Border Proxies: The Trips That Never Happened examines the complexity of researching the Southern Lebanese border, situating the subjectivity of the researcher within the process of producing knowledge about it. How can one engage the border while being paranoid about it? And how can the physical separation from it for security reasons suggest a new violent attunement to it? This sculptural and audio response emerges from research that explores the underground aquatic border geography of Lebanon as a site of conflict. Set within a paranoid framework, intertwined with different forms of gap and distance, Jundi looks into the visceral response to this relationship and how it brings back the body into the field through a violent, collapsed intimacy. As a result, he explores the methodology of the "proxy" - an element that could substitute for another - as a deferred attunement to the field.

Having had difficulty accessing the areas close to the Southern border, the artist focuses on a series of interviews with water specialists in these sites and their affect as part of three field trips that never happened.

Focal elements from these conversations, a border wall, a pipeline and a well, are utilized as proxies and a site of seepage between multiple experiences. Through these “proxy” interviews, he draws parallels between the affective dimension of border geographies and the research methodology he develops, where knowledge gaps and paranoia are instrumentalized as a speculative knowing conjured by a not knowing.

Mustapha Jundi is an architect, researcher and Ph.D. candidate at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. His work encompasses the fields of design, visual culture and geography and his doctoral research investigates borders and the underground in the context of Lebanon.