Dancing Over the Line explores cultural expression and identity-making in colonial space through making and appropriating boundaries.

Physical limitations have paradoxically nurtured cultural abundance in Bermuda, a 54-square-kilometre island in the Atlantic. While colonial narratives dominate the island’s architectural language, the histories of enslaved peoples endure through oral traditions and cultural practices that adapt and subvert the built environment. Festivities re-authorise the boundaries of colonial infrastructure, such as roads, gardens, and cricket grounds into stages for cultural expression.

This project explores boundary-making as a catalyst for creativity and social change. By cataloguing Bermuda’s architectural language, it examines how celebration misappropriates space to reclaim identity. The proposal repurposes an abandoned hotel development as a cultural hub for the Chewstick Arts Foundation, challenging land privatisation through reorienting boundaries.

The project becomes a living framework for misappropriation and renewal, and proposes a model for reclaiming privatised space when building anew is no longer viable.