ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines that the official European discourses on mobility are less influencing on people's actual practices with respect to crossing borders than representations. It argues that 'performed immobility' is the non-practice of border crossing. This refers to the maintenance of the border, to everyday practices produced by representations along the Dutch-German border that (re)produce imaginative spatialities about the other side of the border and the people 'over there'. The chapter turns to conceptual thoughts about 'Space Oddity' for a while and subsequently re-connects those theoretical ideas about performativity, everyday practices and representations with the 'performed immobility' along the Dutch-German border. It emphasises the notion of place in this context, the non-practice of border crossing turns out to be a conventional practice. It is maintained as – and thus remains – an imagined border; an imagined border that has the status of the real.
