Borderlands
2016 - 2023

Borders are a political construction aimed at power enforcement and are imposed on the landscape without often considering the cultural heritage, social characteristics or even the demographic reality of the places and communities they divide.

The project studies the borders of Greece and consequently the borders of the European Union and Western societies. It is divided into two parts, the Restricted Area and the Controlled Area, based on the Compulsory Law of 1936 during the Metaxas dictatorship, which is still in force. This law on security measures for fortified positions defines the Defence Areas of the country and specifically establishes the Restricted Area, as a zone of prohibited access to civilians around the perimeter of the fortifications, and the Controlled Area as a zone of controlled access from the outer limits of the Restricted Area up to a distance of 15 to 45 km inland. The area from the border line up to 500 meters inland is called the Safety Prevention Zone and is a Controlled Area.

The application of this law determined the collective perceptions of the borders, of "who We are" in relation to "who the Others are", but also of the border areas as a place. Thus in the Restricted Area, the project studies the landscape within the restricted zones with an eye towards the Other, while in the Controlled Area it looks inwards and at the effects of the imposition of borders on the collective identities of the area, but also on the collective perception of those remote border regions.

At a time when the strengthening of the borders is re-emerging globally as a strategy to protect nation-state economies from the effects of wars, epidemics and climate change, the project seeks to present the border as a modern monument. The engraved memory of peoples' claims and struggles on the landscape and the deserted border constructions sometimes coexist with modern fences and sometimes with the invisible presence of power in a common place. This place, the place of the border, reveals the need of people to separate their imagined collective entity from the otherness behind the borderline, the "Us" from the "Other", but also the inability of nation states to really achieve the separation. This modern monument is there to remind us that no border has lasted forever.