As most people, I have set up limits around my inner self. Without these limits I’m vulnerable.

In The Fragility of Goodness, American philosopher Martha Nussbaum writes: “Human cognitive limits circumscribe and limit ethical knowledge and discourse; and an important topic ‘within’ ethical discourse must be the determination of an appropriate human attitude towards those limits.”¹⁾Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness. Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 8. In my first encounter with the begging man I didn’t begin by parsing what I didn’t understand, there was no desire to know more – that came later.

BORDER is a two-minute animation with a text by Mara Lee.²⁾ BORDER (animated film, 2:10 min). “She who’s never trembled when she’s passed a border doesn’t know what it is to be human,” writes Mara Lee.³⁾Mara Lee, “… sa hon och darrade”, Glänta No. 2 (2011). This sentence moves me deeply. In earlier works I’ve documented the Israeli wall on the border with the West Bank.⁴⁾Cecilia Parsberg, “The Wall”, ceciliaparsberg.se/thewall/. Back then, in the spring of 2002 I started to draw two people, one on each side of a wall, people who begin to vibrate, eventually the wall cracks, is pulverized, and rebuilt, cracks to powder and is rebuilt – it’s a loop. It’s about two people who vibrate out of desire, they get to know each other, the wall comes down, but in the negotiations of desire the need to differentiate, to set limits, grows and so the situation becomes polarized and a new wall is built. The animation is also about the space between us as the place where the negotiation, the precursor to contact happens. One becomes vulnerable in that negotiation of limits. I finished this animation in 2013 and it turned out to also be about the distance between me and the person begging, a distance demarcated by a number of ethical quandaries.

When I tremble before the unknown I tremble before the change that could befall me. To activate the crossing of the border, movements must be performed contrary to accustomed patterns of identification, new patterns of movement must be generated, a new choreography. Marcia Sá Calvacante Shuback says: “The word dance originates from trembling or quivering.”⁵⁾Calvacante gave a lecture at Weaving Politics, which was a research seminar at Dansens Hus in Stockholm, arranged by Christina Caprioli, December 14–16, 2012.

“We are losers, and you have to learn from us,” says Kefah, a poet living in the Israeli-occupied territories on the West Bank. To occupy is a method of besetting a space, an area, the property of another. Israel has built its wall to demarcate occupied territory, and to control and prevent movement between the occupied and the inhabitants of Israel proper. The wall is Israel drawing its limit, Israeli law. In 2006 the International Tribunal in The Hague decreed the wall to be in violation of international law.

Many Israelis see the wall as protection against what they fear might happen if it wasn’t there. The wall is physical as well as mental. It originated as an idea, it was visualized, sketched, planned, and then projected and built. The wall is the outcome of decisions based on experience. Despite the decree of The Hague Tribunal it would appear that an international moral code supports the wall, by virtue of not actively trying to repeal it, it also condones the occupation.

When Palestinian Kefah says: “We are losers, and you have to learn from us” he is suggesting a less common way of looking at the relating and teaching of them or that which can’t be excluded and controlled. He’s a poet, a poet under occupation. His view of the wall is that it prevents possibilities to relate and thus build communities. He maintains that the wall is a break in a movement, that this demarcation is a law that fractures the development of community.

The community of wall builders provides the basis for a production of knowledge that is disseminated, as is the community of the occupied. Kefah calls himself and his occupied community – which is surrounded by the wall – losers. Because they have been defeated by a victorious power. But the winners don’t possess all of the knowledge. He is saying that the knowledge of the losers is unavoidable. He is saying: We lost, but if your strength, your victory, your success is built on us losing, then we’re in your lives, in your actions, in your knowledge production to the same, or perhaps a greater, extent. “We are losers, and you have to learn from us.”

When I visit Kefah he teaches me: To only relate against, means obliterating one’s own agency in a dependency, to let oneself be occupied. He teaches me to relate to, be close, on the side of, around, by, and turn values around, to see spaces around that which is visible. It’s about autonomy and stance. Dignity, to give worth, to receive worth, worth cannot be taken. Like when women in my home country demanded the right to vote, to be seen, heard, and spoken to, to receive a response from society, an acknowledgement that one exists, to receive worth. They demanded that images of women change. Women were the occupied territory of prevailing knowledge. Counting women’s knowledge as knowledge was a struggle against subordination that was fought by attending to one’s worth. That struggle was just as much about attending to the knowledge that is considered worth promoting.

In Frames of War Judith Butler writes that what may finally be true of us is that: “The subject that I am is bound to the subject I am not, that we each have the power to destroy and to be destroyed, and that we are bound to one another in this power and this precariousness. In this sense, we are all precarious lives.”⁷⁾Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (New York: Verso, 2009), 43.

Structural inequalities have to do with our images and attitudes; these “images”, collective as well as individual, visual as well as verbal – are at play in society. This is how the political is connected to the aesthetic. Reluctance, or desire to include, generates images, ideas of one another.

There is a form of control inherent to how the aid is organized and it is paradoxical that the aid sets the terms and in the worst case institutionalizes (affirms) a hierarchy of power, in which the person who is aided is victimized and subordinated. Of course there is also aid in which the organization and entrepreneurship of the poor set the terms for what type of aid is needed. The question for me, in this project, is how the artist’s – my – framing can be challenged when I aim to make visible the situation of giving and begging. I receive an email from Kultur i Väst [Culture in Western Sweden] and experiment with swapping in the words artist and cultural worker for poor. I also swap in art for survival practice. I want to test my own images by changing a rhetorical context (in a way that is similar to how Ioana Cojocariu tests how values are tied to a prostrate position by changing the context from the street to a yoga studio). What’s regarded as creative and groundbreaking in one context is a method of survival in another.

My mother was 63 years old when she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. She understood what it would mean – simply put she would lose all the abilities that you acquire early in life and she would become dependent on medicine. The important thing was that she had a context, she had us. She died fifteen years later. Over these fifteen years I felt resistance each time I went to visit her and was scared, not of visiting her in the environment that seems to be the final one of life – routines, diaper changes, fruit soup, the smell of urine, other unreachable old people who smelled bad and cried out for help in their dementia – but because I knew she’d have deteriorated more each time. At each visit I wrote down what happened; she was eaten up from the inside, physically and mentally, the moments in which she was able to be present kept getting shorter. But every time I was on my way to her I decided, actively, to see what I did get and not what I didn’t get. That helped me conquer my fear. And she fought. When her ability to discern shapes disappeared she saw the color green rather than a tree. When she lost her ability to discern color – one by one, the last color she saw was red – she still enjoyed the familiar taste of strawberries. When speech disappeared she sang, when words disappeared she made noises, when she couldn’t dance anymore, she twitched, she wanted to communicate! even if she couldn’t reach us. It could take her hours to break out of “her world”. But eventually we’d make contact. It happened in various ways. Once when she came walking down the hallway she didn’t recognize me; I hugged her and said my name, which she didn’t recognize either, but then she inhaled my scent¹⁷⁾Maria Larsson, professor of psychology at the University of Stockholm says that the sense of smell is the oldest of our five senses. Among other things it helps us feel safe. She has studied the connection between scent, memory, and feelings. The feelings aroused by a scent memory are more powerful than sight and sound memories, especially from childhood. and a yeees emerged from far inside her body. That was a great moment, it didn’t matter that she no longer knew my name, that she couldn’t remember our shared history. The moments of contact became increasingly brief and the space between them kept getting longer, but when they happened it was infinitely meaningful.

Contact is something that happens, something that is received and taken. It can be heard and felt. If there is trust. And will. It can’t be described. Swedish translator Joachim Retzlaff’s prologue to Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition reads: “Language characterizes the human as a social being. Because use of language assumes mutual understanding, that is to say a minimum of intersubjectivity.”¹⁸⁾Hannah Arendt, Människans Villkor, transl. Joachim Retzlaff, (Gothenburh: Daidalos, 1998), 17. When my mother lost the ability to communicate, she died.

According to Martha Nussbaum freedom is inherent to the term “capability” (in this story: to discern form, color, scent, sound, to speak, dance, sing etc.) She maintains that capability is the possibility of choosing and that functions are realizations of capabilities.²⁰⁾She gives the following example:
——“A person who is starving and a person who is fasting have the same type of function where nutrition is concerned, but they don’t have the same capability, because the person who fasts is able not to fast, and the starving person has no choice.”
——Martha C. Nussbaum Creating Capabilities. The Human Development Approach, (New York: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), 25. “Functions are beings and doings that are the outgrowths of realizations of capabilities.”²¹⁾Ibid., 25. One could say that in a society where people are involved in functions the function is the final goal of the capability. “But capabilities have value in and of themselves, as spheres of freedom and choice.”²²⁾“In one standard formulation by Sen, ‘a person’s capability’ refers to the alternative combinations of functionings that are feasible for her to achieve. Capability is thus a kind of freedom: the substantive freedom to achieve alternative functioning combinations.’ In other words, they are not just abilities residing inside a person but also the freedoms or opportunities created by a combination of personal abilities and the political, social and economic environment.” Ibid., 21.

Many years ago I saw a light installation by the composer Alvin Lucier who used a number of instruments and recording equipment to show how we create vibrations in the air, sound waves, by moving in relation to one another. In this way we move in a resonance box, indoors as well as in the social space, and despite the matrix and structural delimitations we can reason or resonate with one another. A friend expressed it like this: “Philosophy is slow in comparison to visual art, which is slow in comparison to music. Sound travels the fastest.” Can sound actually be faster than light at times?

“Resonance sets into motion and sustains all creative processes. […] The inhaling and exhaling is the work of rhythm, or of Breath, manifested as voice, sound, word – whether audible or silent, spoken or written, outside or within.” writes Trinh T. Minh-ha.²³⁾Trinh T. Minh-ha, Elsewhere, Within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism and the Boundary Event, (New York: Routledge, 2011), 57.

I think about what Martha Nussbaum wrote: that capabilities and freedom of choice are connected.²⁴⁾Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities, 20.
——In her book Martha Nussbaum proposes a model of capability that would: “insist that the political goal for all human beings in a nation ought to be the same: all should get above a certain threshold level of combined capability, in the sense not of coerced functioning but of substantial freedom to choose and act.” By highlighting certain capabilities in a choreography – in a trusting environment – the function could be made visible that is a precondition for other functions to change: communication. I start planning a film installation with a chorus of beggars standing opposite a chorus of givers; initially I call it Voices across Borders.