(in)place of border

The space of our life is not continuous, nor is it infinite, homogeneous, or isotropic. But do we know exactly where it ruptures, where it bends, where it comes to be disconnected and where it comes together? We but confusedly sense fissures, gaps, points of friction; at moments we have the vague notion that it is being crowded, or that it is bursting forth, or that it has collided with something. We rarely endeavour to find out more. Instead we often pass from one place to another and from one space to another without considering, taking stock, or seeing to these lapses of space. (Georges Perec, Species of Spaces)

Borders do not refer solely to territories; to view them as a means to define space, to perceive them as “lines” necessarily implies the simplification of very complex relationships. To claim that borders create dichotomies is not sufficient enough to express their complexity, the simultaneous difference and connection between things and their interdependence. (...)

Globalization, and in our case transition, multiply political borders, as well as social, cultural, legal, gender and identity borders. UrbanFestival 2009 questions the politics of borders, but it does not restrict itself on state divisions or urban conceptions. When we view a border as a political act, an act that brings rupture into the existing situation, than that act can also signify a crossing of borders, but also their drawing up. Our wish is to question this duality of borders, and that meaning it can have for art, contemporary art in its social context – the context of “art after society” and the reconfigured artistic field against the backdrop of avant-garde demands to return art to everyday life. (...)

By setting up the festival on the river banks we organized for the first time artistic interventions into a concentrated format (as opposed to the “virus strategy” used so far), we would like to explore the specific problems of this neuralgic city area, i.e. line: what kind of a border does the river Sava represent in the urbanism of the city of Zagreb? Is it a border dividing the city into two, a border within the city, or just a break – a place of pastime and freedom?

(from the text by Vesna Vuković)