more than-human. By way of ending this chapter, I invite the reader to look back at the images as interconnected parts of one narrative, one place, one habitat. At the Curonian Spit, we find sand and dunes, vegetation, animals, and people, all together, enclosed by water. These intersecting realms characterize the Curonian Spit as a liminal

246  Gintarė Kudžmaitė landscape, which, following Turner (1969), is “neither here nor there” but rather “betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention and ceremonial” (p. 95). It is a place of continuous meeting and learning to live in these encounters. The different realms have their own familiar paths and ways of walking them. When these paths cross, we witness people stepping off their wooden paths to slide down the sand dunes as a sign of non-conformity to imposed rules, and we have moose crossing borders without passports. These trope-like (but real-life) examples invite us to adhere to the multifacetedness and dynamism as fundamental elements of our realities and to remember that the border is one of these paths among others, no less, no more. References Armaitienė, A., Boldyrev, V. L., Povilanskas, R., & Taminskas, J. (2007). Integrated shoreline management and tourism development on the cross-border world heritage site: A case study from the Curonian spit (Lithuania/Russia). Journal of Coastal Conservation, 11(1), 13–22. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11852-007-0001-8 Ashworth, G. J., & Larkham, P. (Eds.). (1994). Building a new heritage. Tourism, culture, and identity in the new Europe. Routledge. Bischof, R., Brøseth, H.,  & Gimenez, O. (2016). Wildlife in a politically divided world: Insularism inflates estimates of brown bear abundance. Conservation Letters, 9(2), 122– 130. https://doi.org/10.1111/conl.12183 Brambilla, C. (2015). Exploring the critical potential of the borderscapes concept. Geopolitics, 20(1), 14–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2014.884561 Brunet-Jailly, E. (2005). Theorizing borders: An interdisciplinary perspective. Geopolitics, 10(4), 633–649. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650040500318449 Bučas, J. (2007). Gamtosauginė direktyva ar kraštotvarkinės tradicijos? Town Planning and Architecture, 31(3), 140–148. https://doi.org/10.1080/13921630.2007.10697100 Gasiūnaitė, Z. R., Hanninen, J., Razinkovas, A., & Vuorinen, I. (2008). Transboundary environmental monitoring in the Curonian Spit protected territories. In B. Chubarenko (Ed.), Transboundary waters and basins in the South-East Baltic (pp. 237–243). Terra Baltica. Kallio, K. P., Häkli, J., & Pascucci, E. (2019). Refugeeness as political subjectivity: Experiencing the humanitarian border. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 37(7), 1258–1276. https://doi.org/10.1177/2399654418820915 Kudžmaitė, G. (2022). “Silencing” the border as a strategy to conceal the “other” side: The case of the Curonian Spit. Cultural Geographies, 29(4), 565–583. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/14744740211059441 Kumetaitis, Z. (2020). Atkurtos Lietuvos sienos: Sėkmės istorija. Vilniaus Universiteto leidykla. www.lituanistika.lt/content/86463 McCallum, J. W., Rowcliffe, J. M., & Cuthill, I. C. (2014). Conservation on international boundaries: The impact of security barriers on selected terrestrial mammals in four protected areas in Arizona, USA. PLoS One, 9(4), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal .pone.0093679 Ozguc, U., & Burridge, A. (2023). More-than-human borders: A new research agenda for posthuman conversations in border studies. Geopolitics, 28(2), 471–489. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/14650045.2023.2169879 Paasi, A., Ferdoush, M. A., Jones, R., Murphy, A. B., Agnew, J., Espejo, P. O., Fall, J. J., & Peterle, G. (2022). Locating the territoriality of territory in border studies. Political Geography. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2021.102584

Stepping off the wooden path 247 Peña, S. (2023). From territoriality to borderscapes: The conceptualisation of space in border studies. Geopolitics, 28(2), 766–794. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2021.1973437 Shields, R. (1991). Places on the margin. Routledge. Sundberg, J. (2014). Decolonizing posthumanist geographies. Cultural Geographies, 21(1), 33–47. https://doi.org/10.1177/147447401348606 Turner, V. (1969). The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. Aldine Publishing Company. Tutkunkardes, B. (2008). Tourism and recreation in the Curonian spit in Lithuania – recreational-geographic developments and perspectives in a new EU country. Annales Geographicae, 41(1–2), 26–40. www.lituanistika.lt/content/59941 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). (1994, February). Operational guidelines for the implementation of the World Heritage Convention. https://whc.unesco.org/archive/opguide94.pdf Walters, W. (2010). Foucault and frontiers: Notes on the birth of the humanitarian border. In U. Bröckling, S. Krasmann, & T. Lemke (Eds.), Governmentality: Current issues and future challenges (pp. 138–164). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203846476

16 Curating boundaries and liminality A method for disruption Giulia Degano

1. Introduction When we think about the concept and space of a border, we usually visualize it as a line and an edge and associate it with a sense of limitation and exclusion. Paradoxically, contemporary social and cultural practices demonstrate that it is also feasible to give physical and symbolic boundaries an inclusive and creative connotation. I briefly expose a disruptive interpretative line by comparing a case selection of curatorial initiatives at and about borders that I consider to be emblematic because of the counter narrative and disruptive intervention of the border that they offer.1 First, it is worthwhile to ask ourselves what border or borders we are referring to: a border can be physical, geo-politically connoted, and materialized in a fence or a wall, which expresses a plurality of invisible, symbolic borders related to the social, cultural, linguistic and gendered spheres, among others. This Janus-faced concept, given by its constant shifting between its material and mental dimensions, introduces the need to consider the border from the multiplicity that it displays as a nexus and process that can be used methodologically for contemporary social, political and creative practices that move away from the limitations of the hegemonic use of and discourse about boundaries. Over the past century, especially from its second half, this unilateral vision of the border has been repeatedly contested and blurred by social and cultural actions and counter-narrations that have revealed the porosity and dynamism of this concept. These suggest a vision of the border as a place of opportunities for disruption and as a symptom of the globalized struggle between vertical and horizontal discourses, that is, between exclusive and inclusive tendencies, which leads to a constant reconfiguration not only of boundaries but also of contemporary subjectivities themselves. As pointed out by Florian Schneider in his introduction to Heath Bunting’s Borderxing Guide (2002–2003), “borders are there to be crossed”: the physical and geo-political border that had been destined for the maintenance of the labour relations of neocolonial and neoliberal disparity catalyses exchange and dissidence rather than discouraging them.2 The tragic and epic image and experience of the border nurtured by the state of exception that characterizes the life of its both permanent and transitory communities implies an approach to this site as a third peculiar space, a utopian one, where it is feasible to reflect and shape the plurality of contemporary identity. DOI: 10.4324/9781003354772-20

Curating boundaries and liminality 249 As has been noticed by many contemporary authors, the backdrop of the crisis of a uniform sense of social, political, and cultural belonging of the twentieth century, along with the development of postcolonial and globalised contexts and thinking, led to an inextricable alliance between contemporary subjectivities and the concept of liminality. Here, I do not pretend to exhaustively outline the theoretical framework to describe this tendency or more specifically, the role played by the space and concept of boundaries and liminality, or to describe the interpretative risks that have gradually been pointed out in recent publications, congresses, and seminars on the subject.3 However, it is undoubtedly important to mention as a starting point authors such as Homi Bhabha, Arjun Appadurai, Giorgio Agamben, Nicolas Bourriaud, Étienne Balibar, Alessandro Dal Lago, and T. J. Demos who emphasize the pivotal role played by margins in the processes of production of subjectivities and, in a more general sense, the concept of liminality as an interpretative key to contemporaneity. Furthermore, the concept of the social production of space is fundamental to approach the potential of the border as a site of social intervention, so it is also appropriate to recall as part of this framework at least the perspectives proposed by Henri Lefebvre, Lucy R. Lippard, Saskia Sassen, Ernesto García Canclini, Édouard Glissant, Walter Mignolo, Sandro Mezzadra, and Brett Neilson, which can be applied to a vision of the border as a space and agency of social and political rethinking. More particularly, this research fits methodologically into the interpretive line of the concept of “border as method” proposed by Mezzadra and Neilson (2013) along with the previous contributions by Néstor Rodríguez (1996) and Rada Iveković (2010) on this topic, which seeks to give novel application in the historical-artistic sphere to the concept of the border as a fundamental epistemic angle. As has been pointed out by these authors, the growing global trend towards the strengthening of the control of national borders – denounced by Brown (2010), among others – and the intense debate on the management of migratory flows have given rise to a conceptual node collateral to that of migration, that is, the border, which is gradually being adopted as a method to research contemporaneity. The point to highlight here is a vision of the border as a space where some of the most emblematic negotiations of the twenty-first century take place and as the core of a global network of solidarity and exchange that betrays a promising subversion of the traditional criteria of representation. If Border as method focuses on the “border struggles” related to global migration and borders – which involves academics, media, NGOs, trade unions, and autonomous social initiatives by citizens and noncitizens – that reflect the increased attempts of translation and disruption resulting from the current proliferation of borders, then it seems feasible to extend this concept to the artistic field, whose activity could be considered, as brilliantly claimed by Kirsten Scheid (2020), a relevant trigger for social and political research and expression.4 Indeed, initiatives of artistic activism and compromise at and about the border participate significantly in filling the gap between the contemporary political agenda and society: one such initiative still desperately depends on the defence of the ruins of the nation-state system – a concept that Critical Border Studies related to boundaries through the expression “RuiNation”, efficaciously describing the border as the ruin of the nation-state

250  Giulia Degano system – while the other is increasingly discovering its vocation for translating, communicating, and mediating margins.5 Artists and curators have been involved in border disputes at least since the second half of the twentieth century, viewing the margin as an ideal dimension for mediation and dissidence and highlighting its porosity and epistemic potential. The intervention and representation of borders has increasingly driven artists’ attention, as shown by some foundational moments in the history of artistic practice about boundaries and liminality: one is related to the regional concept of border art developed through the pioneering activity of the artist collectives Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo (BAW/TAF) (1984–1990/93) and Las Comadres (1988–1991); and the other relates to the particular action of a group of artists apart from the border art context who interpreted the space and concept of boundaries in the last decades of the century. Among the initiatives related to this last group of pioneers are Sweet Wall (1970) by Allan Kaprow, Christian Philipp Müller’s Illegal border crossing between Austria and the Principality of Lichtenstein (1993), The loop (1997) by Francis Alÿs, The Wall, Commemorate for the German Reunification (1990) by Zheng Lianjie, and (Fen) Ma Liuming’s performance on the Great Wall (1998). The disruptive approach to the border described from both sides reflects the tendency to de-centralize the (re) construction of contemporary subjectivities, making boundaries fertile territories for individual and communitarian self-representation, cross-cultural mediation, and activism. The first decades of this century have also seen the emergence of artistic careers – especially related to the generation born between the sixties and the seventies – that stand out for their specific focus on boundaries or at least, for the recurrence of this space and concept in their work, as evident in the careers of Guillermo Galindo (1960), Marco Ramírez ERRE (1961), Kai Wiedenhöfer (1966), Kader Attia (1970), Emily Jacir (1972), and Khaled Jarrar (1976), among others. This tendency was anticipated regionally in the border art realm and is recently showing a global spread, following the contemporary multiplication of militarized borders and their pivotal role in the current social and political debate. The globalized borderscape that originated from this political context justifies the biographical affinities among the mentioned artists, whose close experience of the border is the primary source of their insistence on the topic. Moreover, the beginning of the twenty-first century has seen a growing number of curatorial initiatives on the subjects of border and migration that globally expand the border curating inaugurated in the last century in the North American region, among which are the following examples: Project DMZ (1988); the InSITE Project (1992–2006); The Real DMZ Project (2012-present); the exhibition “Keep Your Eye on the Wall: Palestinian landscapes” (2013) by MASASAM; Oliver Ressler’s “Transnational Capitalism Examined: Border as method” (2016); Juntos Aparte Encuentro Internacional de Arte, Pensamiento y Fronteras (2017-­present); the Proyecto Maya Transfronterizo (2019-present); and Kai Wiedenhöfer’s WALLonWALL (2019-present). Here, I approach the topic by presenting these aforementioned initiatives and tentatively articulate them into three strategies for curating the border.

Curating boundaries and liminality 251

Figure 16.1 Keep Your Eye on the Wall by Sandra Maunac and Monica Santos (Masasam), installation view at the Magasin Electrique, Arles.

2.  Curating the border The aim of this chapter is to briefly cover this curatorial panorama as a way to point out an increasing tendency in contemporary artistic practice that demonstrates the pivotal role played by the concept and space of borders for the social, political, and cultural expression of contemporary subjectivities. The articulation of this subsection responds to a tentative and open categorisation of border curatorship into three main strategies for the artistic intervention and narration of boundaries and liminality that can be summarised as follows: a ­biennial-like one, recurrent and institutionalized; a single exhibition about militarized borders, with or without an emphasis on the border wall, usually displayed in the Global North; and on-site initiatives implying a communitarian and autonomous (re) appropriations of the border space. These three strategies are described in the following subsections, where they are presented and commented upon along with a selection of related artistic works without pretending to cover them exhaustively or to deny the importance of other projects not mentioned in the present contribution. 2.1  Curating boundaries on site

The biennial-like format is, of course, the most traditional one, and the participation of the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo in 1990’s Venice Biennale, significantly one year after the fall of the Berlin wall, could be considered as a first moment of assimilation of border art in the biennial circuit. This constitutes

252  Giulia Degano the prologue to the adoption of a similar format or, at least, the connection to established biennial institutions for curatorial events approaching the topic of borders. A good example of this category is the Real DMZ Project, a curatorial initiative with national and international articulations devoted to promote a counter-narration of the so-called Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) that divides North and South Korea through an international exchange that includes debates, workshops, and exhibitions that culminates in a diffuse exhibition about this buffer zone and constitutes the main event of this project.6 An inheritor of the spirit of the Project DMZ (1988), the Real DMZ Project patiently cultivates the utopian imaginary of an inclusive border where mediation is possible, in some cases maintaining the strategy of the utopian architecture shown in the Duplex House (2018) by Tobias Rehberger, the project for a Yangji-ri house prototype conceived to host a South and a North Korean family that was also displayed on-site.7 The counter-narrative of the border also relates to lost (border) memories, a recurring topic in the artistic approach to a border viewed as a space of exception, where the exclusion dynamics that it perpetrates culminate in physical disappearance. This connection between loss and boundaries has been pointed out by some works linked to the Real DMZ Project, such as Minouk Lim’s Monument 300-Chasing watermarks (2014-ongoing). This ephemeral anti-monument and research project disruptively uses the inclusion of the Demilitarized Zone in South Korean touristic business as a starting point for an alternative exploration of the site that leads to a place of disputed memory, the Waterworks Centre in Cheorwon-gun, Gangwon-do, where the bodies of three hundred people, who were killed for political accusations during the Korean War, were found hidden in water tanks. The artist evokes the disappeared in a ghostly manner by creating sculptures of life-sized bodies in ice, along with three hundred feather sculptures, all exhibited at the site, and also replicates the founding in collaboration with a group of tourists by dramatically depicting the negotiations for identity and land that still shake the regional society and politics.8 Similarly to Lim, many artists participating in the project chose to convert places related to the controversial touristic dimension of this site. For example, Tomás Saraceno alters the space of the Peace Observatory, the main on-site materialization of the official narration about the border, in DOF (Degrees of Freedom) (2014). The artist extends the rotating capacity of the binoculars installed on-site to point to North Korea and allows a bilateral view of the border through the alteration of an iconic object of border control. This changes perspectives and reveals the controversies of the hegemonic discourse about the other, which is a topic satirically approached by another important work, Red house (2005) by Noh Suntag, displayed in the 2013 edition of the Real DMZ. The site-specific artistic intervention of the area has also been accompanied by a series of initiatives of communitarian engagement, including, in some cases, artistic residency at border villages, as in the fortunate case of Adrian Villar Rojas’s one-month stay at Yangji-ri in 2014 that inspired the feature-length film The Most Beautiful Moment of War (2017). This work lists the entire population of the village, conveys the peculiarity of the communitarian sense of time and space at this border, and suggests its disruptive potential as a place for cultural exchange and creation.

Curating boundaries and liminality 253 Although the Real DMZ fails to achieve a cross-border dimension by not involving North Korean artists, curators, or audiences despite catalysing a broad international community of artists and curators – a paradox of globalization that it shares, for different reasons, with problematic initiatives such as Manifesta 6 (2006) or the Jerusalem Show – this project, here briefly evoked, represents an important step forward for a disruptive and proactive use of the border in the curatorial field. 2.2  Moving boundaries

In other curatorial cases, the on-site approach to the border leaves place to a representation of boundaries that occurs far from the border space and when moved to more traditional cultural spaces, such as galleries and museums in the Global North, often focuses the narration of the border on the image of a border wall. This is the case of exhibitions such as “Keep your eye on the Wall. Palestinian landscapes”, co-curated by Sandra Maunac and Mónica Santos for the curatorial platform Masasam (2007–2016) and premiered at the 2013 Les Rencontres d’Arles in the city’s Magasin Electrique; Khaled Jarrar’s solo exhibition “Whole on the Wall” (2013) at the Ayyam Gallery of London; and Oliver Ressler’s double exhibition “Transnational Capitalism Examined” (2016) at Rome’s The Gallery Apart and Fondazione Pastificio Cerere. This strategy can be described as another traditional approach to the topic, as it centralizes the discourse about borders far from its space and communities by posing a curatorial exportation of the border that is not dissimilar to that presented in the previous subsection. The difference is in the type of audience to whom these initiatives are destined, that is, Western citizens who are the main consumers of the media discourse about geo-political borders and migration policies and who have the political capacity to influence the local decisionmaking process about these issues. It is worthy to comment on these curatorial initiatives that seize the opportunity to export the border to Western centres and their effort to influence this hegemonic context from the inside. Physical boundaries can be far away, but the symbolic ones penetrate and define both centres and peripheries. This first case, the exhibition curated by Masasam (see Figure 16.1), stands out for the transcultural character given by its transnational organization and the participation of artists from different cultural backgrounds, who came together to define the concept of border space against the backdrop of the old warehouse that hosted the exhibition whose brutalist aesthetic dialogued effectively with the works displayed.9 The initiative included the participation of a group of Palestinian, Israeli, and German artists formed by Taysir Batniji, Rula Halawani, Raeda Saadeh, Steve Sabella, and Kai Wiedenhöfer, who were asked to narrate the reality of the Palestinian-Israeli border from their common experience of liminality. The result is an exhibition that brings together very different perspectives on the topic: Saadeh’s tragicomic performances; Halawani’s surreal and melancholic black-andwhite shots; Wiedenhöfer’s globally biased photographic reportage of the walled borders; and Sabella’s canvases with their metamorphic deconstruction of the border. In addition to the prevalent use of the photographic medium, the perspectives

254  Giulia Degano offered by these artists are brought together by the leitmotif of the wall, to which each work refers systematically to depict a narrative that restores the claustrophobic atmosphere and the limitations that its presence implies. This brings the public closer to the sense of the state of exception resulting from the mechanisms of social, political, and cultural exclusion at work in this border zone. Is interesting to note, for example, the sinister familiarity of the wall that Halawani’s shots share as a biographical and aesthetic affinity with the work of Kai Wiedenhöfer, who was born in then-East Germany. Wiedenhöfer has dedicated his career to documenting and questioning the border by photographing and comparing contemporary border walls and fences that are displayed in site-specific interventions or in collective exhibitions such as the present case and by meticulously highlighting the historical connections between these sites from a global perspective. Particularly, it is worth mentioning a long-term project by this artist, WallonWall (2019-ongoing), that could be described, according to the curatorial categories proposed in this contribution, as a hybrid case for being an on-site intervention of historical border sites in the Western world, such as the area of the Berlin Wall or Belfast’s Peace Line, where the artist disruptively converts the wall into a type of anti-monument, that is, a place for disruptive narration and memory. The second solo exhibition to mention is undoubtedly “Whole in the Wall” (2013) by Palestinian artist Khaled Jarrar, a key artist of contemporary border intervention and counter-narration because of his commitment to the topic that he express through his eclectic work. In this case, the curatorship of the Ayyam Gallery chose a material simulation that would project the public into the border experience of the Palestinian people by transforming the museum space with a concrete wall that could be crossed through a breach in the shape of the state of Palestine, which evokes the Palestinian claim for national legitimation through the physical intervention of the wall itself and the desire to break the isolation of this community. The exhibition was completed with a series of artwork made by the concrete exported by Jarrar from the apartheid wall between Israel and Palestine, accompanied by the projection of a selection of short films shot by Jarrar in the area. The exhibition effectively interpreted the artist’s aim to turn a source of separation into a source of unification by highlighting the conceptual charge and disruptive use of the dominant material in his work, namely, concrete, to evoke the resilient attitude that defines his approach to the wall.10 However, the immersive experience offered by this walled-focused curating is constantly exposed to the risk of being a victim of its own fiction, given the ambiguity between the sense of sympathy and distance that the audience can experience. On the one hand, the visitor is invited to share subversive practices and feelings of the Palestinian community by trespassing on a replica of the wall, is exposed to the sense of isolation that it conveys, and explores the world depicted by the artist’s resilient appropriation of this object and its materiality. On the other hand, the context of the exhibition – a Saudi Arabian gallery in one of the wealthiest cities of the Global North – ends up emphasising the artificiality of the situation and the dramatic distance between the two contexts. Furthermore, this kind of border curating faces another dilemma: as for the other initiatives included in this subsection, the focus on the wall does not seem to stray too far from the hegemonic

Curating boundaries and liminality 255 discourse about the border – which is also wall-focused. In these cases, curators tend to avoid this risky proximity by emphasising the resilience of border communities, which is merely absent in the victimising representation proposed by the media, and they succeed in creating an ephemeral connection between the audience and this community by disruptively importing the border and its counternarration to a hegemonic space. This curatorial strategy still plays a dominant role in the curatorship of the border and the national and international debate about contemporary borders and migration flows. Far from underestimating these types of initiatives, my purpose here is to describe a tendency in border curating that emblematically reflects the negotiations that artists and curators have to address when approaching this issue. The last case that I identify for this section is Oliver Ressler’s Transnational Capitalism Examined (2016) (see Figure 16.2), which represents an inspiring example of artistic activism about the Schengen area’s borders and openly quotes Mezzadra e Neilson’s essay Border as Method (2013) in the title of its second part.11 The artist’s exhibition in Rome represents a unique case in the context of border curating taking place apart from border areas and refers to a wider definition

Figure 16.2 Oliver Ressler, Transnational Capitalism Examined: Border as Method, installation view at the Gallery Apart (ground floor), Rome. Source: Photograph by Giorgio Benni.

256  Giulia Degano of boundaries that goes far beyond walls and fences to reveal the (kept-) invisible connections among a wide range of social, political, economic, and environmental phenomena that stand behind the contemporary walled-states policy. Analysing the globalization of capitalism from the perspective of three sectors of capital – specifically, speculative financial capital, the military and industrial security complex, and the energy and extractive sector – this multi-media installation gave the audience the opportunity to establish these connections by relating political and economic trends to the social uprisings, economic collapse, and huge migratory flows that shape our contemporaneity. This artistic counter-narration of bordering subversively takes advantage of the media’s language to develop a striking collage that clearly illustrates the dynamics of inclusion/exclusion that feed global capitalism. The work makes particular reference to the European and Italian status quo by critically combining and intervening images that refer to the political power of the European Community, extractive practices, the global economic crisis, and the humanitarian crisis in the Mediterranean through a critical production – as shown, for example, by the display of the Italian version of Ressler’s series “There is not a flag” (2013–2016). In this way, the work presents a dense counter-narration that highlights the epistemic potential of borders for an independent and dissident interpretation of the contemporary.12 2.3  Curating from border communities

The curatorial counter-narration of the border sometimes takes the form of a communitarian action of civil (re) appropriation of the public space of the border that also relates to the activist practice. This space is conceived of as a social and political arena for reacting locally to the official, stereotyped representation of the border, and it reclaims the right to a self-representation that is both locally referred to and participant in the global search for solutions to the current eco-social crisis. The previous subsection highlighted a curatorial strategy that formally implies the materialisation of the geo-political border, while this other type of border curatorship chooses the opposite path by proposing a de-materialisation of boundaries, which is particularly significant from a political perspective if we consider the onsite and communitarian dimension chosen for these curatorial practices. Resuming the previous subsection, the work by Khaled Jarrar can also be mentioned to describe the transition from one strategy to the other, as he participated in a communitarian on-site intervention of the border with No man’s land (Khaled’s ladder) (2016), a cross-cultural intervention of the geo-political border between Mexico and the United States that goes far beyond the installation of the ladder mentioned in the title. The work can be interpreted as part of a wider on-site performance about the border where he used his interaction and collaboration with the regional border communities to redefine its territory as a site for exchange and resistance.13 The North American region had already been the space for a communitarian re-appropriation of the border space through the on-site collaborative and communitarian practices that characterized one of the most emblematic curatorial projects on this border, InSITE, which can be considered as an inheritor of the BAW/TAF.14

Curating boundaries and liminality 257 Through its editions (1992, 1994, 1997, 2000, 2005, 2013–18/Casa Gallina Project), this initiative established a large web of transnational connections to depict the border as a privileged space for counter-narration, utopia, social and cultural mediation, and memory by often using a performing strategy in collaboration with local communities for a diffuse intervention of the border territory. This project had the novelty of a strong connection with the university realm that anticipates other experiences of border curatorship such as those ascribed to Kate Bonansinga’s curatorial practice at the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for Visual Arts at the University of Texas at El Paso.15 InSITE is a renowned and well-covered institution of border curatorship; however, here, I prefer to present less-known and more recent curatorial initiatives on borders that stand out for their communitarian commitment and that often use the border as a de-colonial method. This is the case of the Latin American initiatives that I illustrate: the curatorial and educational event Juntos Aparte Encuentro Internacional de Arte, Pensamiento y Fronteras and the Proyecto Maya Transfronterizo.16 There is a common curatorial approach among these projects devoted to developing a collaborative counter-narrative that responds to the (geo) political and colonial discourse imposed on border communities. The first initiative originates from the experience of the brothers Brahim, Luís Miguel and Alex, of the border closure imposed by the Maduro government in August 2015 and the happy collaboration with BIENALSUR Bienal Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo del Sur. This event was inaugurated in the border town of Cúcuta, Colombia in 2017 with a series of exhibitions and collateral events such as debates, audio-visual screenings, and workshops. Juntos Aparte became, in its first stage, a mini biennial extension of BIENALSUR, with a good balance between renowned artists – such as Adrian Paci, Francis Alÿs, Antonio Caro, Marcelo Brodsky, and Teresa Margolles – and emerging artists, with a notable regional participation. The event modifies the border space mostly with diffuse and large-scale installations, performances and workshops involving the local community – with its different needs and experiences of liminality – through practices that successfully combine creativity and social activism through transnational artistic and academic collaborations. This is the case, for example, of the workshop “El enemigo está dentro. Disparidad sobre nosotros” (2017) by the Colombian-Spanish Equipo Sublime or the poetic disembarking of La Caravana de la Hermandad during the second edition of the event in 2019. The first was developed with a group of students from the region for the creation of a series of posters focused on the migratory issue that was used to revamp the urban public space, while the second consisted of a march where an old boat used in 1910 to cross the Táchira River – symbolizing the brotherhood of the regional communities – accompanied the participants to the point of a “poetic landing” in front of one of the exhibition venues of Juntos Aparte, the Centro Cultural Quinta Teresa. The project proposes the border city as a space for resistance to and debate on the condition of being a border, with the aim of presenting viable answers at a global level from the local perspective. The diffuse and itinerant intervention of the border public space in and around Cúcuta is part of the tradition of this event along with a pedagogical practice that is dominating the last editions of this event, which strengthens its ties with the local community.

258  Giulia Degano Significantly, the re-appropriation of the border space as part of a local social and cultural struggle for the self-legitimation, identity (re) construction, and resilience of a border region community recurs in the Proyecto Maya Transfronterizo, with the difference being the indigenous perspective that defines this project. This endeavor arose as a way to establish a cross-border connection between Mayan artists from Mexico and Guatemala and was later extended to the indigenous art world of the whole Latin-American region. The project is located on the southern Mexican border, which is less covered by the media but is equally problematic as it is situated on the route of illegal migration from Central America. In a provincial context, the area is charged with centuries of the social and economic marginalization of the local indigenous communities and with a history of indigenous struggle that culminated with the Zapatistas movement. Most of the members of this initiative are associated with a gallery situated at an emblematic site for the history of Zapatism, San Cristóbal de las Casas. The Galería MUY is devoted to exposing the work of local Mayan and Zoque artists and promoting an autonomous curatorial and artistic practice to reflect and participate in the evolution of the Contemporary Mayan and Zoque art.17 The frontiers faced by the gallery’s artists are not limited to those of the nation-state. These artists propose a disruptive concept of contemporary indigenous art that relates to the indigenous legacy and identity without renouncing a hybrid formal search, globally informed, that flees from both local and global stereotypes. The artists linked to the gallery are united by a formal and conceptual proposal that intertwines the identity substratum derived from ancestral community knowledge and the traumatic experience of colonisation with a postcolonial and socio-environmental critique that is coherently inserted in the global counter-narrative trends. Their formal sensibility and glocal training express the intent to combine the experience of living in or coming from an indigenous community with that of a globalized environment in a context where, from the colonial period to the independent history of the country, the free circulation of indigenous narratives has been systematically compromised. The disruption implied by these artists consists of using the border as the space for indigenous counter-narration and a creative alliance on a trans-national and continental scale through a series of artistic exchanges that take the form of exhibitions, workshops, and art residencies for indigenous artists from all over Latin America. The artists recover a regional sense of indigenous identity that defies the traditional Western connection of the concept to the nation-state and consciously insert themselves into the phenomenon of global art from a vision of its becoming, to which these artists can contribute conceptually and formally from their locality and identity. From this perspective, the artists related to the project also faced the pandemic that coincided with its first stage, and they reacted to this contingency with a diffuse production of works that, from the city and the rural, recovered and reinvigorated a communitarian sense of identity and traditional strategies of resilience in a time of forced isolation. In this way, they showed an approach to this situation that is not dissimilar to the disruptive way that the project relates to the border, that is, as an opportunity for self-representation, creation, and communitarian connection, which is evident, for example, in the works Tiznar las palabras (2020) by Ángel Poyón,

Curating boundaries and liminality 259 Yaxal ch’ulel-kuxlejal (2020) by Säsäknichim Martínez and Abraham Gómez, and Suspiro ante la incertidumbre (2020) by PH Joel. The cases briefly presented to illustrate this third strategy for curating the border share an outstanding compromise with border territory and community from a mostly regional perspective. They make this place of liminalities socially and culturally productive in a way that confirms the vision of the border as an epistemic productive space that connects temporalities with margins from a glocal perspective. 3. Conclusions The global spread of curatorial initiatives involving physical and symbolic boundaries over the last three decades seems to suggest the development of a trend in contemporary curatorial practice that follows the pivotal role played by this concept in the social and political realms. In a way, this resembles the concept of “politics of hope” proposed by Appadurai (2013) as a key feature of resistance and political change. Furthermore, art itself can be considered a border, as it often functions as a liminal practice that cultivates an interdisciplinary dialogue about the plural experience of boundaries, making borders and liminality a very suitable topic for curating. As I indicate within this short contribution, the curatorial initiatives approaching this topic can be outlined by two points. One point is related to the categorization of the curatorial strategies adopted to approach the border, on which the main body of the present contribution is focused. The other point is a more conceptual one that can be deduced from the artistic cases presented here and that leads to a general definition of the artistic border counter-narrative from four thematic approaches that evidently permeate it, that is, mediation, utopia, gender, and memory. These recurrent issues in the artistic representation and intervention of the border provide a disruptive reformulation of this concept and confirm the border as a prominent arena for social and political debates about these issues. Such prominence requires showing the social and political potential of the artistic intervention and narration on and about boundaries as an outstanding way of participating, from the cultural realm, in the border struggles that are de-centralizing, de-colonializing, and reinventing contemporary subjectivities on a local and global scale. In a wider sense, the frame emerging from this short introduction to curatorial practice on boundaries leads to a subverting, diverse, and proactive definition of the border that can be tentatively summarised into three interconnected categories. The first one describes it as an emblematic space of the state of exception, a ­no-mans-land of suspended rights and resilience, which particularly appears from the curatorial initiatives focused on the image of the border wall. The second category, referred to in its on-site dimension, consists of the use of the border as a prominent site for social and political intervention, often from a communitarian perspective and practice. Finally, the last category recognizes the border as an epistemic territory of possibilities, confirming the interpretative line recently proposed by Mezzadra and Neilson.

260  Giulia Degano The second and third categories clearly play a more disruptive role, but the first one should not be underestimated, as it achieves its contesting and ­counter-narrative objective by infiltrating the hegemonic representation of the border. As I demonstrated through this short presentation of some recent curatorial experiences of the border, contemporary art is globally showing an increasing use of border spaces, issues, and practices as a creative and socio-politically disruptive method. It does this by putting the margins at the very centre of the past and contemporary debate about subjectivities to reveal their defining liminality and dynamism, a condition that is confirmed by the physical and symbolic boundaries’ own ambivalence. In a world fragmented by social and geo-political processes of bordering, the recognition of social and cultural attempts to subvert this panorama is fundamental to the evolution of the aforementioned debate. By curating borders, artists and curators are participating in the ongoing negotiations referred to the definition of contemporary identities by seizing the social, political, and formal opportunities offered by borders as a method for mediation, inclusion, and resistance. Notes 1 The topic proposed for this chapter is part of a global comparative analysis about the artistic intervention and narration of borders that I am conducting as part of my dissertation at the Universitat de Barcelona for the program Societat I Cultura: Història, Antropologia, Art i Patrimoni an as a PhD candidate associated with the project Art Globalization Interculturality (AGI). See https://artglobalizationinterculturality.com/ 2 See www.tate.org.uk/intermediaart/borderxing.shtm 3 I particularly refer to the definition of the border that emerged at the second session of the 35th Comite International d’Histoire de l’Art (CIHA) Congress 2022 “Motion Migrations” concerning “Border as Method: Art Historical Interventions”, which pointed out the porous, hybrid, and shifting nature of the concept and that the problem is represented by labels such as “border art” to describe the artistic intervention of the border. Most contemporary art moves in, talks about, and challenges borders, in addition to the regional and historical connotations of the expression. I believe that this expression “border art” should be used only for the artistic practice at and about the border between Mexico and the United States, which gave rise to this concept due to its strong ties with the history and aesthetics of the Chicano community. For this reason, I refer to it in italics. See www.ciha.org/content/ciha-s%C3%A3o-paulo-motion-migrationspostponed-january-2022. Furthermore, it is worth mentioning the emergence of a plural and disruptive discourse about the border arising from academic projects such as the Critical Border Studies forum, among others, whose activity is forging a novel interpretation of boundaries, as is discussed in the subsequent footnotes. See www.cemfor.uu.se/ research-networks-/border-studies/ 4 Scheid, K. (2020). Start with the art. New ways of understanding the political in the Middle East. In L. Sadiki (Ed.), Routledge handbook of Middle East politics. Routledge. 5 The expression “RuiNation” appears in the context of border studies and was proposed in the framework of the research workshop organized in 2022 by Critical Border Studies, an interdisciplinary forum founded in 2017 by academics, artists, and activists linked to the Centre for Multidisciplinary Studies on Racism (CEMFOR) at Uppsala University. One of the themes of debate proposed for this event consisted of the ruinous character of the nation-state system. I partially report the description of this

Curating boundaries and liminality 261 concept as it appears in the informative document about the 2022 Research School: “Borders are ruins of the nation-state system. It does not mean that they are abandoned or have lost their function (as the definition of ruins tells us). To approach borders as ruins is a tactical move to construct alternative imaginaries of nation-states. Rather than material constructions, borders-as-ruins is about the politics of imagination and imaginative politics. The vision of borders as sites of ruin challenges the timeless and planned nation-state model of organizing humanity”. See https://anthroassociation.gr/ critical-border-studies-research-school-2022-displacement-and-expulsion/ 6 The project was inaugurated in 2012 at the initiative of both the SAMUSO Centre for Contemporary Arts in Seoul and its founder, the curator and professor Sunjung Kim. For detailed information about the Real DMZ Project’s current activities, see www.realdmz .org/?ckattempt=3 7 Directed by Kyong Park and Cathleen Crabb for the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, Project DMZ was an initiative defined by an architectural approach, albeit with an interdisciplinary vocation, aimed at proposing alternative spatial and visual strategies for the future of the DMZ by intertwining art, architecture, and political ­utopia. Participating artists and architects were Nam June Paik, Paul Virilio, Avant Travaux Studio, and Lebbeus Woods. See http://storefrontnews.org/archive/1980s/1988/­projectdmz/. For the project’s pamphlet, see https://archive.org/details/1998.11ProjectDMZPa mphlet/page/n13/mode/2up 8 It is worth quoting part of the artist’s reflection on this project: “How did the people who only exist as a number on the signage in front of the site die and disappear away like flowing water? The project thus starts from imagining their traces and their names that have been forgotten by the community and that are soon to be concealed eternally after privatization of the land. It is a journey searching for the identity of the place where the conventional description of ‘tragic scene of history’ and the paradoxical definition of ‘security tourist site’ cross their paths”. See www.minouklim.com/index.php?/ monument-300-dmz-peace-project/ 9 See Kiang-Snaije, O., & Albert, M. (Eds.). (2014). Keep your eye on the wall. Palestinian landscapes. Saqi Books. 10 See Jarrar, K. (2013). Whole in the wall. Ayyam Gallery. 11 Developed in collaboration with curator and theorist Mike Watson, the project mixes previous works by Ressler, partly undertaken in collaboration with artists Zanny Begg and Martin Krenn, with others produced specifically for this exhibition. The project has been articulated in two parts, namely, Transnational Capitalism Examined: Dancing on Systemically Important Graves and the aforementioned Transnational Capitalism Examined: Border as Method, which were exhibited in the spaces of the Fondazione Pastificio Cerere and the Gallery Apart, respectively, between September and November of 2013. See www.thegalleryapart.it/exhibitions/ transnational-capitalism-examined-border-as-method/ 12 See www.ressler.at/there_is_not_a_flag/ 13 In July  2016, a group consisting of Palestinian artist Khaled Jarrar, Italian filmmaker Matteo Lonardi, and other Middle Eastern, European, and American members of the project CultuRunners travelled along the U.S./Mexican border from San Diego/Tijuana to El Paso/Ciudad Juarez as part of a multi-year artists’ road trip filmed between the United States and the Middle East against the backdrop of the 2016 presidential elections. See www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/video/2016/jul/04/ can-i-jump-palestinian-artist-at-mexicous-border-video 14 InSITE’s Archive is still an important tool not only for the project’s documentation but also for the eclectic approach to the topic of border curatorship that it offers. See https:// library.ucsd.edu/dc/collection/bb9661755g 15 For an in-depth description of the mentioned initiative, see Bonansinga, K., & Lippard, L. (2014). Curating at the edge. Artists respond to the U.S./Mexico border. University of Texas Press.

262  Giulia Degano 16 The foundation and curatorial practice of the Museo della Fiducia e del Dialogo per il Mediterraneo in Lampedusa, Italy in 2016 by the NGO Comitato Tre Ottobre could also be pointed out as a case of communitarian curatorship of militarized border areas. Despite being focused more on Mediterranean migration flows than on borders, it can be interpreted, because of its location and communitarian dimension, as a radical on-site initiative of border resilience and counter-narration with a strong social and educational vocation. See www.comitatotreottobre.it/museo-della-fiducia-e-del-dialogo-per-il-mediterraneo/ 17 See www.galeriamuy.org/proyecto-maya-transfronterizo/

References Appadurai, A. (2013). The future as cultural fact: Essays on the global condition. Verso Books. Bonansinga, K., & Lippard, L. (2014). Curating at the edge. Artists respond to the U.S./ Mexico border. University of Texas Press. Brown, W. (2010). Walled states, waning sovereignty. Princeton University Press. Iveković, R. (2010). The watershed of modernity: Translation and epistemological revolution. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 11, 45–63. Kiang-Snaije, O., & Albert, M. (Eds.). (2014). Keep your eye on the wall. Palestinian landscapes. Saqi Books. Mezzadra, S., & Neilson, B. (Eds.). (2013). Border as method, or, the multiplication of labor. Duke University Press. Park, K. (1988). The militarized zone. In G. Gilbert, L. Modrcin, T. Nishimoto, K. Park, C. Sholtz, K. Taylor, & J. Dodds (Eds.), Front 3, PROJECT DMZ (pp. 12–18). Storefront for Art+Arquitecture. Rodríguez, N. (1996). Social construction of the U.S.-Mexico border. Center for Immigration Research, University of Houston, College of Social Sciences. Scheid, K. (2020). Start with the art. New ways of understanding the political in the Middle East. In L. Sadiki (Ed.), Routledge handbook of Middle East politics. Routledge.

Epilogue: We are all borderworkers Paschalina T. Garidou, Luuk Winkelmolen and Henk van Houtum

Diving into this rich and inspiring collection of chapters on the pivotal notions of borders and boundaries, the timely academic debate on liminality, along with the unique opportunity of crossing borders of all sorts has been a delight and privilege. We begin this epilogue by returning the compliment to the editors Basak Tanulku and Simone Pekelsma for inviting us to compose the afterword of this diverse and thought-provoking volume that brings together a variety of scholars who provide an open discussion that challenges the roots, definitions, and various interpretations and contextualisations of borders, boundaries, liminality, and transgression. Content-wise, the book draws upon three harmonious sections. The first section of the book (Liminality, Identity and Space) explores how borders/boundaries lead to blurred subjects, identities, and in-between places and geographies. The second section (Liminality and the City) ranges from liminality, the neighbourhood, and gated communities to infrastructure and the borders between clashing sides. The third and final section (Liminality across and beyond the Country) explores liminality beyond the micro-scale of home, neighbourhood, and the city. Collectively, this volume finely interweaves together a plethora of creative empirical examples that focus on how liminality and transgression, along with cross-borders and the praxis of crossing borders, can be reinterpreted with and further emancipated through interesting academic perspectives. As border scholars ourselves, we share the aspiration of the authors of the book to continuously and critically reflect on and reinterpret bordering processes and their impact. A precocious inference that derives from this paper anthology is that liminality constitutes a rather challenging theoretical ideology (from the Greek synthetics “idea” and “logos”, the discourse around a notion). In many ways, liminality is a multidisciplinary idea, whose historical genealogy and idiosyncrasy render it a highly debated discourse. In the notion of liminal space – originating from the Roman limen, the threshold – in this afterword, we trace and envision an outlook to further stimulate the dialogue on borders and borderwork. For this, we argue, the concept of liminality potentially provides a resourceful transition, an almost ritualistic and divinely inspired passage, along with a fluid process that divides and connects at the same time (Campanale, 2006). DOI: 10.4324/9781003354772-21

264  Paschalina T. Garidou, Luuk Winkelmolen and Henk van Houtum Limen, limes, and liminality As a start, let us first dive into this limen and in conjunction, study how this Roman concept, and with that, the concept of liminality, have travelled over time. What lessons does it bring for future research on the most stimulating notions of borders, boundaries, border crossing, and transgression? This attention to the border as liminal space aligns with our ongoing research for the project “Constructing the Limes”, which deals with the construction of the Roman legacy and its borderrelated gods. In this project, we ardently propose travelling back to its original Latin notion of the limen and connect it to the vaunted Roman frontier, the Limes (Constructing the Limes, 2023; Garidou et al., forthcoming; Isaac, 1988; De Bruin et al., 2017). Although phonetically sharing the same etymological root, limen, which inspired the notion of liminality, the term Limes expressed a different meaning. The Limes is primarily interpreted as a frontier or a boundary by metonymy and as an interstitial zone to demarcate the expansion outwards of the Roman empire, as distinguished from the “other”, “barbaric” side (Campanale, 2006). The Limes represented the transition towards the external, the end of the Roman Empire, whereas the limen expressed the opening, the beginning of something new, a time and place between what was and what comes next. Jumping forward in time, it was, as far as we could trace, the ethnologist and folklorist Arnold van Gennep who first referred to the concept of liminality as a derivation of the Roman Limen. In his book “Rites de passage” (1909/2019), he highlighted that societies use ritual passages in order to demarcate transitions and liminality in ritualistic processes such as birth, puberty, and marriage (Thomassen, 2012). In particular, van Gennep detected a tripartite structure, that is, a rite divided into three distinct sub-categories during which the individual undergoes an identity change and a transition process from one social status to another: the “rites of separation”, the “transition rites”, and “liminal rites” (Wels et al., 2011). As Kimball argued, van Gennep’s aforementioned conceptualization of transition and liminal space classified him as a member of the sociologist followers of positivism and the developers of a functionalist approach (Kimball, 1960). Later, Victor Turner (1978) rediscovered the importance of liminality for symbolic anthropology through his research of tribal rituals, since he perceived it as a condition of an individual being “betwixt and between all the recognized fixed points in space-time of structural classification”, namely, of socially founded categories. Turner tentatively suggested that a liminal state may become “fixed”, by which he meant a situation in which the suspension, the in-betweenness has taken on a more permanent character (Thomassen, 2012). Specifically, he introduced the possibility of the “problematisation of liminality” (Neumann, 2012; Wood, 2015; Turner, 1967; Thomassen, 2012; Ben-Amos & Turner, 1970). In line with various commentators, we argue that Turner’s interpretation of the concept of liminality seems rather reductionistic, as it assumes strict binary distinctions (see e.g., Wood, 2015). To paraphrase Thomassen, liminal space for Turner’s positivistic understanding of anthropology is considered to always be clearly defined, both temporally and spatially. There is a way into liminality, and there is a way out of it (Thomassen, 2012). In terms of borders, the liminal, bordered space is perceived

Epilogue: We are all borderworkers 265 as a binary line or a rather fixed and two-way construction of either/or. The liminal space in between a border constitutes at its core a border of two sides per se. In the words of Haller and Donnan, it resembles a “zipper” dichotomiser that is half opened and half closed, where one is negatively opposite to the other (Haller & Donnan, 2000). Transgression It is interesting to see how this book takes issue with the essentialist, theoretical debate and binary understanding not only of liminality but also of transgression. Throughout its polymorphic chapters, we witness liminality in diverse conceptualisations that assume different contexts and interpretations. These conceptualisations include, among others, hybridity and identity-related in-betweenness (Moes, Amorim, Mendoza, in this volume), different realms (Jackson, PapakonstantinouBrati, in this volume), spaces/landscapes (Pekelsma, Rume, Gintare, Tanulku, Carragher, this volume), waithood/limbo (Paviotti, Buoli, Johnson & McCracken, Müller & Abreu, in this volume), art (Degano, in this volume), and even an unidentifiable concept (Darwell & Joost, in this volume). To dive into some semblance of its scholarly contributions, the amalgam photoessay by John Darwell and Katrin Joost challenges the essence of non-visible boundaries. In their case, the glass window constitutes an invisible boundary between the controlled space of the house and the natural realm of the garden (Darwell and Joost, in this volume). They argue that even though we have the opportunity to admire the birds outside, in various cases (for example, in case of pouring rain) the glass becomes blurred and liminal and prevents us from understanding and problematise the “other” side and the world outside. For them, a garden is an interesting place, a buffer zone or else a metaphor for liminality, as it arguably nests in between the absolute inside and outside. At the same time, however, the glass border makes it possible to make a dynamic, everchanging connection between the bordered indoor-world of human beings and the outdoor-world of the borderless sky, “a realm that is largely denied to us” (idem). Gintarė Kudžmaitė extends the multifaceted dynamics of this border-nature nexus (Kudžmaitė, in this volume). Following Walters’ concept of “humanitarian border”, Kudžmaitė, in a powerful visual essay, focuses on the duality of the border as both a protective and restrictive device at the area of the Curonian Spit, which divides Lithuania and Kaliningrad (idem). Moreover, Basak Tanulku explores the English national park of the Lake District and problematises the dividing power of both physical and symbolic borders, their categorisations, and liminality (Tanulku, in this volume). Liminality here is approached as “dangerous and uncanny”, probably, we argue, due to its own nature of in-betweenness and “belonging to neither side” (idem). Furthermore, Simone Pekelsma explores gated housing developments in Istanbul, Turkey and highlights how one of the most segregated forms of housing can in some cases, also extend the possibilities of interactions and relations by forging bleary boundaries between the inside and outside (Pekelsma, in this volume). From a ­different perspective, it is interesting how João Pedro Amorim focuses on

266  Paschalina T. Garidou, Luuk Winkelmolen and Henk van Houtum liminality as a powerful process of transition in gender identity in the context of migration (Amorim, in this volume). In the attempt to transgress oppressive gender boundaries and ethno-nationalist borders, individuals have to pass through a liminal access point, and this border crossing, as in any other case, makes of them possibly out-of-the-ordinary/dangerous “others” since they escape the essentialistic dichotomisations. Fernanda Müller and Luiz E. Abreu explore how the ­ethnography of a school bus from the peripheries to central Brasilia transforms into not just a plain movement in space but rather, a ritualistic, even symbolic transition from one “imagined world” to another (Müller & Abreu, in this volume). Lessons for border(ing) studies The chapters in this volume proactively problematise the thinking in binary, essentialist oppositions such as “male-female”, “Global North-Global South”, “inside-outside”, “domesticated-wild”, etc. that remains an academic trammel to “transgress”. In this way, the rich contribution, academic fervour, and engagement of these chapters’ anthology, make a strong and sincere plea for a critical interpretation of the politically dominant border and liminality debates. This concurs well with the current academic debate in border studies in which there has been a major shift in the relationship between border and territory, known as the processual turn in border studies, that changed the perception of borders from essentialist, delineating devices to socially constructed concepts, contact and transition zones, and passages and doors (Eker et al., 2013; van Houtum & Eker, 2015a; Sohn, 2014; Anderson et al., 2002). The classic conceptualisation of the border as a static, fixed dividing line has been exchanged for a poststructuralist, processual, and critical approach that views borders “as social processes, practices, discourses, knowledge, narratives, symbols and institutions” (Newman & Paasi, 1998; van Houtum & van Naerssen, 2002e), as never-ending social constructions always subject to change (van Houtum & Eker, 2015a, 2015b). Within border and migration studies, epistemologically, the border has lost its fixity and is dominantly perceived as a complex concept that should be studied as “mobile, perspectival and relational” (Rumford, 2006, 2012; Paasi, 2009, 2014). Thus, the border notion is currently perceived as a practice and endless becoming and is always dependent on interpretation, hence, the introduction of the verb “bordering” (van Houtum & van Naerssen, 2002; van Houtum, 2019, 2021). This post-structuralist epistemology provides us with the liberty to deconstruct dichotomies and binary oppositions that formerly existed regarding border interpretation and conceptualisation. It therefore constitutes a precious tool to critically approach the border as a constructive synthesis of diverse territorial, political, social, cultural, economic, legal, linguistic, and religious elements (Brambilla et al., 2016; Dell’Agnese & Szary, 2015; Krichker, 2021). This approach has given room for a continuous pursuit of the contextuality of this amalgam and the interrelations of borders and liminality, the liminal space, as a simultaneous “marker of belonging” and “place of

Epilogue: We are all borderworkers 267 becoming” liberated from what lies in “between and betwixt” (Kitchin & Dodge, 2007). Liminality is thus best understood as a state of mind always open for new interpretations and contextualisations and a long process not of either/or, but of and/and, here-and-there, a closure-and-opening – what we could term the “Art of liminality”. This volume has enriched the contemporary academic debates on borders and liminality with various critical, postmodern, novel, and boundary-disruptive approaches to learn from. For example, Antea Paviotti convincingly challenges van Gennep’s and Turner’s understanding of liminal space and its element of inbetweenness by introducing the interesting notion of waithood (Paviotti, in this volume). By taking the example of the Hutu and Tutsi, Paviotti explains how the in-betweenness, or the “interstitial identity”, is part of a “waithood process” within a “neither-here-nor-there position”, which neither necessarily nor exclusively erects walls and borders between “us” and “them”. On the contrary, the person per se has the power to contest these boundaries, since liminality is a space of “multiple belongings” (idem). In the EU context, Jeroen Moes explores the multifaceted identities of Europe (and the subsequent notion of Europeanness) as a liminal identity caught up in between diverse cultural geographies (Moes, in this volume). By proposing the concept of “Euroscapes”, he argues that European identity is neither fixed nor monolithic. Instead, it reflects a diverse character, depending on “where you stand”. By dividing it into four Euroscapes (North, West, East, and South), Moes showcases the challenging task to define the “European” due to the complex inclusion and exclusion processes of belonging, identity, and culture (idem). Next, Sam Rumé focuses on liminality as an anti-infrastructure in Ecuador, which has the power of both boundary making and transgression in terms of urban mobility as seen from the city tram and the fence (Rumé, in this volume). The tram’s construction leads to liminal spaces of both inclusion and exclusion, free of categorization, and beyond compartmentalization. Liminal, Rumé argues, coexists with infrastructures “in the infinitely complex interplay of what is and what may be”, is a partially “creative, open-ended exploration of the boundary”, and “does not result in an absolute stabilisation, as the practice continues to shift”. In particular, “it simultaneously connects and limits”; thus, the liminal coexists with experience and the transgression of (infrastructural) boundaries. Furthermore, inspired by the idiosyncratic case of Nicosia/Lefkosa, which is often imagined as the “last divided European capital of Cyprus”, Alice Buoli promotes the idea of overcoming, transgressing, and demolishing the city’s binary barrier by cultivating the ground for communication through the emergence of street art spaces of “imagination and longing” and artistic, political, and social practices of free expression (Buoli, in this volume). These practices and spaces constitute a “transformative variable in the production of knowledge around borders” and the activation of “new shared meanings and public uses” (idem). From a different angle, Alfonzo Mendoza attempts to liberate gender from its binary thinking by proposing the meta-theory of the “Tranarcha Border Framework” to bridge between gender studies (through queer theory) and border studies (through the political philosophy of anarchism) (Mendoza, in this volume). With this approach, Mendoza aims for “a critical view

268  Paschalina T. Garidou, Luuk Winkelmolen and Henk van Houtum of the ways sexuality, migration, the state, borders, and authority are all utilized to maintain a lower class of labor, mainly of sexually, racially marginalized individuals without political power or authority” (idem). Moreover, Ioanna Papakonstantinou-Brati argues that digital technology transcends the fundamental duality between man and machine, public and private, and body and home (Papakonstantinou-Brati, in this volume). Particularly, she claims that “It could be argued that thresholds are perceived both intellectually and materially precisely because they have an abstract, metaphorical and at the same time concrete connotation” (idem). On a different note, Shannon Jackson explores the rhetoric of smart technology and digital citizens in Kansas City, USA and how this softens the boundaries between public and private, virtual and physical gatekeepers and citizens, and overall avant-garde and conventional infrastructure (Jackson, in this volume). According to Jackson, “when machines deliver a perspective that is decoupled from situated human judgement, they deepen a conviction that the sign and the signified can onceand-for-all be collapsed or unified” (idem). In their photographic essay focusing on the city of Melbourne, Australia during the lockdown of COVID-19, Pia Johnson and Clare McCracken showcase the importance of micro-mobility in periods and states of immobility and “limbo”, as seen through the “lockdowns and protracted border closures between urban and rural environments” (Johnson & McCraken, in this volume). Through their lenses, “The body becomes performative, and with its different shapes and orientations, feelings of liminality, grief and endurance are present within the surrounds of the everyday”, while “It is through this repetitive artistic process that the micro-mobilities of the subject within the home is emphasised, and a liminality realised” (idem). Furthermore, Ann Carragher researches the border area between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, known as the Gap of the North (Carragher, in this volume). By applying the notions of liminality and hauntology in this case study, Carragher deduces that “the Gap though regarded as a threshold, a site of transformation, a gateway, a portal, a space between, also paradoxically presents an ambiguous state of inbetweenness, neither here nor there, betwixt and between” (idem). Lastly, Giulia Degano explores how the border consists of “three interconnected dimensions”: border as a “space of the state of exception”, “a privileged site for social intervention”, and “an epistemic territory of possibilities” (Degano, in this volume). Degano powerfully states that “through the choice of curating borders, artists and curators are participating in the ongoing negotiations referred to the definition of contemporary identities, seizing the social, political, and formal opportunities offered by borders within a disruptive use of the border as a method for mediation, inclusion, and resistance” (idem). Escaping despotic bordering At this point, let us revisit the preliminary remark of this epilogue: even though the ideas and vigorous writings on transgressing and crossing through boundaries resonate well with a growing audience of academics, in reality, it is almost impossible to escape borders. But what exactly are we all so passionately striving

Epilogue: We are all borderworkers 269 to escape from? The question, on a more situational level, addresses those who set the scheme and define and empower borders “for us, without us”, the “why” beyond, and the consequences that follow. In general, not all borders are politically empowered and enforced; the demarcated space of each individual, for example, where one feels comfortable, is not necessarily a top-down product. It is the political suppression, the despotic freezing of the liminal space that comes along with some borders where one is autocratically suppressed that constitute the existential threat, as in this case someone else is defining your future. This is brutally shown in various forcefully imposed border arrangements that consist of the political agendas of populist and/or ultra-conservative and far-right leaders, such as the dirty deals of the EU with dictators that limit the freedom of movement and, hence, the freedom to self-construct one’s identity and destiny in a most severe, even violent way. The deals are drawing a violent line in space by financing and thereby legitimising racist autocracies and/or militias. The effects of this de-liminalisation of the borderland are counterproductive for both refugees and the EU, as it is fuelling the dehumanisation of and violence against refugees, is giving not less but more room to the far-right, is making the EU blackmailable, is violating the EU’s own rule of law, and is aggravating the global inequality and widening the global apartheid in mobility privileges (van Houtum, 2010; van Houtum & Bueno Lacy, 2020; Beirens & Davidoff-Gore, 2022; Alam & Farhan Asef, 2020; Bohman & Hjerm, 2016; Bonacchi, 2022; Mau et al., 2015; Terry, 2022; Vasilopoulou, 2009). Given the autoimmunity of these deals, the question that has become pertinent for the EU by now is: how many deals with dictators can a democracy bear before it becomes a tyranny itself? Another case of autocratic bordering is that of the Russian President Vladimir Putin, who selectively shops in history to construct the Russian historical, religious, and geographical legacies through which he legitimises and realises his “holy” yet deadly re-bordering mission and war in Ukraine (Winkelmolen et al., forthcoming-a; Putin, 2022; Duncan, 2002; Starobin, 2022; Drost  & de Graaf, 2022). On a more discursive level a case in point is that of the former Prime Minister of Great Britain, Boris Johnson, who consistently and maliciously performed a “weaponization of history and historical borders” in his attempt to border his country against the “uncontrolled migration” “like the Romans did” (Winkelmolen et al., forthcoming-b; Johnson, 2021, cited in Gibbon, 2021; Fafinski, 2021; Casciani, 2021; Knight, 2021; Humphries, 2021; Piper & Maclellan, 2021). He insidiously made an appeal to legitimise EU’s strict and violent borders to keep out what he suggestively framed as invading hordes of “barbaric” migrants threatening the EU and its Member States with extinction. Considering the significant impact of these despotic, anti-liminal bordering and acknowledging that the border is principally a social design, as border scholars, we should not wither away from countering this kind of autocratic borderings. Clearly, in many parts of the world, autocracies are on the rise. It is not that these politicians do not know that their power dynamics play a pivotal role in shaping the discourse and popular opinion. On the contrary, many of them are popular because of their skillful scapegoating, gaslighting, mocking, and downplaying. And it is not

270  Paschalina T. Garidou, Luuk Winkelmolen and Henk van Houtum that the politicians do not know that their border policies are violent, racist, and deadly. On the contrary and even more worryingly, they have to be convinced that their bordering efforts are unlawful and wrong. The mask is off, and the shame has been replaced by opportunistic, even narcissistic pride. Thus, we argue, it is our common responsibility to seize the momentum and nurture the power to counteract against this systemic, institutionalised, and above-imposed Foucauldian synthesis originating from the “power-knowledge” nexus (“le savoir-pouvoir”) and change the borders that are not changing (Foucault, 1990, 2020). Where do we find the power to counteract and overcome this ominous bordering apparatus enforcement? Since there is no one definition of borders and they can occupy multifarious dimensions and forms (manifested, among others, as a fixed wall to counter incoming refugees or conceptualised and theorised within the “safety” of an academic bubble), the border is paradoxically a rather vulnerable concept in terms of its interpretation, which is something that political hardliners make maximum use of. It is here, we argue, that we as border scholars should step in and step up and help turn this paradoxical sensibility towards a non-authoritarian outcome by contesting the legitimacy and the oppression of imposed, undemocratic, violent bordering practices of any form and type. This is because the power to change the border ultimately and exclusively rests with people. Populism and extreme-right politics are clearly dependent on the popular vote; hence, the unmaking, shifting, and dismantling of violent and racist borders and boundaries are not so much the borderwork of them politicians vs us citizens but more of us vs us. In this regard, we are all borderworkers1 ourselves. Moreover, as academic borderworkers, it would be most helpful if not vital in emancipating and humanising the bordering processes to, in our academic work on borders, escape and counter the state-centric gaze with its fixed and essentialist epistemological categorisations (citizens-migrants, migrants-refugees, domestic-foreign, internal-external border, etc.) and its focus on the border spectacle (Stierl, 2022; De Genova, 2013). Furthermore, we might add that in humanising the lens and creating counter-empirics and counter-epistemologies (Stierl, 2022), the academic entrapment of scholarly-gilded disciplines (what is in a name) and limiting intrauniversity disseminations and dialogues, which paradoxically are bordering us, are not very helpful in this respect. We propose to emancipate the limiting disciplinary and university-society borders and plead for collaborative participations to create the “Art of crossing borders”. This volume, with its liminal, multiscalar, and transdisciplinary lens provides an important help in this direction. In Luis Alberto Urrea’s book “The devil’s highway: A true story” (2008), on the absurdity of the US border policy at the deadliest border region between Mexico and the desert of southern Arizona, that is, the notorious “Devil’s Highway”, he stated that “The border remains a fluid, mutating, stubbornly troubling, enthusiastically lethal region. Perhaps it’s not a region at all. Maybe it’s just an idea nobody can agree on. A conversation that never ends, even when it becomes an argument, and all participants kick over the table and spill their drinks and stomp out of the room. I was born there”. Through and beyond this volume’s timeless conversation on the liminal and borders and their crossing, let us grow older and – why not? – wiser there.

Epilogue: We are all borderworkers 271 Note 1 The term borderwork, to indicate the social construction of borders and the verbing of borders, was coined by Barbara Hooper (2004, p. 212) and further elaborated by a.o. Chris Rumford, 2013.

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Index

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate figures, and page numbers in bold indicate tables. accessibility 131 – 132, 175 Agamben, G. 249 agency 129, 151; political 22, 249; theory 25, 64 alternative: spaces 2, 108, 118; transportation 148; visions 22, 44, 168, 178, 233 amoko 62, 65 – 66, 72 Anarcha-feminism 32, 43 – 44 Anarchism: definition/philosophy 32, 41 – 42, 44, 267; feminist 43 – 44 animal: deaths 79; hybrids/non-human 3; migration 89; population 202, 204, 241; studies 6; wild 97, 99, 157, 243 – 244 annihilation 49 anonymity 19 – 20 Appadurai, A. 218 – 219, 249, 259 Architectural Association School of Architecture, London 173 Arendt, H. 50 art: border art 250 – 251, 259; forms 28, 42, 52, 258; indigenous 258; liminality and 6, 133; mixed-media 77; Renaissance 17; workshop 252, 257 – 258 artforms 77, 88 artificial intelligence (AI) 48, 154 artist: academics 77; advanced 16 – 17; colony 237; statements 80, 84m 86, 90; undocumented 34 – 35 artistic: activism 249 – 251, 255 – 259; experience 26, 84, 91, 173; production 16, 18; representation 17 – 18, 259 artistic intervention 251 – 252, 254, 259 artists: photography 96 artworks 77, 80 – 81; Cruskit and Crows (McCracken) 86, 88, 89, 92 – 93; Lisbon Dreaming (McCracken) 81 – 82, 83;

micro-mobilities 92; Nature is a Tonic (Johnson) 88 – 90; performative 90 – 91; Self-Portraits in ISO (Johnson) 82 – 83, 84 – 85, 84 – 85 asylum seekers 15, 21 – 22, 34, 171 attitude 238, 254; natural 100; political 16 aura 49 Australian Climate Council 79 authenticity 24 – 25, 49, 118, 189 Ayyam Gallery, London 253 – 254 b/ordering 33, 38 balcony 56 – 57, 87 Baltics 226, 231 Barthes, R. 96, 176 Beauvoir, S. 237 becoming, process of 21 – 24; see also transitioning Belarus 221, 225 – 226, 230 belonging: concept of 5, 149, 267; cultural 198, 223, 249; feeling of 69, 73 – 74, 128, 195; group 63, 74; multiple 66 Benjamin, W. (Arcades Project) 15 – 16, 28, 47, 49, 52, 57, 59, 80 – 81 Berger, J. (Ways of Seeing) 17, 86 Berlin Wall 2, 126, 168, 251, 254 Bhabha, H. 64, 249 BIENALSUR (Bienal Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo del Sur) 257 binary thinking 4 – 5, 21, 133, 169, 192, 264, 267; see also gender binary birds: obscured vision of 98, 101 – 102; photography of 96 Birds Through My Window (Darwell) 96, 101 – 103 border: art 250 – 251; communities 255 – 257; connections 126, 132, 195,

276 Index 208, 256; curating 251, 254 – 257; demolition 1 – 2; extended 2; guard 244, 244 – 245; historical 254; human 243; limitations 248; narrative 253 – 254; physical/stationary 40, 45, 243 – 244; political/geo-political 237, 243, 248, 253, 256; projects, North America 250, 251; security 1, 33, 35; symbolic 40, 53, 63, 122, 248; territory 191, 257, 259; theory 32 – 33, 38 – 39, 41, 44; wall 251, 253 – 254, 259; zone 192, 238 – 239, 244, 244 – 245, 254 Border and rule: Global migration, capitalism and the rise of racist nationalism (Walia) 39 Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo (BAW/TAF) 250 – 251 Border as Method (Mezzadra) 249, 255 border crossing 18, 20, 44, 175 – 176, 190, 239, 250, 264, 266 borderlands: de-liminalisation 269; description 3, 38; everyday life 238, 243; in gothic literature 192; historic 210; research 166, 168 – 169; theory 31 border workers 270 Bouli, A. (Territorial Fragilities in Cyprus. Planning and Preservation Strategies) 179, 267 boundaries: defining/redefining 126, 132, 234, 253; physical/symbolic 7, 55, 63, 122, 221, 248, 253, 259 – 260; social 62 – 63; us/them 62 – 63, 66, 68, 73 – 74 Brazil: daily experience of school children 137 – 138, 141, 147; Football World Cup 16; gated communities 108 buffer zone 99, 169, 252, 265 Buffer Zone 169 – 173 built environment 131, 134, 170, 205 Bulgaria 221, 225 Bunting, Heath (Borderxing Guide) 248 Buoli, A. 178, 267 Burundi: identity (ethnicity) 62, 65, 73; IDP camps 66, 70 Butler, J. 21, 24 – 25, 33, 39, 53 capacity 28, 113, 147, 153 – 154, 185, 252 – 253 capitalism: global 35, 39, 250, 253, 256; neoliberal 2, 34; platform 153 cell-home 53, 55 challenge: binary thinking 4, 22, 40 – 42; of order 74, 127, 195; political 204 – 205 cities: balcony scene 56 – 57; classical 4, 8; digital 151 – 155; gated 109;

infrastructure 160 – 163, 205; low-income 18; open street 122; satellite 139; sounds 86 citizen 35 – 37, 39, 43, 79 – 80, 157, 163 citizenship 32, 34 – 36, 39, 43; see also sexual citizenship club goods theory 108 Colombia 257 colonialism 16, 38, 92, 191 – 192 Comfort, A. 42 communitas 63 – 64, 128 – 129 community: experiences 64, 67, 73, 79, 82, 92 (see also gated communities); imagined 62; queer 31 confinement 51, 54 – 55, 57 – 58 connect 8, 80, 131, 137, 197, 264 connection: boundary 252, 255, 258; digital 88, 163, 176; human 17, 40 – 41, 52, 140, 171; simultaneous 101, 134 Conrad, R. (Against Equality: Queer Revolution, Not Mere Inclusion) 37 conservative 28, 38, 204, 227, 269 construction: complication (tram) 131 – 134; social 218, 266; symbolic 217, 224, 227; transportation infrastructure (tram) 122 – 124, 125, 126 – 131 consumption 37, 53, 58, 127, 155, 205 – 207, 209, 211 control: digital 51, 155; governmental 52 – 53, 56, 154, 170, 185; political 53, 207 cosmopolitan sexual citizenship 37 COVID-19: artistic maker-thinkers 77; border displacement 58; connectivity 55; domestic safe spaces 91; healthcare 56; lockdowns 6, 8; micro-mobilities 77 – 78, 80, 177, 239; new normal 53 – 54; politics 52, 58; quarantine 55; variants 78; virtual reality 51 – 52 criminalization: of mobility 35, 38 – 40; of queerness 42 crisis: climate 80; COVID 52 – 53, 56, 58; financial 176, 223, 233, 256; identity 68; meaning 232 critical: engagement 186; studies 32, 45, 155, 167, 238, 249, 266; thinking 49, 77, 88, 174, 188 Critical Race Theory 32 Critical Theory 32 Cuenca, Ecuador: experience of ruination 124, 126 – 129, 131; open streets (calles abiertas) 122 – 123; shopkeepers 123, 128 – 132; tram route construction 123, 125, 126, 131 – 132

Index  277 Curonian Spit, Russia: nature reserve fieldwork 238 – 239, 241; peninsula 237 cyber-verbality 53 cyborgs 6 Cyprus Pavilion 166 – 167, 173, 174, 176, 177 Daring, C.B. (et al 2013) (Queering anarchism: Addressing and undressing power and desire) 44 Darwell, J. (Birds Through My Window) 96 – 98, 100 – 103, 265 Davidson, P. 203 debates 7, 123, 166 – 167, 174, 178, 210, 252, 259, 266 demarcation 53, 187, 243 Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) 252 deportation 19, 33 – 36 digital: citizen 163, 268; platforms 51, 56, 152, 154, 160, 162, 176; presence 53; technology 50 – 51, 55, 156, 268 disorder 48, 130, 134 displacement 38, 40, 42, 52, 64, 72 – 73, 128, 171, 192, 196 dissolution 2, 49, 52, 191 DNA 6 DOF (Degrees of Freedom) 252 doubling 192 – 193 DREAM Act 35 dualist logic 134 Durkheim, E. 144 embodied presence 51 – 53, 56, 59, 110, 123 – 124, 192 empathy 129 empirical concepts 8, 233, 263 energy 52, 58, 90, 110, 160, 206, 210, 256 England 202 – 205, 207, 210 entertainment 52, 55 equality 2, 32, 138, 140 Estonia 217, 219, 220, 221, 223, 225 – 228, 230, 232 ethics 2 – 3, 153, 168 Europe: balcony scene 56 – 57; division within 202, 227 – 229; Europeanness/ identity 217 – 218, 229, 232 – 233, 267; gated communities 107; migration 15 – 17, 20, 22, 40 European Union (EU) 176, 225, 227, 231, 267, 269 Euroscapes: cultural division 227 – 229; economic developments 232; experiences 222; geographical

differences 222, 224 – 227; subdivisions 219 – 221 event: defined as 6, 16 – 17; mapping 185 – 186, 237; online 54, 56; public 50, 53; significant 79 – 80, 92 everyday life experiences 4, 24, 51 – 52, 54, 63, 74, 110, 126, 140 existence: embodied 48, 52, 56; human 62, 74, 99, 141; queer 20, 43; rules 148; visual 17, 19, 25 exploration 90 – 91, 110 – 111, 124, 135, 233 – 234, 252, 267 Eyck, A. 4 fairies 3, 209 female 20, 36, 43, 113, 266 film: genre 26 – 28; main character 15 – 20, 27; platforms 23 – 26; short 196 – 198, 254 Finland 222 – 223, 225, 230 First Nations community 92 Foster, H. (The Artist as Ethnographer) 15 – 16, 27 Foucault, M. 102 France 15 – 16, 223 – 224 freedom: of movement 22 – 23, 59, 101, 204, 269; personal 42, 44, 54; politics of 36 – 37, 42 frentistas 128 – 130 Freud, S. 54, 193, 237 Gap of the North: history 187 – 188, 196; religion 189; safe haven 185 gated communities 107; alternative/ compliment to city living 108, 116; diversity 114; everyday life 109 – 111; experiences 109; as hotel 107, 111 (see also Varyap Meridian); as summer resorts 109 gatherings 28, 52, 56 – 57, 65, 167, 172 gay (as being) 21, 31, 34, 36 – 37 gay marriage 37 – 38 gender: binary 22, 41, 44; identity 5, 15, 24 – 25, 36, 266; roles 5, 36 – 37; sex/ gender distinction 21 genderless pronouns 5 genocide 65 geographies 7 – 8, 58, 176, 202, 217, 227, 233, 263 geopolitical border 243, 248, 253, 256 Germany 169, 221, 254 ghost town 170 ghosts 3, 151, 192, 209 glitches 82, 132

278 Index global: capitalism 39, 256; unity 35 Global North/South 8, 39, 251, 254, 266 Goffman, E. 56 – 57 Goldman, E. 32 Google 53, 82, 152, 154, 156 Green Line 166, 169 – 170, 173, 174, 174 – 175, 178 Grobštas Nature Reserve 238 – 239; environmental management 243, 245 Guimarães Rosa, João (The Devil to Pay in the Backlands) 139 Haraway, D. 21, 28 haunting 3, 8, 192, 212 hauntings 3, 8, 192, 212 hegemonic: narrative 27, 225, 233; structure 4, 22, 167, 193; violence 28 Heidegger, M. 101 Henneberry, J. 5 heterosexist 34, 36, 42 hidden 8, 20, 28, 47, 54 – 55, 107, 162, 194, 252 home: abolition of 55; meaning of 119; telecommunications 50, 53 homeless/unhomely 19, 73 homophobic 25, 34, 43 homosexuality 15, 42 human: contact 3, 24, 54, 64, 151; existence 99, 167, 203, 233, 238; judgement 151, 153, 155; nature 48; rights 37, 233, 241 humanity 141, 159 Hutu (social group) 62 – 66; see also Burundi hybridity 2, 6, 51, 63 – 64, 74, 185, 211, 265 immigrants 22, 31, 35 – 36, 139; undocumented 22, 33 – 36, 39 immigration 31 – 36, 40 imperialism 38 – 39 in-between experiences 124, 127, 132, 134 in-between spaces 3 – 4, 48, 64, 73, 188, 231, 263 in-betweenness 124, 127, 132, 190, 193, 265, 267 inclusive 108, 122 – 123, 130 – 132, 168, 248, 252 indigenous perspective 167, 258 inequality 2, 8, 32, 154, 211, 269 infrastructure: perspective 123 – 124, 131 – 134; pre-existing 154; traditional 159 – 161, 163 inside and outside spaces 4, 48, 97, 99 – 101, 108, 113, 178, 265 Instagram 88, 91

internally displaced persons (IDPs): interviews on the hill 66 – 73; Tutsi/Hutu 65 – 66 internet (IoT): digital connection 88, 153 – 154, 159 – 160, 172; home 53 – 56 intersectionality 5, 20 – 21, 23, 186 interstitial: identity 63 – 64, 66, 267 (see also in–betweenness); position 64 – 67, 69 – 70, 73 – 74; wilderness 4 interstitial identities 63, 65 – 66, 73 – 74, 267 intervention 5, 122, 203, 248 – 252, 254, 259 invisibility 15, 19, 20, 22 – 23 Irish War of Independence 190 Israel 253 – 254 Istanbul: gated communities 107, 111 (see also Varyap Meridian); urban development 109 Italy 15 – 16, 56, 176, 202, 217, 219, 220 – 221, 223 – 224, 232 Jackson, S.268 Joel, PH (Suspiro ante la incertidumbre) 259 Johnson, P. 77, 83, 84 – 85, 88, 90, 268 Kansas City, Missouri, 160: City Hall 151, 156 – 157 Kaprow, A. (Sweet Wall) 250 King Arthur 204, 209 Kinna, R. (Anarchism: A beginner’s guide) 41 – 42 Korean War 252 Kudžmaitė, G. 265 Lake District: Cumbria 208 – 210; diversity 206; in-between 211; North/South divide 202 – 203, 205, 207 Lamont, M. 66 landscape: ambivalence 4, 114, 194, 206; cultural 208, 238; multidimensional 18; representation 17 – 18; research 185, 187; wilderness 4, 203, 211 Laursen, E. (et al 2021) (The Operating System: An Anarchist Theory of the Modern State) 42 – 43 Lefebvre, H. 109 – 110, 249 lesbian 31, 36 – 37 Let Alvaro Stay campaign 34 LGBTQ+ 31, 33 – 35, 37, 44 liberation 15, 32, 36, 41, 155, 244 Lim, M. (Monument 300-Chasing watermarks) 252

Index  279 liminal: art 6; identity 8, 13, 63 – 64, 267; looking 96, 101 – 102; space 1, 4 – 5, 64, 96, 102, 263 – 267 liminality: as anti-infrastructure 122, 124, 130 – 132, 267; anti-structure 123, 127, 132 – 133; concepts 2, 5 – 6, 123, 128 – 129, 131, 133 – 134, 186, 191, 249, 263 – 264; liminal personae (threshold people) 63 – 64; of states 223 – 224; study of 4 – 5, 185 – 186; trickster 128 – 129; under-estimating 127, 211 literature 2, 5, 32; academic 107 – 109; boundary-making 74, 127, 170 Lithuania 237 – 238, 265 living: beings 6, 26, 53; camp, in the 66 – 67, 69 – 71; spaces 37, 40, 50, 55, 58, 158, 212, 241 London 203, 205 London Olympics 16 London Tower 87 Madrid 107, 111 male 20, 36, 43, 266 margins 3, 63, 166 – 167, 192 – 193, 249 – 250, 260 marriage 1, 36, 130, 264 Martinez, S. (Yaxal ch’ulel-kuxlejal) 259 Marxism 32 MASASAM (video curating) 250, 253 Masi, E. (Shelter – Farewell to Eden) 16 – 19, 21, 23, 25, 27 – 28 mass media 50 materiality 18, 51, 126, 143, 189, 195, 254 McCracken, C. 77, 81, 83, 86, 89, 268 media: digital 52 (see also social media); mixed 26, 48, 77, 256; radio 50, 158; traditional 16, 209 mediation 52, 147, 250, 252, 257, 259 – 260, 268 mega-event 16 – 17 memory: collective 138, 175, 186, 189, 194, 226, 257, 259; of past violence 62, 68, 73 – 74; short-term 86 meta-privacy 50 meta-space 50, 148, 267 Middle Ages 3, 188 migrants: challenges faced 20, 22 – 23, 39; characteristics 5 – 6; invisibility 17 – 19, 22; queer 20 – 21, 27, 36; theory of agency 25; undocumented 36, 39, 43 migration: flows 171, 255; global 249; policy 31, 40 (see also asylum); wild animal 243 migratory flux 17 – 17

minority 1, 28, 66, 157, 227, 231 mobility 5, 35, 79 – 80, 84, 92, 122, 130, 144, 211, 267 modernism 3 – 4, 122 Moes, J. 267 morality 2 – 3, 147 Moretti, N. (Santiago, Italia) 28 Morin, E.(Cronicle of a Summer) 23 – 25 Moro Islamic Liberation Front 15 movements 21 – 22, 32 – 33, 36, 38, 55, 74, 110, 135, 167, 207 Müller, C. P. (Illegal border crossing between Austria and the Principality of Lichenstein) 250 Mumbai, India 108, 134 Museum of Loss & Memory 86 nation-state: artists 258; borders 5, 33 – 35; formation 31 – 32, 189; narratives 222, 227, 238, 249; queer politics 33 – 35, 37 – 40 neoliberalism 34, 37, 39, 122 Netflix 52 Netherlands 118, 176, 217, 219, 220 – 221, 223, 226, 233 networks 21, 38, 79, 83, 110 – 111, 129, 151; see also social networks NGOs (non-governmental organizations) 172, 249 Nida Art Colony 237 No One Is Illegal (NOII) 34 non-humans 1, 6, 92, 239, 244 Northern Ireland 176, 186, 188, 191, 268 O’Neill Dynasty 187 – 188 openness 122 – 123 order: deportation 19, 34 – 35; restoring 71, 134; state or rule 3, 7, 48; see also social order other/othering 37 – 38, 40, 192 – 193, 232, 239 outsiders 2, 55, 108, 129, 207 Palestine 254 paradigm 16, 23, 26, 175, 185 paradox 49, 169, 177, 190, 192, 232, 248, 253, 268 parallel 48, 139, 240 paranormal 3 Paviotti, A. 264, 267 Pekelsma, S. 59, 211, 263, 265 performative paradigm 23, 91 performativity 22 – 25, 28, 90

280 Index periods: of crisis 192; of immobility 79 – 80, 268; of margin 63 – 64 permanent transience 5 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) 36 photography: birds 97 – 100, 103; liminal looking 96, 101 – 102 physical boundary 7, 55, 63, 122, 253 picturesque 207 pilgrimage 145, 189 Plano Piloto, Brasilia: bus routes 142 – 144; bus rules 145, 148; school children 137, 142; urban experience 139, 140 plurality 248 poetic 18, 26, 92, 96, 257 Poland 221, 223, 225 – 226, 228, 231 political: border 58, 237, 243; debate 250, 259; exclusion 35, 137, 141, 254; power 45, 256, 268 Poyón, Á. (Tiznar las palabras) 258 privacy 50 – 51, 160 private space 47 – 48, 51, 55, 58, 99, 145, 177 production: cultural 166, 173, 186; of knowledge 178, 267; of space 109, 249 Project DMZ 250, 252 Proyecto Maya Transfronterizo 250, 257 – 258 public space 4, 47, 49 – 50, 56, 59, 119, 152, 169, 172, 256 – 257 purity 26, 78 queer: migrants 20 – 21, 27, 36; studies 5; theory 31 – 33, 267 Queer Anarchism 32, 44 Queer of color (QOC) 32 – 33, 44 queerness 31 – 32, 37, 39, 42, 44 Queerphobia 43 Real DMZ Project 250, 252 Rehberger, T. (Duplex House) 252 religion 2 – 3 reproduction 39, 49, 110 Republic of Cyprus (RoC) 170, 174 – 176 Ressler, O. (Transnational Capitalism Examined: Border as method) 250, 253, 255 – 256 Revolutionary Anarcha-Feminist Growup (RAG) 43 rites of passage 47, 63, 127, 130 rituals 3, 86, 127, 130 – 131, 137, 142, 172, 264 Romania 221, 225, 231 romantic 36, 48, 204, 207

Rouch, J. (Chronicle of a Summer) 23 – 25 ruination 124, 128 – 129, 131, 133 – 134, 249 Rumé, S. 267 Russia 221, 225 – 226, 228, 230 – 232, 238 Scotland 203 – 205, 207, 210 Self Portrait in the Photina Robusto (Johnson) 84 – 85, 90 self-affirmation 24, 28 self-alienation 49 self-image 24 self-perceptions 66, 69, 73 separation 48, 68, 100 – 101, 134, 138, 254, 264 settlements 49, 134, 188 sexual citizenship 37 sexuality 22, 31 – 32, 41 – 45, 145, 268 Shelter – Farewell to Eden (Masi) 15, 19 – 20, 27 Shields, R. 203, 205 social: boundaries 62 – 63; change 127, 133; landscape 63, 65, 74; media 1, 50 – 51, 91, 115, 119, 163; networks 50, 56, 80; order 6, 133, 144; science 6, 127, 218 – 219 social status 128, 264 solidarity 16, 56 – 57, 128 – 129, 233, 249 South Africa 108 South Wales/Wales 78 – 79, 203 – 204, 207 space: liminal 1, 4 – 5, 64, 96, 102, 263 – 267, 269; private/non-private 47 – 48, 51, 55, 58, 99, 145, 177; public 4, 47, 49 – 50, 56, 59, 122, 152, 169 – 170, 173, 256 – 257 spatiotemporal place 237, 243 splitting 192 – 193 Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for Visual Arts 257 structuralism 133 suffrage 32 Suntag, N. (Red House) 252 sustainability 108, 122, 126, 130 – 132 Sweden 113, 222 – 223 symbolic boundary 7, 221, 248, 259 – 260 Tanulku, B. 7, 108 – 109, 211, 265 tele-conferencing 52, 56 teleology 124, 224 – 225, 232, 234 telephone 126, 144 television 26, 50, 148 temporary spaces 5, 171 territory: detachment from 218 – 219; landscape of 16 – 18; new/unknown

Index  281 58, 89, 119; physical borders 38, 191, 257, 259 theoretical concepts 31 – 33 threshold: birth of 48; contemporary 48 – 50, 56 – 57; zone 3, 47, 49 Tiganea, O. C. (Territorial Fragilities in Cyprus. Planning and Preservation Strategies) 178 tourism 174, 206, 210 – 212 tourists 22, 37, 176, 206 – 207, 211, 243 – 244, 252 Tranarcha Border Critique 33, 44, 267 tranarchism 44 transformation 4, 17, 22, 49 – 50, 54, 63, 141, 166, 178, 190, 207, 268 transgender 15 – 16, 23, 28, 32, 41, 44 transgressing 15, 163, 267 – 268 transgression 3, 7, 53, 135, 146, 263, 265 transitioning 15, 21 – 22, 24 transnational 31, 38 – 39, 82, 172, 205, 218, 222, 253, 257 transphobia 21 – 22, 32 trauma 68, 84, 89, 171, 185, 191 – 193, 198, 258 Travellers 3, 78, 207 truth 2, 8, 25, 91, 149, 153 Turkey 108 – 109, 221, 224 – 225, 228, 265 Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) 170 Tutsi (social group) 65 – 67; see also Burundi Ukraine 221, 225 – 226, 228, 230, 231, 269 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) 208, 238 unity 2, 6, 26, 35, 49, 154, 189, 211 University of Cyprus (UCY) 178 University of Texas, El Paso 257 urban: anthropology 8, 63, 127, 148; design 168, 173 – 174, 176; peripheries 4, 137, 142, 192, 253, 266; spaces 5, 18, 142; wildlife 4, 98, 100, 102, 210, 243 urban/rural 192, 206

urbanism 122, 154 Urry, J. 210, 218 utopia 138, 140 – 141, 174, 248, 252, 257, 259 Van Gennep, A. 3 – 4, 6, 63 – 64, 127 Van Houtum, H. 40 Varzi, A. 7 Varyap Meridian: boundaries 112; community spaces 116 – 117; daily newspaper (Hürriyet) 118; landscape 118 – 119; management 115; mixed-use development 111; rental units/Airbnb 113; resident behaviours 113; resident diversity 114 veeduría (civic group) 129 – 130 visibility 15, 19 – 21, 25, 28, 33, 36 – 37, 175 visual essays 91, 237, 265 vulnerability 35, 78, 128 waithood 63 – 64, 265, 267 Walia, Harsha (Undoing Border Imperialism) 38 – 39, 41 – 42, 44 Walking Library 86 Western: definition 37 – 38; ideology 39 – 40; tradition 17, 21, 26 Western Australia 78 Western Europe 187, 221, 223 – 227 WhatsApp 86 Whiteness 40 Wiedenhöfer, K. (WallonWall) 250, 253 – 254 without borders 1 – 2 Wordsworth, W. 207 – 208 workers 5, 37, 42, 56 – 57, 69, 78, 80, 110, 124, 159 workspaces 5 xenophobia 21 – 22, 82 Zapatistas movement 258 Žižek, S. 6 Zoom (tele-conferencing) 52, 80, 91