“A Romanian citizen, travelling from the US to Germany via the Netherlands, Borcila was detained and subsequently deported from the Amsterdam, Schiphol airport. She was travelling with a Schengen visa with entrance in Germany, and when transferring at Schiphol she was stopped at a passport checkpoint. Border control staff claimed that there were irregularities with her visa, and also with her carry-on luggage: Her bag contained a series of sculptural chocolates she had made commemorating illegal border crossing performances. These were to be presented at a conference at her German destination. “The border guards”, Borcila comments, “had little sense of humour about these art objects, which were promptly confiscated along with just about all my other possessions”. She was detained for 3 days and then deported. For the next few years she was unable to obtain a visa to the Schengen area. Her contribution to the easyCity project [in Amsterdam] was a video made from footage shot surreptitiously in the airport as she was denied entrance, looking down through the glass walls of the immigration detention centre at the See-Buy-Fly shopping area. […] Unable to obtain a Schengen visa ,she could not attend the easyCity action herself, but instead sent the video generated through the very conditions that ensured her exclusion.
[…] Amongst the other works and jams presented in the shop, Borcila’s video stands out as it relates not only to the construction of internal urban features but also to the externality of privileged spaces. In Borcila’s case this externality was manifested through the terms of her nationality. Her video asserts the precariousness of those rendered outside the privileged spaces of advanced capitalism, and perhaps more, those denied smooth passage through the flows that connect these. As a depiction of the neoliberal city the easyCity action thus also brought attention to the global order of which western urban centres are part, and indeed, function as privileged nodal points in”.
from Tone Huse, easyCity; Art and Spatial Politics (excerpt)