TRANSIT

Nowa Amerika and Słubfurt are two related activist art projects that are set in the German-Polish borderland. Nowa Amerika is an imagined country, and Słubfurt its capital. This contribution introduces these projects and examines their underlying cosmopolitan principles and their strategies of reality construction and performance. The analysis highlights how Nowa Amerika intervenes in the borderland’s spatial and temporal reality and creates new narratives that challenge established political, cultural, and social boundaries. On the one hand, the projects engage critically with existing borders and produce a cosmopolitan vision for the borderland by playfully subverting the borders of the nation state: They remap the borderland as a shared space, for example, through the creation of new cartographies or by bringing people together to form cross-border networks within the local community. On the other hand, their decided focus on the present and future means that historical context is at times oversimplified or elided, thus blurring the cosmopolitan vision. This article invites thinking about the tensions and difficulties that are embedded in cosmopolitan projects, as well as the challenges and taboos in the relationship between Germany and Poland.