“A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants” - Gloria E Anzaldua.

A Narrow Strip Along a Steep Edge explores Fort Lytton as a paradoxical space—both a site of protection and exclusion, past and present, presence and absence. Haunted by unrealized futures, its casemates hold echoes of past violence, yet obsolescence offers the possibility of transformation. While the fort no longer guards against invasion, it continues to demarcate, to exclude, to tell stories of power. A Narrow Strip Along a Steep Edge invites eight contemporary artists to inhabit these lingering structures, reconsider inherited borders, and explore what emerges in borderlands when boundaries dissolve.

Rigirigi, a word from Ansell’s native tongue of Balawaian, means ‘animal trap’ or ‘at the edge’. It refers to an animal being hunted, at the edge of a cliff, a spear, a pit, or ultimately at the edge of death. Ansell’s work Rigirigi operates as a living, breathing trap, a machine-formed structure activated through live ritual performance. From this, a fractured soundscape emerges from where the collision of organic and industrial forces become palpable.

Within the hollow, reverberating casemates of Fort Lytton, an architecture shaped by military-industrial evolution, the work interprets the site’s mechanical capabilities and its surrounding natural landscape through installation and sound. The machine’s movements leave behind material traces, mirroring the fort’s own redundancy and gesturing toward the impermanence of both technology and empire. As the limits of human-machine interaction slip from the artist’s grasp; noise and music fold into one another, refusing resolution. Rigirigi lingers in a state of temporal liminality, its echoes tracing unstable architectures of survival, control, and decay.

Exhibition catalogue ︎︎︎
Roomsheet ︎︎︎
Performance Video Documentation ︎︎︎
Poem interpreted as audio ︎︎︎