For a long, long time now, humans have built structures that slice space, segmenting it to divide “here” from “there,” “us” from “them.” The record of our presence on the planet is an ever denser meshwork of walls, lines, rails, barriers and barricades, borders, dikes, hedges, fences—artefacts that mark, claim, shelter, divide, enclose, and protect, composing the world as a territorial mosaic, crisscrossed by human lines. Together, these lines form a record that is visible from space, a human transformation of the surface. If Earth is our (slow) medium, fences are the calligraphy of our species—an inadvertent scrawl, writing itself into the geological.

Think of this scrawled meshwork of lines—of walls, dikes, barriers, fortifications—as the Fence: as one idea, an ever-shifting line that draws itself across time and the world, weaving itself with the history of our species. The Fence can make diagrams of fear, violence, segregation, exclusion, privation—but, equally, it offers safety, privacy, protection, community, ownership, belonging. It wraps itself around prisons and magic gardens alike. Its beginning is lost in time but we wonder: might this be where the Anthropocene began—with that first inscription, that line in the sand, that first stake planted in the tender soil?