Border Patrol

In the course of 2019, a group of artists, curators, and researchers gathered in the Institute for Public Presence at the Center for Digital Art (CDA) in Holon. The group’s aim was to identify, mark, and research the various spatial borders currently existing in Israel. The liminality of border spaces brings with it high potential for action and creativity that deviate from the mechanisms of order and control, and thus summon performances and interactions that cannot exist in the (geographic, social, and economic) center. In the course of the year, we went on a series of liminal tours: in textual, aesthetic-political, and geographic-social spaces.

This issue constitutes a journey log of the group’s border patrols; it does not seek to draw conclusions, but rather to document and describe processes, thoughts, and out-of-the-ordinary encounters that took place during the different tours. In search of the gestures, the movements and the cracks that typify liminal spaces, and invite artistic interventions, we visited the Status Quo spaces of the holy sites in Israel/Palestine, the urban seamlines of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, mediumal borders, and colonial/national conflict sites.

Our point of departure was a project of gathering-journeying around borders, titled Liminal Spaces, which took place from 2006 to 2009 in conjunction with the CDA. The project was a collaboration between Palestinian, Israeli, and international artists, curators and researchers, that took place in Israel, Palestine, and Germany, and explored the intermediate spaces of living, doing, and action which are increasingly divided and separated by walls, roadblocks, and ideologies.

In an attempt to understand the restricted, segregated, and torn time and space in which we currently live, the present group sought out the meeting points, the liminal spaces, through which we may understand, again and differently, the current reality, our possibilities for action, and the collaborations still taking place in spite of impossible political conditions. The Liminal Spaces project of a decade ago engaged extensively with theories of time and space, which were at the height of their conceptualization in our milieu at the time. The engagement with space and time has, of course, not ceased, but our perspective (both theoretical and actual) has evolved and changed, even though in many respects the possibilities have been reduced.

The group’s first tour outside the CDA in Holon was to an exhibition that represented Israel at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2018, and was then shown at Tel Aviv Museum of Art.