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. 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.

Troubles with the Nation-state

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.

Étienne Balibar often maintains that, at the same time as European citizenship, European apartheid has been formed, so we have to fight to defeat this European (neo)racism if we want to achieve a real unity of European citizenship. That is why Balibar also makes the strict relation between the national state and imperialism or colonialisation, and thus colonialism. We are obviously not only "social beings" or "economic subjects" but we are also "national beings". We should be able to recognise this national moment and, as Balibar suggests, create a critical distance to this national substance so that we can achieve an "end of the nation-state", an "end of the hegemony of the national form", a post-national era, where certain societies would have to become progressively "denationalised" or "trans-nationalised".

Between the Citizen and the Human Being

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's famous thought "Man was born free; and everywhere is in chains" (The Social Contract, 1762) shows us, again and again, how difficult it is to implement equality in real-politics. The concept of citizenship, as an exclusive concept paradigm, working through nation-state is organised to work through institutions characteristic of national sovereignty which function is, in a sense, to administer the universal by subjecting individuals to them (the school, work, judiciary, public health and other systems), and this has gone hand in hand with a vast system of social exclusions that appear as the counterpart of the normalisation and socialisation of anthropological differences. As we can see there is a great abyss between universal rights for all people and the social (national) rights - citizenship. So we have a paradoxical and problematic situation where the citizens and the state ("the community of citizens") are set in contradiction with themselves. Likewise, moral and juridical principles are in contradiction. Moreover, institutions are turned against themselves; the state (as guarantor of fundamental rights) is set in contradiction with itself. All this turns citizenship into a privilege, a title to enjoy, a surplus of rights within a given territory. The equation of nationality and citizenship as the substance of sovereignty appears as the key to the problem. The state is based on justice, but the justice is always a national justice strongly incorporated in  the nation-state. As Hannah Arendt argued, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights which should be a guarantor of the basic rights for all people, does not function at all without considering one's nationality. If someone looses all national identities and became just a human being (homo sacer in Agamben's sense) he has no human rights at all. To achieve human rights it is obviously not enough to be just a human being. At this very point we see how weak juridical system, totally based on national belonging, is. This is how the nation-state with its rules and instruments splits one's identity into two parts - the human being and the citizen.

The Right to have Rights

The EU is dealing with a simultaneous crisis of the national and the post-national. We are dealing with the crisis of the nation-state as a political category. So we need a new foundation for the public sphere, for real democracy; maybe we need a "permanent revolution" like Rosa Luxemburg used to say. We certainly need a new relation between human rights and political rights in the way that Hannah Arendt thought of it: she made these equal. She told us about the "right to have rights" for all people no matter their nationality. Balibar also demands new rights for all people who live in Europe, not only citizens of EU member states or EU nationalities; perhaps a useful model for other countries as well. Reversing Louis Althusser's famous formula, we can say that the essential character of the sovereign is to interpolate subjects as individuals, not as citizens or as nation-beings.

Dispersed Empire, Dispersed Borders

According to Balibar, Europe needs a new democracy; he calls Europe's current social democratic model a "conflictual democracy" - one which recognises individuals as the bearers of collective rights protection. So, when he speaks about "trans-national citizenship" he thinks of European citizenship as a "citizenship of borders". The EU has its borders which divide "civilisation" from "barbarian space". For rich people from rich countries, those borders are just one more step in their journey, the spot where they can show their passport which guarantees their citizenship and social status. For poor people from poor countries, the borders are barely bridgeable legally. For them, borders are everywhere (asylum centres, detention centres, social centres, police, bureaucracy ...), they live on the borders all the time; they are / they have become the border. As there is no centre of (political, financial, ideological) power anymore, today the borders of new socio-political entities have consequently dispersed everywhere a little, wherever the movement of information, people and goods takes place and is controlled. Although the geographical (physical) borders have vanished inside "the great Schengenland", other kinds of borders are actually getting stronger. At least 12.000 people have died since 1988 on the European frontiers. This is even not biopolitics any more; it is real necropolitics what we are facing with.

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 Jacques 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 thought.

In the Permanent Waiting Room

The art installation Permanent Waiting Room is an artistic conceptualisation of a research process developed during a period of twenty months. It artistically disseminates theoretical statements of the project and contributes to the creative popularisation and widening its basic idea among a wider public. Being built of a ready-made cargo container, the special ambience of the installation Permanent Waiting Room visually symbolises the globalisation trend of the neoliberal postfordist society of vulgar capitalism, where the borders are open for capital and goods but at the same time strictly closed for people. It also symbolises the permanent waiting of migrants (for status, at border crossings, for a better life in general ...). At the same time, it is a venue for the presentation of multimedia materials gathered and shared by all of the project's partners from the four countries of Italy, Slovenia, Austria, and the UK.

The selected collection of films, videos, photographs, prints, recorded interviews, written materials and performances from these four countries deal with the migrant issue in documentary, exclusively artistic or/and theoretical ways. In many cases the artists involved are migrants themselves; an intimate and personal aspect thus dominates in some of the works. The curatorial process was coordinated by the Institute of Art Production and Research KITCH Ljubljana in cooperation with Cooperativa Sociale Idee in Movimento from Italy, Soho in Ottakring from Austria and The Rural Media Company from the UK.

As regards the nature of the compilation of the artworks of more than 25 involved artists, they certainly reflect the social background of their origin. The material from Italy is strongly characterised by an activist spirit that in most cases documents the long-lasting fight for closing detention centres in Italy, warning on the suffering and dying of thousands of so-called "illegal migrants" at the borders of Europe. The selection from Austria offers a mixture of artistic and activist approach introducing a number of artists who deal with the migrant phenomenon, often with a strong emotional note as many of them have migrant backgrounds themselves. The material from Slovenia deals with themes of asylum politics and the situation of foreigners, as well as with the rather specific issue of the "Erased" people of Slovenia and an analysis of the experiences of migrant women. Migrant stories from the UK have taken a very intimate approach to the issue of local cultural integration of different kind of migrants.

However, there are certain cross-points that are generally the same in all four cultural systems. The migrant issue always manifests certain condition of exclusion. Sometimes the exclusion results in serious violations of (even basic) human rights, in many cases including individual victims who died in search of better socio-political conditions, and in a number of cases the concept of exclusion promotes and brings to life more or less hidden mechanisms of separation by social status including the melting-pot mechanism of unification as a mask for exploitation. Multiculturalism, the conceptual motor of such a condition of exclusion politics, is probably not the perfect answer to globalisation and its migration issue. Plentiful cultures and their free and autonomous existence should no longer be questioned - the issue of their co- and inter-existence is now focused (and materialised) within the concept of borders, which are not only disappearing (like in the EU) but are also being built again and again in a newly conceptualised manner of the contemporary society of control. Living on a Border wishes to overcome such borders by showing their very reality in a condensed form - hopefully confronting the global-border-reality-show of today.

 

Lana Zdravković is a publicist, researcher, political activist and artist; postgraduate student at Science and Research Centre of Slovene Academy of Science and Arts, Ljubljana. Fields of theoretic interest: nation-state, national identity, nationalism, sovereignty, citizenship, ideology, migrations, social inequality, radical equality, political engagement, emancipatory social praxes. She works as assistant researcher at Peace Institute, Institute for Contemporary Social and Political Studies, Ljubljana. Author and performer of KITCH, the art brand; and co-founder of Institute of Art Production and Research KITCH. Fields of artistic interest: neoliberalization and economization of art, political performance, pornography and art kitsch and trash art.

Nenad Jelesijević is a freelance multimedia artist and critic of contemporary art and culture, both certified by Ministry of Culture of Slovenia. He is co-founder and director of the Institute KITCH, Ljubljana. His MA thesis Art is a Merchandise Unit was published in 2005. He is now a PhD candidate at Philosophy and Theory of Visual Culture Department of University of Primorska, Slovenia. His main field of interest is relation between the critical work of art and the symbolic capital. He published more than 80 articles, mostly critiques, reviews and essays, on contemporary culture and art, architecture, urbanism, design, film and multimedia - in magazines for theory, scientific publications and dailies.

 

Portrait of Lana Z and Nenad J for Mladina weekly, photo and copyright by Borut Peterlin