Description

​

The performance consists in bringing a bordered space inside the fortified city of Mdina in Mlata, through roads and squares letting it cross the entire city from one gate to the other, but paradoxically never really entering the city. Precisely because of the presence of the barriers, a bordered portion of exterior (the non-Mdina) could travel inside the city, but without ever be part of it. The metal barricades, enclosing an exterior space, could with full rights be seen as the limit of Mdina (inside Mdina), and therefore be considered flexible extensions of the medieval walls of the city, but developing and moving within.

​

The“Geography of lives” consists in a performance and a series of photos aiming to confute the idea of national borders as being just the linear limits surrounding nations. Contemporary borders actually extend themselves outside and inside countries. They might not necessarily be built with bricks or fences but are still very effective. Those are jurisdictional, administrative, economic and “cultural” limitations, real impediments for migrants to construct a life somewhere and become fully recognized individuals. Far from being just physical barriers, borders could be considered as spaces in themselves and not just the ending limit between spaces. That means that a migrant that crossed a geographical border decades ago could still find himself without full rights to participate in community life, or worst, to be expelled, realizing suddenly that, the border, crossed long ago, was never really crossed, but rather it trapped him. Constantly adjusting itself, the border kept “the intruder “outside, even if his body was geographically inside. Imagining the mapping of the real extensions and thickness of these borders, the most likely configuration should not be a fixed geographical one, but an infinitive number of pockets trapping spaces and bodies in a permanent migration through countries, but never really belonging to them. A portion of “outside” taken “inside”, but not able to access it. As a matter of fact borders do not only discipline space but time as well, allowing the permanence of “the intruder” at one condition: temporality. A requirement that implies the obligation of permanent movement and the impossibility for a stable settlement. installation “Do Not Cross” questions the notion of borders as devices dividing parts that should be differentiated. Conventionally it’s assumed that borders are established to determine differences and consequently circumscribe them in space. This assumption that our world is geometrically divisible into systems of different belonging that ends in the exact place where the next one starts does not take in consideration all what ends up in between. On a matter of fact, perhaps because of a wrong alignment between reality and its territorial definition, life of people often ends up trapped halfway between these confines, more than to be helpfully disposed by them. Borders operates frequently paralyzing the undifferentiated through disabling, more than ordering sedately the differences (assuming there is a need for). That said, to the drama of people crossing borders, it’s added the drama of people crossed by borders in turn, forced living split lives.

​

​