Installation for The Border Project: Soundscapes, Landscapes, and Lifescapes at the University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson, Arizona
Return to Estamos Buscando A | We’re Looking For Project Page
Statement
As the quest for a greater sense of personal identity, purpose and meaning is universal to our collective existence, viewers are invited to reflect on the anxiety and uncertainty of the migrants, and contemplate that emotional place we all must face when we leave behind the known for the unknown. Regardless of the demarcation lines of country and culture, we are all migrants in search of something profound and meaningful to our being. The bright border light forces a pause in this transitory experience for the migrant. At that very moment, their faces intimately reveal an unsettling and knowing sense that something is being lost and sacrificed in anticipation of something gained once nightfall finally arrives.
Site Nº 5, Tijuana, Mexico
The exploration into the migrant experience began in 2002 with a series of intimate portraits for site-specific installations along the U.S. – Mexico border on the steel wall in Tijuana that divides the two countries. In an effort to create a sense of the process being a collaboration, I used large-format positive/negative Polaroid materials, giving the migrant the resulting print as a record of that one moment of such significant personal transformation while I retained the negative, processing them in the field. The resulting negatives were then printed in the darkroom on 1/4 inch steel plates that had been coated with a gelatin silver emulsion. Each plate measured 16 x 20 inches and weighed approximately 30 lbs.. With the five portraits used for the Site Nº 5 installation, the names of each migrant and their home state in Mexico were carved into the steel so each portrait would be informed by their own sense of personal identity.
Cardboard retablo found along U.S. – Mexico border wall, Tijuana, Mexico
Through the use of steel, and later aluminum, the images reference in a contemporary manner 19th-century photographic tintypes and the Mexican religious iconography of the retablo: votive paintings prepared on sheets of tin that are an expression of gratitude from which the subject has been miraculously guided through a dangerous or threatening event with the divine intervention of a holy figure such as Christ, the Virgin, or the saints.
Once completed, the steel plates were permanently riveted to the border wall in Tijuana, where the migrant had been encountered and photographed. By permanently affixing the steel plate photographs to the border wall in Mexico, the retablos served not only as signs of respect and as a homage to those photographed, but also as spiritual signs for other migrants who would come upon them while making their own enduring journeys. A total of eleven plates were installed at five locations. Due to the harsh desert landscape conditions as well as interventions by the Mexican government, the photographs eventually deteriorated, leaving the portraits faintly visible – small traces of someone’s identity left behind.
Mexican government intervention and deterioration of steel retablo plates from Site Nº 5, Tijuana, Mexico
As the number of migrants attempting to cross rose significantly, the series was expanded upon into the Sonoran Desert along the border with Arizona as well as along the Rio Grande. The same collaborative process was used, however, as printing on steel with such a larger volume of photographs was no longer feasible, the entire series of negatives was scanned and digitally printed with pigments on aluminum using a sepia tone as a reference to the look of the original site-specific steel plates.
Estamos Buscando A – We’re Looking For has transformed into a gallery installation, featuring up to 45 aluminum – plate photographs (retablos) of intimate portraits and the border landscape. In an effort for a larger viewing audience to consider and contemplate the migrant experience and the imposing physicality of the U.S. – Mexico border wall, the series of photographs are now magnetically-attached to sections of the actual steel border wall that was salvaged from Border State Park in California. Originally used as temporary aircraft landing ramps during the Vietnam War and later installed on the border in the 1980′s, the corrugated steel planks are installed as a wall piece that measures 12 feet high and can be constructed to be 60 feet long.
Number of Works | Sizes: 45 aluminum-plate photographs, 16 3/4 x 20 1/4 inches
Framed Works | Sizes: 3 color pigment prints, 24 x 30 inches
Space Requirement: Dependent on available space for border wall installation. Approximately 12 feet high x 60 feet wide