Borders are ubiquitous. It is the human tendency to delineate boundaries. These boundaries, however, are not rigid and stable, but exist as porous interfaces, that do not merely contain, but also permeate. Seeking to occupy such an interface, this research positions itself on the Trans-Himalayan landscapes of Nepal-Tibet border, an interface poised in a fragile in-betweenness, enmeshed in an assemblage of cultural, political, and geographical flux. The research aims at observing the ecologies that take shape on these borders, taking into account the complex cultural history of the borderlands, and the present emerging geopolitical imaginaries by the nation states that aim at re-territorializing the socio-spatial landscape of the trans-Himalayan region. We observe these borders as sites in perpetual instability, yet in an equilibrium, by identifying the forces of reciprocity and tension across them and relooking at their inter-structural ambivalence as a potential stage for transformation.

Arguing on the reductive hegemony of stability, this research, though anchored to a geographically defined domain, extends into larger critical reflection into the act of border making and thus spatial production itself, by foregrounding the concern of architecture and its prevalent tendency to fetishize its social and material stability and identity as an object immune to change, to the point of inaction and stagnancy. In doing so, how can the agency of design operate within an unstable equilibrium, and remain both resilient and flexible to the ecological uncertainty? How can we reconcile the dichotomy of the innate hybridity of our identities and the human proclivity to delineate boundaries, and transcend the reductive dialectics of ‘we and ‘they’? The research acknowledges the primacy of change, eschewing from the whimsies of historical nostalgia or the anxiety of the uncertain future, in the pursuit of articulating and communicating the fluctuating, ever evolving present.