#3 Re: Borders?

Amid ongoing geopolitical upheavals, the border has returned with renewed urgency as a figure of thought. As an instrument of political power, it defines belonging and legitimises exclusion. Yet it is also a precondition of social life: it demarcates the scope of cultural, legal and symbolic orders, without which collective action, responsibility and shared understanding would be impossible. As Michel Foucault writes in Dits et écrits, “Man does not begin with freedom, but with limits and the line that cannot be crossed.”¹ It is through norms and limits that we become social beings.

Despite their purported clarity, borders are not clear-cut lines but contested or temporarily stabilised zones of conflict. The arts are a means to cross or shift borders or make them visible. At the same time, artistic practice itself depends on forms, rules and systems – on constitutive acts of framing – without which aesthetic experience would remain inarticulate. In this sense, art is not boundless; it turns upon self-imposed constraints, whether linguistic, material or formal.

There is nothing new about this tension. Plato distinguishes between two ontological principles that condition one another: apeiron (ἄπειρον), the unlimited as a source of movement, desire and change; and peras (πέρας), limit, measure and proportion. Pure limitlessness would be chaos. Only through limitation do duration, form and order become possible. This insight is not merely metaphysical but also ethical and political. It concerns the good life, the ordering of the polity and the conditions of human self-determination.

In this issue’s interview, Ulrich Peltzer makes the point that borders should be understood less as territorial demarcations than as normative frameworks of historical experience. Norms shape movement, enable resistance and begin to shift in times of crisis. For Peltzer, art is not a moral authority but a practice of aesthetic cognition. It opens zones of experience beyond the familiar while resisting political instrumentalisation. Its potential for resistance lies precisely in its refusal to be put to use.

Ulrike Draesner’s literary essay shifts to a new perspective. Here, borders appear not as fixed demarcations but as thresholds – liminal zones in which meanings, bodies, symbols and systems intersect. She counters the fantasy of fixed, unequivocal lines at work in power politics with the idea of the border as process: relational, extended in time, embodied. For artistic practice, borders become productive spaces of transformation.

Finally, Regine Keller’s essay brings these reflections back to the realm of landscape. Landscape recognises no political demarcations; it follows geological, climatic and ecological logics. Where land appropriation, enclosure and territorial isolation prevail, these logics collide. As a landscape architect, she demonstrates how ecological interdependence unsettles the fiction of national sovereignty. The consequences of the climate crisis do not stop at borders. Landscape figures here as a metaphor for a planetary perspective.

Taken together, these contributions clarify what is now at stake. The reactivation of the border as a political instrument of power proceeds hand in hand with the erasure of its social, legal, moral and aesthetic complexity. The question that presents itself today with a new sense of urgency is how to speak of borders without echoing the authoritarian logics that have already appropriated the language of freedom. Contemporary libertarian authoritarianism has idealised the removal of boundaries and turned rule-breaking into a political method.

This development places the arts in a fraught position. With political actors increasingly adopting artistic strategies of provocation, transgression and taboo-breaking, art must tackle the question of how far the dissolution of boundaries can go when shared norms erode, rules are systematically hollowed out and institutions deliberately undermined? How can artistic practice assume responsibility without becoming functionalised?

Art lives by the freedom to exceed measure; democracy by the capacity to maintain it. The two follow different logics, and confusing them is dangerous. The present political moment demands that we insist on this distinction. Yet distinction is not stasis; it designates a conflictual relation that must be repeatedly sustained and renegotiated.

In her Cahiers, Simone Weil describes a limit as something that is always transgressed yet enforces a compensating oscillation. Perhaps this is the key: not to confuse freedom with the abolition of form, and instead to grasp it as a balancing movement between measure and excess – as the process of labouring on those lines and thresholds on which communal life depends.

Manos Tsangaris
President of the Akademie der Künste

Anh-Linh Ngo
Vice President of the Akademie der Künste

1. Michel Foucault, “Madness, the Absence of an Oeuvre”, in Jean Khalfa, ed., History of Madness, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa, London: Routledge, 2009, pp. 544.