For the
Love of
Inquiry

We invited artists, activists, and world-makers to collectively interrogate, challenge, and resist the border systems they encountered. We used a broad understanding of the border, thinking about how the EU developed and implemented new biometrics and machine learning systems in its border apparatus while expanding its frontier, and simultaneously how cuts in art funding and bureaucratic procedures put restrictive and excessive demands on artists.

We responded to these global and local struggles through collective reflection, speculative design, and by employing artistic practice. Our ultimate goal was to craft a powerful manifesto uniting artists from across continents, disciplines, and issues.

We started the session with creative icebreakers, where participants shared their names, pronouns, and the imaginative tools they would use to cut through borders. After this, the session transitioned into a presentation on the evolution of digital borders, examining how modern nation-states utilize biometrics and social media. Participants then paired up to share personal stories of navigating these borders as artists, followed by a broader group discussion.

As facilitators, we introduced speculative methodologies and the concept of "the glitch" as a disruptive tool. Through the radical imagination exercise, pairs envisioned and wrote about a borderless world before breaking for lunch. The afternoon shifted into a hands-on prototyping session based on the "Art Work Method." Here, participants designed concrete strategies to glitch the art-border system, anchoring their ideas in a physical object, a collective "We" claim, a tagline, and a short reflection. The workshop concluded with final presentations, a comparative analysis with results from Lagos, and an open dialogue on building a living, responsive collective manifesto, ending with a feedback round on what inspired them.

The claims from the session are presented below; their corresponding artworks and analysis will be presented in the forthcoming Glith Border Manifesto.

Oda Breke // Hossam Sultan // Jacqueline Allikas Maldonado

Claim: We inhabit in-betweenness.

Tagline: We linger in spaces that are usually overlooked or considered non-places, places that normally don’t have any sort of function— like bus stops, doorways, or other stationary points within liminal spaces.

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Yari Stilo // Andrea Diaz // Karin Kindblom

Claim: We choose not to understand.

Tagline: We chose not to understand the operating system of the public art funding system by playing stupid, disregarding money, and not listening to the rules and conventions in order to make the art we wanted. In the artwork, we spoke our claim as a dissonant chorus in Italian, Spanish, and Swedish. We danced around and distributed fake money into the crowd. Finally, we spoke our claim again.

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Sakil Hossain // Amina Avdic // Babak Azami

Claim: We define our identities over time.

Tagline: By connecting our inner feelings to time and space, we explore how proximity shapes our experience of both. In the performance, we began by drawing our inner feelings. Then, we spent 3 minutes walking together in a shared space, trying to stay connected by the third minute. Afterward, we paused to draw our feelings again. Finally, we walked away from each other for 2 minutes and reflected on our shifting emotions and perceptions.

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Ella Hillström // Ayodomala Okunseinde // Christoffer Horlitz

Claim: We distribute and influence people in power or maintainers of power with our manifesto

Tagline: We built a fly that hides in flyers in airport lounges. When a person picks up the flyer, the fly travels up the nose and changes the cellular structure of the brain through the manifesto context. The manifesto is in turn affected by the person, and the fly continues to travel to a new person.