BORDERPANIC Reader
fineArt forum, May 2003

When writing, I often find myself telling the same story over and over, drawn to and into other stories that resonate with my own. It happens to those of us who position ourselves (or are positioned) as 'other', somehow locked in the unravelling of that 'otherness', destined to return to, as Jacques Lacan, Hal Foster, et al would have us believe, those instances of trauma which are reducible to our very otherness. Strange that it's otherness that is the source of trauma rather than the hegemonic power structures which produce it. Is it the exclusion or the inclusion that produces trauma? I am not traumatised nor panicked by my own otherness - as an ethnic woman born in and living in an Anglophone/Anglophile nation - for this is something I am well and truly accustomed to. If I am traumatised, then it is by the whiteness, maleness and conservativism that defines and delineates, as Lillian Holt[1] and Ghassan Hage[2] have respectively argued.

"The price of whiteness is eternal vigilance." - Dr Joseph Pugliese, Curator of Whiteness, National Australian Museum of Whiteness, National Circuit, Canberra, ACT

The story I am locked into repeating is that of my heritage and of the postwar diaspora. My family is Italian and my parents migrated to this country in the 1950s, along with countless others who, like them, were searching for opportunities and a new life, nova vita. They arrived in a country with which their own had been at war and where others of our heritage had been detained as 'enemy aliens'. Despite, asylum seekers and refugees having been detained in this country for over a decade, the detention of others is not actually new. Encampment and internment was part of being 'processed'. It's a practice that remains integral to defining who is allowed to call this place 'home'. My partner converted to Islam some 20 years ago while living and working in Palestine and other parts of the Middle East. In this country, we both know what it is to see 'our kinds' detained and excluded, to see them, as reflections of ourselves, criminalised for being other and to see them caged for not belonging. And we feel the fear every day that it may happen to us - an echo of the last line of an activist poem, "... then they came for me".

After Tampa, after 9/11, after Afghanistan, after Bali, after Iraq we're afraid, for ourselves and for others. Disquietingly, the cause of freedom and liberty is claimed by all involved. From experience we know that any excuse will do. So we're afraid of the repercussions - blamed, harangued in the street, spat on, brutalised - because all ethnicities look the same at the level of 'swarthy' or 'foreign'. We felt that fear when the mediaspace decried 'send them back', when a mosque was firebombed in our city and when there were raids on Muslim homes and Islamic community centres. Panic produces more panic and at my extended family's dinner table we say things like 'if they could figure out how, they'd be sending us back too'. We feel it every time someone asks 'where do you come from?' and every time someone demands that we go back there. We are afraid of a panic born of a hatred that defines this country as a home - though obviously not a welcoming one and obviously not our home.

In the contexts that I experience and mention, 'coming from' points to another place. Coming from produces a nebulous xenotopia, a place of strangers, perhaps depicted on maps from bygone eras as lands and waters dominated by monsters and mythical creatures. The details or specificity of where you or anyone has come from is irrelevant because the inquiry is not about where you are from but an assertion that you are not from here. Where you are from is a generic elsewhere; it is specifically a place of strangers that assumes many forms within imaginary and physical realms. Fortress Australia has been waging a war against terra-ism. At its most confrontingly horrific, xenotopia manifests as detention centres for 'illegal immigrants' or 'enemy aliens' and the myriad atrocities heaped upon Indigenous people.

"I have been in detention since I was 13 years old, and now I'm 16 years old. That means I have spent three birthdays in detention. I have lost in these three years my freedom, my education and most of my friends. I hope that one day I'll get my freedom back. I wonder if Jesus came to Australia illegally whether the authorities would put him in detention - it doesn't matter who he is." - Humam Al Abaddy

The borders are threatened? Please remain calm.

The BORDERPANIC Reader is only one component of a complex and multi-faceted project that aimed to 'bring together artists, media makers and thinkers who are questioning the world's geopolitical and metaphorical borders'. It's one of what appears to be increasing numbers of physical and virtual forums in Australia where artists, activists and intellectuals are coming together and connecting, addressing plagues of issues through a collaborative web of exchange. Produced in association with a bevy of partners and sponsors, the BORDERPANIC project was curated by Zina Kaye and Deborah Kelly and emerged in late 2002 as an exhibition, seminar, media lab, symposium and website as well as this Reader. This publication was edited by Cassi Plate and published by the Australian Network for Art and Technology, one of several hybrid zine-like monographs that ANAT has produced in the last few years. It includes documentation, artworks, writings, transcripts and statements. Most importantly and poignantly, this small and modest volume features stories - accounts that tear at the separation of self and other, that despair at the persistence of this and many more hierarchies which inhibit the ways in which we inquire into these circumstances, that seek and posit alternative perspectives, approaches and visions.

I have no means for mapping this xenotopia because its architecture and geography is fragmented, striated and stratified, although I believe BORDERPANIC might provide one kind of map, a deterritorialisation and reterritorialised of homogenised spaces. Just as there are spaces of detainment, there are those spaces in which we declare 'refugees are welcome'. While these are shaped by well-meaning intentions of hospitality and encounter, and provide some means of encroaching on contested zones, they can be spaces of containment. Equally, they can be emancipatory reterritorialised spaces through which spatial politics are renegotiated. Artist, Tracey Benson points out that, in Canberra, a friend had bricks thrown through her window twice because she had that sign on the window saying that 'refugees are welcome here'. Similarly, artist, Vivienne Dadour defines her own xenotopia through her body of photomedia works Realm which "describes my Lebanese ancestor's social and political environment in Redfern, NSW circa 1895. It is about the different realms of their community life in a climate in which they had to often confront the intolerance of the wider Australian community. Their place became a tract of land that allowed them to belong somewhere, to connect with their past, an antidote to a prevailing alienation."

The curators know the impossibility and contradictions of xenotopia and the xenotopic imagination and Kelly drops the words 'fully implicated' into her curatorial statement, admitting there's more to be done: "Every day I walk here on land cleared of its people for, eventually, me. I'm subject to leaders who incarcerate fleeing people in my name. It's overwhelming. The point is, it's worth starting somewhere." Of course it is. Just as it's absolutely necessary to continue rather than trip over endless false starts. What's also useful about Kelly's statement is the inference that it is possible to do something: that in the xenotopic imaginary, for every 'unwelcoming' place, a 'welcoming' place can also be founded. Borders are never wholly inured or impervious.

However, I do wonder why this series of events is considered to be a start rather than a recuperative moment, a juncture or marshalling of energies. I wonder how many starting points are actually required when the national paranoia (or panic) about borders is endemic in the histories of migration, displacement and diaspora - or endemic to colonisation and colonialism. It's not just here, it's not just now. Likewise, it causes me to wonder, as any such undertaking always does, about the terms and language by which this struggle is discussed. Such reflexive pauses are necessary to intercultural work because it's so easy to obliterate others as abstract symptoms or victims of political circumstances, to gaze upon those lives as devoid of meaning and substance beyond the political apparatus that contains, detains or inscribes.

ANAT Director, Julianne Pierce describes BORDERPANIC as a means of building bridges, "to create sustainable modes of communication and collaboration across communities and cultures". None of us exist outside of power, none of exists outside of the military-media-industrial complex, none of us are free from the globalised economies of exploitation and oppression. In problematising cultural politics as a 'zero-sum game', Dorinne Kondo says that while opposition can be both 'contestatory and complicit', opposition does 'constitute a subversion that matters'.[3] Culture in its multiplicity - its tools, faculties, agents and constructs - is more than mere response or representation. It is the power of change and the change of power.

As Kelly's statement indicates, one central focus in the works, debates and discussions that comprise this book, and I assume the BORDERPANIC event in its entirety, is what it means to be Australian - un-Australian, new-Australian, first-Australian, anti-Australian and never-Australian. It's an ongoing tension that defines the dividing lines and the borders of country, nationalism and identity. For sure, the current conservative government is morally bankrupt and many in this country have been overwhelmed by a feeling of powerlessness in the face of it. BORDERPANIC exposes the void of policy-driven tolerance and multiculturalism, disposes archaic national stereotypes and imposes on the populist hysteria whipped into a frenzy by the dual beaters of government and media.

NOTES
1 See Lillian Holt, 'Psst ... I wannabe white'. published on On Line Opinion. http://www.onlineopinion.com.au, accessed 17 April 2003
2 Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of white supremacy in a multicultural society. Sydney: Pluto Press, 1998; Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching For Hope in a Shrinking Society. Sydney: Pluto Press. 2002
3 Dorinne Kondo, About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater. New York: Routledge. 1997. 11

For more information about BORDERPANIC or to order the BORDERPANIC Reader visit the website at http://www.borderpanic.org