At the edge of the ancient world, just beyond the Mediterranean, the Pillars of Hercules stood like sentinels at the Strait of Gibraltar. According to myth, these rocky promontories bore the warning: NON PLVS VLTRA – “Nothing further beyond.” For sailors and thinkers of the classical world, this was not only a physical limit but a psychological and cosmological one. The known world ended here. What lay westward—beyond the ocean, the mist, the myth—was left unspoken. Centuries later, that very threshold would be transformed into an emblem of expansion. When Emperor Charles V claimed the gateway as the symbolic opening to the New World, he dropped the non, replacing it with plvs ultra and the exhortation: PLVS VLTRA – “Further beyond.” From a barrier to a beckoning, the same space became the beginning of an imperial chapter. The once-forbidden passage became a door to exploration, colonisation, and the projection of European power onto other shores.
It is within this symbolic reversal—from limit to gateway, from inward to outward—that this exhibition finds its conceptual footing. The wall need not be merely the end; these thresholds become not just architecture features but charged sites of projection, fear, fantasy, and memory. The exhibition space itself echoes these themes. Deep beneath the ground, in a subterranean parking garage, rests the Keizersbastion, a fragment of the City Wall. Discovered, excavated, and meticulously reconstructed, it now sits six meters below its original context, its meaning suspended between the real and the theatrical.
This displacement invites us to ask: what does it mean to preserve the past by reconstructing it elsewhere? In this process of moving, preserving, and creating a new narrative; The boundary becomes porous again—between history and fiction, fact and fabrication, past and present. Yet this isn’t just about an ancient fortification. It’s also about the psychological and political resonance of barriers in contemporary society. All around us, partitions are still built—literal and metaphorical, hard and personal. Consider the US-Mexico border or the West Bank barrier. Think of the Berlin Wall. Or the vanished Kowloon Walled City, where lawlessness and autonomy coexisted in tight, vertical spaces. Every barricade divides—but also reveals. It tells us something about the lines we create and why we enforce them.
But must a rampart always divide? Philosopher Édouard Glissant offers an alternative vision. For him, difference is something neither to fear or to erase. In his theory of creolisation, it is okay not to fully understand the other. Rather than striving for cognisance and assimilation, we should accept the impossibility of full comprehension. This acceptance is not a failure but a kind of ground for respectful coexistence. In this light, a wall can be imagined not as a hard limit, but as a porous threshold, a place where encounter happens, where languages, customs, and identities rub up against one another.
From this ground-level, the exhibition emerges not as a linear historical narrative but as a polyphonic encounter—an archipelago of responses, each artist forming a conceptual sedimented deposit as they shared the current threshold that is the site itself, folding back to its beginning. Once again was there found the inscription: NON PLVS VLTRA. Is it a warning that no one may tread beyond? Or has the phrase come full-circle—from limit to beyond and back again to limit, its meaning shaped by its dislocation? The fragment of the wall, transported and displaced, reflects this liminal, amphibious threshold-state. Here is a space between past and present, between histories, memories, and their representations. Here is the past’s presence within the contemporary world, and in that presence, an opportunity: a wall is not merely an object, it is a complex interaction with time and perception.
A wall, then, is not merely the relic of a bygone conflict; neither is it only a tool of division nor a simplistic metaphor for psychological or societal deadlock. And yet—because it is a shared product—it is also where transformation might begin.