Borders/Boundaries
The sixth edition of the Split Format festival will open with an exhibition of the finalists and the announcement of the winners of the international photography competition on the theme of BORDERS/BOUNDARIES. This theme runs through the competition, the exhibition and the entire festival programme—from workshops, talks and film screenings to educational photo safari walks and accompanying events, exploring borders and boundaries from different perspectives.
At their most basic, borders and boundaries define space and mark points of separation. In a broader sense, they can be social, cultural and personal. They shape our relationships, our sense of belonging and our experience of the world. Some boundaries we establish ourselves, while others are determined by the circumstances in which we live. They can offer a sense of security, but also impose limitations, while crossing and shifting them creates space for encounters, exchange and new experiences. In photography, the theme also invites us to explore the medium itself, its possibilities and the ways it shapes our gaze. Photography can record reality, but it can also transform it, move towards abstraction or prompt a perceptual shift—a change in how we look at and understand what we see. Through the choice of perspective, the isolation of details or experimentation with photographic processes, everyday scenes can take on different meanings. As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly widespread, the boundaries between the authentic and the artificial, between the photographic record and the computer-generated image, continue to shift. In this sense, reflecting on the boundaries of photography also raises questions about what we recognise as photography today and how we understand its relationship to reality and artistic authorship.
We invite all interested photographers—amateurs, professionals and enthusiasts—to explore and (re)interpret borders and boundaries through their work: spatial or social, personal or collective, visible or invisible, as well as the boundaries of the photographic medium itself. Boundaries we accept or question, borders that divide us or become meeting places, and those whose shifting reveals new ways of seeing and expressing ourselves through photography.
