Politics and Border Project in Global Space–Time. Configurations

The biunivocal interaction between man and the environment is made of continuous adjustments, modifications and policies in which the project represents an experience of synthesis. The project constructed and then demolished, or only imagined, determines a «here» and a «there», and indicates the cultural level of the society that has contributed to its realisation through everyday collective actions. The Great Wall of China, which is “long 10,000 Li”, is a defensive wall, but also a written evocation for reading a place; the project offers additional non-essential irreducible keys for the interpretation of a space as the expression of a community: the bestowing of a confidential name bears witness to this. The same is true of Hadrian’s Wall, as built articulation of defense based on a lasting and ecological rationale, in its most efficient etymological sense, which associates the re-use of architecture in other contexts. Superstudio proposes the Continuous Monument: not necessarily a border or defense structure, but rather an architecture in which all the historical transitions preceding its affirmation are synthesised and which include technique, art, construction, human interactions, vegetation, excrescences and shipwrecks. Superstudio’s subject matter could not be considered to be the “border”, yet its role emerges in the extensive written output. From these three experiences a heterogeneous linguistic horizon is crystallised in the panorama of the “border”. Wall, Barrier and Monument, through their acceptations, at different depths, express a meaning that is additional to that of the project itself. In the contemporary age, other attributive foundations stand out, which are far removed from the previous meanings, such as “separation barrier” or “buffer zone”, in which reasons, complexity and meanings undergo a process of slippage. In the light of these considerations, the paper intends to investigate the configurations of the political and humanistic meaning of borders in the space-time of globalisation (contextualized to the examples presented), in relation to the transformations, also of a cultural nature, that have taken place in the contemporary age and which emerge first of all in the change in the nomenclature (Israeli separation barrier, separation barrier between the United States of America and Mexico, Cypriot buffer zone). Taking all of this into consideration: in what terms should we understand the configurations of borders in the contemporary spatio-temporal context?