A decade of running on the Swiss-Italian border hasn’t made the sensation of crossing invisible lines feel any less strange. Living in the Alps teaches you that borders are real, but also not.

Switzerland is an island inside Europe, with semi-hard boundaries compared to the freedom of movement across the EU. By car, plane or train you’re checked, controlled, surveilled. On-foot in the high mountains, crossing nature’s border, you think you’re not.

But time and experience say otherwise. Hidden cameras, sensors, and tracking systems exist up here too – just as they do in daily life for so many people.

Data trails, linked camera networks, facial recognition technology and gait recognition – all feeding machine learning systems designed to follow our every movement. Developed for war. Sold as security. Used for control. Used for oppression. This work is inspired by surveillance, and the instinct to evade it.

Human intelligence moves faster and with more creativity than its artificial counterpart. Running on a small amount of sugar instead of a reactor, it is free to think, it understands nuance, and it’s not bound to the digital realm. So how do you avoid detection? How do you slip past the systems? Face coverings, umbrellas, dumb watches, redaction, no phones.

A counter culture learning to outpace an Orwellian obsession with AI. Free thinking, free moving. Human.

Security and insecurity prove to be elements of one and the same security mechanism, or of a ‘mode of production associated with a mode of rule that is based on the institutionalisation of insecurity.’

Thought - Security and insecurity are potentially interconnected aspects of a broader security framework, where the management of insecurity is integral to governance and societal control. Security is structured and can often rely on the existence and management of insecurity.