Print No Border : Questioning the Nature of Boundaries Via Printmaking Practice

Abstract

As borders gradually open up once again, the consequences of the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic are casting light on the renewed importance of regional and national borders. This is also true of European national borders – which had already been tested by the intensification of migratory flows and populist impulses – now in the process of becoming unwilling symbols of the restrictions ushered in by the pandemic. Closed for months, or at the very least made difficult to get through by health-related restrictions, the internal EU national borders that European peoples were coming to think of as a thing of the past were, quite suddenly, extremely concrete once again. This is a process that has been brought even more dramatically to the fore by the tragedy of the war in Ukraine. 

From the starting point of these premises, the Print no border project explored the border and frontier concepts via xylographic practice, juxtaposing, stratifying, and comparing the geographical representation of boundaries with images borrowed from nature and the man-made elements that boundaries cut through.