No More Beyond

No More Beyond is a video essay about boundaries filmed in the city of Melilla, a Spanish enclave in northern Morocco, where 11.5 km of heavily patrolled triple wire fence separate EU territory from migrants who are trying to enter. The project takes its title from the city’s motto: Non Plus Ultra.

This phrase and its possible readings form the starting point for various operations of collision and collage, performed across three screens with materials including interviews recorded on site, video footage of the city and its surroundings, the architecture of its barriers, and the encampments of those who seek to cross them, as well as extracts from film, advertising, corporate PR, journalism, theoretical writings and historical documentation.

Weaving webs of relations and following lines of flight from these assemblages, No More Beyond operates across different modes of interpretation, from the poetic to the investigative, from the ambiguous to the polemic, while remaining motivated by a radical questioning of the ethics of segregation, of inside and outside, and a curiosity to lay bare the ideological operations that produce these divisions, as well as the cracks and fissures in European discourses on rights that they betray. No More Beyond takes the boundary not just as the line of separation, but also at the threshold where the violence that sustains inequality erupts and is forcibly revealed.

Camera: Vanessa Bowles, Ghislain Yakam

Location Sound: Matthias Kispert

Fixer: Jesús Blasco Avellaneda

Interviewees: Imad, Jesús Blasco Avellaneda, Donald, Mohammed, Boris, Abou, Abou

Video + Sound Edit: Matthias Kispert

Script: Matthias Kispert

Voiceover: Lucy Ellinson, Vanessa Bowles, Matthias Kispert

Research: Matthias Kispert, Vanessa Bowles

Translation: Vanessa Bowles, Maya Chami, Pierre Bouvier Patron, Blanca Regina, Artur Vidal

Thanks to: Maya Inbar, Angus Carlyle