Phil Misselwitz and Tiem Rienets present their project "Borderline Geographies" at the Borderline Academy 2005 in Tarifa (ES): Israeli, palestinian and german students map the area of East Jerusalem and explore the urban and cultural consequences of the conflict.

Raw, unedited interview with Florian Schneider. Schneider was one of the 40 guests interviewed at Incommunicado (15-17 June 2005, Amsterdam) for an upcoming DVD. He talks about Incommunicado and the Fadaiat / Borderline Academy taking place in Tarifa (18-26 June 2005).

Some initiatives in cities of Europe offer guides (paper and online), which want to give an information service for migrants and refugees who just arrive. This collection of information wants to show the possibilities and gaps, which one can find between the realities of governmental system of laws.
The workshop will start with a short introduction into two existing projects of Hamburg and Berlin (Germany). After this we want to discuss about the possibilities, which emerge in such an idea. We ask about the perspective of who is speaking for whom, how comprehensively and how detailed such project could be; how the different and specific concerns can be served and how topicality can be ensured. Miercoles 15:00 castillo

»Touki Bouki - The Voyage of the Hyena« (1973) is a wonderful little piece of film history. It's about leaving, returning and staying, jump cuts, dreams, rejections, clichés and colours, it's about money and a motorbike. Is it a story or an utopia? Bonny and Clyde also could have been in Dakar. Touki Bouki is a tale about Europe and Afrika but Djibril Diop Mambéty the director of this film is rejecting something like African Cinema before anybody was speaking about african aesthetics. Touki Bouki is far beyond time and space.

On Saturday, June 18th 2005 "Fadaiat2// Borderline Academy" has been opened in the old castle Guzmán El Bueno in Tarifa (ES). Javier Mohedano, Jose Perez de Lama and Florian Schneider introduced the idea and the background of the 10-days event. To be continued!

"keep on pushing my love over the borderline" - Screenings,Production, Distribution, Research. From June 19 through 26, 2005, Tarifa, Andalucia

Haven’t we all been deceived to turn our attention in the wrong direction, haven’t we all been fooled to see the forest in front of the trees. It’s a simple strategy that we all know, and we still swallow the bait; for telling jokes, producing magic or picking somebody’s pockets.

A friend recently told me how he in Moscow suddenly found him self in a setup with at least three gangsters involved, out of which one was a police officer and the deceptive object a bundle of hundred dollar bills. Excellent street theatre of the 21st century and my friend, a well trained performer, was perfectly seduced to pull out his own wallet exposing his innocence including the perfect opportunity for the gangsters to snatch his euros, dollars, travel checks and visa card. Moscow is such a show.

To what extent could the double meaning of ‘custom’ function as tool or discursive resistance to activist strategies today. Is customs perhaps a keyword in respect of a general understanding of what activism or even activating practices intend to irrigate.

Precisely the paradoxical strategies inscribed in; the necessary and excluding strategies of creating a community, i.e. to create an axis of recognizable, reoccurring events around which a group of individuals can produce identity and allegiances. Strategies that in their turn produce notions of territory. An inside and an outside are established, or in other words, a border which crossing always implies an exchange of economy, a custom.

The Bulgarian linguist Tveztan Todorov wrote a book about the encounter between the Europeans and what they called the New World. The New World was an old world, inhabited by ancient cultures which had achieved a great level of civilization and wealth. In the Inca empire hunger was unknown, the distribution of the food by the State made Marx to write an enthusiastic pamphlet about the Incas.
But Todorov argues the European were not prepared for a such encounter, the Spaniards who came to America (my ancestors), destroyed and humiliated the natives inhabitantants and colonized them with the help of more advanced weapons and technics.

In a way the netphilosoph Hakim Bey and the anthropologist Marc Augé talk and write about the same thing when they formulate the concept of "No Places". Places which are "between", places where the wait and the action forms the place, transitory places, nomadic places, where activism and art meet and merge. Places where the hybridization of the content changes the forms and make the borders intangible and workable.
This is my phantasy about Tarifa and about Gibraltar, pockets of colonization where old gone empires keep the control and the key of the gates, as the Arabs and Jews expelled from Al Andalus and living in Marocco still keep the keys to their houses from the 16th Century.