"Borders
Project"_________________
_____ is a complex long-term project by Bernardo
Giorgi, linked to a new type of experiment on the concept of
border.
It all started with the project "German - Polish frontier:
changes after the maximum of the last glaciation", Borders
'99 - realized during my residence at the International Studio
Program, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin Germany.
This first phase of "Borders Project" consisted in
a journey along the Oder-Neisse river, the "natural"
frontier between Germany and Poland; during the course of this
travel, the experiences and opinions of the people living in
this frontier zone were collected, as video-recorded interviews,
photos, as well as notes and drawings, and published in real
time on the web site www.borders.de/borders99/index.html
In its original form, "Borders Project" already included
in nuce a succession of single projects -journeys inside the
Journey; a sort of "chain of experiences", shaped
and enhanced one by the previous one:
Switzerland "The Value of Genoa's port for Switzerland's
economy", linguistic frontiers in Switzerland, 2000-2003;
Czech Republic-Germany "Between Dresden and Prague",
2001-2002;
"Helmets Project" 2001- in progress;
Poland-Italy, "Patterns", Kostrzyn (PL), Turin- Milan
(I), 2004-2005;
Poland-Germany-Italy, "Borders of Eden", Frankfurt
Oder (D) - Slubice (PL) - Venice (I) (in collaboration with
Cinzia Cozzi), 2004-2006;
trans-siberian train, from moscow to beijing 2005
Mongolia, "Songlines in the sheep's way" 2006
Travelling is an ancient and, at the same time, a constantly
evolving practice, consolidated in every culture around the
world.
In Borders are merged the historical and personal dimensions
that have always denoted the concept of journey, ultimately
symbolized by the spirit of the Grand Tour, the famous intellectual
and spiritual formation journey European men used to embark
upon.
However, "The last two decades of the XX century were
witness to a rising crisis of the journey seen as an individual
path in the pursuit of personal knowledge.
The advent of mass tourism and the ever-growing movement of
goods and people caused, as a consequence, what many anthropologists
call "the death of exoticism".
For artists working on the notion of travel, and who see their
own travels as performance, rises the need, not being able to
rely anymore upon simple acts of perception, to find alternative
complex and sophisticated techniques of inquiry, observation,
monitoring…" (Michele Dantini in
a private discussion with Bernardo Giorgi)
Borders is a characteristically transversal project, encompassing
an individual and collective spatial/temporal dimension - an
exploration of the border seen as a mapping of territories/identities
and an exercise in developing relationships.
"The main connotation of the project Borders is, primarily,
trying to return, once more, to the planning role of artists
and to experiment the fluidity of roles and languages: artist,
curator, critic, interpreter, intellectual" (Michele
Dantini in a private discussion with Bernardo Giorgi)
It is therefore significant that the project has its main fulcrum
"in-between" cities, with a sort of decentralization
of the places-roles: it is precisely in that "in-between"
that the correct interpretation key is to be found, the clue
to the loss of the nucleus, as well as of the alteration of
roles. It is the idea of transit, of a continuous passage, uninterrupted
and reversible at anytime that occurs along the "border",
of a fluid and continuous osmosis, a flux of information and
circumstances always open to exchange, devolution and transformation
into an "open space" - experimental set - delimited
by a border-zipper.
"Is it possible, today, to speak of border's poetics?
Maybe, if we understand this to be the experimentation and exchange
of languages and roles, and as part of the poetics of mobility.
The word border has to be understood not only in a geographical
sense, but in a linguistic sense as well. The skin is border
for the human body; the house (with which many artists are working
today) for man's living space." (Laura
Cherubini, private conversation with Bernardo Giorgi during
the round table about Between Dresden and Prague)
The instruments become thus extremely important: the construction
of the network-real work with an actual visual outcome, as is
visible from the geographical maps: in the Dresden-Prague project,
for example, more than 25 artist and more than 40 institutions
participated.
Just as the realization of the maps-patterns - lines and connections,
which, beyond the superficial chaotic appearance, are actual
representations of real cartographies of identities: the bottom
of the tent used for Dresden-Prague, the map of the conflicts
exhibited at Palazzo delle Papesse in Siena in occasion of the
G8 protests in Genoa, the "patterns" in Kostrzyn-Turin-Milan.