Walk the line

'Walk the line' is a companion piece to 'Salt lines: play it as it sounds', also in the AGNSW collection. The work was filmed at Cape Leeuwin on the south-western tip of mainland Australia, considered locally to be the point where the Indian and Southern oceans meet. Brincat invokes this speculative and spectral contact zone as a metaphor for the arbitrary lines that overwrite the world ocean, from meridians and parallels to the International Date Line and, in particular, judicial and territorial boundaries.

Brincat's performance - which culminates with her being subsumed into the ocean's depths - is conducted in solitude and hauntingly finite. Distilling the notions of departure and disappearance, it is understated but insistently political. Colloquially, to 'walk the line' means to abide by a moral code. At a time when the ocean has become a desperate means of passage to asylum and an ideological battleground, the work quietly foregrounds what is at stake in the permeability of abstract borders.