Ant Hampton, Borderline Visible

Where to start? Where to end?

These are questions I ask every time I blog, too, but after experiencing Ant Hampton's immersive book-based thingummy Borderline Visible, they're questions that I realize ought to be informing our every moment. Where has this started? Where will it end? Where will it start? Where has it ended?

To the details: Borderline Visible is a large, handsome book that you're not allowed to read, because in fact it's meant to exist in tension (or possibly in companionship?) with a continuous 77-minute audio recording, available via QR code from the publisher's website.

The recording, too, doesn't allow you to see each page, because the narration controls your migration through its pages. You're allowed to flip through the book afterwards, on your own time, but when I did, I felt abandoned, crushed by a chaos that felt nothing like freedom.

The audio recording pushes you backward and forward through the book, asking you to close your eyes, to touch pages, to turn the book upside down; Ant's voice, and the other voices presented along with his, helps you to make sense of these caption-less images of places unknown to you, places and images that would be meaningless without this context. Without his voice, without the gentle but inexorable authority that his voice represents, it's hard to find opportuity or value in the resulting freedom.

More or less, this project represents a record of the consequences of a strange decision made together by Ant and his friend Rita: namely, to learn German rapidly enough to get a passport before Brexit by randomly hitchhiking with German strangers, wherever the drivers would take them. One thing led to another, and the two of them ended up making an art project out of speaking German on stage without full confidence in the meaning of their words. This led, next, to an invitation to do the same in Turkey (although this seems never to have quite come to fruition).

There's no point my explaining or describing the stages that this journey follows between Germany and Turkey (with detours to Lausanne and Greece), or the shapes taken by the mid- or post-journey reflection, because in those stages lies the full experience of this book-based thingummy.

Let me say only that Borderline Visible is about migration, and belonging, and murder by coastguard and army and inaction, and memory, and Alzheimer's, and the echoes across centuries of such things. One section of T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland turns out to lie beneath much of the book, as subtext but sometimes as text itself, Eliot's own words and travels informing Hampton's experience--my experience--the experience of refugees--of the places that this book visits and documents. (My line was "In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing / Over the tumbled graves." That's neither here nor there, and it doesn't matter, but it was.)

And let me say also that immersive wasn't adequate, by the end of the book experience, to describe how I'd felt my time with Borderline Visible had gone. I struggled to accept what has happening for a while, and had trouble getting out of my head, but the last twenty minutes felt like transformed time. This was like nothing else I've ever experienced as a reader, and this book is something that should get passed between readers like a talisman.

Still, and this will sound odd after all that, but I don't think I'll go through the Borderline Visible experience again. For one thing, part of me regrets, maybe even resents, the basic form that Hampton has used for this project. I adore a reading experience that I can prolong, extend, recapture, reinvent simply by going back to the text, and while Borderline Visible is nothing so limited as a movie, it's much more than that, it does share something of a movie's singular linearity. Admittedly, part of me regrets, maybe even resents, that I feel this way, but one's skin is so difficult to shed.

In sum: Borderline Visible is a remarkable project, transformative for at least as long as you're experiencing it, probably more, and it's a glimpse at where art ought to be able to lead us, not just as a civilization but as a species. If you ever get the chance to spend 77 minutes in the company of this book and its recording, you owe it to yourself to give it a try.

I'd love to hear how it goes for you.