Symposium: On Limits, Borders, Edges and Boundaries

January 12-15, 2018

From the ELSE Foundation: “The planet seems to grow as we become entangled with each other and so too our understanding of limits, boundaries, borders and edges. They emerge in various ways and mean different things for each of us. We want to open up a discussion, hear your opinions and find how they might overlap, exclude, include, intersect and mingle. This is an invitation to re-configure, re-draw, re-imagine, re-think and re-discover the ways in which we consider limits and boundaries, to disentangle rigid borders and challenge assumptions. What if our boundaries have been misplaced? How do we ground them? How do we respond to them? How do we share the planet? Can we nest instead of settle?”

The fifth issue of Dissolve, on the theme of cartographies, is the result of a particular collaboration between contributors in Bogotá, Colombia and San Francisco, USA. The contributors mark the fleeting and the unmappable, from multiple spaces of enunciation: linguistically, geographically, and ideologically. All of the articles were originally written in either English or Spanish, and translated into the other language, providing a way to explore the common and uncommon spaces between two languages, and between two geographical locations. The process of translation itself pushed us to linger in the in-between-ness of words—in the fissures and incongruencies—drawing on the words of queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz who wrote that, “We crucially need to map our repression, our fragmentation, and our alienation—the way in which the state does not permit us to say ‘the whole’ of our masses.”

The Bureau of Longitudes expands on these alternate approaches to cartography and place while working with editors based in San Francisco and Mexico City. The Bureau will serve as a visual and written archive for accounts of place, organized by degrees of longitude. In this cyclical ‘catalogue’ of the globe’s east-west divisions, we address the absurdist logic of globally-organized space; the time zone-based dissonances; temporal lag, drag, and (im)permanence; and the quixotic and overlapping modalities through which we see, understand, and experience the imaginaries of place, from its fantasies to its realities.

Dissolve is thrilled to join the Transart Institute for Creative Research and the ELSE Foundation in their symposium on contemporary approaches to cartography and global entanglement. The symposium will take place at Casa Maauad in Mexico City on January 13 to 14, 2018 and will culminate with an issue of ELSE Journal. We invite you to join us. Further details can be found here.