Walls, Blockades, and Barricades: Art at the Margins of the New Enclosures

We are living in an era of walls. Not only physical walls, which have exponentially increased since the ballyhooed fall of the Berlin Wall, but boundaries made of identities, economies, illnesses, and politics that seem impenetrable. By 2021, 72 border walls covered 31,000 kilometers of the Earth’s surface, 56 of them built after 9/11 and 32 after the Arab Spring. The rigidity of the border wall appears as an ironic indicator of the fear of the loss of state sovereignty, performing what border theorists call a theatrical presence to assuage the anxieties of an internal population.

It’s also striking that the image of a wall, barricade or blockade is formally, but not actually, at odds with Capitalism’s reorganization of space over the last four decades. The latter is consistently described by a wide range of scholars as deterritorialization; a process by which surplus labor and capital is deployed to new regional locations to accumulate. This panel considers how artists work in, around, and against political, geo-economic and environmental barriers to question these social relations. What are the solutions and provocations that artists use to confront and unsettle spaces of control? What new imaginaries and speculative futures do such artworks engender?

Topics may include (but are not limited to) case studies of artworks that resist or redeploy space as political tactic; temporalities of walls; intersections between art and critical geographies and urban studies; art’s ideological marking of territory as monument or gentrification; connections between art, activism and time-based media or performance.