Close Distance

Postborder City: Cultural Spaces of Bajalta California, eds. Michael Dear and Gustavo LeClerc (New York: Routledge, 2003), 217-248

Border Aesthetics in Contemporary Art – The Border Crossed Us, 2022

The concept of the border occupies a central place in representational practices and in shaping our collective understanding of border politics, crossings, and identities. The global border regime has produced a migrant population of 272 million reported in 2020 and counting. This course will focus on Latinx, Chicanx, and Latin American diaspora cultural production while extending and connecting our conversations to other representations of border aesthetics in contemporary art. Through artworks, lectures, fieldtrips, guest speakers, screenings, readings, and group discussions, we will engage critical texts, film, media, and visual art practices that take up the concept of “the border/ la fronteira” through diverse representational strategies. How is the border and borderlands both representative of a geopolitical and metaphorical site of periphery, liminality, and colonial histories? How does the border become a site of knowledge production that implicates race, class, sex, gender, language, and immigration status? Using critical border thinking frameworks (Anzaldúa, Chacón, Walia) and drawing from Mestiza consciousness (Anzaldúa, Moraga, Hurtado, Portillo), we will examine how colonization, cultural displacement, transnational identities, homeland politics, and remix culture inform an inquiry into the ethics, and aesthetics of representing border subjects.

Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture, 2017

This study combines first-person storytelling, visual interpretation, and linguistic investigation to analyze how a mixed-media artwork that Kasia Ozga produced in 2011, The Internal Frontier, represents immigrant journeys on an autobiographic, social, and discursive level. In the context of an increasingly polarized political climate, Ozga examines borders as individual experiences and geopolitical phenomena to explain how art conditions conflictual aspects of the self to coexist, promoting social consciousness and community engagement.Those in power use borders to naturalize and separate what is familiar from what is strange. As an artist, Ozga explores how our personalities are partitioned, enforced, and made from external boundaries that define our movements, and by the internal borders that we impose on ourselves. Here, reproductions of different “frontiers” around the world are literally cut from the fabric of human chest x-rays collected from immigrant long-term visa applican...

SOPHIA JOURNAL, 2018

Introduction Pedro Leão Neto This 3rd number of Sophia1 from the series Crossing Borders, Shifting Boundaries, with the theme “Image, Body and Territory”, has as invited Editor Iñaki Bergera, who is an invaluable author and collaborator of the editorial project scopio Editions since its first years of existence. This publication has three major peer-reviewed essays, where its authors challenge our understanding on issues related with the theme “Image, Body and Territory” and where photography practice and discipline is always significantly present. Introducing the notion of a vernacular of economic growth, Kallen McNamara borrows the eyes of Gavin Brown in order to uncover aspects of our daily urban environment that are culturally out of focus, but may be more expressive of our contemporary world than we might like to admit. Her essay is a significant exploration of how a subjective gaze of a particular author, in this case Gavin Brown, is used to critically read in a meaningful manner various aspects of the most conventional and banal aspects of the contemporary urban reality of the city of Houstan. Kallen also makes an interesting creative link between Gavin Brown´s contemporary gaze and the New Topographics landscape aesthetics, which had a significant effect on photography universe, not only in the United States, but in Europe and, as Kallen bring to light, is an aesthetics still influencing contemporary photographers, as happens in the case of Gavin Brown. (read more at https://www.sophiajournal.net/) Editorial Bodies and territory: visual footprints of our inhabited built world Iñaki Bergera In recent times, the complexity —and rich potentialities— of our contemporary world is being fruitfully described and depicted by photographers and visual artists. The interest of urban landscape at large, understood as the natural scenario of our contemporaneity, expands its borders and boundaries towards a more intricate appraisal of the territory and our physical (body) and conceptual (inhabitant) relationship with it. As the following papers explore, it is not just a matter of arranging a visual report —from a documentary perspective— of the space we live in but, rather, interpret and suggest the threats and opportunities that our personal dialog with the territory implies. As every negotiation, this conversation implies mediation, a pulse between a desired natural balance and the dramatic and unconscious footprints of our human action. Our presence —passive or active, spiritual and fleshly— is no more innocuous. By being at and dwelling the territory, the place gains the constrictions of an often contradictory conciliation. It is there where a thrilling visual narrative emerges, where the accurate and sensible eye of the visual artist finds a highly potential field of exploration and complaint. (read more at https://www.sophiajournal.net/)

2018

In 1973 the Chilean-America video artist Juan Downey set out on his Video Trans America (VTA) project. It was described as “A videotaped account from New York to the southern tip of Latin America. A form of infolding in space while evolving in time. Playing back a culture in the context of another, the culture itself in its own context, and, finally, editing all the interactions of time, space and context into one work of art.” Equipped with a topological notion of space, and a devout belief in the socially transformative power of video feedback, Downey envisioned a cross-cultural exchange linking the various populations of North and South America. However, the logistical considerations necessary for the realization of VTA proved to be almost insurmountable. By its end, multiple trips were taken, rarely following the initial route, and the hours of videotape produced became difficult to manage. Nonetheless, Downey devised installations presenting the VTA footage to audiences, mostly in New York, and a condensed version was even posthumously exhibited in 2015 at the Museum of Modern Art’s “Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America, 1960–1980.” Besides this, Downey’s work has received little attention. Yet, given the contemporary difficulty of the kinds of border crossings VTA is predicated on, revisiting this work is crucial. What would it mean today, in an atmosphere of intensified ethnic nationalism, to seriously consider the cross-cultural exchange Downey hoped to achieve? How is a topological notion of space, one premised on continuity and variation rather than metric discontinuity, especially well suited in bringing distinct areas and peoples into contact with one another? As both nations and populations are gradually becoming segmented and closed-off, a work like VTA, and the questions it asks, are of increasing importance.

Diaspora: Exit, Exile, Exodus from Southeast Asia, MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, 2018

Geographien der Grenze, 2020

This article seeks to explore the geography of borders and borderlands in the Americas by looking at the photographs of Tatiana Parcero. In her works, Parcero palimpsestically uses a series of anatomical drawings, codices, and maps, chemical constructions, which she projects on the female body, mostly her own. In thinking from the concept of bordertextures, my analysis of the corporeal borderlands of this artist will expose her strategies of counter-mapping. Laying bare the border imaginaries that Parcero's images design, I will show how her works expose the faultlines that borders create in the dominant cultural imaginary in the Americas.

Exhibition review by Caroline “Olivia” Wolf, Rice University “Migraciones (en el) arte contemporaneo / Migrations (in) Contemporary Art.” Centro de Arte Contemporáneo. Museo de la Universidad Nacional Tres de Febrero (MUNTREF), Centro de Arte Contemporaneo, Hotel de Inmigrantes. October 1, 2015 – December 31, 2015. Currently online as a virtual exhibition. A recent exhibit organized in the heart of Buenos Aires, Migraciones (en el) arte contemporaneo boldly tangles with discourses of immigration via contemporary art. The show, curated by Diana Wechsler with the support of MUNTREF Rector Aníbal Jozami, brought together an oeuvre of twenty-two artists from over a dozen countries. These works engage intimately with issues of identity, itinerancy, alienation, and belonging in mediums ranging from found objects and photography to video and sound installations. Emerging amidst the Syrian refugee crisis, the exhibit can be seen as one of a series of curatorial efforts tackling the topic of border crossings throughout Latin America in 2015. The exhibit must be understood as holding particular resonance in Argentina, a country historically recognized for its open-door immigration policies during key moments of mass migration.

New Approach to Cultural Heritage: Profiling Discourse Across Borders. Eds. Le Cheng, Jianping Yang, Jianming Cai. Singapore: Springer (second edition), 2021

This chapter investigates contemporary visual art in the USA by Chicanas/os in which the U.S.-Mexico border is the common denominator. The aims of the investigating are: 1) how references to the border are expressed in different ways, 2) how different kinds of references to the border imply expressions that transcend conceptions of the U.S.-Mexico border as a dividing barrier, and 3) how various conceptualizations of the border bring forth understandings of a bi-national/transcultural heritage that reach across the border and into its both sides. By applying a combination of content analysis, visual semiotics and social semiotics and drawing from border history and the concept borderlands, a found selection of 30 artworks in different material and techniques are organized into five thematic clusters. These clusters of visual themes and conceptualizations of the border reveal that: 1) a continuity with the past is created through polyvalent visual signs and symbols that adjust themselves to the theme of any composition, and 2) that temporal and spatial links between colonial pasts, U.S.-Mexico border history and present conditions in the borderlands bring forth visual expressions of a bi-national/transcultural heritage that transcend and challenge the U.S.-Mexico border as a national barrier of cultural heritage.

The U.S.-Mexico border region has been theorized in the writings of Gloria Anzaldua (1987), Nestor García Canclini (1995), Walter D. Mignolo (2000), and others as a liminal space, generating new kinds of hybridity in the minds and actions of so-called “border subjects.” Anzaldua identified with the spiritual, primal, indigenous roots that were hidden by years of Americanization. García Canclini offered up the notion of “hybrid cultures” in which the modern and the traditional not only coexist to create something new. Finally, Mignolo delved into the psychological mindset of the border subject, identifying a kind of “border thinking” that defines not only physical but internal borders. These theorizations were a response to the mixing of art and culture on international borders, at which a distinct society was being formed. In turn, these attempts to understand the border have influenced an artistic response that embraces the notion of site as a performative gesture. It is in this theoretical context that I will contrast two border performances, The Cloud by Alfredo Jaar (2000) and One Flew over the Void by Javier Téllez (2005).