Borderline Visible

Borderline Visible is created by the artist Ant Hampton, who is also co-director of the Time Based Editions series. With a deep focus on liveness, his performance work since 1999 has often involved guiding people through unrehearsed situations using automated devices and a subtle use of instructions and narration.

As with all Time Based Editions (about), an audio track combines narration, soundscape, and instructions that guide you over a given time through the book. See a demo video here. The work is also experienced collectively as a live event for audiences, presented in theatre, film, sound art and music festivals, museums, book fairs and many other contexts.

Borderline Visible begins as a journey from Lausanne to Izmir in 2022 by two artist friends, one of whom experiences health problems halfway and has to stop. As the other continues towards Turkey, suddenly alone, the narration grows into a moving and troubled psychogeography as it shifts between “we” and “I”, present and past, piecing-together value and meaning from the very human ruins of aspiration, history, and language.

Ant Hampton’s careful, at times miraculous, process of reconnection gradually lights up a constellation: voices and earthquakes, the Sephardic diaspora, tourism and forced movement, breakdowns and dementia, the end of the Ottoman Empire, swifts and swallows, Eliot’s The Waste Land and an urgent insight into hidden atrocities at the edge of Europe being funded from its centre.

ARTIST INFO: Ant Hampton (1975, CH) is a British-German performance maker and writer. His work since 1999 has often involved guiding people through unrehearsed situations and interactive relations, using automated devices. His three collaborations with Tim Etchells are participative experiences for two at a time, combining audio with different engagements with the page: text and silent reading (The Quiet Volume, 2010); archive photography (Lest We See, 2015); and mark-making/ erasure (Not to Scale, 2020). In more recent years his practice has expanded into a wider investigation of risk-taking and leaps of faith, for example with The Thing – An Automatic Workshop in Everyday Disruption, created with Christophe Meierhans. These and many other of his “Autoteatro” works continue to tour internationally in over 80 language versions, some of them without anyone needing to travel – an oxymoronic outcome for an art committed to liveness and presence which in turn informed his 2021 advocacy and researchproject: ShowingWithoutGoing.live – an Atlas. Together with David Bergé, he co-founded Time Based Editions in 2023.

CREDITS:

Borderline Visible, 77 min, 232 pages by Ant Hampton
Voice & sound, english version: Ant Hampton
Feedback: David Bergé
Book design: Roland Brauchli
Image retouching: Flavio Milani
Copy-editing: Neil Bennun
Printing and binding: SYL (Barcelona)
Typefaces: Elante, Rom and Unica
Music: Fever, A Warm Poison by Oren Ambarchi. From the album In The Pendulum's Embrace (2007) Corridor Between Days by Perila (2022) Quixotism Parts 1 and 2, by Oren Ambarchi. From the album Quixotism (2014)
Based on a project conceived with Rita Pauls With thanks to: Pieter Ampe, Giorgos Antoniou, Sae Bosco and Samos Volunteers, Yannick Christian, Hani Dunia, Effi & Amir, Tim Etchells, Katy Fallon, Martin Hampton, Britt Hatzius, Leo Kay, LAPS, Camille Louis, Eva Neklyaeva, Beyhan Onur, Anelka Tavares, Prodromos Tsinikoris, Giulia de Vecchi, Anny Y.