Border Aesthetics

This project investigates how changing perceptions of borders relate to shifting practices of aesthetic evaluation. In so doing, it draws upon two guiding observations that must inform any notion of a border aesthetics, these being a) that aesthetic theor ies and practices regularly invoke and engage with notions of the border; and b) that borders are in turn capable of producing aesthetic effects and can themselves be conceived of as aesthetic objects. It will pursue its primary objective both through the oretical reflection and a sequence of interlocking case-studies that focus on the literature, film and video art produced by creative artists working in or imagining border regions and the Barents Region in particular. In the process, it will also explici tly address the question of how aesthetic activity participates in the processes by which people relate to the real and conceptual geographies in which they live and through which they move. This focus is both socially-engaged and inquisitive about the dy namic ways in which cultural phenomena are ascribed value through aesthetic practice. At the same time, it situates the project at the vanguard of current thinking about aesthetics. For the concentration on border regions enables the project not only to e xplore and develop further the, relatively new, field of migratory aesthetics, but it also requires the formulation of what might provisionally be called a zonal aesthetics. Indeed, one of its principal goals will be precisely to establish how a new 'aest hetics of space' of a kind likely to be required by its study of the divergent groups, objects, values and activities that inhabit and pass through the border zones it surveys is to be instantiated, negotiated, evaluated and described.