11:00, Medialab. Conversation. Ignacio Mendiola together with Gari Garaialde, Anaitze Agirre, and Esteban Zamora.
Security devices and sovereign view at the border: the Irun wall.
We live in a context where the demand for security has become a hegemonic reality. A real regime that tells us what happens and identifies the different threats hanging over us. Due to this demand for security, power will activate devices to immunise us, to protect us from those threats that are often built in an unhistorical way, appearing as a fixed image that disregards its conditions of possibility and the way in which security participates in the production itself of the supposed threat. In this context, through their different techno-scientific devices, security demands will reproduce that ancient dream of power to see in detail everything that happens in the territory it is projected upon. There is a sovereign vision that invariably accompanies the demand for security.
The border is one of the main security devices, a government technology that establishes how mobility should be practised: the border allows passage, but also sometimes it denies it, arrests the person arriving, captures them, drives them away. What is at stake at the border is how we relate to others, how we transit between hostility and hospitality. The security border has created the migrant person as a threat and prepares to immunise itself, to contain and filter their arrival. The border is currently the security policy exercising itself, deploying itself in multiple spaces, externalising and internalising itself. We have the southern border and the northern border of the Bidasoa river. Violent, racialised, militarised, securitised borders. To think about them critically requires challenging the security discourse that encourages them, breaking the sovereign vision that accompanies them.
First day of the seminar "Evil Eye" with guests Ho Rui An and Beatriz Colomina.