The last time I remember smiling at a newspaper was three weeks before global headlines were swallowed up by a living organism, when 2020 became annus horribilis (“terrible year”) I was in Dhaka in February working on a new film, and Emeka Okereke and the Invisible Borders team were installing their project at the national Shilpakala Academy. Emeka handed me a copy of The Trans-Bangladeshi,[1] a newspaper published jointly by Invisible Borders Trans-African Organization and Bangladesh’s Pathshala photography school. The immediate sign that something was pleasantly awry was the price—“Taka 0,” a gentle way of announcing a barter or gift exchange. The haunting cover photograph had both the Bangladeshi photographers I knew well (Sayed Asif Ahmed, Sadia Marium, and others) and a team of African writers and photographers who were on their first trip to Bangladesh. Captured by Emeka, the black-and-white image had a sepia sheen that rendered the team members copacetic beyond their passports, differences marked only by small glimmers of local fashion. 

But what is local anyway? In Invisible Borders’ imagination, a shawl was equally likely to be a roadside find in Lagos or a gift from a Dhaka friend. In its staging, it also reminded me of Okereke’s images for an African road-trip (Dilemma of a New Age II, 2012)—the gas station attendant holding a petrol pump nozzle to his head, as if to say to a rapacious world: you’re trying to kill me. The lead news story in this Africa-Asia joint newspaper was Kay Ugede’s “Let’s Try On New Clothes.” The rest of the newspaper alternated between English articles and Bangla texts from the local artists. Again, if to say: those who know will read, we don’t always translate to make it easy. Three weeks later, much of the world would go into the long lockdown—Invisible Borders’ beautiful project to break down checkpoints between African nations, and between Africa and Asia, suddenly faced a new opponent. Since March 2020, a hygiene regime has been attached to surveillance and border controls, the global movement of humans is seemingly at a hard stop. This is a necessary time to insist that the idea of a Trans-African Organization must not be allowed to perish in this pandemic. A dream of open borders—through journeys, stories, and images, between African and Asian nations—stands in contrast to the nightmares that have gripped our lives, accelerated by autocratic dictators, North and South.

For a decade, Invisible Borders has been committed to a journey that surpasses the incentive-reward system of contemporary art circulation. The making of work can be as heterogeneous and universal as we wish and will it. However, the majority of capital flowing around art distribution remains concentrated in Europe and North America. Because money always shouts, its selections and favorites try to stand in for all of contemporary art. A familiar journey is for the artist from the Global South to gain legibility and accelerated circulation through recognition by Northern gatekeepers. Even the performance of authentic forms is striated with this wondering: which audience matters? From the beginning, Invisible Borders and its expanding team have insisted that the dialogue is between the many Souths, and not for a Western audience. In particular, the collective has taken on the format of the long-form road trip as a building block, focused on pulling together African nations through their peoples, rather than an obstinate state machinery. 

Lagos, Nigeria has been the nerve center of the project since 2009, but from there the road trips radiate outward across the continent as part of a trans-African exchange. Starting as a project where artists took photographs as they crossed into each country, the project expanded to encompass literature, film, and performance art. Individual projects, such as a celebrated Lagos to Maputo 2018 road trip, stretched into 50 days with equal numbers of entries, from exuberant music videos to a sober assessment of Rwanda’s post-genocide futurity. While real-time sharing and video diaries are a visible aspect of how the project makes itself known during and after a journey, this project is not concerned with the over-production of material and archives. Look closely at the mission statement and the emphasis is unmistakable: “collective journey of the participating artists who, during their momentary stops in capital cities”—the long travels are the point, not the arrival or destination.

This is not a project focused on grand outcomes or tangible milestones, as those favored by NGO-modeled arts funding today. A great volume of work is produced, but communications underscore the transformations and friendships among the artists on the long-distance bus. This is present especially in the focus on the after-life of the journey, when artists return to their own countries and cities. The focus on borders as lines to break and overcome gives Invisible Borders a possibility to create something new outside the nation-state form, and it is best expressed in the psyche and artworks made by the alumni of this project many months after the road trip has ended, when they are back in their own homes. Except the idea of a “home” in Africa has permanently changed, because of what the artists learnt from each other, in ways that are both symbiotic and friction-laden. The Congolese artist finds herself unable to stereotype Nigeria’s oil-riches, and the Cameroonian photographer is haunted by the energy of a Kigali that defies Hollywood’s Hotel Rwanda. Invisible Borders meticulously documents all works produced with different do-it-yourself (DIY), scrappy website hosting platforms (blogspot being the earliest) that also stand as testament to a decade of technology shifts. Follow projects since 2009 and you can trace a repeated, looping, and accumulative line of movement, and a focus on what happens to the travelers afterward.

I started with a memory from Bangladesh, and this was not a random itinerary for the Invisible Borders Trans-African concept—rather, it universalized their idea of Africa. In 1972 Walter Rodney published the iconic How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Fifty years later, Invisible Borders audaciously proposes the contrapuntal arc: How Africa might show a path for building warm neighbors instead of hostile walls. After traversing the African continent, the project expanded to post-war Sarajevo for a road trip between Africa and Europe’s former Socialist Bloc periphery. In a similar spirit, the team traveled in 2020 from various African countries to a central airport, and from there to Bangladesh. Finally, with a group of Bangladeshi artists, they set out to one of Asia’s most heavily militarized map lines—the Bangladesh-India border, a site of shootings and killings by Indian soldiers of desperate Bangladeshi migrants. As anthropologist Delwar Hussain outlined in Boundaries Undermined (2013), this border is the site of lethal military surveillance, and at the same time it is a bustling microscopic scale city on a border line, where sexuality, commerce, bureaucracy, and leisure collide and overlap. It is this perpetual push-pull between danger and promise that is captured in Invisible Borders’ joint project produced as a newspaper and exhibition this spring. 

The spirit of more roads / less walls is captured decisively in the images and prose that Invisible Borders has left for Bangladeshi artists to savor and build on in the coming years. The Islamic preacher who tries to pronounce Nigeria as “Nai-je-ria,” the young villagers who ask with naivete about dreadlocks, and finally Innocence, a member of the road trip, patiently obliging requests for selfies from villagers who are meeting African artists for the first time. 

Finally, I treasure a quiet image of three young Indians at the Hili border checkpoint between India and Bangladesh, eagerly snapping mobile phone images of the artists. Their easy smiles and enthusiasm stand in sharp rebuke to the heavily armed border guards of their own nation. 

Naeem Mohaiemen (b. London, works in Dhaka and New York) combines essays, films, photography, and installations to research socialist utopias, incomplete decolonization, shifting borders, unreliable memory, and family histories. He is author of Midnight’s Third Child (Nokta, forthcoming) and Prisoners of Shothik Itihash (Kunsthalle Basel, 2014); co-editor (w/ Eszter Szakacs) of Solidarity Must be Defended (Tranzit/ Van Abbe/ Salt/ Tricontinental/ Asia Culture Institute, forthcoming); and co-editor (w/ Lorenzo Fusi) of System Error: War is a Force that Gives us Meaning (Sylvana, 2007). His work is in the permanent collection of Kiran Nadar Museum, Delhi; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Art Institute of Chicago; British Museum, London; and Sharjah Art Foundation, United Arab Emirates. He was a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow and a finalist for the 2018 Turner Prize. Naeem has a PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University and is currently Research Fellow at Heyman Center, Columbia University, and Senior Research Fellow (non-residential) at Lunder Institute of American Art, Colby College, Maine.