Borderlands
Author: Daryna Skrynnyk-Myska
Translation from Ukrainian: Viktoriia Grivina
Editor: Clemens Poole
Appealing to the border as a state of being itself is an important foundation of decolonial theory [3]. Walter Mignolo considers modern borders in the categories of European Early Modern political thought — as frontiers, created from the perspective of European imperial / colonial expansion, and created for opposing civilization against barbarism. Frontiers are not only contact zones between societies, but also an instrument of political thought for legitimising domination, and therefore they have an epistemological dimension. The advance of civilization and the idea of frontiers created a geographic and bodygraphic division — certain territories were defined as the habitat of people classified as barbarians or primitives. One of the reasons for such division was the belief in their inability to think and theorise. Those who established such a classification order, accordingly, put themselves at the top of humanity. Decolonial thinkers have critically analysed who has the authority to develop and apply such classification, and what logic underlies it [4].
The condition for resistance to this particular logic is border thinking, which arises from the anti-imperial epistemic reactions to colonial difference — the division of people into those who are below, and those whose models are to be imitated [5]. “If border thinking is an inevitable condition of imperial / colonial planning, critical border thinking is an imperial / colonial state transformed into epistemic and political projects of decolonisation” [6]. Such decolonial thinking is aimed at broadening possibilities and liberation of different communities (racial, gender, class, epistemic, religious, etc.) from oppression, as well as undermining the presumptions that lie in the basis of naturalising, implementation and corruption of imperial power [7].
Borderlands as a transit zone and periphery where unique processes and interaction occur, come into focus of art. In the mid-1980s, a movement called border art, was initiated on the US-Mexico border. This artistic practice focuses on the problems related to tensions between centre and periphery, borders, hierarchies, power, identities, race, and national origin. Its defining features are physical or imaginary borders [8].
After 1989 [9], in contrast to the countries of East-Central Europe — perceived by the West as a ‘contemporary periphery’ — Ukraine was seen as a ‘periphery of the periphery that even less civilised, even less cultured and even more dependent on russian policy [10]. In 2004, Poland's eastern border became the external border of the European Union. In the Ukrainian context, the reaction to the colonial difference, according to which the hegemonic discourse defines ‘other’ people as inferior, can be traced in the example of a 2007–16 series of art projects by Serhyi Petlyuk and Oleksiy Khoroshko [11]. Their site-specific installations [12], shown on both sides of the Ukrainian-Polish border, problematised the relations between people, structured by colonial differences. The artistic projects were based on direct experience of humiliating control and classification procedures during the crossing of the Ukrainian-Polish border after the tightening of the visa regime in 2007. The artistic language of the projects appropriated visual images typical for the gigantic border lines of Ukrainian salespeople — a distinctive chequered bag made of synthetic fibre as a symbol of peddler marginals; neon stars — a symbol of the EU, translated into mass culture; an arched entrance as a symbolic checkpoint that ironically equated the crossing of the border with a heroic rite of initiation. The project was shown in Ukraine and Poland in different variations and under different names (Lviv, Lublin, the borderzone near Shehyni, Rzeszow, Warsaw, Częstochowa, Kharkiv, Kyiv). Its consistent visual elements remained a chequered bag and a symbolic transition, connoting border markers.
The artists' criticism was directed not only against discriminatory inequality, but also concerned the Ukrainian myth of Europe as a ‘coveted paradise’. For Ukraine, the desire to become part of the West was a leitmotif of all the historiosophical and cultural projects of modernity [13]. In the history of borders, this type of dependent relationship has dominated decolonization [14], accordingly, the implementation of a decolonial project requires critical deconstruction of the symbolic centre, and the affirmation of one's own subjectivity. While simultaneously criticising the colonial gaze of the West, the artists resorted to an ironic artistic gesture in order to critically deconstruct their compatriot’s mythologized ideas about that same West, through ironic artistic gestures that can be interpreted as acts of decolonial resistance. The art action revealed an important line of tension between the periphery and the centre — in Warsaw, the project was seen not only as a reflection on the borderlands, but as a metaphor for migration from the East as such. Visual images (bags, crossings, EU stars), which, according to the artists, symbolised a specific border (that shared by Ukraine and Poland) were subjected, in the centre, to the metonymic generalisation of the periphery as such.
In the installations created before the start of the Russo-Ukrainian War in 2014, Serhyi Petlyuk and Olekiy Khoroshko commented on the perception of the Western border, structured by the logic of colonial differences. Even though the projects after 2014 also rely on the images of bags and transition, they acquired other connotations — these iterations no longer had irony in them. The installations in Kharkiv and Kyiv were read as a reference to the eastern borderland, structured by colonial and imperial differences, that acquired the connotations of a frontier. In these works, the artists appealed to the growing feeling of uncertainty (labyrinths instead of passages), and the experience of internally displaced persons, existing in a ‘border state’ that had to do with the loss of home due to war and the threat posed by the border of the empire. Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, probably, marked the end of an era of peace, giving rise to escalating armed conflicts in the world over territorial claims. This creates a new dramatic context for further understanding of the borderlands.
video. Dzyga Gallery, Lviv, Ukraine
Warsaw, Poland
Installation. Lublin, Poland.
Center, Kharkiv, Ukraine
happening. Lublin, Poland
objects. International festival Fort.Missia., border
area near the town of Shehyni, Ukraine
| Art project "Exchange". Site-specific installations from 2007 to 2016 by Serhiy Petlyuk and Oleksiy Khoroshko |
Endnotes
02. Bohdan Cherkes, Józef Hernik, Karol Król, and Magdalena Wilkosz-Mamcarczyk. “Polish-Ukrainian Borderland Cultural Heritage Bridges—Lesson Drawn from Forced Population Relocation” Sustainability 2021.13(14), 7898, accessed 15 February 2024.
2.2. Borderland Areas.
2.3. Borderland Types.
03. Тамара Гундорова, “Як між собою говорять периферії, або Україна, евроцентризм і деколонізація” «Критика», №7–8, (2022): 25–26, доступ отримано 10 грудня 2023,
04. Walter D., Mignolo, and Madina V. Tlostanova, “Theorizing from the Borders: Shifting to Geo- and Body-Politics of Knowledge”. European Journal of Social Theory, 2006, 9(2), 206, 208.
05. Ibid. 208
06. Ibid. 211.
07. Ibid. 208.
08. Guglielmo Scafirimuto, “Uses of border in transnational art and in Guillermo Gomez-Peña’s work” In Transnational Narratives of Migration and Exile. Perspectives from the Humanities, ed. Camilla E. Skalle, Anje M. Gjesdal (Scandinavian University Press, 2021) 115, 118, 120, 123, 125–127.
09. The year of the demolition of the Berlin wall and the fall of communist regimes in Europe.
10. Galyna Kotliuk “Colonization of minds: Ukraine between Russian colonialism and Western Orientalism” Front. Sociol, 2023. 8:1206320. doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2023.1206320, accessed February 15, 2024.
11. I base my review of the projects and the factual references to my Zoom interviews with artists: Oleksiy Khoroshko on 11 January, 2024, and Serhiy Petlyuk on 17 January, 2024.
12. Site-specific art includes the physical conditions of a particular location as an integral part of the production, presentation, and reception of art. See. Kwon, One Place after Another. Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England, 2002). 1–9.
13. Тамара Гундорова, “Як між собою говорять периферії, або Україна, евроцентризм і деколонізація” «Критика», №7–8, (2022): 25–26, доступ отримано 10 грудня 2023.
14. Walter D. Mignolo and Madina V. Tlostanova, “Theorizing from the Borders: Shifting to Geo- and Body-Politics of Knowledge,” European Journal of Social Theory 2006, 9/2. 210.
For further reference
Mignolo, Walter D. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality,
Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton University Press,
2000. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.cttq94t0.
Author
Daryna Skrynnyk-Myska
About the author