The European Frontier: Fort Europe As an Artistic Narrative

In recent years, two Belgian artists created ‘performative exhibitions’ about the problematic identity. Thomas Bellinck made Domo de Europa Historio en Ekzilo, a shabby museum conceived from the imaginary point of view of 2063, years after the collapse of the European Union in 2018. Filip Berte built Eutopia, a hybrid construction of rooms, with short films, paintings and conceptual objects representing the precarious borders of Europe. These Both installations are the result of fundamental research, and both suggest that the ‘true’ identity of Europe, as a political project, relies upon its conception of the border, of the frontier. Paradoxically, the European Union is a construction without fixed boundaries – a new member state creates new borderlines for the whole Union. But these provisional confines are protected by drastic measures under the supervision of  a mysterious agency (Frontex) with an unclear institutional status. Why is the narrative theme of the border policy of the EU picked up by artists dealing with European cultural identity?

A double argument will be developed: (1) an analysis of different concepts of (legal, political, cultural) boundaries as used in the discursive formations constituting the European Union and (2) a demonstration how contradictory concepts of the ‘European frontier’ are re-arranged in artistic works. Europe is often qualified as a cultural project. Here, the imaginary cultural unity is represented by a very discomforting notion of identity: the obligation to exclude ‘the other’ (‘the non-European’) from its territory.