"Hello, my name is Ekaterina Sisfontes. I'm a Swedish performing artist. On the 8th of August I will be showing my piece Borders Unlimited at the Emigration to the Future Festival.

I do not believe in countries. I don't believe in their existence in the form they have now.

So I invite you to enter seven other countries of my own. You can definitely see how it can become.

The performance is quite long, with the means for you to fill in applications to the countries that are still not existing, but are very possible to exist in the future.

Welcome to my future."

BORDERS UNLIMITED runs on 8 August. You walk through the space, and without warning a border checkpoint is standing in front of you. Guards ask for your documents and hand you a form to fill in before you are allowed through the barrier into a country you have never heard of. Nobody agrees to take part. That is the design.

The border does not hold still. Every time you come back to it, the flag has changed, the country has a different name, the guards behave differently and the questions on the form are new. You can never re-enter the same state twice. Behind the barrier there is always another dictatorship, monarchy, anarchy, theocracy or republic of militant equality — and each of them can collapse in a coup at any minute, as long as somebody has thought up what comes next.

The guards are parade guards. They decide nothing, they only carry out orders from above, and they take bribes in any form. They get tired, wander off to the bar and leave the border unmanned, or ask a visitor to stand in for them. Some people are refused passage for being unworthy. Groups get split at the barrier on criteria invented on the spot. There is no equality and no logic — only the temporary laws of an unstable state, obeyed without question.

The only things prepared in advance are the forms. Some ask reasonable, official-sounding questions. Others are intrusive, conspiratorial, or have no justification at all. You may be asked for a photograph for the state espionage service.

Borderless Borders is the temporary collective Sisfontes assembles for each intervention, and the collective grows as it runs: visitors are recruited into the guard, and the line between the person being checked and the person doing the checking stops being clear. What the piece is actually watching is how fast the absurd becomes routine — how quickly people settle into the roles they were never assigned, and start treating a border invented an hour ago as a fact of life.

Ekaterina Sisfontes is one of the artists rehearsing a livable future with us.

8 August
ExBrache, Berlin

#EmigrationToTheFuture #BerlinWedding #BordersUnlimited