Constructing barricades and creating borderline events

Abstract

This article articulates how an expanded conception of scenography is capable of critiquing our built environments in order to disclose architecture’s role in reinforcing power structures, socially sanctioned behaviours and geopolitical cartographies. As an interdisciplinary practice, travelling between discursive fields, performance design casts a performance studies lens on scenography, thereby broadening its scope and capability of confronting and reimagining our lived reality, especially within a globalized condition of proliferating borders that reduce, control and deny mobility for bodies and information. By adopting a ‘broad spectrum approach’ we are able to recognize that those constructing our world – the architects, planners, engineers, builders, technicians, manufacturers, suppliers and politicians – tend to be complicit in spatially suppressing our motility, flexibility and expressivity. Through such spatial performativity, the built environment reinforces a contemporary barricade mentality, curtailing our freedom of movement and expression in the very name of ‘freedom’. And yet the borderline – more than a simple dividing line between us/here and them/there – thickens into a complex geographical and metaphysical terrain that inhabits us just as we inhabit it. Scrutinizing our contemporary borderline condition, alongside constructed and deconstructed barricades created by artists, designers and architects, unearths a critique of how our public performances are limited and controlled. Positing the barricade as an architectural and social formation allows us to consider its shifting political implications seen in public artworks that are aligned with Rubió Ignaci Solà-Morales’ concept of ‘weak architecture’ as a productively scenographic approach to spatial analysis and its mediation.