The Liminal

There is a wall. Just a simple wall, it seems—a partition. But if you listen carefully, you can hear voices. An entire community lives in the wall.

The now isn’t working, says the Lebanese-Palestinian-Dutch visual artist Alaa Minawi, and the time for waiting has run out. Humanity can’t seem to live together peacefully, and so he imagines a world in which we live parallel to each other. The earth’s unsatisfied inhabitants flourish in the wall. Outsiders can hear them, but they have no access.

The installation The Liminal is a work-in-progress, which is intended to result in a hybrid performance next year with the working title No Man’s Land. The greater the conflict between neighboring countries, the larger the no man’s land between them becomes.

And, Minawi argues, if you put all the no man’s land together, it becomes the largest state in the world. What would happen if those who no longer want to be complicit in the current reality were to claim it?

Winner of the Film Fund DocLab Interactive Grant 2024.