A Roadside Philosophy

While reflecting on this essay, I recalled a very specific moment in 2010, when I sat with a fellow photographer and colleague, Uche James Iroha, in his apartment. We were about to take off on the second edition of the Trans-African Road Trip, which had its debut the year earlier. I was fishing around for a formal name for the project as it became obvious that it carried prospects beyond a one-off event. Then he said, “How about calling it Invisible Borders”? Without further illustration, the logic was clear. Yes, that’s it! It’s a name that anchors the inkling both on an ontological and phenomenological level.

What is Invisible Borders in the context of a supposed post-colonial/modern world by which societies, identities, and relations are constructed? From the onset of the project, we felt deeply that an artistic project that takes as premise the allegory of journeys through roads across imposed cartography is much more than highlighting the existential and bureaucratic conundrums of nationalism.

The Invisible Borders Trans-African Road Trip project, as an artistic proposal and enactment, was founded in 2009, in the first decade of the 21st century; coming off the heels of a previous century jam-packed with movements and discursive interventions that focused largely on reforming and unhinging sociopolitical tethers of colonialism. But as artists and thinkers who were so blessed to have entered the fray after the likes of Frantz Fanon, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison, who, through their work, opened our gaze to the psychosomatic implications of colonialism, the Trans-African Road Trip project was more than a discourse. It was the very form of emancipation without the usual burden to make it into a political justification, also known as activism. But most importantly, we knew that to get to the heart of the matter, this project must return us, over and over, to the road.

Thus when in 2014, in a conversation with Okwui Enwezor — who by then had been appointed the Artistic Director of the 56th edition of the Venice Biennale — referred to the sense of an “interminable archive” as a way of grasping the scope of the Invisible Borders Project, he was indeed putting his finger on a century’s pulse. This perspective would inform the installation of the project in the International exhibition section of the Biennale in 2015.

It’s been 16 years since the first edition of the project. As I write, we are planning the 11th edition to take place sometime in 2026.

What has become most apparent through these years of enactment is that the invisible Border is first and foremost that which alienates the self from the other-self, that is, from the world. In other words, the deep almost indelible wound of colonialism (out of which modernity, as we know it, was birthed) is the indoctrination and willful reinforcement of the illusion of separation. This illusion is like an ossified, static image held in place by myriad tentacular machineries aimed at giving it a structural integrity. It is the graven image of a world that has mistaken its hangover from colonialism as modernism.

So far, we have travelled across villages, towns, cities and countries in Africa, Europe, Asia. This colonial-image plays incessantly in a loop — like a broken record.

It is important for the reader to grasp this illustration of the static image, for as photographers, writers, filmmakers and researchers, the domain of intervention is within this image. Thus, from the onset, we were aware of how one can easily be entrapped by the label of an “image maker” or a “story teller”. It is not so much about telling a story as it is about demystifying the image. It is not about proliferation of images or the propagation of more stories of crossings. It is rather about inhabiting the space between preconceived projections of the world and freshly acquired perception. It is both an enactment and a diagnosis of the border condition.

Much like Plato’s allegory of the cave, what is at stake is not merely the presence of images, but the conditioning of perception through which the image acquires the force of reality. The shadows on the wall are not simply illusions; they are the world as it is known, repeated to the point of conviction. In this sense, the colonial project did not only redraw maps or impose borders upon land; it instituted a way of seeing, a grammar of perception through which the world is apprehended as already divided, already named, already ordered. What persists, then, is not the border as line, but the image of separation as truth. One moves, travels, crosses territories, yet remains bound to a field of perception that has been naturalized into unquestioned reality. The cave, in this regard, is no longer a place one is confined to, but a condition one inhabits — an ambient image that sustains itself through repetition, circulation and structural reinforcement, rendering its own artifice invisible.

What history does such a gaze produce? Is it not a history validated by exclusion; a history in which brute force appears as destiny, and violence as the logic of order? Such a history is not born of relation, but of the object-based gaze — the illusion that people, places and things stand apart and thus can be stacked hierarchically or pitted against each other. The so-called “historical figures” are not the origin of the world they claim to shape, but the fruit of a perception already conditioned by separation.

In Hegel’s lectures on the Philosophy of History, he says Africa “is no historical part of the World” and, furthermore, has “no movement or development to exhibit.” From this standpoint, it becomes obvious that the proposal and enactment of the Invisible Borders Trans-African Project is ahistorical. It neither seeks nor claims a seat in history. It does not ask to be included. It simply asks to exist. Like a pocket of air moving in wind, it inhabits the in-between space, the vortex of paradox that characterizes the border condition. It is a deliberate reorientation of the frame of reference away from a notion of history whose insistence on linearity and exclusivity is also its violence.

One such frame of reference can be found in this saying from the Igbo language of present-day Eastern Nigeria: where one thing stands, something else stands beside it. At first glance, this may appear to resonate with the Newtonian worldview illustrated in the law of motion, where action is met with equal and opposite reaction. However, the Igbo adage speaks to a different ontological premise. Before something becomes opposite to the other, it already stands beside it. Relation or equality, here, does not begin in collision, but in co-presence. This view renders hierarchy redundant and sets the conditions for the poetics of relation.

Similarly, we find a reverberation of this view in the work of the Indian philosopher and spiritual teacher, Jiddu Krishnamurti. In the 1955 compilation of his lectures, The First and Last Freedom, he says, “until I, in my relationship to you, understand myself, I am the cause of chaos, misery, destruction, fear, brutality.”

This speaks to the relation between the self and other-self. Holographic in disposition, it projects into the world and leaves coagulated residues as stark lines of demarcations and enclosures.

Rather than speak of a post-colonial present, let us consider the colonial-modern. Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first Prime Minister and President, a leading Pan-African theorist, and a major figure in the African independence movement, understood the consequence of colonialism to be neocolonialism, the last stage of imperialism. But I would argue that what follows, as the trailing echo or the stubborn insistence of colonialism, is a colonial-modern world. What does this mean? It means that the entire planet — its ecology, its consciousness, its psyche — is caught in the bind of the colonial-image. The consequence is an enclosure, a stifling of movement, exemplified in border dynamics both within the self and in the world. No one is exempt. That is the reality of the world today.

We live within a “double bind” between colonizer and colonized which neutralizes any safe projection of duality and turns one into the doppelgänger of the other. The invisible border is the inner workings of this bind — fraught with tension, thistles of inconsistency and the dilemma of the unknown. Yet a border is also, as a consequence of our identifications, a site of encounter. To humanize the border is to enter the road, and to bring movement back into the static image enshrined by a colonial gaze which, in totality, informs identities. Thus, the work of those who resonate with the premise of the Trans-African Project operates on the level of a deep devotion to understanding oneself in relation with the other and the world, bearing in mind that what one sees is not an “elsewhere” separated from the “here,” but rather a relationship asking for renewed measure of perception. In this sense, one’s movement through space and time is not a matter of accumulation, conquest, or arrival, but of learning to see through the inherited reflections that hold the world apart. To resonate with this premise is to move with the awareness that where one stands, something else already stands beside it, and that the road is not a passage toward distance, but a return to relation.

Emeka Okereke
Berlin
March 2026

This essay is written for publication in the issue La Biennale di Venezia’s quarterly magazine, entitled Hemispheres.