A border is a barrier, a limit or a gateway, and a product of surveillance. A corridor manages traffic, strategizes spatial planning, and develops infrastructure. A line of desire is a path created by movement and a manifestation of insurgent citizenship. All three entities suggest what Lee Rodney might call a ‘mode of management of collective life.’

 

Borders | Corridors | Lines of Desire is a body of work emerging out of TUG Collective’s three-year engagement with these modes of collective life as experienced by individuals and communities across the National Historic Lewis and Clark Trail, a trail forged by an expedition that played an essential role in US-American territorial, cultural, and economic expansion across the North American continent throughout the 19th Century.

 

Each work breaks into history and exposes the seams of some of the most poetic visions that US-Americans have of themselves as belonging to a country founded on the ideals of democracy and freedom. ‘To begin to see the contradictions,’ writes Amitava Kumar, ‘is to become aware of history and of another relationship that this history has with the present.’