Parallel Borders is a roving laboratory for interdisciplinary and cross-cultural research created as an artist / curatorial partnership between Mark Mangion and Malta Contemporary Art.

A series of collaborations will be initiated in 2012, generating a discourse with a diversity of specialists invited to contribute to an explorative platform of site-specific fieldwork in various regions around the world, questioning ideas of cross-field dialogue through visual culture. An ambitious, epic global journey will be embarked upon, experimenting with the aesthetics and subversion of archiving and documentation, historical and anthropological mapping, storytelling and geo-political cultural examination against a backdrop of a deflating capitalism and technological revolution and ideas and disputes of borders; physical, territorial, scientific, philosophical.

This network of collaborators including professionals, academics, skilled workers, craftspeople and scientists among others, will be invited to collectively question and respond to a predefined thematic trajectory ranging from War & Politics to Science & Technology to the Environment and the Universe, culminating in a series of texts, films, events, photographs, sound works, drawings, collected and constructed objects, web based structures, performances, public actions, workshops, architectural and digital models. For each thesis the selected collaborators will re-examine the parameters, patterns and crossovers of their own individual field of research within a group dynamic and connected to place, time and culture; the artist’s role becoming that of collaborative maker / curator: mediator.

Parallel Borders commences with 2012 - Wealth, Security, Prediction, Crisis and the deflation of Capitalism. The Greek Tragic Comedy, a collaboration between an unusual and surprising selection of researchers culminating in a curated collection of actions, objects, films, and images, forming the foundation for a series of site-specific public interventions. Questions of social and transcultural context will be investigated through the collective effort and notions of community. Political in scope and confronting remnants of conflict, power and colonial tradition, stage two repositions each project via ideas of the pilgrimage to the shrine, re-contextualizing the non-art, site-specific, non-western across a parallel border to a Western visual environment.

An extensive and interactive website will be developed as a virtual documentation of Parallel Borders and a publication will relocate each collaboration in a series of books.