Abstract

The relationship between architecture and border studies is, rightly, at the forefront of many architectural scholars' minds, and has seen the inception of other publications, most notably  Angeliki Sioli, Nishat Awan and Kristopher Palagi’s edited collection Architecture of Resistance: Negotiating Borders through Spatial Practices (KU Leuven, forthcoming) and a special issue of Architecture and Culture, ‘Border Fictions’ edited by Mohamad Hafeda, Samuel Vardy and Paula McCloskey (again forthcoming). We started putting together this issue of field,  ‘Across Borders: Questions, Practices and Performances’ — the first full collection on architecture and borders to be published — by defining what we specifically meant by the notion of border. The conventional meaning, as the delineation of territory, has shaped our individual lives: the three of us have moved across borders, territories, communities and languages several times; we have crisscrossed our identities from the colonised Global South, the so-called commonwealth colonised antipodes, the settler colonial North America, the (post)communist East of Europe. We have experienced borders  not as neutral separation lines, as Prem Kumar Rajaram and Carl Grundy-Warr suggest, but as the creation of distinction between centre and periphery, normal and exceptional, belonging and not belonging. Borders enact biopolitics: demarcating (and othering) identity, creating zones of exception, and marking jurisdictions in which bodies (racialised, gendered) can be disciplined and made to conform or cohere. We realised, as we continued our attempt to define, that any understanding of the border is always entangled with other political concepts. The border is the logical consequence of the notion of the utopia that underlies the nation state. An ideal place can only be created if it is set against the other, or its dystopia; the creation of boundaries, physical or artificial, makes sure that the conditions for the ideal place are maintained. Borders,  whether material or metaphorical, are always at once utopian, colonial, patriarchal, capitalist and hegemonic. 

How to Cite:

Hernan, L. & Cheatle, E. & Statica, I., (2024) “Editorial — Across Borders: Questions, Practices and Performances”, field 9(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.62471/field.147