Between Borders and Belonging
Abstract
Under the overarching theme of Intergenerational Fairness and our tutorial’s focus on Slow Violence (Nixson, 2011) our group chose to centre our research on borders, making a documentary style film to explore the often unseen and gradually unfolding violence borders produce. Rather than visualising this topic through graphic and distressing real-life footage of border crossings instead we put the peculiar internal EU border situation at Baarle in the Netherlands in dialogue with the terrorizing reality of the external EU border situation policed by Frontex in the Mediterranian sea. Paring our own footage of Baarle and interviews we conducted there with a poetric script that narrates the atroscities of border politics, our film seeks to create a jarring conversation between the absurd and the realistic. It is our hope that this film provides another way to enter the narrative of border violence and intergenerational fairness, using Baarle and it’s playful understanding of borders as a landscape to reach below and unearth the slow violence that creeps beneath. We ask our viewers to consider what a border is? Who belongs and who is excluded? What does the permeability of these borders reveal about the control and policing of bodies?
When researching the topic of borders we were inspired by Sandro Mezzandra’s 2013 text Border As Method, Or, The Multiplication of Labor which reconceptualises borders not as fixed lines but dynamic sites of struggle, control and violence. Borders exceed beyond the represententational, they are no longer arbitrary lines on a map that mark geographic landmarks or trace conflicts gone by, they are, “not only devices of exclusion but also technologies of differential inclusion (p157.)”. Therefore understanding borders as a modern technology to moderate inclusion and exclusion, where the regulation of mobility and labor becomes central to global capitalism and the production of political subjectivities is central to our project. This informed our approach when visiting the primary site of our research, the unassuming border town Baarle, to remain critical when examining its unique and often trivial border cases.
Baarle is a quaint village in the south of the Netherlands that houses the majority of the 63 enclaves in the world. Extending over two municipalities: the Belgian Baarle-Hertog and the Dutch Baarle-Nassau it is a peculiar case of a border town that has two mayors, two police forces, two electrical systms, two income tax rates, two flags and thirty enclaves. An enclave is a territory that is entirely surrounded by the terriotory of another state, country or entity and in the case of Baarle there are 22 Belgium enclaves, 7 Dutch counter enclaves and 1 Belgian counter-counter enclave. The peculiar enclave situation in Baarle dates back to 1198 when the Duke of Brabant ceded the majority of his estate to Lord of Breda and despite many attempts to simplify the border situation over the following centuries neither the Netherlands or Belgium gave up their territory so the entangled border/enclave situation remains to this day.
Despite the violent origins of gaining or surrendering land, Baarle has become a tourist destination where the town have been able to sustain its livelihood through the commodification of borders, “turning borders into a tourist attraction” (Willem, 2025). Witnessing firsthand the triviality of borders being a group composed of members from Australia, Italy and Greece, that all have their own horrific policies when it comes to asylum seekers and border crossings, the banality of borders in Baarle was both enticing and shocking. It is here within this disjunct we decided to atune our project and expose the ironic frictions between territory, people and legislation. Aware of the delicate subject matter at hand we moved away from contrasting one site to the other and instead shifted our interest to comparing the difference instances and understandings of borders. We hope to put these two border sites, Baarle’s internal EU border situation and Frontex’s external EU border situation in conversation with each-other so they migh highlight their mutual implications as well as their differences, dissoances, commonalities and singularities.
