For many, the word border evokes a singular image: a towering wall of steel or concrete slicing through a landscape. Yet these structures are far more than simple physical barriers. They are powerful geopolitical forms that broadcast a nation’s deepest phantasms about who belongs and who must be excluded, rendered voiceless, invisible, and lifeless. Fortified borders project the illusion of total control. Enforced by a panoptic regime, a world of high-tech security and surveillance renders the steel barriers and bordercrossing migrants hypervisible while simultaneously pushing the most violent aspects of border enforcement into “dark spaces”—the dangerous, unmapped terrain (“hidden topographies”), where state violence and migrant deaths often occur unnoticed. By framing borderlands as “empty voids,” states create zones of public inattention. This visual logic of concealment promotes a collective forgetting whereby the public becomes indifferent to human suffering happening out of sight. How can we challenge such narratives? The answer may lie in counter-visualities: artistic projects that disrupt the official view of the border and contest its militaristic core. My paper highlights several transformative examples. Running Fence (Christo and Jeanne-Claude): This 24-mile white fabric installation in California stood in stark contrast to traditional borderwalls. Meandering and porous, it allowed the passage of people and wildlife, rendering the idea of an impenetrable border absurd. Kikito and Giant Picnic (JR): In 2017, the artist JR mounted a massive 70-foot photograph of a smiling toddler peeking over the border fence in Tecate/Mexico. The installation allowed onlookers to gaze upon a child’s face instead of a threat. JR later organized a cross-border picnic where people shared food and music through the fence, momentarily enjoying a shared humanity. Hostile Terrain 94 (Jason De León): This participatory project used thousands of handwritten toe-tags to map exactly where human remains were found in the Sonoran Desert and along the US/Mexico border. It turned a ‘dark space’ into a visible, collective act of witnessing.

Such artistic interventions are forms of political resistance, providing platforms for cross-border community building. Whether it’s JR’s Giant Picnic where people shared a meal through the fence or the collaborative assembly of memorial maps, these acts of “radical humanism” challenge ‘medieval’ fantasies of electrified spikes and alligator moats that have dominated recent political discourse. By turning the border into a gallery or a dinner table, these artists invite us to move beyond fear and imagine a future built on collaboration and socio-spatial justice.

Dark spaces: borderwalls in the cultural, political and artistic imagination by Uli Linke (Rochester Institute of Technology, USA) is published in Architecture_MPS, volume 33

Uli Linke is Professor of Anthropology (Department of Sociology and Anthropology), School of Humanities, Languages, and Social Sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY.

surveillance spatial injustice materiality visual culture