Dark spaces: borderwalls in the cultural, political and artistic imagination

The article examines the phenomenon of border fortification in the twenty-first century. It proposes that borderwalls are not just physical barriers but symbolic forms that embody and enact a state’s political visions and phantasms about national belonging and exclusion. It analyses how the visual apparatus of borders is tied to state power and to the use of electronic surveillance technologies to create a seemingly totalising panoptic regime. Central to the investigation are the tactics of state territorial control that unfold in the ‘dark spaces’ or ‘hidden topographies of power’ beyond the visible corporeality of the borderwall, where state violence and migrant deaths often occur unnoticed. When so expunged from public discourse, visual fields, maps and memory, how can these hidden border zones be reimagined? In contrast to the official optics, the article presents the making of counter-visualities through an analysis of border art installations. Such artistic endeavours are analysed as examples of how art can challenge hegemonic narratives and humanise border experiences. The article probes instances of artistic experimentation and visual radicalism (performances, installations, public works) along the US–Mexico border as counter-visual platforms for digital knowledge production, witnessing, political agency and cross-border community collaboration.