“It shall be said to me: that’s just like you, always with the same incapacity to cross the line, to pass over to the other side, to listen to and make heard the language which comes from elsewhere or from below; it is always the same choice, for the side of power, for what power says or of what it causes to be said.”
Michel Foucault (from The Life of Infamous Men)
It is culture that makes us human. The history of human beings is a history of movements, diversity and exchanges. And we ourselves are all “crossovers”, both biologically and culturally. An identity based on territory, class, gender, sexual orientation, race, age, ethnicity is in no way appropriate anymore (if it ever was). Identity maps traced on opposing and instable flows bear no correspondence to the multidirectional topography of subjectivity, with its multiple layers, choices, encounters, tensions, second thoughts, actions and rebellions. Identity is a moving perspective, especially if we are to consider that until not long ago individuals were not able to choose any of the traits of their identity: not their sexuality, race, social status, illnesses or morphology. It was an identity embodied in a corporeality which we had no choice. Within the problems surrounding identity, a new way of conceiving the body and the territory where we move is coming forth. The need to reinvent the self/other relationship is clearly emerging, first of all by seeing self and other in a new light, in a perspective of anthropological mutation. Donna Haraway, who defines the body as “a surface where many, changing information codes cross over, from the genetic code to the computer code”, votes for confusing boundaries in her myth about “transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities” which establish “affinity, not identity”. Thus, in this dimension the contrasting dichotomies of mind/body, animal/human, organism/machine, man/woman, public/private, primitive/civilized, nature/culture and natural/artificial are all called into question. And it is this questioning that triggers the mechanisms to exit the traps of identity.
One of the most interesting practices of the dimension of multiple identities is the practice of transfer, from the nomadic condition of geographical places and electronic networks to identity transfer. Transfer is the condition that enables us to take up a new position and therefore a new point of view, the condition of the mind in which any place and any identity can be lived as detachment, not-belonging, so that we can be granted the necessity to discover new mental places and new emotional worlds.
In his book Imagined Communities, this is how Benedict Anderson answers the question “What is a nation?”: “an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign”. It is imagined because all its members will never know each other personally; limited because a nation is always imagined as having boundaries, beyond which there are other nations; and sovereign, because the concept, devised during the Age of the Enlightenment, considers freedom to be a great ideal. The terms “nation”, “nationality” and “nationalism”, asserts Anderson, should not be likened to an ideology, but placed on another level of phenomena to the political sphere. They are particular modes, like anthropological categories such as “kinship” or “religion”, complex systems responding to a multiple set of social and individual needs. Anderson investigates the concept of “nation” first of all as a cultural product, a creative process of human social imagination. Indeed, he speaks of “imagined” and not “imaginary” communities. But boundaries are not natural: and those same rivers and mountains that people used to ford and climb become barriers, and, by decree, transform a natural fact into a legal regulation. It is the border that creates the foreigner. “What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal” wrote Nietzsche, but tracing a boundary is easier than building a bridge and there are more and more reasons for building a new wall instead of joining two shores.
So the word boundary indicates an abstract and artificial limit, imposed arbitrarily as a principle regulating the world. If you look at the earth from the sky, you can’t see any boundaries: before we humans, the world did not have any boundaries. Indeed, boundaries come about to separate, to divide us from the others. But who is us? And who are the others? A world that traces boundaries on presumed identities is a world that needs to cross frontiers, those frontiers that only serve to define the rhetoric around culture, identity, race and various forms of profit mechanisms.
In recent years, many movements and political parties have increasingly been propounding an ethnic, identity-based and excluding society. A society based on one’s place of birth and not on cultural choices. A society that upholds the concept of “roots”. But, as Marco Aime (lecturer in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Genoa and writer) has written on several occasions, “men do not have ‘roots’, they have feet and the history of humankind is made of people walking”.
All of the cultures that have gone before us knew how to welcome what comes from another place, all of us are the product of encounters and exchanges, and inside we are a cultural crossroads. Cultures have always been permeable. They are not closed structures but work in progress. They are put together, taken apart, put back together again, also with pieces of other cultures and other ways of seeing and thinking and dreaming and imagining. Indeed, every individual can choose to change their culture and, with it, their identity.
Our forefathers moved, found new and different climates, and each time they had to come up with new strategies. For the whole of the first half of the twentieth century, the talk was of race and the attempts to classify humankind on the basis of racial criteria were based on differences in outer appearance, such as, above all, the colour of skin. With the discovery of DNA in 1961, it was proven once and for all that humankind cannot be classified under distinct races on scientific bases. And this is precisely because man has feet and with his movements has given rise to a hybridization, also from the genetic point of view. Race does not exist. “We were prepared to accept anything except to learn that it all began with the feet!” writes André Leroi-Gourhan, one of the greatest specialists in human evolution. And he continues by asserting that the history of our kind has been made with the feet, because a large part of our being human depends on our erect posture, in order to achieve which feet were fundamental.
We live in a time when many factors have radically transformed the perception of territories, limits and boundaries. But today what does it mean when we speak of “boundaries” and “roots”? These terms do not only indicate a geographical notion but also refer to a concept of belonging that extends to society, culture and identity.
Barbed wire, passport control, long lines of migrants moving from one country to another: today the dreams of a unified Europe are dramatically mixing with the spectres of stories already seen in the last century, and the shadows of the worst pages of the past seem to be getting longer and longer.
This year too, the Venice Biennale, unlike Documenta in Kassel and biennales less linked to boundaries, has lent itself to presenting a new geography. Venice is the place where the debate between nations continues to exist and intensify, but in a peaceful way, in the name of knowledge. Right from the first Venice Biennale in 1895, it has always been situated at the confluence of many socio-political changes and radical historical ruptures in the fields of art, culture, politics, technology and the economy. Many artists have reflected on these issues in recent decades: Tiffany Chung, Mona Hatoum, Uwe Walther, Yanko Tsvetkov, Michal Rovner, Qiu Zhijie, Yto Barrada, Tadashi Kawamata, Mohammed Ibrahim Mahama, Sigalit Landau, Richard Mosse, Paulo Nazareth, Zhang Huan, Maria Thereza Alves, Santiago Sierra, John Akomfrah and El Anatsui, to quote just a few. The artists’ works show different attitudes and ways of living and thinking the instable relationship between identity, territory and boundaries. Photographs, videos and installations prompt reflections on the idea of the boundary as a discovery or barrier, on the hybridization between cosmopolitanism and territorial claims, on the very figure of the artist in their condition of traveller, nomad or experimenter poised between physical and symbolic territories.
Once again, the world panorama appears in pieces and chaos, marked by fears and acts of terrorism, frightened and impoverished by the economic crisis, and struck by an increasingly deep instability in all of the regions of the world. Once again it is artists who are asking the question, “How unstable is our identity, and how flimsy have territorial boundaries become?” Boundaries are a catalogue of hypotheses, an encyclopaedia of the possible and the practicable. Even before geography, boundaries are stories, tales and images. They are constructions that compare and confuse, that is, they fuse together, mix, amalgamate and unite, without reducing to a single possibility.
“Limits are thresholds that can be stepped over, the human species shifts them continuously in every field of its activities.” writes Erri De Luca. “From telescopes that explore the galaxies to biology that rummages among the secrets of cells, knowledge is furthered by moving the previous limits. So a boundary traced in pencil on the face of the earth cannot have the power to halt us.”