There are over 30 physical barriers operating as a blunt and often ineffective tool to addressing the issue of disputed territories, the movement of goods and the migration of people.
Throughout history, artificially created physical barriers have been the imbedded visual representation of social and political impasse. As a method of creating obstruction to waring faction; or military ingress, the wall has a place in our violent history. However, in contemporary society, this spatial approach and thus manifestation of the barriers can be seen as a physical embodiment of the limited ideologies which facilitate their creation. The construction, stated reason and operational mandates all relate to the political philosophy which spawned and validates the financing of their creation, despite their limited operational effectiveness.
This blunt tool received a powerful endorsement from candidate and then president Donald Trump. The support that he received for the proposal of a wall… where there is already a wall… to overt a problem which would be almost completely unaffected by the upgrade of a wall… is a bizarre but prescient segway into the problematic politics of the situation, as opposed to even the most conservative notion of necessity.
As such, these walls are the embodiment of statement. Literally a message from the incumbent (state) management authority… from one side of the barrier to the other. Once erected, they are hard to remove as they become the de facto physical condition and once erected social, political and economic decisions operate around them, always making them much harder to remove than erect in the initial flurry to overt the unknown or outsider.
