B&A Transition: Minor Voices in Line

For every majority that carries anger, there is a minority that loves within a liminal space.

The Subway,
The Sharing Space,
Anemoia Melodies,
The Bed,
Learning to Stay,
Dreaming,
The Airport,
Apartment Block Hallways,
Existing to Live.

B&A is now investigating the line of separation.

Voice 1 — Woman in bed

“Where are we positioned? A LOVE MANIFESTO in our caresses — that is where the dilemma trapped me.

I was sleeping softly, cradled within my liminal space, when suddenly an apple almost fell on my head. [It is not my intention to steal Newton’s bibliography]. That apple was a heavy magazine on feminism. And yet… I promise… that very night I had also shaved. Can’t find the line separating me from who I may welcome in my own liminality. Maybe beds don’t welcome borders between beings; beds only bring them closer by softening or dissolving their concept of vulnerability. Where I am positioned in relation to your gaze loses all importance, as long as your gaze continues to follow mine, steadily.”

Voice 2 — The conscious dreamer

“I can never see my own body fully. I know only parts of its reflections my sight can catch throughout the day. I try to recognize myself by noticing my gestures mirrored in others' eyes. I know I don't see myself the same way I am seen. I am aware that I don't know myself the way I am known. You would think I know myself better, but I am not honest. I am a stranger to myself.”

Voice 3 — The Somnial Architect

“A line is usually imagined as something precise. A clear division. A border that separates one space from another. Yet the line that shapes minorities' place in society is rarely precise. It trembles. It shifts. It exists less as a mark on the ground and more as a sensation underfoot. To live along this line is to become attentive to it. To feel when it alters. To sense when it expands. Belonging is not granted once and for all: it is measured, reconsidered, quietly adjusted. I learn how far to move from it, how visibly to exist before the boundary or beyond it. Too little essence risks resistance. Too much presence, erasure. The position of the “in-between,” the corridor. The boundary that measures how far one can go before becoming excessive, inappropriate, or disruptive. To be a woman is to feel this measurement.”

Voice 4 — The visitor

“The line decides which bodies become subjects, which remain themes. The suffering that is sublime and the political one. The nude that is art and the bodies that are indecent. The line is rarely drawn on the floor. It is drawn in history. Borders are not edges of land. They are frames. “ 

Voice 2 — “There are gaps between the physical body I inhabit and the body that appears, between my authentic identity and the negotiated one I perform with. This is proven in the way I dress. Contorting my body in twisted angles, staring at a dirty mirror, distorting the image it projects in my messed-up head. Do I make a choice to satisfy myself or society's contradictory opinions? Is my own judgment truly mine, now that it has been influenced by the external? Has it become somebody else’s? Is my own judgment driven by a specific person’s tastes? Sometimes I feel a whole culture has been policing and pressuring me in juxtaposing directions. I can't dress myself without being in front of a line.

Voice 5 — The Seated Traveler

“I’m wondering if I can eat without a table in front of me. The border as the Table, Anthony Bourdain. Food is one of the most political borders that pretends not to be political. Think of the dinner table as a transitional space. The border dissolves faster over shared food than shared ideology. But who gets to be the host? And who is always the guest? Who sits at the head? Who serves? Who is invited? Who is exoticized? Whose food becomes ethnic? Whose becomes refined? Food is never neutral. It carries history, colonization, migration, and survival. Cuisines are adventurous experiences, but some are treated as smells that linger too long to be liked.

You can’t dress yourself without being in front of a line, because fashion is a border you wear. Before you speak, you are interpreted. Before you move, you are categorized. Deeply transitional: it sits somewhere between authenticity and performance. It is where the private self meets the public system. Some forms of fluency are visual. A coat can speak more confidently than we can. Polished shoes do not mispronounce anything. Fabric becomes a dialect that lies in our control. In places where language falters, silhouettes do not. Dressing well begins to feel like drawing your own boundary before someone else draws it for you. When you enter a room where it feels like the air already knows everyone else, there is a particular fatigue that engulfs you. You stand there, technically present, neither excluded nor included. Just... adjacent. We learn early that belonging can be assembled. Fabric helps. Structure helps. For a moment, the repetition of being slightly misplaced dissolves. The mirror becomes reassuring. See? You do pass. But pass as what? What posture should I assume while handling a fork? Which gentle movement should I precisely follow when using chopsticks?”

Voice 2 — “When you become aware that someone is looking at you, you suddenly experience yourself as an object in someone else’s world. I am aware of my posture, body and presentation. My performance, repeated long enough, begins to blur with my identity. I lost access to who I am. I am the performance structured around anticipation. I am trapped in myself with no clue how to escape. I feel this mediation has been taught to me and projected onto me. As a woman, the idea that I am a sight being observed is not accidental. John Berger: Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. A woman learns very early that she will carry the male gaze with her, and the gaze will follow her, even when alone. The idea of fragmentation is not just my personal alienation, but a cultural condition.”

Voice 1 — “I would like to enjoy sushi properly, with suitable chopsticks, even feeding myself with my own feet. After all, there’s only me here. Or is someone spying on me? Does the scene disgust you? Does it arouse you? I couldn’t care less. I like being watched, but only up to a certain point, only through the eyes of a minority that I have carefully chosen with love. Your gaze offends me. Only I exist, and those I choose to exist. This is my boundary of love. Feeding myself here is delightful, before and beyond this line.”

Voice 5 — “Explore: how immigrant food becomes trendy only after being rebranded, how “fusion” is celebrated when done by majority chefs but dismissed when done by minorities, how sharing a meal can feel like crossing into someone’s interior world/space.Something subtle but important: power lies inside hospitality. Bourdain’s power was not in speaking for people but in sitting with them. Eating what they ate, letting the camera linger on hands, on kitchens, on stories. I don’t position myself as a savior but rather as a learner. That’s a different kind of border crossing. The minority is often invited to share but rarely invited to define.”

Voice 4 — “We like to imagine minorities as occupying ‘in-between spaces.” Transitional. Almost hopeful. But the border is not a corridor. It is an enforcement. It is a decision disguised as inevitability. To be a minority is not always to stand between worlds. It is often necessary to be positioned at the margin, for the others to feel accepted at the core, their own core. The majority depends on the minority for definition. Without an outside, the center dissolves. Perspective collapses without a fixed margin. Western art perfected the illusion of a single, stable viewer – that one eye at the center of the world. But who was allowed to stand there?

Voice 5 — “Being an immigrant teaches you that belonging is not automatic. It is negotiated, repeated, earned in small instalments. You do not always know the language; you do not always catch the joke... so you learn to control what you can. Naturally, clothing becomes one of those things. Compliments feel good. Of course they do. “You look like you belong here.” No one says it that directly, but it’s there. It’s there in the nod. It’s there in the double-take. It’s there in the absence of scrutiny. What happens if we stop performing the coherence? Will we become foreign again in high resolution? Clothing has become both comfort and shield. Not because we are hiding, but because we are aware. There is a thin current running through every space; how much difference is acceptable before it becomes excessive? The wardrobe offers coherence, but it also blurs the line. Where does the adaptation end and the self begin? At what point does the version of us that navigates foreign spaces stop being strategy and start becoming identity? We adjust so often that the adjustment begins to feel natural. We call it “personal growth”, or “integration” ... though we do not always admit that sometimes it feels like rehearsal. Perhaps the unsettling truth is that after enough repetitions, the armour fuses with the body, and it fits so well it begins to feel like skin. The line lives between skin and fabric. Between accent and posture. Between the person who feels out of sync and the person who looks composed. No one draws this line. We just feel it. There is no visible barrier in these rooms, no tape on the floor. Just an abstruse narrowing of what feels allowed. The body senses it before the mind can name it. Dressing well isn’t about vanity; it is about alignment. About stepping across a threshold that is already composed.”

Voice 6 — The Man

“The line, the threshold that let us die inside, that condemns us and saves us at the same time. We look for an escape, for a breach in the wall that is precluding us from seeing beyond, from the truth. However, what if that constraining wall is not really a block but a protection? What really scares is what comes after the line. Imagine spending your entire life trying to understand why you don’t feel right, why something is keeping you from knowing the truth, just to discover that the end of the line doesn't really exist.”

Voice 7 — The Unafraid Writer

“What does it mean to be afraid, to look around when you walk? At the age of 20 Shirley Jackson decided that she wanted to write at least one thousand words a day. Anxiety, mental disorders, loneliness. Books that make you feel these feelings. What does the one thousand words have to do with fear? They are the line that Shirley decided to draw to protect herself from the world. Feminism as a personal path.”

Voice 5 — “Consumption has always felt generous from the side that is doing the consuming. Appreciation tastes better when it doesn’t have to account for extraction. We congratulate ourselves for being adventurous eaters. Yet, we forget to ask why certain foods need rebranding before we can swallow them without suspicion.”

Voice 1 — “Sometimes I just wish to be consumed by life. By what happens to me, without thinking about what I could do for it. I can only let myself be consumed through creating, and I’m afraid of refuge. I’m afraid of lines, of definitions, I’m afraid of how you see me. I’m afraid that your gaze might disillusion you once it rests on me for the. But of disillusioning myself, by looking at you, that I fear less. Because I walk knowing I’ve inherited my father’s thoughts, but my mother’s infinite capacity to love — the kind that slips through your hands. And that makes the enchantment endless for me. When I lose that enchantment, it’s because I get lost in my own reflection. Don’t lose your enchantment, don’t force yourself.”

Voice 2 — “When I undress my body, in its most extreme form, I am conscious of the fact that I’m on display. There is difficulty in forgetting. Difficulty in letting go of the idea that in this moment I am an artifact “Seen naked by others and yet not recognized by oneself.” My nakedness estranges me. In the journey of uncovering, I become a sight before becoming a self. The identity in this dynamic becomes predictive, defensive, and strategic. When one experiences harm within intimacy — emotional, psychological, or physical—the nervous system shifts into survival mode. Women are often stuck between love and blindness. A conscious decision or a loss of agency? Compliance as a form of self-betrayal.”

Voice 1 — “You are slowly turning one of my liminal spaces into a refuge. You are disrupting my lines, my measurements, my small adjustments. We placed the crayons on the table, as if laying down weapons of war, and we stopped drawing colored lines of separation. We erased them with our fingers, we crossed them—yours and mine. We made all the marks and lines disappear, because we were already in line—you and me. I am discovering how to undress myself without being in front of a line. You make space for me within your liminality, turning it into something I can inhabit, shaping it around me even when I feel out of place and closed off.”

Voice 2 — "Movement is the only loophole.

In motion, I am duration. I am not gone. I am not finished being seen.

In Dance What Passes Is Time. We Are Eternal (Inspired by exhibition Roppongi Crossing 2025: What Passes Is Time. We Are Eternal.)” 

Voice 3 — “Il sesso inutile… our dear Oriana. This border refuses subtlety. Il sesso inutile shows exactly what happens when we cross lines that were not meant to be crossed. Confrontation does not dissolve the boundary between inside and outside. It exposes it. Fallaci occupied an uncomfortable space that was too forceful for some, too necessary for others. A question that still lingers: how far can a woman go before she is told she has crossed the line? And once that line is crossed, does it break, or does another one quietly take its place?”

Voice 5 — “I cross that invisible threshold daily. After a while, I am not sure whether I am passing through or whether I have learned to live on it. The strangest part is that the armor feels good. It makes me taller, it makes me certain, it makes me visible in the right way. The performance empowers me. But it also reminds me that there was something to perform in the first place. The barrier here does not clang shut. It is subtler. It hums beneath the conversation; who owns the recipe and who owns the narrative? It is possible to be welcomed and remain outside. It is possible to be tasted and still not truly known.”

Voice 6 — “You have been following every brick of that damn wall to find out that you are trapped in a spiral. You are moving in circles that become wider every time you complete a lap. You cannot find a way out. There is an entrance; things can come in and disturb you. You are marginalized, constrained from letting your thoughts and feelings resonate through others’ minds, hurt and wounded by the path, on the verge of accepting your condition of minority.  Then something happens, you find someone along the way, someone like you, who can hear you and talk to you even without ears or a mouth. There is a connection, there is a link. You are both trapped inside, with the only desire to go out, to let others know that you are there, ready to act.”

Voice 4 – “Susan Sontag: interpretation suffocating art. Borders do the same to identity. They interpret differences until they harden into a category. Woman. Immigrant. Queer. Other. The label becomes the fence itself. Modernity promised movement forward. Minorities often move otherwise – laterally, diagonally, disobediently. They disturb the axis. They expose that the line was never destiny, only design. Art does not reconcile the line. It does something far more dangerous. It exposes that the line never existed outside our agreement to believe in it. A border is a fiction maintained through repetition. A choreography of power. It persists because we continue to perform it. This ritual of separation is active in language, in institutions, in the quiet assumptions that shape what is “serious”, what is “universal”, what is “art.” The minority does not threaten the border by standing outside it. It does, however, threaten it by revealing that the center is not stable enough to hold itself together without an outside. A structural anxiety is exposed – identity is not essence but arrangement. That “normal” is not the truth but a majority vote. And art, when it refuses comfort, refuses to stabilize that anxiety. The most radical works do not seek inclusion. Inclusion leaves the architecture intact. They destabilize perspective itself. They shift the ground so that there is no fixed inside from which to exclude.”

Voice 3 — “To represent feminism is to walk along a line that keeps shifting beneath your feet. It is to speak and be heard, while still being continuously corrected. To demand space and be reminded of proportion. To move forward collectively, and to encounter resistance that redraws the border just as it seemed to open. Feminism promises freedom. Yet it is constantly shaped by expectations about how that freedom should look. It must be calm but firm, strong yet not threatening, visible still at times transparent. The line does not disappear, it adapts. The border is not a wall. It’s rather a habit, a regular tendency, a repetition of who is allowed to remain central and who must negotiate their position, without truly ever advancing. It is to remain in movement along a line that resists settling. The boundary trembles, but it does not close.”

Voice 6 — “The personal liminality becomes a collective one, endeavoring to kick away that awkward feeling of being alone, lost in the void. Breaking the line is not a happening; it is a responsibility.   

Once we begin to feel committed to our lives, responsible to ourselves, we can never again be satisfied with the old, passive way.

It means rejecting attitudes of “take-it-easy”, “why-be-so-serious, “why-worry-you’ll-probably-get-married-anyway. 

-Adrienne Rich

Mona Lisa Smile exposes the wall through the cinematic lens, unveiling the truth to the observers, a truth that every adult knows, that is embedded in the process of experiencing life day by day. However, that truth is oftentimes hidden in our conscience, restrained by our routine: we are so used to the “male gaze” assumed by the various forms of representation – art, photography, film – that we are surprised if a woman is the main character of a movie, or even if she does not need a man to please herself or a second figure to help her out. Mary Devreaux, an American philosopher and bioethicist, addresses the male gaze by exposing the cinematic industry. 

Movies promote a way of seeing which takes man as subject, women as object. 

-Mary Devreaux

The boundary shifts from institutional to visual: women may speak, but they are still framed; they may act but are still seen. The line does not disappear here; it is reshaped, following its circular flow and becoming the camera’s lens. It comes from the social instability constructed by a patriarchal way of seeing the world that not only marginalizes women but also educates men into positions of unexamined authority.”

Voice 4 — “There is a line in every museum. You cannot always see it, but you feel it. A frame does not only contain an image. It tells you what is worth looking at. Minorities appear in art history mostly as objects – the exotic body, the deviant body, the hysterical woman, the colonized landscape, the tragic other. The gaze stabilizes itself by naming what is outside it. The border between the viewer and the viewed feels natural because it has been rehearsed for centuries. Something happens when the object begins to look back. Félix González-Torres spilling candy onto the floor, letting the viewer consume the vanishing body of his lover; Shirin Neshat inscribing poetry across skin, declaring geopolitical territory; Adrian Piper calmly announcing the racism circulating in the room; Kara Walker weaponizing the polite silhouette into a massacre. Suddenly, the frame trembles. A border is powerful only when it appears neutral. Art becomes dangerous the moment it reveals that neutrality is a costume. We like to imagine minorities as occupying “in-between spaces.” Transitional. Almost hopeful. But the border is not a corridor. It is an enforcement. It is a decision disguised as inevitability.” To be a minority is not always to stand between worlds. It is often to be necessarily positioned at the margin, for the others to feel accepted at the core, their own core. The majority depends on the minority for definition. Without an outside, the center dissolves. Perspective collapses without a fixed margin. Western art perfected the illusion of a single, stable viewer – that one eye at the center of the world. But who was allowed to stand there?”

Voice 5 – “If the museum draws borders with frames, the table does so with appetite. We like to believe that food is universal. It is easier to digest than politics. It makes us feel evolved. As if appetite has erased history. As if colonization could be plated and called “fusion”. The truth is less romantic. Some cuisines are written off as adventurous, or “ethnic”. The minority is often invited to share but rarely invited to define. There is a frontier disguised as a tablecloth. It looks harmless – four legs, a surface, sometimes a candle or a vase of flowers in the middle to soften the scene. We tell ourselves that sharing a meal dissolves division faster than ideology. And sometimes it does. But the choreography of invitation remains. We like to believe that the world can be fixed with a long table and good lighting. Invite everyone. Pass the dish. Problem solved. Some cuisines are described as “interesting”, as “exotic”, which is just a way of saying unfamiliar, which is a polite way of saying not ours. The table quietly arranges who holds power. Someone tastes, someone explains their culture in digestible portions. After all, no one likes indigestion. We call this exchange and openness. We rarely call it what it sometimes is: a performance of palatability. The minority is invited to share stories between courses, preferably brief ones. Trauma pairs well with white wine, but not too much. Keep it elegant.”

Voice 6 — “The line is not only social but optical. As a white man, I have trouble trying to talk about minorities, feminism in particular. The pressure stems from recognizing that the line I am describing is one I have often stood comfortably behind, from a position of unexamined authority. Men who support feminism are seen as intruders. I have always lived in a context that traced an occult line that shaped the minds of people around me, me included. However, I was in a position that enabled me to understand that something was off, that a wall needs to be constructed and is not there by nature, that there is something worth behind it. Part of my awareness did not emerge from theory, but from proximity. Being in a relationship during my teenage years exposed me to experiences of gender that I had never been required to confront. Through listening, rather than speaking, I began to understand how ordinary situations - comments, expectations, assumptions - were not neutral, but structured by a patriarchal logic I had previously taken for granted. I began to see that many of the attitudes I had grown up around were not driven by explicit malice, but by normalization. The wall is rarely built with open hostility. More often, it is maintained through habits, jokes, and silences. What changed for me was not stepping outside the structure but recognizing that I had been comfortably positioned within it. Perhaps the most challenging line to cross is not the one that confines women, but the one that separates acknowledgement from responsibility. To recognize the wall is not enough; the real task is to decide whether to remain protected by it or help dismantle it, and so far, the first option is the one to which most people cling.”

Voice 3 — “Perhaps the movement from liminal space to border is not about crossing. It is about realizing that the border was drawn to protect an illusion of coherence. And once it cracks, something unsettling happens: the majority becomes a minority of one – a fragile position desperately defending its outline. The line, once solid, begins to tremble. And in that trembling – not in resolution – a different “we” can be possible.”

Voice 7 — “I want to talk about that specific kind of fear sitting next to us. Fear is used as a powerful force in so many contexts. Governments stand with fear, decisions, jobs, and love. My dad told me that love for a child is completely different from all the other forms of love, driven by the constant fear that you could lose them. How do we protect ourselves from fear? How do we protect from love? Do we need protection, or should we explore fear? Still wondering if avoiding it needs comprehension or judgment. When I decide what to read, I do it because I want to feel that specific fear. And I like or dislike something based on that—literature for empaths.”

A manifesto for empaths— that’s where we want to go to.

A LOVE MANIFESTO— where our first question was born.

We are in desperate need of another MANIFESTO to get closer to an answer.

For every majority that carries anger, there is a minority that loves within a liminal space.

We are minor voices, perhaps misfits.

We are empaths.

We are coming soon…

 

- B&A Editorial team 

Voice 1 & editor - Maddalena Alberani

Voice 2 - Julianna Podoba

Voice 3 - Emma Torelli

Voice 4 - Ugne Burovaite

Voice 5 - Ashley Wee

Voice 6 - Antonio Arpaia

Voice 7 - Vittoria Fabbro