In June 2004, Francis Alÿs walked twenty-four kilometers with a punctured can of green paint along the armistice border that had demarcated the territories of Israel and its neighboring states from 1948 until 1967. The gesture centers the history of colonization and the land struggle between Israel and Palestine. The work’s commentary on equity, culture, and territory can be re-contextualized to speak to the current state in which we find ourselves in the United States. The work is not simply an analysis of borders, but also speaks to the question of what the desire for borders might actually be, which is a matter of identity.

The recorded performance begins with the statement “sometimes doing something poetic can become political, and sometimes doing something political can become poetic.” As Alÿs walks the route of the defunct armistice border with the leaking can, he sketches a new, more sustainable border. The playful new border, with its overlapping and jagged curves, encourages interaction through its form. The new line is a border that recognizes our independence and interdependence through the penetrability of the demarcation it creates. In Alÿs’s gesture, the inability to distinguish between the political and the poetic creates new potentialities of acknowledging similarities and differences and, in turn, creates a new poetics of how we relate to one another.

In the past year, the triadic confluence of unresolved settler-native-slave history in America surfaced with the George Floyd march and the Capitol Hill riot, which took place on stolen and unacknowledged Nacotchtank land. While the first march was engendered by exasperating attacks against black lives, the latter was a compromising jibe for a return to an impracticable past of white futurity. This summation of events makes visible the ideological division piled into a nation that anchors its inhabitants in place by altering the history of the place.

Alÿs’s painted border smudged the lines between art and politics, consequently raising questions as to the role of art in society and in relation to our collective identity. After the hottest year in history rendered apocalyptic scenes of widespread wildfires, as a deadly virus spread globally killing millions, if there ever was such a thing as the right time, now seems to be it for each of us to take up the arduous task of analyzing our responsibility to the land that we tread; precisely because, frankly, whether our differences position us on the left or right of Alÿs’s green line – in the ambient baritone of Paul Buchanan – does it matter anymore? In a heatwave.