Transborderline: Habitable infrastructure to support the free movement of the public, 2000

Stalker is a collective that engages research and actions within the landscape with particular attention to areas around the city's margins and forgotten urban spaces, and abandoned areas or regions under transformation. Stalker faces the apparently unsolvable contradictions of salvaging through abandonment, of representation through sensory perception, and of intervening within these areas' unstable and mutable conditions. In Manifesta 3, Stalker presents the project Transborderline: Habitable infrastructure to support the free movement of the public. An unbreachable spiral of barbed wire is always the only three-dimensional representation of a border. Transborderline is a proposal for a new kind of border, one that maintains a spiral shape, but through losing its barbs and becoming wider, could be transformed into a ludic space, crossable and at the same time habitable. It is a prototype of a possible future public space born from the 'unfolding' of borders, creating an ideal place for exchanges and for approaches to diversity. It is an infrastructure that could be a structure and a conductive medium for an urbanised type of free movement. Along the transborderline there might be found traces of previous 'passengers', places where a stranger could find welcome, spaces for meetings and public encounters and ludic spaces for all ages. It is a public space where one could come to relate to diversity and to play with borders, with their symbolic value and the reality of their being uncrossable. It is a space that allows the crossing and the exceeding of borders without negating them. The installation represents an imaginary infrastructure that crosses the borders between East and West. It also brings to the heart of Ljubljana thousands of soccer balls, on which there will be written the names, stories and desires of those who line the borders of Europe. This project wishes to contribute to the lessening of confrontations and facilitation of exchanges with the 'other', as well as the freer movement of the public.