Bordering Practices: Negotiating Theory and Practice

Abstract

Following the shift from borders to bordering practices in the field of border studies, this article proposes bordering practices as specific kinds of critical spatial practice which occur through processes of negotiating and narrating, and are situated in relation to concepts of everyday life and spatial practice. The essay explores the bordering practices of art and research as critical spatial practices in their capacity to transform certain border positions, including those between theory and practice. It presents a site-specific and practice-led research project that examines political and sectarian conflict since its resurfacing in Beirut in 2005. The research project worked with residents to negotiate the borders of surveillance, sound, displacement and administration. The process allowed the production of new bordering practices of crossing, translating, matching and hiding that transform borders into multiple shifting practices, and of representations that divide and connect simultaneously and challenge the fixity of borders.

Keywords:

• bordering practices
• Beirut
• conflict
• negotiating
• narrating
• critical spatial practice
• surveillance
• displacement

Notes

¹ The research project with the residents at the site was conducted prior to the outbreak of the Syrian war; hence the essay does not address the influence of the Syrian war on Lebanon.

² On spatial practices and everyday life, see most notably Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991) and Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA; London: University of California Press, 1988 [1984]).

³ The shift from ‘bordering’ to ‘bordering practices’ is discussed in Alexander C. Diener and Joshua Hagen, Borders: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), and Noel Parker and Nick Vaughan-Williams, “Lines in the Sand? Towards an Agenda for Critical Border Studies,” Geopolitics 14, no. 3 (2009): 582–87.

⁴ On consciously critical spatial practices through art and research, see Jane Rendell, Art and Architecture: A Place Between (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006).

⁵ The art installations were exhibited at Cities Methodologies exhibition in 2010 – 2012, Slade Research Centre, UCL, London, and at Exposure 2012 exhibition, Beirut Art Center, Beirut.

⁶ Diener and Hagen, Borders, 59.

⁷ Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 1–67.

⁸ De Certeau, Everyday Life, xi–xxiv.

⁹ Rendell, Art and Architecture, 1–12.

¹⁰ Mohamad Hafeda, “This is How Stories of Conflict Circulate and Resonate,” in Peripheries: Edge Conditions in Architecture, ed. Ruth Morrow and M. Gamal Abdelmonem (London: Routledge, 2012), 251.

¹¹ J. Squires, “Private Lives, Secluded Places: Privacy as Political Possibility,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 12, no. 4 (1994): 399.

¹² Parker and Vaughan-Williams, “Lines in the Sand,” 584.

¹³ Rendell, Art and Architecture, 6–12.

¹⁴ Ibid., 8.

¹⁵ De Certeau, Everyday Life, xix.

¹⁶ Ibid., 117.

¹⁷ Ibid.

¹⁸ Ibid., 30.

¹⁹ Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 33.

²⁰ Ibid., 38.

²¹ I. Borden, “Beyond Space: The Ideas of Henri Lefebvre in Relation to Architecture and Cities,” Journal of Chinese Urban Science 3, No. 1 (2012): 170.

²² Kanishka Goonewardena et al., Space Difference, Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre (London: Routledge, 2008), 37.

²³ Mona Harb, “Public Spaces and Spatial Practices: Claims from Beirut,” Jadaliyya (October 25, 2013), http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/14,710/public-spaces-and-spatial-practices_claims-from-be (accessed July 7, 2014).

²⁴ De Certeau, Everyday Life, 129.

²⁵ Hafeda, “Stories of Conflict,” 262–63.