AC Discussion | Beyond Borders: Thinking In-Between

 

On July 13th, curator and researcher Rosela del Bosque, curator Daril Fortis, artist Allegra Hangen, and artist Enero y Abril sat down to take a closer look at the increasingly important role borders play in decolonial discourse as fluid spaces where knowledge is produced, embodied, and circulated.

Watch the full conversation, or read through the transcript below to find links to additional resources, and share your thoughts in the comments section.


Title of Discussion: Beyond Borders: Thinking In-Between

Panelist 1: Enero y Abril, Artist

Panelist 2: Rosela del Bosque, Curator and Researcher

Panelist 3: Daril Fortis, Curator

Moderator: Allegra Hangen, Artist

Date of Discussion: July 13th, 2022

List of Acronyms: [EA] = Enero y Abril; [RB] = Rosela del Bosque; [DF] = Daril Fortis; [AH] = Allegra Hangen; [PF] = Peter Fankhauser

 

Transcript

 

[PF] Welcome everybody. I think we’re going to go ahead and get started. It’s great to have you all here for tonight’s Alternate Currents panel discussion, Beyond Borders: Thinking In-Between. Alternate Currents is a three-pronged program that seeks to contextualize national and international issues in the arts with a discussion series, dedicated blog, and a working group of ten artists who help guide the program and move it forward. 

 

My name is Peter. I’m the program director here at Amplify. Tonight’s discussion, that deals with borders and the position they occupy in the cultural imaginary, is part of a year-long investigation of place and the environmental, economic, and social dimensions that shape our understanding of what it means to be in, of, or from a place. 

 

We have an incredible panel of artists and thinkers with us tonight to help unpack some of what that means. They’ll be in conversation with each other for 40 or 45 minutes before we open the floor to questions, but the Q&A and chat functions will be active throughout so please feel free to share thoughts or questions anytime. 

 

I’ll also mention quickly that a video and transcript of tonight’s discussion with links to additional articles and more resources will be posted to the Alternate Currents blog in a couple weeks on our website at amplifyarts.org. You can revisit it there, leave your thoughts in the comments section and help us keep this conversation going. 

 

Thank you all again for being here. We really appreciate your participation in critical discussions like this and thank you to the Sherwood Foundation whose support makes Alternate Currents programming possible. With that, I will pass it over to Allegra.

 

[AH] Thank you and thank you everybody for being here. I'm super excited to have this conversation with three artists and thinkers mostly based in Mexico. We discussed as a panel, the idea of making this conversation pretty horizontal, so we're going to jump through some questions. Each participant will start with a prompt and then we'll popcorn it around with responses leading into other prompts. I will introduce myself and then I’ll let the rest of the participants introduce themselves.

 

My name is Allegra Hangen. I’m based between Omaha, Nebraska and Mexico City. I’m a multi-disciplinary artist mainly working in photo and video. I also curate and do cultural organizing and I’m currently a co-founder of Fortuna with Enero y Abril who's also on the panel with us. Fortuna is an art space and an artist residency between Omaha and Mexico. And I will hand this metaphorical microphone off to whoever wants to go next. I also just want to note that I’ll be translating for Abril throughout the night.

 

[EA] (Allegra translates for Abril.) I'll be speaking in Spanish because I’m more comfortable speaking about the topic in her in my own language. I’m a visual artist who works with photo and video collage and DIY practices. I also work with a lot of underrepresented communities and artists and am part of Fortuna, an art space and residency between Omaha and Mexico.

 

[DF] I'll go. Hi, my name is Daril Fortis. I’m a curator based in Tijuana, Mexico and I’m interested in performance art, the politics of memory, and the body as a research object. I’ve conducted a research project since 2017 about the history of performance art in Tijuana, but also in California, the border art movement. I’ve worked on two projects about the movement in Baja, California: Archivo Vivo and Modos del cuerpo. So, I'm interested also in memory, the archive, and everything about their politics.

 

[RB] Okay, now I’ll go. Hello to everyone. My name is Rosela. I am an art curator, a researcher and, am involved with cultural management. I’m also from the borderlands here from Mexicali, Baja California. I was born and raised here. I studied art history and I’m now a student in the Master of Advanced Studies in Curating at the University of the Arts in Zurich. I’m currently an associate curator at Planta Libre, a cultural center and project space based here in Mexicali, where I’ve been collaborating for a year and a half. I’m also an active collaborator in the Family Archive of the Colorado River, a project that I’ll be bringing up to throughout the discussion. This is a long-term project that seeks to explore the relationship between people, settlements, ecosystems, and the water in the Colorado River specifically here in the delta region.

 

Alongside my colleagues Jessica Sevilla and Mayté Miranda, I’m collecting memories, lost memories and archives about the people living with the river and bringing the topic of water scarcity, that is seriously impacting this region, to the forefront.

 

[DF] Okay, I will introduce the first prompt. We were talking about border thinking and the experience on the border, and we want to respond these questions from our embodied experience. The border between Tijuana and San Diego or Mexicali and Calexico or the borderization of Mexico that migrants experience are all different. We are also using the concepts of Gloria E. Anzaldúa as tools for this discussion. We are going to go between past, present, and future and jump through different temporalities to discuss topics related to violence or state violence, but also the history of art, specifically border art and performance practices. As I mentioned before, I have conducted research about its history and connection to processes of extractivism and the power relations located in geographies.

The history of performance practices in Tijuana cannot be explained without the border qualities that artists and activist experience in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s. The topics, or the social problems, that collectives, artists, and activists addressed were related to state violence that resulted mainly from this geopolitical division between the United States and Mexico. Even though there wasn’t a physical or material border in the early 80s, the violence made the border present. Migrants were killed and arrested there, so the political context of Tijuana and San Diego and the relations between those cities in the 80s and 90s are very important. When we look at archival photographs from the border art movement, we see that the division between art and activism is blurred. We can talk about artivism, but we can also reject that division and just embrace that activists and artists work together to make this topic visible.

 

[RB] Jumping into what Daril was saying, the idea of violence over bodies, particularly with the project that I’m working on, really migrates the concept into thinking of water and how bodies of water have been heavily violated and deprived of their natural flux due to geopolitics or treaties that were made between Mexico and the US. It's really the Colorado River. Because of its trans-boundary nature, it entangles issues from both sides of its geography. In terms of binational policy and administration, it is always complicated to actually be in accordance with both countries. So, this is the thing with the colonizing of this body of water, its instrumental use for growth has also heavily impacted the landscape in really visible ways. You can see the difference between the Mexican and the American sides of the river and that the agro-industry system is way more exploitative in one side than the other. That’s the thing in the border nature of the project.

We’re also thinking about how ideas of progress, the politics of usage, and extractivism are so intertwined. We’re constantly doing lectures on these deep histories and understanding how the economic development of Mexicali came about because of the water. In the US, dams that were done built in the 50s and 80s also prompted responses and reactions to specific policies imposed on the river. We’re really just putting together all of the different aspects that have come to form what we know now as a delta region. That also includes illustrations and archives from American biologists who traveled to the Colorado River in the early 20th century. Comparing their images of the biological island it used to be and more recent pictures, you can see that the new landscape or the new ecosystem that people now have to understand as water and as nature create this effective engagement between different generations which share a collective memory. Young people have a memory of the river as completely dry, whereas my grandmother has this memory of flourishing nature, of water. We’re interested in those kinds of contrasts and relating them to borders and how bodies of water have been deeply affected by geopolitics.

 

[EA] (Allegra translates for Abril.) My project talks about migration in another way, mainly through micro-histories and family archives. It talks about the idea of the border from different geographies and landscapes in Mexico because my family is from Veracruz, which is in the south of the country. I use family histories, oral histories, and memories to look at stories of migration through a more sensorial lens that isn’t normally used in this context to open the geography of the border. This will probably come up in the in the conversation. We’ll be jumping between macro histories and micro histories, the personal and the political, the individual and the collective. We’ll talk about these concepts and ways of understanding.

[RB Now that I think of it, maybe I gave the abstract of my project and didn't talk about how it is constructed. The Family Archive of the Colorado River is also thinking about the micro—anecdotes, photographs, stories and plowing into this past / future / present aspect of the river because it brings up memories from the past, even before the founding of Mexicali. We’re thinking of the ancestral communities that were way before us that used the water for many, many years and the political concerns we have for those communities that no longer have agency over their homelands. Laguna Maquata, ‘the water between the hills’ in the dialect of the Cucapá community, is one example of a place where we see a historical unfolding of events that transformed the water and the land.

 

I think now we can move on in the discussion and talk more about Gloria Anzaldúa. Do you want to jump into that Allegra?

 

[AH] Yeah, so Gloria E. Anzaldúa introduced the concept of border thinking in her book, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza as an epistemological position that shifts the location from which ‘modernity’ is thought. She acknowledges coloniality as the underside of modernity and the hegemonic impulses of colonial projects. She posits that rather than accept dominant Western readings of modernity, which privilege Eurocentric projections of power, we should challenge them with a plurality of co-created histories and knowledges at the borders of colonial apparatuses to engender a more nuanced understanding of place, its relationship to the body, and the body politic.

 

[EA] (Allegra translates for Abril.) With this prompt, we want to consider other concepts that Gloria writes about too, specifically themes that we work with in our own projects and research. I mentioned writing self-histories and the concept of napantla, which is an intermediary point, middle point, that's not just the actual physical border but rather a place that can open the idea of the border.

 

We’ll also talk about her concept of el mundo zurdo, which means the left-handed world, as a way to rethink research methods or artistic practices that tend to follow a very ordered and categorized system. El mundo zurdo takes different kinds of sensibilities oral histories, micro histories, personal and intimate histories into consideration. It also opens the field to people who aren't normally considered in right-handed world research.

 

[DF] I think it's important to note that even though we don't all work with the specific concepts of Anzaldúa, or at least I’m not working with them, we all are working from another side hegemonic history, like Abril just said. Memory, micro history, and performance practices don’t have as many archives or documents that register the body or actions. The practice of performance, I think, naturally negotiates with the colonial or postcolonial and those methods of making history. I think that’s important because we all approach the archives from the other side of that. We want to remember, or build a memory, and that is not the same as western research methodologies.

 

[AH] Yeah, in my own personal practice, I work a lot with archives and rethinking archives. I think we all rethink archives and create new archives that don't already exist. Like you said Daril, there aren’t many archives of performance, so how can we become those agents to create that archive? That's necessary for the future. If we think of this left-handed world as a space that's including other people and more intimate familial ways of being and creating, I think that brings necessary pluralities in the way a story is told. I don't work with border spaces really, but I do talk about the political aspects of architecture, of archives, of political decision-making from the US into Mexico and I see that the contradictions and stories that don't really make sense when you're reading them from the public archive that already exists. Creating from this like left-handedness is agency to have our own voices in in these public histories and public archives.

[RB] Also, adding to what also Daril mentioned about this gap of where the ephemeral nature of performance art, sometimes that gives you the opportunity then to think of fictions. That's something that I would like to reinforce with my own methodologies and research. Speculation and storytelling provide a means for reappropriating historical narratives and decolonizing these public stories, as Allegra mentioned. Storytelling through fictions, through playing around with anecdotes and having the liberty to change their context and make them completely localized, is a way to present the future of our landscape.


It’s one of the most important processes that I love to reinforce in artistic practice. Speaking specifically about research and archives, we can’t take the archive as a given. We should instead play around with like Abril does with her own family archive and their migration stories. In the Family Archive of the Colorado River project, we ask people for anecdotes, stories, and images and maybe this is a good place to start taking about the second part of the discussion and another passage from Gloria Anzaldúa.

 

Central to border thinking is the idea that the theoretical must have a lived dimension. “Lived” in this context means the lived experiences of those who have been excluded from modernist discourse. The inclusion of embodied experiences introduces new epistemologies into Western frameworks for understanding place. For example, in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Anzaldúa writes:



“The U.S-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms, it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country — a border culture. Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. Los atravesados live here: the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the half-breed, the halfdead; in short, those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the ‘normal.’”

 

So now in this part of the text, the metaphor of the body becomes even more visceral—an open wound. We were discussing between the three of us, it's a bit problematic to give this tint of only violence to the border. It is important to recognize the blood that has been shed and the families that mourn, but it’s also to extend this metaphor to understand the corporeal body’s relationship to borders as a deeply embedded in social and political relations. It also helps us frame border thinking as an embodied consciousness, something that is really in the collectivity, not only in the literal mapping or tracing of the architecture that separates one country from another.

 

[DF] I think we were discussing for example differences between who’s crossing today and who was crossing in the 80s. I shared a video about that proposes the border only exists because of crossing bodies. Every time that a body crosses the border, legally or illegally, it constitutes not only a material reality but also an imaginary in political and social spheres.

 

For example, in my experience living here in Tijuana and going to San Diego mostly every week when I was a kid, the social conditions of our bodies change when we cross the border. We are read differently whether we are in Tijuana or in San Diego. In relation to the project that I’m conducting now documenting performance practice and the archive and the lack of documents that registered these actions, we can also relate it to the undocumented the bodies that cross and get killed and remain unidentified. So, I think there is an entanglement between the archive, history, and documenting bodies--how they get lost in the material but also in the political dimension.

[AH] I’m going to take Daril’s point and talk about not being able to cross the border specifically. Fortuna organized an exhibition in Omaha recently at Amplify’s Generator Space to talk about the difficulties of crossing the border and how that shows up in our lives and the impediments it poses specifically to artists. We created this exhibition from a place of frustration. We were setting up an artist residency with the artist Rosita Relámpago, who's based in Oaxaca. Because of changes in the visa process right now and being backed up from the pandemic, she couldn't get a visa interview, even though we had all the official papers to get her into Omaha. These overarching bureaucratic political obstructions from the US embassy kept her from being in residence with us. We still had a show a solo show of her work, but in that process, Abril and I were talking about how we discuss this from a place of frustration. So, we organized a companion group show with three artists from Mexico and two artists from Omaha. All of the artists from Mexico created work that spoke specifically about crossing the border. Sonia Madrigal took it very literally. She's a really wonderful photographer and she showed a series of photos of people crossing over a street barrier in Mexico City. It's not on the Mexico/US border but someone graffitied “Trump’s wall is pure progress” on it, and it has this spelling mistake, and it's pointing a huge finger at something political in a space that's geographically removed from Trump’s border wall.

 

In the case of Marcia Santos, she is based in Sierra Juarez and included work with t-shirts printed that spell out responses in Spanish and English to the typical questions you’re asked when you're trying to cross the border. These were accompanied by photographs of her doing a performance at the border, handing out these the t-shirts to people crossing over. We also had El Pinche Barrendero who did a video performance. She dresses up as this kind of deranged Mickey Mouse and there’s a whole back story. She wanted to go to Disneyland to see Walt Disney. Disneyland is her Mecca and Walt Disney is both her god and her father. She just wanted to pay her respects, but because of other visa issues, she couldn't go there. So, she wrote a letter complaining to the US embassy and asked why she was not allowed to enter into the US, even though Disney is her religion.

We also included two artists from Omaha, Obed Sanchez, who showed a really wonderful installation of ceramics, and Maritza Estrada, who showed three poems and a large-scale painting. Their works talk more specifically about land crossing and land. We wanted this show to provide a way to cross borders. Even though not all the artists could be in the space physically with us, their work still crossed the border and created a conversation around issues of permission, overarching politics, and prohibitive bureaucracies.

 

That ties into the last section of the discussion. We have this resurgence of populist politics, like populism and neo-nationalism, that play a significant role in activating tensions surrounding borders and overshadowed much of the conceptual reframing of borders as liminal spaces where social, political, economic, and cultural knowledge is co-created both within, and outside of, colonial matrices. As we're talking about this conversation, we really wanted to address this. Populism and neo-nationalism are very obvious, especially at the border. We wanted to acknowledge that this is definitely a heated issue and that there are tensions around this, but we also want to understand how we can provide context through examples of lived, embodied experience.

 

[DF] Yes, and we were thinking about the border as a dialectic place, or space, or point of view but also the social conditions of ethnicity, gender, class, everything that marks us as a specific body and give us certain privileges, or not. So, we are aware of new approaches to the border, like border studies, but we also know that the lived experience of crossing the border is always present. I uploaded a photograph of the border wall because we see it every day. It’s normal for us in Tijuana and Mexicali. I think we want to get close to these experiences.

The “right-handed world,” as Allegra put it, existed in the 80’s. The actions and performances or protests I’m researching were made back then. There were anti-immigrant, racist groups then too that acted against people crossing the border without papers or documentation. Art was used as a tool to counter those groups. I think it's important, as I said before, to think of the border not as a place, or as a wall, but as embodied political and sociological dimensions.

 

[EA] (Allegra translates for Abril). As we were thinking collectively about this this topic, we were saying that even though these conflicts are happening, there is still work being made in the moment. Both conflicts and creation at border happen simultaneously where it is super raw. We're seeing it play out in real time and we can talk about these texts and theories but we're also seeing this happen right now.

 

[RB] I think it's important to say, what all of us collectively think, that borders are far, really far, from being neutral sites. It's something that we always have to bring up in discussion and specifically think about how to situate our own practices and our own research. We all take borders into consideration but not in a strictly theoretical matter. It’s actually in a more embodied way. I want to expand the point of thinking only in theoretical terms to memories and the more unstable ways of thinking of borders that don’t always square with institutional thinking.

 

[AH] While people type their questions, maybe we we could just share more about what we’ve been working on.

 

[DF] I just launched Tijuana Performance Art, a project about the collective memory of women artists who practiced performance during the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s. You’ll find documents, photographs, texts, audio, and a timeline you can add to. The first feminist group we looked at was founded in Baja California in 1978 and the timeline goes through 2006. That’s the period we try to remember collectively. There’s a bunch of information that you can go through and read. The photographs are really beautiful.

 

[RB] I’ll give a quick introduction to Planta Libre. Planta Libre is the platform for the project that I have been talking about throughout the discussion. If you want to link into any of the events that Planta Libre will be hosting, either contemporary art or the water project, you can check our Instagram account. We're constantly having workshops, talks, and exhibitions. Also, to extend an invitation the rest of the Family Archive of the Colorado River project team, we will be having a discussion at Arizona State University in September. This year, we'll also be hosting some workshops with Abril here in Mexicali and if you’re close to the Calexico, Southern California area, you're more than welcome to participate in any of the activities we'll be doing.

 

There is a comment in the chat. It says:

 

“I’m in my 50s now, but I lived right at the Arizona and Mexico border in a very small village. I loved to be by the river and would often see people crossing up through the mostly dry riverbed. Many households along the riverbanks would greet travelers. I remember dinners together as they waited for the coolest hours to keep walking.”

 

That's a super nice memory and I would love to also extend the invitation for anyone to send anecdotes. If you have an archive of the waters--any kind of archive including oral histories, anecdotes, stories, images--you can send them to the email that I’ll type in quickly in the chat (archivofamiliardelriocolorado@gmail.com). We're still accepting materials so please send all of those beautiful memories.

 

[AH] That's so great. Thank you. I love hearing these personal stories.

 

Well, I think that's about it! Thank you all for being here for this awesome conversation. Thank you to all the panelists and thank you participants for taking the time to be here with us. 

*This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.


About the Panelists:

Rosela del Bosque lives and works in Mexicali, Baja California (México). Curator, cultural practitioner and researcher. Her interests focus on the local context and entwine empathy, memory, historical revisionism and reconstructing more-than-human relations in the Colorado river delta landscape. She studied Art History and Curatorial studies at the Universidad de las Américas Puebla. She has completed courses in curatorial practice and contemporary art from Central Saint Martins and the Universitá di Siena. She has collaborated in volunteer programs focused on art education with Museo Jumex and curatorial research with MCASD. She has co-curated projects at La Nana ConArte (Mexico City), with the curatorial collective Base_arriba (Mexicali), Reforma 917 (Puebla) and OnCurating Project Space (Zurich). She is currently an associate curator at Planta Libre (gallery and project space) and pursuing the Master of Advanced Studies in Curating at Zurich University of the Arts. 

Daril Fortis is a Tijuana-based curator exploring politics of memory around performance art, archives, and bodies. In 2014, he co-founded the art organization Periférica and served as Program Coordinator until its dissolution in 2019. Since 2017, he has conducted a research project focuses in the history of performance art in Tijuana with the support of PECDA-BC (2017), Patronato de Arte Contemporáneo (2020, 2021), and Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo (2019, 2022). He edited the books “Ecos y resonancias. Primera panorámica de la pintura en Baja California” (2021) and “Archivo Vivo. Primer mapeo de artistas mujeres de Baja California” (2021), both published by La Rumorosa, the Baja California Ministry of Culture’s editorial. He earned a BFA at the Autonomous University of Baja California (2015) and an Archives Management Specialization at the Mexican School of Archives (2021). He is currently an MSc candidate in Sociocultural Studies at the Institute for Cultural Research-Museum, Autonomous University of Baja California, where his research focuses on the participation of women artists in the performance art scene of the late 80ʼs and early 90ʼs in the Tijuana-San Diego border region.

Allegra Hangen is a multidisciplinary artist who works in video installations, photography, found footage, and archives. Hangen’s artwork is concerned with social and cultural issues, usually focusing on the social effects of images and architecture. She has participated in organizing various institutional and independent collaborative projects in the United States and Mexico over the past six years, including community workshops, film festivals, independent curatorial initiatives and arts markets. Her work has been shown in solo shows, group shows, and film festivals in the United States, Mexico, Canada and Argentina.

Enero y Abril is a visual artist from Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico whose work focuses on generating counternarratives that sprout from artistic terrains, dialoguing with different tools like appropriation, collage, oral histories, audiovisual experimentations, and DIY practices. Her practice is strongly tied to collaboration and inclusive practices that often involve underrepresented artists and/or individuals who are normally excluded from the production and reception of art. Her work has been shown in solo and group shows as well as film festivals throughout Latin America. She has facilitated numerous workshops and has helped organize various community projects and events across Mexico. 

 
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