Shifting back and forth along a line between Lausanne and Izmir, this 77-minute experience pieces together value and meaning from the very human ruins of aspiration, history, and language.
Borderline Visible begins as a physical journey in 2022 by two artist friends, one of whom experiences health problems halfway and has to stop. As the other continues towards Turkey, suddenly alone, the narration grows into a moving and troubled psychogeography as it shifts between “we” and “I”, present and past, piecing together value and meaning from the very human ruins of aspiration, history, and language. Ant Hampton’s careful, at times miraculous, process of reconnection gradually lights up a constellation: voices and earthquakes, the Sephardic diaspora, tourism and forced movement, breakdowns and dementia, the end of the Ottoman Empire, swifts and swallows, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and an urgent insight into hidden atrocities at the edge of Europe being funded from its centre.
Borderline Visible is the inaugural book of the Time Based Editions series, co-directed by Ant Hampton and David Bergé.