Introduction
performingborders
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performingborders as a project has always held hands with artists thinking about how to cross-borders in their practices. Our work has been rooted in this lived experience and as we have continued to extend our network of relationships and tapestry of knowledge(s) with our collaborators, we have been deeply interested in cross-border practices that navigate and critique the power structures that render such work both precarious and vital.
Entangled Practices: Embodying cross-border live art gathers practitioners making visible the many ways we are connected and dependent on each other, our freedom held in each other’s hands. In the e-journal, an expanded horizon of shared methodologies comes into view – rooted in territories, struggles and ecologies where the dynamics of resistance, collaboration, and organising offer new possibilities for creative practice. In these digital pages, we hope that a dialogue can unfold between practices that challenge dominant narratives and envision new forms of solidarity and survival.
In the third edition of our e-journal we have invited artists to reflect on their work through the lenses of the ethics and strategies of meaningful collaborative practices across territories. To open the third edition, we invited our dear friend and long-term collaborator, Diana Damian Martin to contribute with editorial support and write a foreword to contextualise the contributions within her rich frame of references and practice-based research. We hope this edition will offer both the readers and contributors ways to connect and keep expanding the routes in which live art practices can reframe what it means to work in, against, and across borders.
performingborders
Foreword
Diana Damian Martin
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It is good to see you here, friend, joining us once again; or maybe you’re new around here. Welcome to Entangled Practices: Embodying cross-border live art.
When I think of entanglement, I think of Anna Lowenhaupt-Tsing’s vision of solidarities that emerge in the mosaics of open-ended assemblages of entangled ways of life, as she refers to her analysis of webs of labour in Mushroom at the End of the World. Salvage accumulation, is the term she uses, to describe that which takes place at the edges of capitalism, amidst ruins.
When I think of entanglement, I think of cultural geographer and Black studies scholar Kathrine McKrittik. She opens her book Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, by exploring geographic stories, as she calls them. ‘The earth is also skin’, she tells us, and ‘a young girl can legitimately take possession of a street, or an entire city, albeit on different terms than we may be familiar with’. McKrittik’s entanglement is a search for a terrain where ‘different geographic stories can be and are told’, against the repetitive naturalisation where difference is spatialised.
When I think of entanglement, I think of travelling across the Dnister river in the Republic of Moldova, moving towards the contested territory of Transnistria, and the ways in which many have organised their lives along and around this river, in spite of the borders that split it in numerous ways along its right and left banks, from the Carpathian Mountains through to Odessa and the Black Sea.
When I think of entanglement, I think of how ideas are smuggled across borders; their smuggling makes both the violent border politics and the forms of resistance that refuse them palpable. I think about relations, binds, networks, flight paths and surprising solidarities – many of these gathered in this iteration of the journal. This issue spends time with methods, dreams, tools and knowledges that articulate modes of cross-border working in and beyond Live Art. These are embodied not only because they emerge at the meeting point between many bodies and their own experiences of borders; but also because they locate agency precisely in political imagination – they emerge from, and return to, bodies – human bodies, bodies of water, bodies of knowledge, bodies of time.
I say that we spend time with such reflections because in thinking about what it means to cross-borders – be it a body or a practice or an idea- the contributions here also enact such a crossing at the level of the temporal. So much of the work we do rests on the premise of queer time, time that moves in multiple directions – immediate time and cosmic time, pasts-forever-present and needing to be known, and futures being shaped by relations forged in the now. Thinking about cross-border work necessitates multiple ways of tending to time, stretching out in ways that are not linear, and do not reproduce colonial logics of ordering and sequencing. Here’s to moments of quiet disturbance, emergent solidarities, myriad intimacies in the borderlands.
Entangled Practices opens with setareh fatehi’s parallaxing (i): a story of practice, inviting us for a walk in this microcosm of a practice of remote hosting. fatehi’s is a practice that tends to shifting the geographies of distance for intimacies of many kinds; in their words, parallaxing is a way of overexposing ‘the void that exists between the images of two locations, two bodies, two actualities that are distanced by the forces that make wars’. Parallaxing contends with moving from and with places deemed to be ‘unlivable motherlands’, asking, where is my body? Where can my body be? How can we fight to not have to decide where our bodies should be?
Tanja Ostojić reflects on over three decades of work with Mis(s)placed Women?, a long-form and long-term art project with contributions from across the world by over 180 participants with experience of displacement. Through shared reflections, an ethics coda and an offering of scores, the contribution entangles methods for cross-border collaboration with performative modes of exploring displacement as a means of unpacking travel, identity, questions of home and belonging, public and private space, safety and solidarity, united by a commitment to a collectively-shaped feminist politics of care.
The multi-form and multi-lingual contribution from Sharon Mercado Nogales and Eli Wewentxu, co-founders of Moviendo Territorios, is a five-part tapestry made up of materials gathered since before the formation of the collective in 2020, up to now. They refer to this material as living – made up of videos of journeys, soundscapes of collective labour, images of encounters and amended memories, poems and stories of what has occurred. Like many of the offerings in this e-journal, this is time and place travelling, learning from and with territories, places, people and stories that have emerged along the way.
Entangled stories and practices are also encountered in Rodolfo Suárez and Giulia Palladini’s Backpack, a sharing and invitation to join this unfolding multi-modal text-action woven around the Fronteras project on migration and exile. Backpack is in itself a multi-vocal speculative form of travel and action where transit, exile, displacement become fabrics of grief and possibility. The invitation of a farewell letter you never got to write, or perhaps, one that never got sent, is resonant- and such letters and offerings are woven here in what McKrittik might call geographic stories at the borderlands. ‘Yes’, we read in Backpack, ‘migrating is jumping the walls of all frontiers separating us from some kind of fantasy life. It is crossing the desert and becoming a piece of night behind a bush.’ The text continues ‘when we arrive something in us will feel as if we had arrived there before.’ In transit, what is stable becomes blurred, what is fixed becomes fluid, and we shape-shift and body-morph and for a while, we time travel. I kept coming back to ‘incitement’ in my reading of Backpack. Inciting has an energy that travels with.
From letters of farewell to letters of love, the collective Fehras Publishing Practice offers Love Letters to Our Comrades. This collection of letters to those who have offered companionship and camaraderie in the least likely of moments and times stems from a desire to remember and honour love as it emerges in ‘the face of loss and genocide’. The letters open with a story of a Sawt Al-Shaab (Voice of the People radio) five hour radio broadcast between Lebanese artist Ziad Rahbani and journalist Doha Shams and others, recorded in Beirut against the backdrop of the lingering Qana massacre of 1996, where the Israeli Occupation Forces destroyed a UN compound in South Lebanon, claiming the lives of over 106 civilians taking refuge. The letters that follow, to culture workers, booksellers and a literary magazine, reflect on the material conditions of cross-border labour and labour in the midst of conflict, the value of poetics, of shaping new political imaginaries, of tending to what intuition offers for revolutions of many scales and seasons. ‘This garden’, writes Fehras, ‘is a paradise of undoing, where weeds and brambles begin to digest the enclosure, and vines embrace the hinges of the gate’. The momentum of what Tsing might call a different form of accumulation, a rewilding.
Across the temporalities of these offerings, new entanglements are produced in their proximity. Postimperial imaginations emerge at all scales, and any border can become a borderland, anyone a time-traveller. This un-mapping, to draw on Tao Leigh Goffe’s term, is an undoing and a form of presence: solidarities emerging at the borderlands, entanglement as practice of rewilding. We dwell in these borderlands together, shifting ideas across genres, modes of communication, Live Art practices, bodies, spaces and times.
As a long-term collaborator and friend of performingborders, entangled across many projects and iterations, I hold with me questions of what emerges in the borderlands, what spaces of thinking, critique and experiment are forged in the midst. For this e-journal, attunement has offered a form of being with and alongside the contributions; as my late colleague and friend Rebecca Collins has explored, lingering longer with uncertainty, and finding moments where something else becomes possible- at times, wonder in the midst of grief.
Gratitude to performingborders for gathering us all, and to all time-travellers keen for new stories to emerge at and across the borders. Our hope for this edition is that we might continue to explore what the digital offers in building and holding space for new imaginaries.