Borders, between ourselves and the others...

DIANA B. WECHSLER

Cucuta

Conferencia; Juntos Aparte 2020; 2020

Centro de Estudios Fronterizos/ Fundación el Pilar /Colombia Min Cult

To speak of the border that separates us from "others" at the end of March 2020, could place us in a very limited space: that of our own houses, at least for those of us who hace the privilege of dweling in what we generically call "house". In these pandemic times, front doors, windows and balconies are trasnformed into the physical borders of our daily lives. Screens -of TV, cellphones, tablets or computers- are all borders for which we have something akin to a passport, depending on our service providers, they give us access to different worlds, even if is no physical risk in crossing these frontiers. A sharp contrast emerges between this reduction to the domestic and the alternative of a global reach of course quite fictional, that presents a panorama of imaginaries that are possibly irreconciliable amongst the different dimensions and forms of being in the world, in the broadest sense of what this entails. Generally speaking, this framework is not new, but the situation of social isolation in which we find ourselves unavoidably fixes us in what Paul B. Preciado defines as a "home -based tele-republic" bringing us to reassess the ways in which we come to think of dwelling the contemporary. With and beyond these borders that are imposed on us today, along with the commitment we assume through the possibillity of thinking the present, let's test out some questions with respecto to these spaces of inclusion and exclusion where the borders place us, as well as how these spaces between us and the others are defined...