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Border Crossings – Practices for Beating the Bounds

‘Border Crossings – Practices for Beating the Bounds’ is a 6500-word chapter published in an interdisciplinary academic collection, following conference presentation. It represents Kairotic Landscapes, a sub-section of my broader research enquiry, Not Yet There (http://www.not-yet-there.blogspot.com/), which focuses on the relationship between how landscape is lived or performed, and the emergence of a critical – and resistant – form of citizenship.

This chapter interrogates how artists Heath Bunting and Kayle Brandon approach the border between territorialised zones (between European nation states or within existing social systems) as a liminal zone of ‘elective exile’, wherein they attempt to escape – however momentarily – from the more repressive aspects of contemporary global capitalism. The contribution to knowledge is in articulating Bunting and Brandon’s practice as a manifestation of technē, a ‘productive’ or ‘tactical’ knowledge whose key principles of mêtis (cunning intelligence) and kairos (opportune timing) support the discovery (even production) of ‘loopholes’ or ‘exit strategies’ within situations that otherwise seem inescapable. I propose the original term kairotic exile to newly conceptualise exile as a form of liberation made momentarily possible through opportune harnessing of the lapses (blind-spots) of security or control within the ‘system’.

This research enquiry has developed through several national/international conferences (Liminal Landscapes, Liverpool John Moores University, 2010; Living Landscapes, Aberystwyth University, 2010; Emerging Landscapes, University of Westminster, 2010, Interregnum: In Between States, Performance Studies International, Copenhagen, 2008), and as a related 8000-word book chapter ‘Looking for Loopholes: Cartography of Escape’ in The Cartographies of Exile, (Routledge, 2014). Parallel investigations exploring the ‘kairotic’ conditions of the marginal landscape include: ‘Room for Manoeuvre – essay in Manual for Marginal Places, (closeandremote, 2010); ‘Towards a Knowledge of the Margins’ – book chapter in Emerging Landscapes: Between Production and Representation (Ashgate Publishing, 2013) and ‘The Yes of the No!’ – essay published in the peer-reviewed online journal drain, 2010.