Borderlines: Essays on Mapping and The Logic of Place

Ruthie Abeliovich, Edwin Seroussi

• Editorial: Sciendo
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783110623802
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Categoría: Artes escénicas

Borderlines innovatively explores the ways artistic interventions construct social, cultural, and mental spaces. The fifteen essays bring a broad multidisciplinary approach to the concept of borderlines and its markings through artistic manifestations. Rejecting older "normative" understandings of the word border lines as signifying semantic irreversibility, this work gives prominence to the plasticity of the combined single word "borderlines."

Borderlines is a collection of essays that address the cultural, artistic, conceptual, and performative mapping of places. The essays in this collection "write" borderlines from a wide variety of perspectives, representing diverse disciplines, cultural backgrounds, countries, and generations. It presents the pervasiveness of borderlines as an intellectual, artistic and political concept, across media, theories, and places.

Borderlines is intended for academic specialists and students in cultural studies, theatre and performance, media and sound studies.

Author information: Ruthie Abeliovich, The University of Haifa. Edwin Seroussi, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Part 1: Introduction

Edwin Seroussi

On The Borderlines: Introductory Annotations

1Experiencing Borderlines in Nature and Culture

The last days of August 2015 are unusually warm. Sitting at ease on the back porch of our tiny cottage in the White Mountains of New Hampshire on a late afternoon, I observe absentmindedly the restrained dance of the towering trees that mark the borders of our backyard. I am contemplating writing this introduction to Borderlines, an unfinished protocol of an amazing intellectual journey that I shared for the past three years with a remarkable group of young colleagues, students and visiting faculty at the Hebrew University. This collection of essays has occupied me throughout the summer. On this magical afternoon, writing an introductory article to such a textured and adventurous collection of essays, well beyond my field of expertise, appears a daunting task.

A miniscule detail appearing in the woods at the borders of the backyard sparks my somnolent inspiration. A yellowing leaf on the verge of turning into vivid red, the first one among the still sea of green leaves that my eye has captured this season, silently announces the beginning of the end of summer. This is a distinct sign of nature that one hardly experiences in Israel, where autumn is just a late, second summer waiting for the short winter to erupt. In the rapture of the intoxicating early evening of late summer, I experienced borderlines as a tangible embodiment, in lower case, of the otherwise abstract concept of Borderlines with a capital that constitutes the name of this volume. That fleeting moment of nature shifting its colors in front of my eyes provided me with a start. I had to write about an unwritable idea, to reflect on a word crucial to the mapping of our existence in the world, yet as illusive to grasp as the borderlines between the unbounded shades of the North Country autumn leaves.

From humankind’s origins or, more specifically, from the beginnings of consciousness, monitoring nature’s cycle of changing seasons was a crucial mechanism for survival. Cyclical and therefore predictable, even if sometimes surprising in its appearances and disappearances, the transition of the seasons marked the rhythms of social life and conditioned the emotional life of the individual psyche through the changes: from the plentiful light and heat of summer to the gloominess of autumn, the darkness and chill of winter, and the joy of spring’s renewal. The borderlines between seasons however, are hard to determine. Humans first learned about the forthcoming changes intuitively, from the shifting patterns in nature’s behavior. Later, astronomers learned to measure the seasons scientifically based on the cyclic movement of the earth around the sun: 21 September, 21 December, 21 March, and 21 June always re-turn on the “same” date to mark precisely the end of a season and the beginning of the next one. From time immemorial, humans have marked these dates with special rituals.

Scientists cannot, however, delineate the phenomenological borderlines of seasons because they vary in each latitude of the globe. This is a moment when the concepts of place and borderlines coalesce. Borderlines also vary, as we have noticed, in the deep latitudes of our consciousness. As the leaf in my backyard turned red this year on 30 August, in my innermost subjectivity, I experienced on this date – not on 21 September – the borderline between this summer and the ensuing fall, pace astronomers.

Ever since that late summer afternoon of initial inspiration and while editing the essays in this publication, I saw, heard, and felt borderlines at every step on my way, and they all shared one quality: they were all either blurred or blurring. Let me flesh this out with specific examples. Just a few weeks ago, I experienced shifting borderlines among passing, casual voices and bodies at the Frankfurt Airport, that gargantuan modern crossroads leading from and to every imaginable borderline. My impressions truly resonate with Zali Gurevitch’s essay in this volume, aptly titled “On the Border: Barriers, Passages, Journeys.”

For example, a young woman next to me was talking on her cellphone with earphones, oblivious, as is normative now, to her surroundings. (I was trying quite unsuccessfully to compose a section of the text you are reading at this moment.) What struck me was her language, a fluid, effortless, integral and obviously unconscious hybrid of (acquired) American English and (native) Russian. This was not the speech of a newcomer inserting a word here and there from her native language into the acquired one. It was rather a solid, unified language performed by a virtuosa, her intonation moving naturally from one language to the other, challenging the obvious syntactic, semantic and sonic borderlines that separate them.

In a second scene, a few minutes later (flights were, of course, delayed), I bumped into an extremely heterogeneous, from the point of view of bodily features, group of teenagers. They were interacting, as teenagers usually do, with close physical contact while chitchatting very fast, as teenagers usually do, in an unfamiliar language. As a cluster, they resembled a United Nations assembly (or an ad for United Colors of Benetton), so diverse were their colors, eyes, and complexion. Their language of communication however, was flawless, energetic, in short, very natural, in contrast to their stark physical dissimilarity. Trying desperately to identify this language (is it Finnish? Icelandic?), I felt abashed trying to solve this dissonance between voices and bodies, mortified by the underlying racial prejudice of my curiosity that kept me listening to these diverse bodies sharing the same language so naturally. Borderlines came back to my preoccupied mind, again, this time in the disguise of the embedded, axiomatic intuition that different bodies must speak different languages. Finally, I yielded to my nosiness and asked them. They were not surprised, for they obviously noticed my listening to them over several minutes.

These two incidents (clearly, I could find many others in every nook of the Frankfurt Airport) show that we live in an era of, as I articulated above, blurred and blurring borderlines. Languages, those discrete components of communication carved out by humans from raw sound material since ancient times and turned into key markers of what was called “culture,” appear now as endangered species, wiped away by a hybrid American English inculcated through mass media and technological gadgets. Moreover, bodies are not homologous with languages any more. Bodies and technological devices have become one. Do not read for nostalgia here (a fleeting sensation that itself challenges borderlines of time and space) for a past of clear borderlines between cultures, languages, bodies and instruments, the human and the nonhuman. Read these scenes just as triggers, collected in spontaneous fieldwork, for deeper thinking about Borderlines.

By the way, it was Norwegian….

2Genesis of a Project and its Borderlines

Technically a collection of essays, Borderlines, as hinted above, is also a form of protocol. Six years ago, while serving as head of the newly established School of the Arts at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, I invited a group of young scholars who had approached me for diverse reasons to an informal reception at our home on French Hill. This varied group of scholars (involved in theater, performing arts, visual arts, digital arts, music, sound studies, folklore, etc.) were, for the most part, concerned in some way with the impact of new technologies on the arts. “Diverse reasons” is a euphemism for seeking a future in academia near the end of the doctoral phase or in the early post-doctoral one. I had nothing concrete to offer these remarkable young people except my genuine attention, which is (still) not budgeted by the university. The dialogue was lively and engaging, the agenda an open one.

To make a short story shorter, we decided on taking two steps. The first was to establish a collaborative seminar at the Hebrew University at which the group would meet regularly but also would be open to a new generation of students interested in the intersections between the arts and new technologies. The second step depended on the first; if after the first experimental and highly interdisciplinary seminar, we felt we were accomplishing something, we would narrow our focus to more specific issues and try to recruit the necessary means of support. It thus happened that, in May 2013, the Israel Science Foundation announced the awarding of a most generous grant to a group of professors from several Israeli universities of which I was a part. Da’at Hamakom, The Center for the Study of Cultures of Place in the Modern Jewish World (I-CORE in the Study of Modern Jewish Culture, grant no. 1798/12), an academic think tank, thus came into being. With the backing of Da’at Hamakom, we dedicated the second seminar (2013) to Maps, and a third one (2014) to Soundscapes. We also benefited from support by the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the Hebrew University.

In light of Da’at Hamakom’s goals, the seminars then turned their focus on the concept of place as constituted in the arts through acts of mapping and sonic representations, while continuing to examine the role of new technologies in these creative processes. The budget enabled us to invite two guest scholars from abroad who are renowned for their scholarship on the relations between new technologies and the arts in relation to place, Irit Rogoff from the Department of Visual Cultures at the University of London (Maps) and Brandon Labelle from the Bergen Academy of Art and Design in Norway (Soundscapes).

The seminars were experimental, challenging the borderlines of established academic disciplines and hierarchies. Furthermore, they contested the separation between the academy and the “outside world” itself. Senior professors worked together with outstanding graduate students at the start of their careers; scholars interacted with performing artists in the fields of sound and visuals and with social activists; and the public at large participated, actively or passively, in several events generated or produced by the seminars.

Some of these events took place off the campus, on the streets of Jerusalem (such as on the Jerusalem light rail discussed below) or at the Hansen House (formerly Leprosarium Jesus Hilfe), an innovative center for art, design, and technology, which became a second home for our seminars. Hansen House hosts the Mamuta Art and Media Center run by the Sala-Manca Artists Collective, and these associations became deeply involved with and committed to the academic endeavors of the seminars. The Maps seminar, in fact, opened with an artistic happening called Borderline, which, in the long run, inspired the title of this collection. The event was part of Traces 5 – The 5th Biennale for Drawing in Israel produced by Sala-Manca and curated by Tal Yahas with the participation of Josef Sprinzak, Hadas Ophrat, Lezli Rubin-Kunda, Adi Kaplan, and Shachar Carmel with Dudu Carmel, and Shira Legman with the ensemble Musica Nova. The liminal nature of the Hansen House and its history became the subject of artistic and theoretical reflection at this happening as manifested in the studies by Diego Rotman, “The Fragile Boundaries of Paradise: The Paradise Inn Resort at the Former Jerusalem Leprosarium,” and by Josef Sprinzak, “Map Song – Poetic Intersections between Sound, Maps, and Performance,” included in this volume.

In addition, the Hebrew University campus on Mount Scopus itself became an object of critical inquiry in both the Maps and Soundscapes seminars, leading to a reflexive examination of the very place where students and faculty were meeting. Artistic interventions into the nature of this place are the subject of the essay “Three Trees: Environmental Projects on Mt. Scopus, 2003-2015” by Ran Morin, the artist who reshaped symbolically-loaded sites on Mount Scopus and its slopes. These performances, exhibitions, and interventions thus became an integral part of an ongoing learning process rather than a regular university “course.”

The Maps and Soundscapes seminars generated discussions focusing on concepts of borders and their markings as expressed in the arts. The distance from those seminars to the present book shortened, as it became clear that a protocol of these discussions could be shared with the public at large in an ongoing conversation. We therefore expanded the borders of Borderlines through a public call for papers to colleagues from around the globe who share similar concerns.

The present, multifaceted volume thus includes analyses of works of art generated by or related to our seminars, theoretical reflections by some of its participants on place, boundaries, and the arts, and original contributions from peers who responded to our call to meditate on borderlines. As expected, this protocol is by nature fragmentary. It is a modest posting on the side of an endless road running from the very origins of human communication— one based on difference (and therefore on the institution of borderlines, such as those separating discrete phonemes to generate language)—to the unpredictable frontiers of the “fourth revolution,” where humanity appears to dissolve within the technologies it designed.

3Borderlines of Language

Borderlines as a plural form of the noun “borderline” is not a bona fide term in English, according to “normative” dictionaries, which define “borderline” as either an adjective or an adverb (and even as such it is, not surprisingly, a very modern one, first documented in 1907). Until recently, “borderlines” as a noun existed only as an unhyphenated two-word concept, “border lines,” used to denote ultimately unambiguous partitions, as in Daniel Boyarin’s Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). In Boyarin’s argument, border lines emerge at a critical moment for Western civilization, when Judaism and Christianity split. Border-makers imposed from the top down the ultimate distinctions between Judaism and Christianity, defining some beliefs and practices as Christian and others as Jew...

Índice

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Titlepage
• Copyright
• Contents
• Part 1: Introduction
• Part 2: Journeys
• Part 3: Maps
• Part 4: Places
• Part 5: Sounds
• Contributors
• Back Cover