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We are always too early and too late. A threshold isn’t a line, border, or frontier. It is passageway, phase shift, and drift: time thickens, space trembles, the possible wavers. It’s the event before and after the event, the flicker before form stabilizes and the atmosphere it leaves in its wake—when nothing has ended, and nothing has begun, but everything has changed.
This programme is devoted to exploring the politics and poetics of thresholds in all their variations and declensions. Thresholds don’t just shape our sense of history—they pulse along the field of perception, shifting the relation between what rises to the surface and what evades and eludes detection. Above: the visible, the declared, the sanctioned. Below: the residual, the remainder, the disavowed. Power is one name for that threshold below which undercurrents move. Infrastructure crumbles from beneath while the spectacle of order holds above. Climate events smoulder underground before they erupt into storm. Finance skims the surface, extracting value from unseen circuits of labour, mineral, waste. Surveillance devices scan the face while the infrapolitical movements of ungovernable change slip out through cracks unknown. What hovers just above the threshold of awareness can be felt without being named, a pressure, a tremor. What lurks below, imperceptible, exerts its own force, stealing away back and forth.
On an earth at loose ends with itself, this programme moves with the perpetual movement of before and after, above and below, inside and out, caught in the vertigo of transitions that refuse to resolve and have never quite started: the planetary catastrophe that has already begun, the political collapse that is always underway, the histories that refuse to pass and the futures that never came and feel already past. We stand where histories unspool into the unknown, where planetary shifts undo the world at its seams, where political chaos tilts toward trajectories unthought and practices unforetold. In this field of irreversible transformations, nothing holds fast and nothing stands still. The ground erodes beneath our feet, and what once seemed stable is now scaffolding over the abyss. This is a programme of crossings with no return, of shifts that don’t reset, where instability becomes our permanent condition, our horizon and our home. How do we reckon with the damage done, the futures undone, and the irreversible mess that is the present tense? What might it take to think, gather, elaborate social life at a threshold?
