Mingjia Chen

out of frame is a student-edited platform supported by MIT Architecture for all things untold, unseen, and forgotten. We are interested in elevating what is hidden in our everyday life, academic or not. Topics can span from untold (hi)stories to forgotten places, from things we misunderstand to unseen processes. Contexts situate anywhere in between the saturated bounds of the institutional. Formats include essays, videos, interviews, comics, and more.

Today, national borders are the very site of hyper-surveillance. Not every traveling body is mobile in the same way due to political and legal boundaries. Harald Bauder wrote that “the imagination of open borders is a faint and unfinished image that arises on a distant horizon, whereby the concrete terms of what an open-borders world would look like are not yet discernible.” Yet, border fluidity is already practiced by migrants daily, and is not utopian but part of an ongoing struggle for change. The modern practice of border fluidity is heavily policed.