Amanda Priebe

"Let us leave this Europe which never stops talking of man yet massacres him at every one of its street corners, at every corner of the world.” - Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

In Greek mythology, Procrustes (Προκρούστης) was “the subduer”, “the stretcher who hammers the metal”. A blacksmith, he posed as an innkeeper to offer hospitality to weary travellers with the promise of a magical bed whose length exactly matched whoever lay down upon it. When the travellers accepted his offer, instead of comfort and rest, they found a brutal mutilator who stretched or sawed off their limbs to match the size of his iron bed.

These works began in Greece, where in December 2015, I spent time on Lesvos, working with Platanos, an anarchist solidarity group based out of Skala Skamnias, and with other anarchist solidarity projects in Athens. In 2015, and in Greece today, the violence of borders is not a metaphor or an academic debate, but a truth written upon the beaches and tombstones of Lesvos. Here stand the fortress walls, the foundation on which Europe’s carefully manicured hegemony rests – the ever multiplying detention centers and hotspots shoring up the cracks. These works are an indictment of fortress Europe, a reflection of my rage and pain at what so many hundreds of thousands have been forced to endure as a result of these procrustean borders; borders that maim and mangle our shared humanity no matter which side of them we find ourselves on.

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