metropolis m

In November this year the world celebrated the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The very mediatized destruction of the barrier that separated East Berliners from their Western neighbours has been regarded ever since as a powerful symbol of freedom and hope.Segments of the wall have now become museum pieces and tourist attractions. Sadly, Berlin has not been a lesson to the world. Walls are being built almost everywhere we look. Think of those that have appeared recently in the news: the U.S. border with Mexico, the dense network of fortifications, gates, trenches, roadblocks and checkpoints that controls access of people and goods to Palestinian territories, the three-metre-high barrier that follows Saudi Arabia’s border with Yemen, India’s reinforced border with Pakistan and Bangladesh. Add to this picture the walls raised within the walls: the gated communities so popular in the U.S. and increasingly in the rest of the world, the Baghdad wall built by the U.S. military to keep Sunnis and Shias apart, the walls that guard Israel settlements in West Bank, the ones that – ironically – encircle the Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem and the walls that partition the city itself. The list goes on and on. There is no need to venture to other continents, though. Europe – alas! – is not immune from this fortification fever. Spain erected a triple layer of high tech fences around its enclaves in Morocco, and back in 2006, the city of Padua near Venice built the infamous ring of steel that for one year separated white middle class from immigrants living in the so-called ‘African ghetto’. Every single one of these walls was erected after 1989.The frenzied construction of walls around the world today is starkly at odds with images of a planet that is ever more connected through border-crossing media. Emails might reach a boyfriend who lives at the other end of the world in just a few seconds, and Coca-Cola might be available in supermarkets from Kyiv to Bujumbura, but that doesn’t mean that the right to free circulation of merchandise, pollution or even diseases applies to human beings as well.There’s no such thing as ‘good fences make good neighbours’. Whether they aim to deter and screen poor people, illegal workers, asylum seekers, drugs and weapons smugglers, race or religious mixing, the walls and barbed wire do more harm than good. They send a message of failure, despair and alienation rather than one of security.The 21st century spatial order is one that sees those who can afford it erect fortifications that are meant to keep the exiled and the destitute away from them. Walls have been built for as long as men have been in need of protection. But the phenomenon is accelerating in a world that is often heralded as unlimited and hyper-connected. I see no turning back, and I shudder in fear when I think of the climate refugees who will soon contribute to the tensions. Their number is undoubtedly growing but it is also difficult to calculate and predict, seeing as people displaced by the effects of the disruption to the earth’s climate system are not granted official refugee status under the Geneva Convention. The rising dichotomy of our world offers artists, journalists, cultural institutions and curators alike an arena for reflection, debate and proposals. I believe it is one of the most pressing issues that the art community should address today. To paraphrase the title of an article that Ahmed Bouzid wrote a few years ago about the ‘security fence’ that Israel illegally built at the time within the West Bank and around occupied Jerusalem: ‘acquiescence is not an artistic virtue’.Régine Debatty is a blogger, curator and critic whose lives and works in Turin and Brussels. http://we-make-money-not-art.com/