Unstable Geographies, Multiple Theatricalities

Abstract

In 2015. Ildikó Rippel and Rosie Garton retraced Lucia’s footsteps. Crossing borders, climbing fences, bleeding, crying, blistering. We walked through the united and borderless Europe, witnessing a post-national utopia, particularly at the borders of Poland and Germany. Once separated by barbed wire, armed border police and animosity this area now runs joint cultural projects, has opened German-Polish Kindergartens, as well as setting up a floating bar on the river Neisse which had formed an insurmountable border for many decades. Whilst we were walking the refugee crises escalated, and elsewhere borders and fences were erected. The escalation of the crisis placed survival, identity and migration at the forefront of the project. The project’s historical and current context of migrant mothers, borders and displacement raises interesting questions with regards to the traditionally gendered assumptions of heroic walking (Heddon 2012).