The Boundaries of a Border Town

What happens in a place where the yellow line running down the middle of two countries, aptly-named Canusa Street, is the dividing line itself?

Stanstead-Derby Line is a town that straddles the border—literally. Sitting directly atop the Quebec-Vermont border, the town’s library and community centre sits half in America and half in Canada. But in a post-9/11 world, what happens to a place in which the yellow line running down the middle aptly-named Canusa Street is the border itself? It’s pondering that question and others like it that gave rise to Border Town, a 12 week design studio project that took place in Toronto this summer headed up by artist-thinkers Emily Horne and Tim Maly. Pulling together a small group of designers, artists and tinkerers, Border Town sought to explore the “edge cases of the world” where boundaries, both literal and metaphorical, bring to bear an array of issues, from security to identity to sovereignty. The group created an array of projects—from a convertible dress designed to disguise inhabitants of a fictional, divided city, to a video contrasting people giving directions in Canada and America—and the culmination of Border Town was recently shown at the Detroit Design Festival. Given that we’ve mostly, if uncomfortably, settled into our post-September 11th world, however, what has prompted a look at borders now? And what have the project’s leaders learned? For Maly, other than the simple act of frequently crossing back and forth into America, it was the ways in which the idea of the border has started to permeate its way into many facets of our lives. “What happens when the built environment starts to get more intelligent?” asks Maly, referring to the proliferation of surveillance technologies like CCTV and locative technology. “It can be fun with something like ‘checking in’ Foursquare, but there’s also the GPS-enabled anklet that ensures you stay in your bounds.” The ambivalence of the boundary, then, has a sinister edge. “You go into courtrooms, for example, and they’ve had to jury-rig the rooms to control crowds to go through a metal detector,” Maly says. “But those ropes: Anyone could walk through them. The rules are just a trick.” Borders are not only external barriers but also mental, social boundaries, too, rules and regulations that police our movements. To try and begin to poke at and think through those rules, the group took a field trip to Niagara Falls where, among other things, they learned that the bridges are in fact owned by private companies. “They own the bridge and a little bit of land on either side,” says Horne. “ But they also do interesting things like run simulations of bomb scares. And that’s not just a test for border security, but also the fire and police departments on both sides. People have to work together in this massively co-ordinated way.” That collaborative nature of borders was new and surprising to the team, who had initially expected to see borders as only mechanisms of restriction. The mixed, layered approach produced a number of proposals that were different and surprisingly interactive. “They tended to be more playful than other work I’ve seen around border towns and security,” say Maly and Horne. “There’s a garment that transforms in a whimsical way and was illustrated with stop-motion animation, or 3D printed snowglobes of a hypothetical tourist town that Niagara Falls could have been if King Gillette had had his way. So those are very different from what we normally see.” Maly and Horne admit that the project didn’t do as much as it might have to highlight injustices around borders, but felt the group’s slightly lighter look at border towns provided something new. Indeed, Border Town’s novel approach was able to raise over $2000 through Kickstarter to get the project shown in Detroit. Border Town is now actively searching out spaces and galleries in Toronto to display its creations. __ Navneet Alang is the Toronto Standard Tech Critic.

____