EX SISTERE,
strand 1 # stand outside
Part 2 # expose oneself to exist
St Emilion and Bordeaux contemporary art route
May / June 2019
The question of finitude and sufficiency constantly haunts human beings. Talking about crossing a border comes down to talking about oneself about each person's capacity to go beyond their being in order to experience their own finitude and become aware of their insufficiency.
From a pragmatic point of view in the age of globalization, the free movement of goods, people, information and financial exchanges, we always come up against problems of territorial limits, very real borders and difficult to cross, in a world that is however voluntarily open ... at least virtually.
The dramatic news of migrants from countries at war for the majority is proof of this.
Borders, seas, barriers, walls, barbed wire, camps, watchtowers, punctuate the journey of these "fleeing" who brave poverty and death, tear themselves away from their native land in the grip of violence to reach more lenient spaces. A thousand cables from the hospitable promises of a globalized and unified world amplified by the web, their migration turns into an obstacle course constrained by the convulsions of the world. This world which for half a century has been trying to push back borders, especially in Europe, by trying to establish a semblance of what Sylvain Tesson would call "the political theory of the bocage" inspired by the genius of the hedge of the past which "separated without walling up, delimited without opacifying, protected without pushing back". An intelligent world borrowed from benevolent humanity and universality.
The politician is building walls again and placing "watchtowers" supposed to defend us from the "invasion" of migrants, turning ordinary men on the run into bloodthirsty barbarians. Instead of taking advantage of this interbreeding by confronting the here and there, the local and the universal, learned and popular experiences, the stories of each other, their roots and their upheavals, we erect the other as the enemy to be defeated. Our territories under high security are trying to become fortresses with guarded posts on the lookout for the supposed enemy. A real obsolete throwback to the contemporary globalized world turned towards openness and exchange.
Despite everything, these new limits, walls or other enclosures, are erected in vain because they are imbued with permeability and porosity. The migratory flow is inevitable. From the moment when man feels threatened he moves as moved by the preservation of the species, a determining factor of permanent development for humanity.
Humanity is thus caught in a perpetual movement punctuated by displacement and ephemeral fixity. Suspended time perceived as transitory spaces where everyone is aware of being in the world, of finding this primitive habitat that of our early childhood, a bubble of intimacy. Setting boundaries is certainly a deep need for man to have his home; it is to draw contours, to give shape and face to a territory, to a concrete and visible reality, it is to oppose the infinite, the indefinite, the elusive, what is formless, the 'informed. But to exist is to expose oneself, to get out of oneself and to go beyond borders. Human life is caught in this duality between staying safe, and leaving, walking, breaking boundaries. A necessary coming and going where the border fulfills its role when it is neither concrete nor liquefied, but borrows from a balance between adventure and security according to the philosopher Olivier Abel.
Karinka Szabo - Detchart.