BEYOND BORDERS | Call for Papers

The London Science Fiction Research Community's theme for 2020 was 'Beyond Borders: Empires, Bodies, Science Fictions'. The year's reading list, reading group and events programme discussed borders in SF and how SF could help to reimagine and dismantle borders, whether bodily, national or planetary.

LSFRC director Katie Stone and I discussed ideas around the duality of cruel fictions (fictions that matter to our lives - fabricated lines which are nonetheless significant), the permeated quality of borders, and strangeness that exists without being visible. 

I wanted the Call for Papers to not only serve as a practical call to action, but also visually reflect the thought and depth of ideas the LSFRC directors had engaged with, delivering the concept with more immediacy than a body of text.

Playing with three dimensional space allowed me to explore more abstract ideas whilst containing them structurally. The notion of creating a paper model and photographing it was influenced by my previous visit to the 2017 kinetic and optical art exhibition 'Seurat to Riley: The Art of Perception' at Compton Verney, as well as my recent reading of 'The Art of Papercraft' by Hiroshi Ogawa. White card would reflect light and thus emphasise surfaces, depth and angles. I wanted to create an object that was not concerned with establishing a border to exclude. Neither with the notion of eradicating a border entirely. Instead, of a border as something fluid, changeable and complex. Inverting the boxes and photographing them upside down enhanced the element of estrangement and added surreality to the image.

I extracted the following quotations and highlighted them on different layers of the object:

'A border, like race, is a cruel fiction

Maintained by constant policing, violence

Always threatening a new map.'

BRAZILIAN IS NOT A RACE

Wendy Trevino

The arm twisted and turned with lightning

Imperativeness as if to reach the point

Of the borders of the day that touch

Each other on the rim of the precision-discipline.

Where is the place of the circles of

the eternities?

THE ARM

Sun Ra

‘to dwell ‘in a beyond’ is [...] to be part of a revisionary time, a return to the present to describe our cultural contemporaneity; to reinscribe our human, historic commonality; to touch the future on its hither side.’

Homi Bhahba