Fences Make Senses re-stages and interrogates international barriers and borders using the bodies of non-refugees. Through a series of rehearsals, Barber aims to have privileged bodies experience the themes, situations, and ideas that refugees frequently face. This video was produced in response to the great number of documentaries the artist witnessed that interviewed the unfortunate in their impoverished conditions. Kept in limbo and squalor for years, these refugees are casually disliked by their "host" country. Fences Make Senses is ultimately a re-enactment of debates around displaced people; in effect, the rehearsing and acting-out helps to re-ignite and re-frame this problem as a global call to arms, rather than a relentless series of interviews featuring the unfortunate.
