On Moving Borders: Vivian Ziherl in conversation with Andrea Bagnato, Marco Ferrari, and Elisa Pasqual

The Italian Limes project by Studio Folder (2014–2018) explored how melting glaciers in the Alpine peaks are causing national borders to shift, revealing the submerged paradoxes of Western state making at a time of political and ecological crisis for liberal democracy. The evening’s programme will mark the launch of A Moving Border, a publication that builds upon the questions raised by the project. Using textual contributions and archival documents from Italian state archives, the book exposes the spatial and historical fictions through which borders are designed, built, and naturalized. A Moving Border was authored by Marco Ferrari and Elisa Pasqual, directors of Studio Folder, and Andrea Bagnato, an architect and editor.

Following an introduction to the book, the authors will be joined by Vivian Ziherl, founder and director of the art and research project Frontier Imaginaries. Moving from the internal limits of the European Alps to the imagined externality of the settler-colony, Ziherl will discuss the concept-image of “the frontier” through a series of artist projects. With works that bring together Singaporean high-tech governance and Hollywood Spaghetti Westerns; Indigenous shell middens and the concrete skins of contemporary urban space; and the inscriptions of 5000BC cuneiform tablets with contemporary travel papers; Ziherl will discuss the ‘inextrinsic’ composition of European space and spatial rationality.