Abstract:
Despite relying on a fantasy of unity, globalization maintains a conflict-ridden system of exclusion. The politics of division physically emerge as barriers, partitions, and concrete walls, barricading national groups away from their imagined Others. While borders and cultural identities appear increasingly permeable, political walls by contrast reappear around the world. Such barriers produce restrictive political spaces and delimited perspectives; however, they also demarcate the psychological conditions and historical imaginaries of those they keep apart. Drawing on the example of the former Berlin Wall, Israel’s Separation Wall and the imminent Wall at the US-Mexican border, this project examines the psychological and traumatic settings of political division as materialized in political walls. Foregrounding the traumatic voids and fantasmatic structures these barriers impose, the project looks at the function of political walls in securing narratives of political separation and investigates them as potential screens. I argue that, while political walls work as ideological screens, erasing the Other, they can also be read as media screens that project the politics on which they rest and thereby enable encounters across the two ‘sides’. As a media screen, a political Wall either serves as a backdrop for constructed political realities or as a surface onto which political commentary can be projected and subsequently engaged with. The silent imposition of the Wall is often envisioned through fictional films, documentaries and photography, while graffiti, murals or installations foreground the Wall’s rewriteable materiality. Political walls conceptualized as and through such forms of art and media make possible the reworking of the politics and histories of walls by disrupting the prevalence of their perception and making visible the exclusionary realities they sustain. Investigating both cinematic and artistic encounters with each Wall in Berlin, Palestine and Mexico, the project examines the Wall as a projective screen which implies an indivisible relationship between two sides. Political walls are read as symptoms of our time, working to separate people but also attesting to the silent barriers we erect from within. They function as symbols of cultural othering and continue to mediate the intimate and often traumatic conflicts at the physical and psychological faultlines of human communities. I suggest that by bringing to the surface the conflicts of human division, political walls allow us to rethink, rewrite and reclaim the meaning of these structures, enabling a re-vision of their politics.