A Line to Cross, A Voice to Follow

A trace to walk, a voice to follow

A Line to Cross, A Voice to Follow is a site-specific performance activating a real GPS segment of 17 meters, corresponding to a border crossing I made on foot between Albania and Greece, at dawn on June 13, 2022.

A synthetic voice reads the exact coordinates of this path. At 2 minutes and 18 seconds, the voice speaks the exact location where I crossed the border:
lat="40.6231940" lon="21.0560680"

At that precise moment, I physically cross a red line traced on the ground.
It is not a line to follow.
It is a line to cross — at the right time.

Body, signal, alignment

The performance lasts 5 minutes and 53 seconds.

I walk slowly and steadily, carrying the same staff that accompanied me from Paris to Mardin during my 5232 km journey (Ex-tracés), a long-distance performance retracing in reverse the Balkan route taken by many refugees. That project — crossing 11 countries and inscribing 160 Braille excerpts from the Geneva Convention — serves as the broader matrix from which A Line to Cross, A Voice to Follow emerges: a fragment reactivated, concentrated, and localized in one specific crossing point.

A synthetic voice (Melina) plays from my smartphone, reading the GPS coordinates in Greek.

The sound is amplified via a portable speaker worn on my body.

A red line is drawn on the floor, corresponding to the real-world frontier.

My aim is to cross that line exactly when the voice reads the border point — not before, not after.

The action is simple. The tension lies in synchronization — between voice and step, code and skin, timing and presence.

Depending on the space (indoor or outdoor), the GPS trace may also be projected, echoing the voice visually in the environment.

Why I walk this line

Because some borders are silent. Others scream.

This performance is an attempt to make audible, visible, and walkable what usually remains abstract — a crossing point, a legal threshold, a digital trace.

It is also a fragile choreography of precision:
to walk in sync with data — and to confront the gap between those who cross freely, and those who cannot.

I believe that a line is not always a limit.
Sometimes, it’s a question. Sometimes, a wound.
Sometimes, a possibility to meet — at the edge of what separates.

Ridha DHIB, June 2025