Limes Bio-Border/ Park/Spektakel

“To the east of Neusiedler Lake, in the so-called Seewinkel region, deployment operations of the Austrian armed forces (“Aktion Limes”) and the NATIONAL park service co-mingle creating an extraordinary spectacle. Local stories, biology and visual and acoustic signals generated by both environmentalists and the border police can easily be confused with each other in the landscape, which leads to the disappearance of a global dimension behind national ritual. “Nature” serves as an unsuspicious ideological resource. This construction will reveals itself in the following upcoming course of events: In a few years, Fortress Europe will shift its line of demarcation further to the east. Here as well as there, limes refers not to the local territory but to the regions and populations thousands of kilometers to the east and south.

Landscape tableaus form the visual material from which an ethnographic investigation of the border region begins. The idyllic integrity of “free nature” is deconstructed by a narration punctuated with quotes. Sound and text reposition these stereotypical images back into the context of political reality.” (wr)