TAUSEND METER [Thousand Meters] shows a steel fence of 1000 meters length packed into a reservoir of 4 meters height. The installation formed part of the Urban Art Festival “Berlin Unlimited” and was on view in the Stadtgarten Moabit. Through compression the linearity of the fence is transformed into a compact block. The three hundred layers of overlapping identical grids reveals a new spatial structure inside the cube.
What is on this side of the fence and what is on the other side, the familiar and the unfamiliar, dissolve in the depth of the installation. The viewer is able to take an in-between position and is visually drawn into the infinite spatial grid of the reservoir. Every fence is the manifestation of a border; the fence makes the border physically perceptible. The presence of a border is the basis for the constitution and differentiation of space. It allows the detachment of one from the other. But inside the border things are also connected. There is no this side without the other side of the fence. The border as well as its spatial manifestation as fence are ambivalent constructions. They possess an inner dynamic. Their regulation as well as the erection of fences in order to draw borders are classic means of exercising power. The drawing of borders and acts of surmounting borders alternate in cycles.
“One is never installed within transgression, one never lives elsewhere. Transgression implies that the limit is always at work.“
[Derrida, Jacques, Positions. Transl. by Alan Bass, University of Chicago Press: London / Chicago, 1982. P.