On Boundaries and (No) Borders at the Creative Time Summit

August 14th, 2018

The 2018 Creative Time Summit: On Archipelagos and Other Imaginaries—Collective Strategies to Inhabit the World comes to Miami, November 1 – 3: three days of presentations, performances, and intimate breakout sessions with dozens artists and activists from Miami, the Caribbean, and around the world. Book your pass today.

Every few weeks between now and the Summit, we’ll be taking a closer look at one of this year’s four themes. Today we explore: On boundaries and a borderless future.

Around the world, immigration policies and border controls continue to dominate headlines and political debates, influencing decision-making, transforming identities, and dividing communities. Faced with a dehumanizing rhetoric around immigrants and refugees, intensified levels of surveillance, as well as increasing compassion exhaustion, activists and artists continue to fight for empathy and engagement while risking persecution themselves. Rather than fixating on the divisive boundaries between “them” and “us,” presenters in this section will consider how we bring the two closer together, to universalize migrant peoples’ experiences? How can we imagine seemingly impossible possibilities otherwise discarded in politics, which could produce new models of citizenship or the dissolution of global borders?

Taking on those questions at the Summit, we have, among others:
– Elvis Fuentes, curator of the landmark exhibition Caribbean: Crossroads of the World
– Zach Blas, an artist whose work critiques the dark side of surveillance technology
– Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, an artist who explores visual language as a way to speak across borders

For an even deeper dive into boundaries and a borderless future, visit the Summit Reader. Organized by the Summit curatorial team, the Reader has even more links to free articles to get you up to speed before you arrive in Miami.