ZOLL | DOUANE | CUSTOMS
Zoll - Douane is an art in public space project that took place in the summer of 2004 in Hamburg¹s warehouse quarter, at which 30 artists participated with painting, photos, video works and installations.
The border in its many-sided meanings is one of the central social and cultural themes of our time. The exhibition comprised works which discuss the concrete drawing up of borders and their anchoring, defence and reallocation in society.
On borders
National borders are artificial constructions, in a juridical sense "imaginary lines", which divide two state's territories. Those lines rule and control the movement of people and goods alongside those borders especially in the rule of passport and customs. As indicated in the Slavic loan word "Granitza" (or Polish, "Greincz", meaning to "protect, to save from"), borders in all their historical forms came to be a main part of human community-life, especially in times when the ownership of land and estate were the families' basis of livelihood and had to be protected. Since the establishing of the capitalist market economy, borders were used more and more to steer goods flows and people's movements in favour of the national economies. With the national borders evolved the national identities, travel documents being their most important indicators. But all the way along the establishing of borders was linked to quarrels, instability seems to be part of what they are. Even though one of the fundamental principles of the international law is the mutual immunity of national borders, history has seen countless battles over borders which left deep wounds. The much employed metaphor of the national border being the skin of a country's body is evident is that sense. Ambivalently, we, on an individual level, sense boundaries as harassment, personally restrictive and nauseating evil, and wish for unlimited freedom. But boundaries and barriers on the other hand protect us from infringements of our personal integrity. The same is true for social and cultural boundaries, which are a protection for one, an invincible barrier for another.
In that sense protecting barriers on the one and opening them on the other hand seems to always have been a double edged art. Since the beginning 21st century, the look on frontiers seems to be less one of separation and isolation but much more one of building bridges, of building a "between". If this is initiated by means of a contact and an exchange between differing, enclosed and at the same time respected ways of life, remains to be seen. (Ch.B.)
