\Diango HernándezMarina30.04. - 04.06.2016

An island is a fixed unit. Unlike nation states on the continent, it requires no territorial definition, naturally isolated from the rest of the world by the sea.

Accordingly, the only real borders are those on the level of the elements, whereas political boundaries are based upon invented systems and a balance between countless cultural mechanisms is needed to sustain them. By contrast, the clear-cut geographical unity of a territory constitutes a concentric situation in which cultural attention focuses less on the peripheral external edges and the associated constant differentiation of the Self from the supposed Other and rather on the coherent unit of its own culture and its internal heterogenity.

On the one hand, this detachment from the world creates the idea of the island as a paradisical place of freedom, within whose easily surveyed bounds it may be possible to dream up and potentially realise a utopia. Simultaneously, on the other hand, it inevitably creates a longing for confraternisation with the rest of the world.