Before entering the images, let us pause on this map, and on this line, which marks the division, from end to end, of a small country between two entities (to mention only these) whose conflict has been at the heart of the news for several decades.
This line marks the Belgian language border, separating two spaces according to a national principle: one territory, one language, one history, one culture – the one Germanic, the other Latin. As if, from differentiation to differentiation, from one nationality to another, the partition of Belgium were the apotheosis of the national principle. A significant paradox: at its very heart lies the capital of Europe, held in an institutional straitjacket even though this status propels Brussels towards post-national concerns.
A border describes a situation that separates different spaces at the same time as it connects them. While the institutional partition feeds the social, cultural, political and media distance between the two communities living on either side, these images nonetheless tend to show a common, shared condition, to the point of making this line of demarcation intangible, imperceptible.
In the end, what these images convey is rather the sense that a whole series of myths, symbols and narratives still form a shared imaginary baggage – anchored in an outdated past and resistant to change – for those who live in and inhabit this territory, or who take part in these various events. While the notion of the border returns to the fore, in all its contradictions, in a globalised context that sees walls and other security barriers multiply, this space seems to bear no trace or sign either of our globalised present or of the urge to enclose that characterises our humanity. It appears frozen in a space-time standing at an equal distance from the forces at work within the country and in its relations with the outside – thereby inverting the very notion of the border, supposed to be the place where they meet and confront each other.