Borders are active, performative constellations that both shape places and are shaped by them. This lecture reclaims the border from a state-centred instrument and directs attention to the territory’s own agencies: material traces, ecological morphologies, and unbuilt violences that refract, attenuate, and reconfigure bordering practices. Moving beyond the human-only frame, we investigate how landscapes — deserts, mountains, and marginal ecologies — produce counter-effects that feed back into the production of frontiers, identities, and institutions. Through three situated inquiries (the North Caucasus frontier between Georgia and Russia; the Georgia–Armenia boundary; and the desert margins of Balochistan at the Iran–Pakistan–Afghanistan nexus) the lecture assembles a compact diorama of methods and design stances: what kinds of instruments, multiscalar readings, and speculative enactments reveal the latent politics of place? Can shared methodological vocabularies be distilled without erasing geopolitical specificity? The talk proposes a practice-oriented reframing of border studies — one attentive to the material milieu as co-author of borders and to design’s role in making those relationships visible. The session, in conclusion will invite for an open collective discussion.