Caroline Arhuero

How can we approach the question of borders and identity in a time of deterritorialization, dematerialization, and artificial intelligence, within a complex and ever-shifting geopolitical context where Western, Eurocentric, and neo-sovereignist cartographies are being deconstructed? It is clear that we are living in an era marked by the vulnerability of institutions and doctrines—often undermined by financial, political, and identity-based alliances—which now face the upheaval brought about by technological revolutions and shifts in power structures. Institutions, including museums, are overwhelmed and burdened by the question of borders and new alliances. They are unable to offer a sustainable response, caught between the desire for a “didactic” classification system—constructed to be universally understood—and the risk of slipping into a situational, opportunistic political-cultural gesture that lacks the reflexivity advocated by Hal Foster: “In this text, I emphasized that reflexivity is necessary to guard against excessive identification with the Other (through personal involvement, self-distancing, etc.), which could compromise that otherness.“¹ The word “border” comes from a lexical field related to war, and more generally – to organization, a form of legitimacy and stability that creates a sense of security and belonging. In a world of dematerialization and immediacy, it is becoming increasingly difficult – without being contradictory – to maintain a “categorical” cultural narrative, without it excluding the Other, his perception and his differences… Therefore, it is fair and important to recognize the significance of BUNA – a polymorphic event, unfolding in a variety of spaces – increasingly diverse and often devoid of traditional divisions. A festival that takes place in a country where history and geography reveal the significance of cultural syncretism. A country where a figure like Yulia Krasteva emphasizes the theme of exile and offers a reading of the Woman/Man division, going beyond the boundaries of sexual categories – and thus opening up questions of subjectivity, identity and otherness. And in a coastal, university and port city like Varna, which – as Gyz La Rivière explains in her book New Neapolis² – with each port concentrating diversity and rethinking the concept of community. In a humanity reshaped by new technologies, it will be fascinating to see how artists born or based in a place symbolic of cultural abundance can, through the diversity of creative tools (languages, images, sound, AI, dance, performance, etc.), and through a shared subject that resists established classifications, express this zero degree of discovery and otherness in the era of 5.0. As Coco Fusco explains in her 1994 essay The Other History of Intercultural Performance, from 1994: “Our project aimed to focus on the ‘zero degree’ of intercultural relations in order to determine the origin of the debates that make ‘discovery’ and ‘otherness’ two interconnected issues.“³ —Caroline Arhuero ¹ In the Face of History. The Artist as Ethnographer, or Does the 'End of History' Mean the Return of Anthropology?, Hal Foster, Flammarion, Centre Georges Pompidou, 1996, pp. 498–505 ² New Neapolis, Gyz La Rivière, Trichis Publishing, 2017 ³ Art and globalization, an anthology with texts from 1950 to the present day, edited by Sophie Orlando under the supervision of Catherine Grenier, The Other History of Intercultural Performance,, 1994, Coco Fusco, Centre Pompidou, 2013, pp. 146–152