Vala Schriefer

The Atlas of the Stranger

Here are pages from an atlas of a world formed by natural expression of movement, a world whose core is hospitality. In Achille Mbembe’s lecture “The Idea of a Borderless World” he explores a utopian model of the world which realizes the Kantian thought that the earth is a possession common to all human beings. “Circulatory and pendular migrations would be the norm,” Mbembe says. We should recover the utopian concept of a borderless world, “at the service of an idea of the world that is premised on the project of relationality, relations, as opposed to the project of essence.”

Using Homer’s Odyssey and the fragmented character of Odysseus, I consider hospitality as the remedy for an internally divided identity—divisions which today are the result of the nation-state system with its strict separations and ever-digitalizing border security governance. A utopia where borders act as points of encounter, where hospitality is the key virtue, and the stranger is an essential figure, means envisioning a geography in flux, a geography which responds to the gestures of the human soul.

Gouache and colored pencil on paper, 2021