Science-Art explorations at the Border
Résumé
Creating a journal is a challenge. Launching the antiAtlas-Journal is a double challenge: it assumes that the web offers new and different formats for combining texts, images and other media and that this will renew our approach to borders. Borders are at the centre of our enterprise because, for us, they constitute an excellent opportunity for understanding the complexity of contemporary issues. Even though it has been scientifically established that borders are opening and closing at the same time, the most common representation of borders remains a line! Long perceived as a reality that is peripheral to our territories, they now constitute complex networks sorting and regulating flows and they profoundly intersect and influence our lives. More than any other political object, borders are simultaneously places and procedures that must be taken into account when analysing globalization and building up critical thought. In order to better understand how borders operate, the antiAtlas of borders collective has, over recent years, sought to problematize the frames and formats we use to understand and study borders. Talking about an antiAtlas does not mean that we deny maps as a way of accessing the world, rather we envisage maps, like any other dispositive, as tools sustaining specific techniques of representation. Constituted over a particular period of history and in a European-centric context, this knowledge has strongly contributed to the construction of the reality that it pretends to grasp and depict: space, territories, borders, etc.Confronted with what we have identified as a crisis of representation, we offer a radical and critical rethinking of our representation of borders in the spaces we open (seminars, performances, conferences/exhibitions, Internet site) where researchers in human and hard sciences, artists, experts and inhabitants can confront their practices and experiences