Of what the border is the place ?

Initiated in 2015 by two artist-teachers-researchers from the National School of Art in Bourges, Éric Aupol & Hervé Trioreau, Re:Territories / Challenging Borders (international research and creation programme) has made it possible to deploy, throughout the first half of 2016, between France and Palestine, a multitude of projects, exchanges, research and workshops between students and teachers, artists and architects, between the universities of these two territories, etc.
These projects of encounters and experiments have attempted to go beyond the bilateral question of the ‘border’ to broaden it conceptually and plastically towards a possible idea of ‘thresholds’ where spaces, whatever they may be, meet, intersect and join.
The exhibition L’Horizon des Événements has already taken place, elsewhere, in another site, in another space, in another time, …

In June 2016, a first exhibition experience took place at the Franco-German Cultural Centre in Ramallah in Palestine, a collaboration between students from two different but related disciplines (art and architecture) and two other spaces, but so close: Palestine and France.
Today, this first space-time of crossing and crystallization moves and splits, in another territory, into two distinct times and spaces allowing, even more, to apprehend and grasp these questions of thresholds and borders: two cities, two places, two institutions, two contexts and two exhibitions where all these antinomic questions related to closure and opening, so contemporary and so current, are reflected. Today, it is the borders that cross us…
Between La Box (Bourges) and Glassbox (Paris), between these two points, a reflective line, like a distorting mirror, observes us: a double exhibition, almost homothetic, where students, teachers and French and Palestinian artists meet again.
A horizon connects us, sucked by powerful gravitational forces towards a new singularity, a limit where space and time no longer follow physical and political laws and from which we cannot escape: an in-between at the threshold of spatial extension and at the border of territories.

L’Horizon des Événements…

Re:Territories / Challenging Borders eis a research and creation programme and international network of artists, architects, researchers and students brought together to work and be worked, to question, experiment and create, to anticipate and provoke, to embrace the emergence of a world of changing borders. An artistic, social and political responsibility drives this perspective.
This exploration integrates other experimentations questioning the invisible and rigid domination of power, its tensions and dynamics.
This research questions the links and connections between objects, spaces and bodies and questions contextual mobilities and the new forms of behaviour they induce.
Finally, it is the mobility of knowledge between artists, architects, academics, researchers, students, institutions and geographical zones: the displacements and ‘migrations’ between the Middle East, Europe, Asia and America, as well as the mobility of exchanges between pedagogical and artistic practices thatRe:Territories / Challenging Borders wishes to experiment.

From near and far, Re:Territories / Challenging Borders is constructed as a constellation of encounters, exchanges, practices, experiments, …, covering a set of border identities and differential practices (from concrete to invisible, from solid to liquid, from the body to social space…).

These are some of the questions in the making that accompany the Re:Territories / Challenging Borders project.

Re:Territories / Challenging Borders, a political territory: the singular context of this exchange and the territories that compose it are the main paradigm of this cross research. The apprehension of a territory of conflict through art, architecture and urbanism, the economy generated by the production of forms built in conflicting spaces or historically marked by the extensions of the conflict, are the questions that nourish the whole project.

Occupation, displacement, reoccupation, it is around these physical spaces, these central terms of this space of conflict, that the research and the plastic and conceptual proposals of the teachers and students enrolled in this project are born.

A prospective and transversal form: multiple views on two territories. The interest of the project is to cross our Western and Eastern views on the making of these signs and their consequences in our respective societies. It allows us to question, through the singular reflexive and plastic forms proposed by each actor, the notion of space as a political terrain, a terrain of projections, and to measure what it indicates of the contemporary geographical, political and aesthetic context, on territories with a strong political value.

Architecture, public and private space, colonization and deterritorialization are the terms and concepts to be developed with the students around common and crossed theoretical and plastic proposals, without a priori constraints of mediums and realizations.

« The current era would rather be the era of space. We are in the age of simultaneity, we are in the age of juxtaposition, in the age of near and far, of side by side, of dispersed. We are at a time when the world feels, I believe, less like a large city that develops through time than as a network that connects points and intertwines its tangle. Perhaps it could be said that some of the ideological conflicts that animate today’s polemics are between the pious descendants of time and the relentless inhabitants of space.»

Michel Foucault, « Des espaces autres », in Dits et écrits (1954-1988)

What is the nature of built, urban and public space? What displacements are likely to occur there? What about the relationship between interiority and exteriority? What is a territory where boundaries are broken down, pulverized from the inside to the outside? What is a territory where boundaries are blurred in favour of controlled interference that transforms it into subject intervals, supervised passages, manipulated transitions… How can we act directly in and on this type of fragmented and deterritorialized territory? How can we, through fiction, science fiction, parallel and subversive economies, utopias, dystopias, uchronies, heterotopias, …, reoccupy these territories in a quest for ‘other spaces’?

Above all, what reflexive and creative practices accompany these questions? What remains, moreover, of the experiences of subjective appropriation of urban spaces or their interstices? Is it possible to hold a space, a place, an ‘in-between’ or a ‘non-place’, by doing something other than living or working in it? Can one intervene in it, as an architect, urban planner or artist, other than to build or construct? What is an artistic ‘gesture’ in a public urban space, in a territory in constant movement?

All these questions, which structure Re:Territories / Challenging Borders, suggest a program: to consider the territory as a field of operations to liberate new uses, new ways of thinking, of crossing it, of acting and making it act…

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In collaboration with Les Turbulences – Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain Centre-Val de Loire

With the support of du Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, de la Direction Régionale des Affaires Culturelles Île-de-France, de la Région Île-de-France, de la Ville de Paris, de la Direction Régionale des Affaires Culturelles du Centre-Val de Loire, du Conseil Régional du Centre-Val de Loire, de la Communauté d’Agglomération Bourges Plus, de l’Institut Français – Ministère des Affaires Étrangères et du Développement International, du Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication / DGCA – Programme Entr’Écoles, du Consulat Général de France à Jérusalem / Service de Coopération et d’Action Culturelle, de l’Institut Français de Jérusalem et de l’Institut Français – Centre Culturel Franco-Allemand de Ramallah, Palestine

In partnership with avec International Academy of Art Palestine / Ramallah, Birzeit University – Department of Architecture / Palestine et Al-Quds University – Bard College / Jérusalem-Est