UN[dis]CRIMINATE

NO MORE BEYOND

by Matthias Kispert

No More Beyond is a video essay about boundaries filmed in the city of Melilla, a Spanish enclave in northern Morocco, where 11.5 km of heavily patrolled triple wire fence separate EU territory from migrants who are trying to enter. The project takes its title from the city’s motto: Non Plus Ultra. This phrase and its possible readings form the starting point for various operations of collision and collage, performed across three screens with materials including interviews recorded on site, video footage of the city and its surroundings, the architecture of its barriers, and the encampments of those who attack these barriers, as well as extracts from film, advertising, corporate PR, journalism, theoretical writing and historical documentation. 

Constructing lines of flight from these assemblages of materials, No More Beyond hovers between different modes of interpretation, from the poetic to the investigative, from the ambiguous to the polemic, while remaining motivated by a radical questioning of the ethics of segregation, of inside and outside, and a curiosity to lay bare the ideological operations that produce these divisions, as well as the cracks and fissures in European discourses on rights that they betray. No More Beyond takes the boundary not just as the line of separation, but also at the threshold where the violence that sustains inequality erupts and is forcibly revealed.

Camera: Vanessa Bowles, Ghislain Yakam; Location Sound: Matthias Kispert; Fixer: Jesús Blasco Avellaneda; Interviewees: Imad, Jesús Blasco Avellaneda, Donald, Mohammed, Boris, Abou, Abou; Video + Sound Edit: Matthias Kispert; Script: Matthias Kispert; Voiceover: Lucy Ellinson, Vanessa Bowles, Matthias Kispert; Research: Matthias Kispert, Vanessa Bowles; Translation: Vanessa Bowles, Maya Chami, Pierre Bouvier Patron, Blanca Regina, Artur Vidal; Thanks to: Maya Inbar, Angus Carlyle.