Ant Hampton: Borderline Visible

An immersive audio-visual journey across continents, alluding to diasporas, the Ottoman Empire, Eliot's The Waste Land and more

Winner of the IDFA (International Documentary Festival Amsterdam) 2023 DocLab award for Creative Technologies.

Borderline Visible, created by the artist Ant Hampton, begins as a journey from Lausanne to Izmir in 2022 by two artist friends, one of whom experiences health problems halfway and has to stop. As the other continues towards Turkey, suddenly alone, the narration grows into a moving and troubled psychogeography as it shifts between "we" and "I," present and past, piecing together value and meaning from the very human ruins of aspiration, history and language. Ant Hampton's careful, at times miraculous, process of reconnection gradually lights up a constellation: voices and earthquakes, the Sephardic diaspora, tourism and forced movement, breakdowns and dementia, the end of the Ottoman Empire, swifts and swallows, Eliot's The Waste Land and an urgent insight into hidden atrocities at the edge of Europe being funded from its center. Borderline Visible is the first in the Time Based Editions series where an audio track--triggered by a QR code--combines narration, soundscape and instructions that guide you over a given time through the book. Ant Hampton (born 1975) is a British German performance artist and writer. His work since 1999 has often involved guiding performers and audiences through unrehearsed situations and interactive relations using automated devices. Together with David Berge, he cofounded Time Based Editions in 2023.