BORDERLINE: A MANIFESTO
Jennifer Cabral, Brazil
20 November 2024
I am a vast territory, you will never own. You don’t course through me, I course through you. Hear my voice. Sound travels over you. My birthplace has been written. I am a living document. I have my own identity so don’t tell me what I am not. Beware of where you cut me through because you die when I die.
We are a vast territory, you will never own. You don’t course through us, we course through you. Hear our voice. Sound travels over you. Our birthplace has been written. We are living documents. We have our own identity so don’t tell us what we are not. Beware of where you cut us through because you die when we die.
This is a vast territory, you will never own. You don’t course through it, it courses through you. Hear its voice. Sound travels over you. A birthplace has been written. There are living documents. It has its own identity so don’t tell it what it is not. Beware of where you cut it through because you die when it dies.
Borderline is a group of images exploring topography and territoriality. It’s a simple concept, tracing a line. But once it cuts through a body – human or earth-body – a roar emerges. This surging voice from the perspective of an individual, people or land is what is being explored – a sort of manifesto.
Once a line is drawn, what is owned, and what is not, becomes palpable; Belonging and longing merges, And a heightened peripheral vision is inevitable. A sensorial mapping and a scanning of our own surfaces takes place, as a question glides over it all: how could we possibly think individuals, people or land are ever contained by dotted lines.
In today’s landscape where appropriation and zoning are used as solutions to an economic, political and social crisis, what becomes evident is the borderline disorder of governments. The U.S. border portrayed could be easily interchanged by the Russian-Ukranian border, Turkish-Syrian border, Israeli-Gaza border or the Brazilian-venezuelan border where my own country of origin must face the question – Where our countries end and our humanity begins?
A set of six silver-gelatin prints were the initial exploration. The writing on the glass frame is erasable, removable, impermanent, transient like borderlines eventually are. Although this work was generated in analog format.