Bodies on the Line: Somatic Risk and Psychogeographies in Urban Exploration and Palestinian 'Infiltration'

Balbuk, an aboriginal woman in Stephen Muecke’s fictocritical trav-elogue No Road (Bitumen all the Way), is a trespasser, a destroyer of private property. She is also merely maintaining her routine, do-ing what she has always done and asserting her relationship with the land irrespective of changing ownership rights and newly-built obstacles. In a similar manner, the two types of infiltrators I discuss here also defy access restrictions in order to claim a space that has been taken away from them. Taking as my starting point the 2013 documentary Infiltrators by Palestinian artist Khaled Jarrar, I juxta-pose practices and discourses of Palestinians who enter Jerusalem without a permit with those of Urban Exploration (Urb-Ex). Urb-Ex, engaged in predominantly by elites in the cities of the global North, involves the recreational physical exploration of derelict and aban-doned locations in the city, but also of exclusive securitised spaces. The practice has become highly visible due to spectacular actions that generated numerous media reports, but also thanks to self-pro-motional films and blogs. (Incidentally, a low-budget action film also titled Infiltrators about urban explorers was released in 2014). While the physical acts involved in these two types of infiltration are similar, the meanings attached to them differ in many, albeit not all, areas. This is an attempt, then, to link descriptions of somatic experience involved in ‘infiltration’ with the psychogeographies they produce, which are in turn also produced by them