Citizenship as we understand it today has a clear territoriality: one is or is not a citizen of any given territory one stands on. Such a territoriality was established almost exclusively through violence, in particular through European colonial violence against the indigenous populations of the five other continents. In Mirages de la Carte (The Map’s Mirages), Hélène Blais describes how the borders of colonial Algeria with its neighboring countries (five of them also being under French colonial rule) were established in places where the Sahara Desert had served as a diffuse permeable boundary until then. “Making the World a Better Place” is a humorous reflection on what the world would be like without colonial Europe. The time necessitated to notice what is missing might be proportional to the viewer’s relationship to this small part of the world responsible for most of the structural necropolitics at the global scale. If we are to follow Martiniquais poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant in his descriptions of the archipelago’s diffuse boundaries as paradigm of sovereignty, we can imagine a world with no exclusive citizenship on decolonized Turtle Island, Hawai’i, Kanaky, Palestine, etc.

Léopold Lambert

Léopold Lambert is a trained architect and the editor-in-chief of The Funambulist, a printed+online magazine dedicated to the politics of bodies. His work through the various media of magazines, books, articles, podcast, cartography, and photography consists in articulating a discourse about architecture’s inherent violence and its political instrumentalization, in particular in Palestine and in France. leopoldlambert.net | thefunambulist.net | @TheFunambulist_