Border art for a border ecology

This chapter considers the intertwined notions of ecological and international borders in connection to border crossings and symbolic representation of territoriality. By analyzing two seemingly unrelated artworks, Amar Kanwar’s The Scene of Crime (2011) and Postcommodity’s Repellent Fence (2015), I put forth an understanding of how such an intersection can allow us to understand notions of subjectivity and objecthood as they apply to issues of migration, displacement, and precarity. Kanwar’s 43 minutes video The Scene of Crime juxtaposes scenes of the landscape in India’s eastern state of Odisha with textual and sonic overlays, conveying a sense of an ecosystem on the edge. As with much of Kanwar’s work, there is no narrative to be gleaned from the images and no authoritative voice to interpret them. Instead, each visual speaks to the others, set against the text and submerged in an ambient soundscape. The objects depicted are connected through the mechanism of video and their shared precarity. The biopolitical ramifications of the conflict in Odisha extend not just to the humans dwelling within the forest, but its inhabitants at all levels. The Scene of Crime visualizes the ever-shifting boundaries between the legal system, the material world, and those entities (human and nonhuman alike) seeking representation. Repellent Fence encourages discussions of the borderlands as a shared space for human and nonhuman interests. If the border is simply a line drawn on the map, a political distinction that has grown to encompass an increasingly militarized security apparatus, this places it within a purely anthropocentric framework. Such an argument voids the notion of border-as-habitat, in some areas a watershed, an estuary at its ends, with large swaths of desert in between. A “big, beautiful” border wall not only separates long-standing human communities, but also divides ecological niches. Through its use of the visuals of an ineffective bird repellent product, itself an appropriation of indigenous symbols, postcommodity’s site-specific installation creates a space for that panoply of human, animal, and object-oriented interests that all vie for recognition at this highly charged site.