This symposium explores the relationship between avant-garde art and the notion of the borderland, focusing primarily on the period from the turn of the twentieth century to the Second World War, while also considering its continuation after 1945 in what is sometimes termed the neo-avant-garde. While the borderland is understood here in the geographical sense of a territory surrounding the line separating two countries, the symposium also welcomes proposals that approach the borderland as a more conceptual space: a dynamic, shifting, and negotiated zone between two self-differentiating entities, whether political, cultural, or ideological. Borderlands can thus serve as spaces of encounter, mixing, possibility, hybridity, and conflict, not only in terms of how communities and individuals relate to themselves and to one another, but also as a conceptual framework through which knowledge production and dialectical tensions may be examined.

The title, Sitting on the Fence, points directly to moments of artistic, discursive, or historiographical uncertainty, doubt, ambiguity, mixture, conflict, inconclusiveness, impasse, friction, and epistemic indeterminacy. The symposium seeks to explore the avant-garde in such moments, asking how art from borderlands either fails to register the complexity of these spaces or actively engages with their tensions. It examines how art from borderland contexts denies, overlooks, registers, responds to, manifests, navigates, expresses, embodies, illustrates, reveals, or indeed generates moments of indecisiveness, ambiguity, hybridity, fluidity, conflict, or friction, whether between communities, narratives, identities, or political imaginaries. The symposium therefore treats the failure of art to represent such phenomena as equally important to examine as its capacity to render them visible.

Keynote speakers: 
1 October 2026: Dr. Sebastián Pineda Buitrago, University of Veracruz
2 October 2026: Dr. Katia Pizzi, University of London