No More Beyond is a video essay about boundaries filmed in the city of Melilla, a Spanish enclave in northern Morocco, where 11.5 km of heavily patrolled triple wire fence separate EU territory from migrants trying to enter. The project takes its title from the city’s motto: Non Plus Ultra.

This phrase and its possible readings form the starting point for various operations of collision and collage, performed across three screens with materials including interviews recorded on site, video footage of the city and its surroundings, the architecture of its barriers, and the encampments of those who attack these barriers, as well as extracts from film, advertising, corporate PR, journalism, theoretical writing and historical documentation.

Constructing lines of flight from these assemblages of materials, No More Beyond hovers between different modes of interpretation, from the poetic to the investigative, from the ambiguous to the polemic, while remaining motivated by a radical questioning of the ethics of segregation, of inside and outside, and a curiosity to lay bare the ideological operations that produce these divisions, as well as the cracks and fissures in European discourses on rights that they betray. No More Beyond takes the boundary not just as the line of separation, but also at the threshold where the violence that sustains inequality erupts and is forcibly revealed.

There is an ongoing online screening of No More Beyond at The Unstitute, and the video can be downloaded in its entirety from its Vimeo page.

Camera: Vanessa Bowles, Ghislain Yakam
Location Sound: Matthias Kispert
Fixer: Jesús Blasco Avellaneda
Interviewees: Imad, Jesús Blasco Avellaneda, Donald, Mohammed, Boris, Abou, Abou
Video + Sound Edit: Matthias Kispert
Script: Matthias Kispert
Voiceover: Lucy Ellinson, Vanessa Bowles, Matthias Kispert
Research: Matthias Kispert, Vanessa Bowles
Translation: Vanessa Bowles, Maya Chami, Pierre Bouvier Patron, Blanca Regina, Artur Vidal
Thanks to: Maya Inbar, Angus Carlyle