Border Work
Ulrike Draesner

I have flown over a border, the sun rolling behind the horizon. It is dark, crepuscular for around three hours, dark. Wind, snow, polar night, ice.

Borders are made by humans. We experience them with our bodies; we speak of them. Physical borders are transitional spaces, even when sometimes no more than a couple of centimetres wide. A friend, travelling across the United States with his wife, stopped on a Californian beach. Sunshine, calm sea. He was up to his knees in the water when something knocked him over. His wife screamed for help. He struggled but couldn’t get back on his feet, was unable to cross that one metre back to the beach, which became three metres, then ten. Luckily two surfers, who were already further out, saw his wife’s desperate gesticulations. They found him and dragged him away from the lethal current.

Borders are real, harsh and not always visible. As a species, this seems to have impressed us from very early on. Borders were marked, their crossing enacted ritually. We tried to bring the weather under our control by means of sacrifice and prayer. Neither time nor space should constrain us. The Polar Museum in Tromsø commemorates sundry Arctic expeditions, most of which failed. Merely looking at the photographs is enough to make one feel cold. White European males drew borders across continents, made the prime meridian pass through Greenwich, covered the planet with a grid. 

Germany was so bad at borders that for centuries the country existed only in an oversized iteration of the Roman Empire, or as one petty princedom next to another. Schism was the order of the day. During the eastward migration of the late Middle Ages the word granica (boundary marker) was adopted from Old Slavic. Its German derivative Grenze, meaning “border”, entered popular usage through Luther’s translation of the Bible. With the Enlightenment, metaphorical uses of the word eventually gained traction (as in die Grenzen des Wissens, which in English, drawing on Anglo-Norman lymit and Latin limes, meaning a border, frontier, boundary, translates as “the limits of knowledge”).   

I find it important to emphasise the corporeal and/or territorial meaning of borders. Ultimately, this sense underpins the concept’s every metaphorical use; the one cannot really be separated from the other. 

Border. We are confronted with spaces and lines, transitional zones and human-made, artificial markers. Borders cannot be conceived of as “things”. They are better understood as temporally extensive, relational, interactive structures whose persistence is dependent solely on their continuing materialisation.   

Border traffic means sign traffic. Signs are ambiguous – they both demand and permit interpretation. The actual meaning of Wittgenstein’s proposition “The limits [in German, Grenzen] of my language mean the limits of my world” itself means is worthy of discussion. It is certainly the case that he employs the word Grenzen in the best possible way. It expresses ambiguity, but an ambiguity set out around an imaginary line. Borders indicate order and that order’s indeterminacy. The concept of “liminality”, developed by anthropology, has proved useful for describing this kind of ambiguity and the diffuse beauty of the border (a hazy line through a landscape – drawn on paper, regardless of physical accessibility). 

Limen is the old Latin word for threshold. In an architect’s plan the boundary between two rooms is represented as a line, a delight to every structuralist’s heart: either left or right, black or white – binary thinking ahoy! There are situations where this may be useful or rational; in power politics it is constantly fabricated and enforced. In lived cultural and human reality, however, borders are thresholds. A threshold is where what was blends with what will be. Rooms one and two (the cold threshold, the dark threshold, the state border) interact. Each transforms in a field radiated by the other. Each increasingly assumes parts of its opposite. 

Borders understood as liminal spaces are precisely not what borders on maps of power purport to be: machines producing definitude. Boundaries as liminal spaces open up a fertile conceptual field for artistic work: zones of blending in which X becomes Y without predetermination, transformative continua rather than rigid grids, processes instead of fixed entities. 

Words, too, work with borders. We distinguish between them by way of minimal differences, phonetically, orthographically, etc. Yet it is through their interrelations that we read texts. Words gather to form rhythmic, pictorial and semantic clusters, often enough between different languages, or languages yet to be invented. They construct a (literary) space of their own by combining associations that AI can only partly decode (to avoid the word “understand”). Artistic texts evolve within liminal spaces where meaning emerges in the form of phenomena made by contiguity and blending, as waves of process and feedback. Languages and neighbouring languages cannot be “cleanly” separated; dialects, neologisms and grammatical shifts work hand in hand. 

It is precisely here, in the apparent narrows of the threshold zone, that time and space open up. The expression “between the lines” refers to the high liminal potential of written (i.e. re-readable) texts. In such between-spaces trauma, taboos and the long-repressed or forgotten can be told subliminally, without appearing on the page “in so many words”. The voices of those who have been (deliberately) ignored are granted space. 

The German word grenzwertig (i.e. borderline – literally: of border valency) itself indicates a boundary: this far and no further, it says, you can forget about it! But it could also be interpreted in a different, more positive sense: as a literal reference to the value of the border. According to Niklas Luhmann, the art system in any social system has the function of purposeful non-functionality. By contrast, purposeful restrictions of a religious, moral, cognitive, etc., nature, Luhmann claimed, lead to the dissolution of art. This approach was developed in the 1980s and early 1990s. From today’s point of view we gain a clear sense that democracy was safer then.

In the political and social spaces we inhabit in 2026, however, borders have been blurred beyond recognition by media rhetoric (fake news) on the one hand, and, on the other, violently altered by wars. People are being lumped together and sorted into pots tagged “bad” and “good”. Where (and how) does art act when faced with enormous (data-) entanglements that are globally effective and deliberately generated and which, in conformity with the objectives of power politics, economics and ideologies, conceptually and visually undermine reality, perception and intelligence with the intention of drawing new borders between people and countries, new lines that can facilitate practices of exploitation and oppression? 

As a post-Luhmannian I ask myself what counter-functions art can adopt. In my work I attempt to de-ontologise borders, to draw up boundary values and turn boundary lines into spaces for mixing and meeting: zones of ambiguity, where life can be embraced – “impure”, inhabited by the voices of the living and the dead. Artistic border negotiations are not without effect. Metaphorical and artistic uses of borders and their conceptualities have a retroactive impact on bodily and territorial worlds. One function of Article 5 of Germany’s Basic Law is precisely that of protecting that valuable, indeterminate “borderline” space where speech occurs between messages – a space for subtly conceived ambiguity whose intuitive acuity goes straight to the heart and is therefore liberating and the opposite of blurring, dishonesty and verbosity.

This approach is supported by linguistic history. In Indo-European languages the consonant cluster “gr” (as in green, grass, great or German groß) is associated with growth and vitality. The threshold zone can therefore be seen as something that helps us grow. In opposition to all those who would rather use borders to confine us. 

Translated by Iain Galbraith

Ulrike Draesner, author, has been a member of the Literature Section of the Akademie der Künste since 2019.

1. Niklas Luhmann, Die Kunst der Gesellschaft, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995.
2. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1922. First published in 1921.