| Description |
This a/r/tographical study was the third in a series of youth-driven Comic Book Art Apprenticeships and Visual Studies. Its purpose was that of border poetics, to create a set of inherently geographical and artistic strategies for analyzing and deconstructing hard space, or fixed borders, in transmigrant youth comic book art. Through deconstruction and associated movement methods (i.e., a cosmic treadmill, BorderXing, and the monstrous), hard space or fixed bordered forms of representation were countered, that is, where the gutter was thought a dystopic, unaccounted-for void where nothing happened. Instead, the gutter was redrawn and reconstituted as an uncanny, lively, alien territory, where the cultural enunciation of entangled or hybrid, small-scale resistances against the status quo flourished. By installing invention and experimenting with subject suspension, relationality was the focus rather than fixed dualisms such as empty or full, human and not. Panel borders were broken, thus liberating the gutter, the space between and around panels, as a/r/tographers crossed borders and spaces through artifacts. By dwelling in the space of the imagination and playing with normalized conditions at the margin of the panel, the redrawn gutter opened possibilities to what a border work could be rather than what it was, or had been. Thus, imaginaries were co-created to refuse closure, or the either/or logic, which had been imaginatively and co-productively deconstructed. The findings have enlarged conversations about spatial agency and other ways of doing bordering by characterizing and visualizing a theory of borders in motion in transmigrant youth comic book art. It emphasizes the importance of art forms like comic book art in constructing and tracing borders, in actively rebordering space, and regulating embodied border crossing narratives in migratory culture. This study has both theoretical and practical implications for the field of border poetics, migratory aesthetics, creative geographies, comics studies, and geophilosophy. It has furnished an idea of what comic book art can do in the world, when the thing-side of affect or the situated suspension of the subject is a topic and all the producers of space are; enmeshed and intertwined hybrid transition zones where edges mix. |
