THE NATIONLESS PAVILION(2nd Edition)Embodying Borders
a performance series
25.05 - 27.11 2016

During the 15th International Architecture Exhibition of Venice “Reporting From The Front”, The Nationless Pavilion has decided to develop the performance series “Embodying Borders” on the dynamics of individual and collective bodies in relation to the architecture of barriers, spurring a reflection on what it means to inhabit the border, appropriate it, measure it, crossing it, going beyond it.

The Nationless Pavilion 2016 opens its second edition keeping its non-exhibition form, in collaboration with local entities and creative realities present in the venetian territory, activating processes that cross paths with fellow citizens, migrants and refugees.

didascalia prova

“No form of power is more elementary than the power exercised by the body” Elias Canetti

On May 9 2016 Human Rights Watch published a video portraying the violence and the killings inflicted upon the bodies of Syrians, fleeing their country, at the border with Turkey. At the beginning of April 2016, only one month ago, Europe closed entry routes to 326 people seeking refuge along the Greek border and sent them back to Turkey. In 1989 the decision was made to eliminate the divide between East an West Berlin, but only a few decades later European governments are dealing with the ongoing migration/military emergency by raising walls. The last border we have on Earth is the see. All this is taking place while global free trade agreements are signed, humanitarian aid is cut, and we are not allowed to inquire and confront the issue of a possible cultural and religious coexistence. Borders, places where change takes place and perspectives of emancipation manifest themselves, embody the act of questioning hazy political and historical landscapes –to be suspended and reactivated. The creation of dividing lines between sacred and profane, good and evil, life and death, private and public, internal and external, can be traced back to ritual societies and belongs to the strategic game of building the world. In “Border as method”1 , Sandro Mezzadra deals with the border as an epistemic system, a place of trans-disciplinary knowledge, the center of the production of knowledge itself. From an object –walled stable barbed-wired – of research, the border becomes the object of a perspective of change, from the instability of our contemporary world, something that must be crossed by states, global political players, governance agencies and capital. During the 15th International Architecture Exhibition of Venice “Reporting From The Front”, The Nationless Pavilion has decided to work with the dynamics of individual and collective bodies in relation to the architecture of barriers, spurring a reflection on what it means to inhabit the border, appropriate it, measure it, crossing it, going beyond it.

1 Refer to Sandro Mezzadra, Brett Neilson, Border as Method or the Multiplication of Labor, Duke University Press, Durham, 2013

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These first appointments are part of cycle that will continue during the whole Biennale period:

Friday, May 27 8.00 pm, Sale Docks, Venice Embodying Borders, Primo Studio. Performance born from the collaboration between Nation25, Kinkaleri and Nadia Arouri.

A body, a space, a border. A relation of rethinking the reciprocal distances through the body and its presence, subverting the limit. Embodying: to incorporate, from the lat. IN and CORPORE, mixing different elements and blending them together, but also to attract and convert to one’s own substance. The power of subverting and crossing the border, the resistance in living the divide, to be reduced but also to fill the emptiness in order to cross it, this all is at play. Not only “border as method” but “body as method”. Words make space for bodies filled with different meanings, whose sense and needs are entirely problematized, displaying their potential and infinite abilities within the state of need itself. In this view the frontier is not an object de-responsibilized from human action, but it transforms into the body on which it is still possible to project its functions, needs, the fears of governments, the falls and implosions of nationalisms, the crisis of the systems still tied to an old idea of geography, the anger of those who – at war – are seeking refuge and are still resisting. The Primo Studio (First Study) is the result of a period of artistic residency in Spazio K in Prato and is the prologue to a research path leading to the following Studies of the cycle Embodying Borders, open to the public, a work in progress in Venice during the months of the Biennale. Saturday, May 28 Embodying Borders comes to light in a site-specific, not pre-established, not traceable a priori manner, in the path of the Biennale Urbana, in collaboration with Stalker-Osservatorio Nomade. The Nationless Pavilion 2016 opens its second edition keeping its non-exhibition form, in collaboration with local entities and creative realities present in the venetian territory, activating processes that cross paths with fellow citizens, migrants and refugees.