Living on a Border is an international research and art project that deals with the migration issue in Europe - especially in the EU - and tries to demystify the migration phenomenon and clarify the situation in light of the fact that in public discourse migrations are usually understood as negative, threatening, or conflictual. In dissemination part of the project we use artistic, performative approach followed by multimedia installation Permanent Waiting Room to present results of the research process to wide public in all partner countries: Italy, Slovenia, Austria and the UK. Such demystification and clarification is especially important if we keep in mind that in the last decade migration processes have been increasing throughout all of Europe (primarily in the EU) and the USA (that is, in the entire so called "developed and prosperous, democratic and civilised western world"); these processes are simultaneously a product of and a threat to their governments. The fear of foreigners - as foreign workers from "the East"; as "uncivilised terrorists"; as so-called "illegal migrants"; as representatives of so-called "third world countries" whose cultures and traditions are "too different from ours"; as a source of difficulties (except in the case when their countries are cheap tourist destinations or when they are cheap occasional labour power) - is a consequence of non-understanding or not being well-informed about their political, social, and cultural condition. Furthermore, it is a collapse of emancipatory politics as a politics of radical equality of self and others. Precisely there - having in mind that the radical politics of equality has no arche (i.e. is anarchical) - we should search the origins of the deep institutional and latent xenophobia, nationalism, ethnocentrism, and cultural (neo)racism that we are facing.

Concrete wall on the Mexico-USA border

The most important burning question raised by the migration phenomenon is the role of the modern nation-state in general. The classical understanding of national sovereignty strictly based on pure national identification is practically impossible today - the EU is a typical example of political trans-nationalisation - therefore issues like national citizenship, national belonging, nation-state, and sovereignty should be reconsidered in a new way. The migration process has opened a multilevel debate on the very notion of citizenship; the key question, however, is: what is the foundation of a democratic nation-state - the individual or the citizen? What is the subject of the postmodern, trans-national Europe - only European citizens or also numerous migrants, who live and work in Europe for a short or long period of time, but usually do not have equal rights as European (or EU) citizens? In a way, we can speak about the real impossibility of European unification, because we do not know who the "European people" are, we do not know what the modes of inclusion and exclusion in the European sphere as a "public sphere" are. At theoretic level we try to think these issues through the concepts of the political philosophy of Étienne Balibar (droit de cité, transnational citizenship, equal freedom), Hannah Arendt (right to have rights), Michele Foucault (biopolitics and the death of the subject), Giorgio Agamben (homo sacer and sovereignty) and Jacques Rancière (radical politics of equality).

Rethinking the traditional concept of borders and national sovereignty, the Living on a Border project contributes to active diversity - with the understanding of different historical, political and national backgrounds - on the European and regional but also on the global level. We try to think beyond specific national concept; we try to open questions of trans-national (universal) equality with a wish to debate some new foundations for (global) identification, beyond national belonging and national citizenship. Arguing strongly, together with Rancière, that disidentification is an urgent condition for political subjectivisation, the project rethinks the ways to step beyond (neo)racism, xenophobia and national exclusivity and to open a new understanding of the contemporary concept of equality - radical democracy though.