Bordered Lives

About Bordered Lives

The experience of detention from the perspective of the immigrant, drawing on the fields of art, design, and criminology.

Drawing on original documents, photographs, and detainee artwork, Bordered Lives offers a unique insight into the experience of immigration detention in the United Kingdom. With interdisciplinary backgrounds in art, design, and criminology, the authors present views of everyday life under this form of border control. In offering a glimpse within these hidden sites, they explore fundamental questions about coercion, censorship, and control, as well as belonging and resistance.

This book introduces the Immigration Detention Archive and reflects on the conditions under which art is supposed to be produced (and is undermined) in institutional spaces. Mixing shadow puppetry, photographic slides, video, architectural models, and spoken word, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll’s performance Men in Waiting presents the effects of indeterminate detention, bureaucratic indifference, and banality on the subjectivity of the incarcerated.