MaryLynne Wrye
With What Eyes? An Artist in the Borderland

In 2018, I took an artist’s residency with a non-governmental organisation (NGO) on the island of Lesvos, Greece. I base this practice-led research on my experiences from 2018-2020 working in the borderland community of Lesvos. As an artist in the borderland, I intended to make work that could testify to the crisis, but, instead, began to explore the idea that testimonial art can raise awareness of events but does not bring the voice of the refugee as a person out of the silence of the borderland.

My research defines the nature of the borderland on Lesvos, how it is a physical space and yet constituted by the diverse community that lives and works there. I discuss the silence that fell across the borderland community resulting from the state of exception (Giorgio Agamben, 2005) in which refugees were detained without recourse and treated as less than human, and by necessity, humanitarian work went underground. Living and working in the borderland allowed me to observe a world built and rebuilt by performances of care and solidarity that left no trace and made no sound.

As I became part of the borderland, I redirected my practice to ask about the role of the artist as borderlander, knowing that an artist who enters the borderland is subject to the voiceless nature of its operation. One cannot enter a silenced place without losing one's voice. One cannot speak for a silenced place from without. I consider the theory that what comes out of silence is my practice, work that is best described as translation rather than testimony.

Classicist Anne Carson reawakens fractured language in her translation of the fragments of Sappho. She uses brackets to denote gaps in the original papyrus, thereby activating and composing the silence. Through my practice, I experiment with the concept of recovering lost and unknown words as translator (Anne Carson, 2009). The artist’s task as translator becomes one of listening, the willingness to fail, to encounter loss, a kinship, a journey (Walter Benjamin, 1999).

The text in I Fly Over refers to my last flight off of Lesvos in March 2020. The video was filmed in Dungeness, a landing point for refugees crossing the English Channel from Calais.

The images in Translate are four photos taken over time of the same view of Turkey from Lesvos. In my mind the element of time carries the words as they travel over the water, some restored, some lost along the way, leaving the borderland behind.