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Borders in the City
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
- Chapter
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Borders in the City AYESHA HAMEED B orders in the City was a series of three performances that used simple materials such as paper, chalk, sticks, and small mechanical devices like radios to explore how invisible borders affected the construction of public memory and the circumscription of bodies deemed undesirable by the state. These interventions took place over eight months and sought to question the technologies of state control and surveillance and the practices of exclusion and inclusion that are complicit with such technologies. Our project focused on three different manifestations of border control in Montreal. The first project, Remembering and Forgetting was a photobased performance that looked at the relationship between tourism and the writing of history and was eventually developed as a website. The second, 902 Days and Counting, was a community-based public performance and installation that examined the secret violence of incarceration for migrants living in church sanctuary to avoid deportation. Finally, the third project, Papers Please! was a performance-intervention focusing on the itinerant nature of border control in the form of racial profiling and the targeting of “undesirables ” on the street by the police. Borders in the City originated in a series of conversations I had with Montreal-based multimedia artist Anita Schoepp in the summer of 2007 around how trauma, body memory, and time related to one another. Our project began in thinking through the question of how time and embodiment are spatially implicated.We were interested in how embodied time questioned linear time,where sudden bursts of body memory made past memories seem part of the present: a concept Marcel Proust made popular when describing how the taste of a madeleine caused him to viscerally relive memories of his childhood. We were also interested in the possibilities of overlap of scale: the connection between the microcosmic scale of individual bodies and the macrocosmic scale at which communities and social bodies experience time and trauma. In other words, how might trauma, embodiment, and time be a means to understand urban space and urban histories? 121 This is, of course, not a new concern. There is a rich array of works that examine the relationship between cities and memory, and the trope of the city as a body in trauma is as old as the modern city itself.1 What we wanted to explore was how the notion of traumatic memory might be applied to the specifics of Montreal’s history and current social climate. We wished especially to focus on the process in which memory is “written out,” as this process suggests how such erasures have a domino effect within public policy and within the city: where the term“immigrant”becomes racialized, and where “tolerance” becomes shorthand for exclusion. Like many cities, Montreal is a city whose infrastructure functions differently for different populations. Our project was governed by key questions: What are the secrets that a city keeps within its well-polished infrastructure? What are the barriers that it erects that are visible to some and not to others? When we began this project in the winter of 2007, the governmentappointed Bouchard-Taylor commission had recently finished touring the province of Quebec,holding public forums that asked to what extent it is“reasonable ” to accommodate the cultural practices of immigrants from other countries.2 This issue raised the gnarly head of national identity and a refreshed suspicion of cultural difference and of immigrants in general. Within the mainstream media coverage of this tour,“accommodating” and “tolerating”difference was depicted as the most progressive standpoint.3 The fact that Montreal is on Algonquin and Iroquois land and is a settler culture of immigrants was erased from this account. The erasures effected by the Reasonable Accommodation hearings fuelled the conception of Borders in the City. In planning this project, we examined how different types of borders operated in the city. We considered the differences between visible borders such as checkpoints, security outside of public buildings, perimeter walls, and those that were only partly visible, such as turnstiles, roads that divided one neighbourhood from another, the architecture of public spaces, and buildings. A good example of a visible border in Montreal is the boundary wall that divides the predominantly wealthy Town of Mont Royal from Park Extension where there is a majority of South Asian immigrants. Considering invisible borders is a more complicated endeavour as it points to the ways in which spaces and the apparatuses of the state operate differently depending on who you are...