In August 2020, with the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic in full swing, a mixed group of Venezuelans and Haitians found themselves in legal limbo. They had effectively become stuck on the Ponte de Amizade that connects and marks the border between the Brazil and Peru. They had initially been permitted to enter Brazil after presenting undertakings approved by the Brazilian Ministry of Health committing them to adhere to all national COVID-19 protocols but were subsequently deported back to the bridge, and purportedly to Peru, by Brazilian Federal Police on the grounds that the border had been closed due to the pandemic. However, Peru, too, had in the meantime closed its border for the same reason, so that the group ended up stuck on the border bridge for several weeks, until a Brazilian court issued an order allowing their (re-)entry into Brazil.
This border bridge is an example of what Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, in the 1950s, called “the organic line.”
Think of the space between the door and door frame, or between the stone tiles on the floor, or in this case the border between two countries. It’s organic because the line is not straight, but rather the border line expands or narrows between two uneven river banks, while the bridge densifies variably with more or fewer refugees. In this way, the organic line, in the words of Irene Small, “dilates a space of contingency” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRc3CidwSME&t=3945s)
What’s policy-relevant about this? “The line is the path of passing through, movement, collision, edge, attachment, joining, sectioning,” wrote another artist earlier. Or better yet,
There is nothing more active than a line of flight, among animals or humans. . .What is escaping in a society at a given moment? It is on lines of flight that new weapons are invented, to be turned against the heavy arms of the State.
(Deleuze and Guattari in https://files.libcom.org/files/A%20Thousand%20Plateaus.pdf)
Source. Irene V. Small (2024). The Organic Line: Toward a topology of modernism. Zone Books: New York.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 