Walls, structures of division and separation, systems of confinement, markers of property, obstacles to movement, channels of passage; walls trace lines of sovereignty and frame the government of populations. They are, along with the paths that they trace, the most ubiquitous feature of human space. Pierced as they may be by pathways, gates and windows, such points of passage rarely leads to anything other than more walls, like a castle with numberless walls and no centre. Their literal and complete physical destruction is impossible, their transgression often only the occasion for new walls. To move beyond them calls for a gesture of a different order, a movement of blindness, an apprehension and agency that takes the wall as a space of possibility, as a non-wall upon which new forms emerge: the wall as point of passage, as a frame which is in turn framed, without end, bringing thereby an end to or suspending all frames. The wall becomes a canvas, a field, a stage: life spills out from its frames, moving with surfaces formerly limited to prohibition. Plants overrun them, animals mould them with play and pursuit, and out touch brings to them shape and colour. The walls come to speak of worlds, but unseen. And like children, we again see with surprise.
Plastic bodies: Queering walls, Queering life
(Yves Klein)
Our creativity is potentially boundless; the limits that it encounters are of our own making, rooted in our fears and our oppressions. Nowhere perhaps is this more evident than in/with our bodies. Our freedom extended to them violates, stretches, confounds what we often consider to be the boundaries of the body, its borders, both physical and moral. To freely live them is thus to queer them, that is, to queer ourselves.
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