Wall

The wall that separates 'us' from 'them', friend from enemy, organizes the opposition of imaginations. A conflict (or war) of projections, virtual placeholders, where the enemy is designed as an image that will never actualize. But the consequences of the wall are real; information which would allow us to find out whether our outrageous ideas about others hold any truth, is being managed and reduced to the level of images in emerging ‘zero friction zones’; public space, in every aspect, is being reshaped under the imagined threat from the opposite side of the wall. This lecture will describe the wall as an imaginary piece of architecture and rhetorical device from which it is possible to observe conflicts carried out through images. Those conflicts include well-known rhetorical oppositions like Team B versus the 'Soviet threat', the Neocons versus the Axis of Evil, and European 'Leitkultur' versus radical Islam. This talk will address how many simultaneous oppositions are sustained by the wall and how ultimately the wall even separates 'us' from 'us'.