Borderline Visible is the first in a planned series of “live books” known as Time Based Editions. These books combine photographs and audio to take you on a journey that interweaves history, autobiography, literature, and an urgent investigation into hidden atrocities that have been perpetuated on the margins of Europe. It begins as a journey undertaken by two artists and friends from Lausanne in Switzerland to the ancient city of Izmir, once known as Smyrna, on Turkey’s Aegean coast. Health problems force one of them to stop after they reach Greece; the other continues, suddenly alone. Switching from “we” to “I,” from the present to the past, from the personal to the political, Ant Hampton attempts to give meaning to the all-too-human consequences of ambition, language, and history. Gradually he discovers a complex web of Jewish history involving the end of the Ottoman Empire, Sephardic diasporas, rumours, earthquakes, tourism and forced migration, sanity and dementia, swallows and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.

The audio features of Borderline Visible are accessed through a QR code. But often it is presented collectively as a live event, each person holding a book, guided by an immersive soundtrack from surrounding speakers, and occasionally plunged into darkness. People go on the journey together, flipping back and forth through the pages of the book, comparing images, closing and opening their eyes, drawing lines on the maps with a finger, guided by an audio track that combines narration, music, field recordings, and instructions that guide you through. Borderline Visible was introduced at the 2023 IDFA DocLab Festival, where it won the Special Jury Award for Creative Technology.

Ant Hampton, born 1975 in Switzerland, is a British-German artist, writer and performance-maker. His work since 1999 has often involved guiding people through unrehearsed situations and interactive experiences with automated devices. His work, though varied in tone and content, has consistently played with a tension between liveness and automation. Most often, this has involved guiding people through unrehearsed performance situations, and since 2007 it has included the audience itself within structures loosely defined as Autoteatro. He made his first works under the name Rotozaza, a performance-based project that ended up spanning theatre, installation, intervention, and writing. His three collaborations with Tim Etchells are participatory experiences for two at a time, combining audio with different engagements with the page: text and silent reading (The Quiet Volume, 2010); archive photography (Lest We See, 2015); and mark-making and erasure (Not to Scale, 2020). In more recent years his practice has expanded into a wider investigation of risk-taking and leaps of faith. His “Autoteatro” works tour internationally in more than 80 language versions, some of them without anyone needing to travel.

In September 2023 he co-founded Time Based Editions, a series of “live books” binding print to time, merging sound with paper. His co-founder, David Bergé, is founding director of Photographic Expanded Publishing Athens, a publishing project that currently produces the imprints kyklàda.press as well as Time Based Editions. Borderline Visible is its first publication.

IN THE MEDIA

“In his beautiful installation/performance Borderline Visible, Ant Hampton uses a journey from Lausanne to Izmir to reflect on migration, diaspora and genocide throughout history. . . . The bulk of the piece sets up a deeply compelling psycho-geographical framework that is continually enriched by Hampton’s searching mind and razor-sharp political rage.”

—Theaterkrant