With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, pundits rejoiced in the
dawn of a new era, a world without walls. Instead, walls now
permeate our world with 33 nation-states constructing them.
Walls now separate Spain from Morocco (in the exclaves of
Ceuta and Melilla), India from Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia from
Yemen, Botswana from Mozambique, and the United States
from Mexico. Many countries, including the United States,
view border walls as a key element in their wars on terror,
undocumented immigration, and smuggling. These walls are
the centerpiece of policies aimed at increased militarization
and the reconfiguration of rights and citizenship at borders.
Their construction is part of a border security industry that
includes collaborations between the public sector and
multinational corporations. Even though border walls are a
strategic reaffirmation of state sovereignty, states build them
with minimal public input on their necessity, location, and
design. Concrete walls, metal fences, and concertina wire
speak to the overwhelmingly militaristic logic that guides
the prevailing approach to borders. More specifically, in
the United States, mainstream media, through its reporting
and circulation of images, fuels the public’s articulation of
borders as war zones. Mexican-American residents of border
communities, border artists, human rights advocates, leaders
of Native American groups, and environmental organizations
contest this onslaught of government and corporate
domination as well as the mass mediated spectacular. This
contestation is a story rarely told and a media imaginary rarely
re-imagined.
This bilingual (English and Spanish) group exhibition brings
together work by artists, activists, architects, and other public
intellectuals who have created alternative designs for or
fought the construction of the United States - Mexico border
wall. The major questions that this exhibition addresses
include: How can we reassert a more populist notion of
sovereignty by re-imagining borders? What is the role of art
and architecture in providing a bulwark against the erosion
of democracy that border walls materialize?
"1,950 mile-long open wound
dividing a pueblo, a culture
running down the length of my body,
staking fence rods in my flesh,
splits me splits me
me raja me raja"
–Gloria Anzaldúa, La Frontera/Borderlands 1987
Raja (split) encompasses how borders not only divide but also
scar and wound both the landscape and people (namely,
Mexican-American citizens residing in the borderlands) it also
describes how the border wall affects borderland culture on
the United States side. The painter Celeste De Luna shows the
border wall as it cuts through the in-between spaces of border
culture while mapping this "tearing" onto border residents’
subjectivities and bodies. In Anchor Baby, De Luna represents
a pregnant women’s torso and upper body as the dividing line
between the United States and Mexico, with picket fencing
and barbed wire entrapping and severing her bare breasts
and limbs. Within her body is a mature fetus encircled by an
anchor calling attention to how childbirth is rendered a crime
within the militarized framework of the border wall, antiimmigration discourse, and presidential candidates wanting to
end birthright citizenship.
A series of ethnographic photographs invite contemplation
about how the border wall splits people, communities, and
nature preserves in the United States. A photograph from a
community museum and park, Pedestrian Trail (Miguel Díaz Barriga and Margaret Dorsey), centers the viewer’s attention
on a sign pointing to hiking trails in South Texas sliced by the
wall. In a place where 90% of residents are Latina/o, and the poverty rate is among the highest in the nation, such action
slices more than a park. The wall literally cuts into family life
as illustrated in a photograph of metal pylons from the border
wall rising behind the backyard of a house in Granjeno, Texas.
The art of Alfred J. Quiroz draws attention to the theological
and existential aspects of border crossings, including miracles
and deaths. The exhibition includes three border milagros:
Mano por Centavo, Brazo de Trabajo, and Sinagua from his
binational Parade of Humanity project in which he attached
sixteen giant metallic sculptures to the Arizona border wall.
The three milagros (icons that reference miraculous events)
featured at apexart draw inspiration from religious amulets
popular in Mexican vernacular Catholicism, and also highlight
the deathly nature of border crossers’ experiences, as people
regularly die in the desert from dehydration.
Anthropologists also locate the wall in relation to the
experiences of migrants, the transformation of the landscape
into killing fields, and, in subtler ways, the reshaping of border
subjectivities.
Photographs provided by Jason De León
feature the border crossing experience from the perspective of
migrants themselves, and Carolina Rocha’s digital recordings
voice migrants’ fear as they cross the international boundary,
border wall, and interior checkpoints. Gilberto Rosas and
Randall McGuire’s photographs capture anti-militarization
graffiti and the paradoxes of border life, focusing on the
wall as state violence. Lupe Flores documents United States
border residents’ unease with their community’s militarization in his photograph Abrazos No Balazos/Hugs not Slugs in which
adolescents hug in front of the border wall. The improvised
nature of the graffiti suggests the ephemeral yet embodied
and visceral nature of their disappointment with the immense
concrete wall that stands in their backyard. Alejandro Lugo
interprets late twentieth century borderlands culture through a
larger history of conquest, and his photographs of the border
wall and the Statue of Liberty are symbolic gestures towards
such conquest.
Architects reimagine the border wall’s potential as a generative
site of binational cooperation. An installation in the exhibition
features architects Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello’s
vision for repurposing the wall’s concrete and metal into hike and
bike trails along the border, solar panels that generate electricity
for residents, and water collection stations (a statement on the
deaths from dehydration). Another architectural redesign is
James Brown’s plan for a "friendlier" Friendship Park. Brown’s
proposal restores cross-border human touch, a small gesture
that embodies a much needed turn to Humanism.
Maurice Sherif’s photographs capture the massive and
monumental, yet piecemeal and prosaic, nature of the border
wall. Sherif spent three years photographing the wall from
California to Texas and brings the structure as a whole into
public view, inviting scrutiny of its socio-cultural, environmental,
and binational impacts. His photographs represent how the wall
frames and indifferently militarizes historical and cultural sites,
through its rusted metal and severe pretense. In the photograph University of Texas at Brownsville Rio Grande Valley Sector, the
border wall intersects a white building generically labelled "ART
MUSEUM" and provides a critical vantage point for pondering
the intersection of culture and militarization. In their floor-toceiling print that emulates the grand scale of the wall, Scott
Nicol and David Freeman photographed muddy footprints
moving up the wall’s rusty bollard poles.
While its title, Section
0-21, mimics the military logic of the border security industrial
complex, the footprints signify the humanity of border crossers.
In this exhibition, visitors cross a threshold, a checkpoint where
their citizenship becomes suspect and under review. North the
Checkpoint, (De Luna), an oil on canvas painting, depicts an
interior checkpoint that draws attention to the camera and light
arrays through which travelers must pass even though they are
75 miles north of the United States-Mexico border. The camera
and light arrays teleport visitors into a virtual world where
their images are reticulated onto crisscrossing security grids
that compress experiences into a technologically accelerated
space-time and transmutes personhood into algorithms and
Non Structured Query Language searches. What kind of
biometric data and photographs are these cameras capturing,
and how are they being correlated with other information in
the enormous data aggregators that enmesh citizen and noncitizen alike? The entrance to the exhibition reproduces these
cameras and light arrays to provide visitors with an ephemeral
sense of their empowerment over them. In this zone, can we
challenge their all-seeing power and their infinitely flexible
searchability?
The title Fencing In Democracy indexes how the border wall
encloses democracy through suspending laws. In building the
border wall, the U.S Department of Homeland Security waived
thirty-seven laws. United States citizens had no legal standing
to either challenge the construction of the wall or to contest
its design and placement. In other words, the way in which
the DHS organized the construction of the wall "fenced in"
democracy’s creative power. This exhibition invites participants
to ask: Would we have a wall if its proposed construction
had occurred in a fully democratic setting with an ethos of
democracy? Can border walls and international boundaries
become eco-zones that produce green energy and sites of
binational cooperation, as suggested by the architects Brown,
Fratello, and Rael?
In the case of the actual border wall, democracy’s power was
constrained; this exhibition allows participants and visitors
to imagine alternatives and generate public dialogue about
border militarization. While history offers many examples of
building walls to restrict and control people, they crumble. But
before they crumble, walls imprison, make legitimate human
interaction across political borders illegitimate, and reduce
democracy to tyranny. We can break down these barriers.
De-fence Democracy.