Along the road, we come across colony settlements and Bedouin tents. Two opposite ways of using the territory: one sedentary, one nomadic. The settlements are fenced in by walls whose foundations are dug into the ground, while the Bedouin tents are perched on the surface of the land. Immobility versus motion. Controlled borders versus freedom of movement.

At 2:30 p.m. we’re on the outskirts of Jerusalem. At 3 p.m., curfew starts. We have to hurry. Yet another checkpoint. We get out of the taxi in the middle of a line of vehicles packed tightly together. We jump into a new taxi that turns around and goes back for a bit over the same road we’ve just arrived on.

I’m starting to give up on the idea of ever making it there, when the genius of self-organisation suddenly comes into play. Whenever a new checkpoint is set up by the Israelis, the Palestinian taxi drivers respond by planning a new road to get around it. They take up a collection to lease a tractor and clear a few hundred yards with it: voilà, a new passage that circumvents the checkpoint. The soldiers know about it, but these are the crazed rules of the game and the Palestinians are forced to abide by them.

The taxi driver who’s taking us on this part of the drive is a refugee; he risks receiving a fine that he wouldn’t be able to pay and being arrested, but what can he do about it? It’s the only way, he has to get by.

After a long series of twists and turns, we finally make it to the gates of Bethlehem. We get out of the car to find the entire family there to greet us. Our marriage, which had taken place a few weeks earlier in Rome, is celebrated in the family courtyard with singing and dancing. My thoughts turn for a second to the courtyards of Italy, lit by the blue glow of televisions, and to the same TV news story broadcast every year, about the mid-August exodus and counter-exodus and the bad weather that’s ruining everybody’s summer holidays.

Four years later… on the border between Palestine-Israel and Jordan, August 2006

Tala, my daughter, was born in Bethlehem on a beautiful spring morning in the month of February. She was born in a clinic built with funds from the Japanese government and tended by a Palestinian nurse who spoke perfect Neapolitan, learned during a long stay in Naples where he had studied.

After the first few days spent rejoicing in her arrival, we find ourselves faced with a dilemma: how is Tala going to be able to cross the border and get out of the Occupied Territories? How will the border machine work on her, with a Palestinian mother and an Italian father? If Tala leaves Bethlehem as an ‘Italian’ she’ll only be able to come back as a tourist; if she leaves Bethlehem as a ‘Palestinian’ she’ll be treated as such by the Israeli army, meaning she won’t be able to move freely around the Occupied Territories and Israel.

The border machine is interactive architecture. It changes depending on the citizenship of the person who crosses over it. As a prototype of biopolitical architecture, maybe in its purest form, it becomes more or less porous depending on the nation it belongs to: it constructs and deconstructs itself depending on the relationship that each individual has with the state, a regulating device that mediates between birth and nationhood.

By being half-Italian and half-Palestinian, Tala puts the pre-established spatial and political order into crisis, revealing the fiction of national belonging and all the politics that stem from it. The mere thought of having to face the device with her that awaits us on the Jordanian border, the only entry and exit point for Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, is deeply disturbing to me. The idea of being forced to be stripped bare by the border machine makes almost any certainty you have about your rights and existence falter.

We hire the usual group taxi, a dilapidated yellow Mercedes. Concerns about the trip are magnified by the sense of uncertainty. How many times have I heard someone say that the real problem is not knowing what the rules are? At the beginning, I always used to say, “There must be someone who decides what you can and can’t do!” Then I discovered that this void is a form of government.

Take the roads, for example. The Israeli army can decide for security reasons to block a given part of a road used on a daily basis by thousands of Palestinians. The blockade is enforced by deploying patrols, roadblocks and barriers. After a few months, even though the roadblocks have been removed, the Palestinians – fearful of running up against soldiers and being arrested – choose not to use the road anymore, thus leaving it to the exclusive use of the colonists.

This is what differentiates the rule of Israel in the Occupied Territories from South African apartheid. The separation here is not crudely imposed by ‘Only White’ signs, but rather by a much more sophisticated system ensuring that the prohibitions will be internalised. You will never find signs saying ‘Forbidden to Palestinians – Reserved to Tourists and Colonists’ along the roads used exclusively by colonists. The regime of prohibitions is implemented by verbal orders given by Israeli military officers who control a given area of the territory. Palestinians found on a road prohibited to them or for which they lack the required permit risk being put into jail or having their vehicle confiscated. This is why Palestinians are forced to use group transportation vehicles that shuttle between one checkpoint and another.

The border machine is not located on state lines; rather, it acts on the boundaries of Palestinian cities and villages.