2014 borderline states_apex unsolicited program

 
borderline states
a proposal for ‘apex unsolicited program’  

 

This exhibition investigates the phenomena of borderline states.  In psychological terms states signify sets of conditions; a borderline diagnosis establishes pathology. The state: a physical, economical, political entity. The border and the line reinforce a separation, a rigidity of power. borderline states posits a disruption within which opens space of potentiality. In the balance are questions of collective political and economic agency.

 

Gordon Matta-Clark’s Reality Properties: Fake Estates (1973-4), exploited the City of New York’s periodical auctioning off of unusably small slivers of land sliced from the city grid through anomalies in surveying, zoning, and public-works expansion. Purchasing fifteen lots, the majority in Queens, Matta-Clark collected maps, deeds, and other bureaucratic documentation attached to the properties and considered using the sites for anarchitectural interventions. Although ownership of the properties reverted to the city after Matta-Clark’s death, these odd-lots persist as imaginative possibility.

 

Harun Farocki’s final work Parallel ll (2014) explores the subject of boundaries in game space; how animated games conceive of space and their seeming limitless borders, appearing to have no limits or end until one exits unlawfully from the carefully scripted narrative to reveal a prop-like reality; a reality surrounded by nothingness beyond the borders of the script. Although increasingly realistic game space contains no indexical bond to the real. The containment of design within the game mimics the psychological detachment of the gamer’s mind to any agency in the real world.

 

Naroa Lizar’s project 59 DAYS (& nights) (2013) functions as an interference with the projection of ideas surrounding OccupyWallStreet in lower Manhattan in 2011. Appropriating GoogleMaps aerial view of Zuccotti Park and inserting into the image code 99 sentences culled from the protesters signs (a representation of the voice of the 99%, the slogan made popular by the movement), the video image digitally transforms as increasingly, for each of the sentences, noise appears like a scratch or error echoing digital failure on our TVs. Scrolling along the bottom, approximating a news or stock market ticker, plays the illegible image code interrupted periodically by inserted text. The physical containment of OWS within the park met with the violence of state authority whenever breach of that confine was tested. 59 DAYS escapes that confine providing insight into media portrayal of the occupation and its motivations, challenging perceptions of the movement.

 

DAAR’s (Decolonizing Architecture/Art Residency) methodology seeks to find and utilize cracks and loopholes within existing colonial systems of separation and control.  For The Red Castle and the Lawless Line (2010-13), DAAR researched and followed the five-meter-thick line separating Israeli and Palestinian controlled land that runs at the margins of towns and villages; around, across and through olive groves and orchards, fields, roads, gardens, kindergartens, fences, terraces, houses, public buildings, a football stadium, a mosque, even a large, recently built castle. The line remains an open legal question, paradoxically challenging the very partition it enacts. DAAR argues that the line represents an extraterritorialterritory, a thin but powerful space for potential political transformations—a site for a new borderline state.

 

2014