Curator Kirila Cvetkovska developed this proposal during the 2022 Curatorial Intensive in Kampala.
There is an endless empty expanse and there is no horizon. There are talks of loss, disasters, and ruins classified under a dystopian genre, because things are allowed to operate only by their definitions.
How do we access the cracks of collective memory in times of extreme systemic violence, nationalism, and social polarization? When official historical narratives are being either reinforced or contested, how do we create space for the memory that appears coincidental – the remembered detail that branches out onto a story rather than the other way around?
A Line So Deep / A Hole So High looks into the histories of the edges that demarcate cross- border spaces in the physical and political realms. These edges reflect violent systems of governance where concepts such as ‘cross-border cooperation’ become repeated and instilled only to slowly lose their meaning. In these demarcations, the people whose lives and mobility are directly affected become mere statistics, reports with no past or present (let alone future), or invisibilized figures taken out of the frame.
As a long-term creative endeavor, A Line So Deep / A Hole So High seeks to interrogate the limits between oral history and the archives of both personal and overtly public remembering within places that fall into a cross-border designation. Traveling from the shared home and the email or phone conversation to the boxes stored in institutional spaces deemed as local, regional, or national, this endeavor searches for a historically significant momentum that opens or closes the physical and political border lines between places situated on each side.
Imagined as an assemblage of various media developed in multiple phases, with the book as a first materialization, A Line So Deep / A Hole So High is also an attempt to challenge the very forms it utilizes, such as the printed matter. How can the book become an exhibition space? How does collaboration blur the lines between the professionalized roles of curators and artists, and those of a (non-)defined community or ‘participants’ in a project? A Line So Deep / A Hole So High questions the possibilities of a curatorial practice to create conditions that do not affix meaning, but rather provide stepping stones for a fragmented historical memory to take shape on its own.
At the end of the day, there might be a break at the end of a line, another hole at the end of a tunnel, but this time it might be a tunnel hole-through, where the ends meet so as to become one.
