Gegen Borders

If you draw a line and suddenly cannot go any further, you have probably reached the edge of the sheet. You turn around and continue drawing in a different direction until at some point the lines create a pattern that might describe you quite well. That’s how borders are made. They are drawn across the earth like a pattern that only needs to be filled. They simulate and stimulate economic systems that need to be protected from each other and from intruders. They organize land, property and people. And they determine which possessing people are allowed to enter a particular tract of land. It is here that madness becomes a reality: systematic controls, surveillance technologies, passports and laws create enormous pressure on individuals, protecting the last fortresses of wealth. They themselves become bastions to protect identity, a supposedly national one on the one hand, but also a social one, as in the understanding of fixed gender identities. Borders represent the opposite of connections, but they can become those if one seeks out for the transnational, the transgender, the transidentitarian visions. Migrants are among the first to question, evade or cross borders and in doing so, constitute themselves as political subjects.
We must understand borders as psycho-geographical complexes and use them to our advantage. Drawing boundaries also means protecting ourselves and others from violent invasion. They become negotiation zones. In this way, they protect individuals and even the land from being dominated by greedy people.
Beyond the pattern: In the pre-modern world, the border was understood less as a division than as an edge of the sovereign sphere of influence. The periphery, the elusive borderland, a GEGEN reality, a place of borderliners who devote themselves to completely different struggles than those of the center.
So don’t repeat any new patterns and feel free to continue drawing over the edge of the sheet, to live your transidentitarian visions, to break through any gender boundaries and let us meet on the other side of the border. GEGEN BORDERS.