As scholarship on borders has developed into the making of ”border studies” per se, visual artists have shown a growing preoccupation with space in their creations, known by some as the “geographical turn” in contemporary art. Within this broad field of expression, a growing number of art works encompass border territories, and I believe it is not only because “you don't have a sense of space without a border” (Interview with Christo, Canal + Documentary, 1994). The argument of this talk is to engage with the complexity of cultural production in geopolitical complex places such as borders, be them soft and opening or hard and closing, a binarity which this study will help to deconstruct. The lecture will account of the upsurge of visual arts projects which, all around the world, both denounce and accompany the (b)ordering of space. It will discuss the performativity which artists engage in when working at/on/about the border, in figurative and abstract works whose singularity open for interesting interpretations of the politics of aesthetics.
Dr. Anne-Laure AMILHAT SZARY is Professor at Université Joseph Fourier, Grenoble. After studies in Paris (Ecole Normale Supérieure and Paris Sorbonne & Nanterre), she completed a Ph.D in Geography in the Latin American Research center of Toulouse University in 1999. Since September 2000, she is Associate Professor in the Geography Department (Institut de Géographie Alpine), linked to the PACTE Research Unit, UMR 5194. Her worked has been recognized through her nomination at the renowned Institut Universitaire de France (2011-2015). She spent 2011 as an invited scholar in Canada (University of Victoria, BC). She was the co-chair of the XIth BRIT conference in 20111 (Border Regions in Transitions Network) between Geneva and Grenoble, dedicated to the analysis provocative formulation of “mobile borders”, which brought together over 250 international scholars and stakeholders.
Specialist of political geography, she is studying comparatively American and European borders. She is the author of Après la frontière, avec les frontières: dynamiques transfrontalières en Europe, Ed. de l’Aube, La Tour d’Aigues, co-edited with M.-C. Fourny, as well as over 20 papers and 10 other edited books or special issues of international journals. She is Head of the Editorial board of the Revue de Géographie Alpine / Journal of Alpine Research and member of the boards of Geopolitics, Journal of Borderland Studies, L’Espace Politique, Si Somos Americanos (Chile). She represents the French Commission of Political Geography at the IGU and has been elected at the board of the Association of American Geographers’ Political Geography Speciality Group.
Prof. Amilhat Szary’s lecture is the result of a collaboration between the Border Poetics/Border Culture Research Group and le Centre Franco-Norvégien en Sciences Sociales et Humaines, & the Department of Culture and Literature