Saturday, September 30 9.30am, Galerie Rabus

Andrea Sick
How space and zones gain existence:
Surveillance and political control on the spot

Surveillance and political control take place “on the spot”. By “taking place” in such a way, they constitute a spatial existence that, owing to the various technologies of surveillance and control, inscribes itself onto topography, not only protecting zones and borders but establishing them in the first place. The question here is not so much whether the space is granted, but how it can “take place” as such.

The discourses of cultural pessimism and geography posit the non-existence of space as a result of its vanishing in the global network of telepresence and remote control. At the same time, a European space is established that both delimits and monitors zones within its territory and controls its outside delimitations in a way that is economically significant, drawing a clear boundary to the so-called non- or not-yet-European states.

So what does it mean to posit the non-existence of Europe as a limited, homogeneous space, to watch this clearly denominated entity vanish, when at the same time mechanisms are operating that seek to establish a sense of orientation (one could also say, objectivisation) in just such a space?


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