Estamos Buscando A

 

The quest for a greater understanding of purpose and meaning is universal to our collective existence. We wrestle with the anxiety and uncertainty we all face when we leave behind the known for the unknown. The searing border sunlight forces a pause in this transitory moment. Regardless of the demarcation lines of country and culture, we are all migrants in search of something profound and meaningful to our being.

Estamos Buscando A is a multi-faceted series that explores and contemplates the migrant experience in Mexico along the U.S. – Mexico border through various practices, including site-specific public art installation, a gallery installation as well as a migrant guide photo book, spanning a period of 15 year from 2002 – 2017.

 

 


 

 

Site-Specific Installations

 

 

Between 2002 and 2004, the series started as a site-specific, public art installation with intimate photographic portraits of migrants waiting to cross. The portraits were printed on large-scale steel plates which were then installed on the border wall at the locations where the photographs had been made in Tijuana between the Pacific Ocean and the San Ysidro Port of Entry. 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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

 

Border Wall Installation

 

 

In the summer of 2005, a Marine Corp unit just back from Fallujah and the Iraq War was charged with completing the demolition of the original 14 miles of primary fencing that was constructed between 1990 and 1993 from the Pacific Ocean inland to divide the two countries.

The fence was constructed of 10 foot-high steel army surplus landing mats (M8A1) with the assistance of the Corps of Engineers and the California National Guard. The original landing mats were manufactured by the Syro Steel Company in Girard, Ohio in 1968 and were used during the Vietnam War. Each original steel mat measured 22 inches high x 12 feet long and were pieced and welded together to make the border wall.

On the final day of the demolition, nearly 3,000 lbs of this fencing was salvaged, enough to construct a border wall that could measure approximately 10 feet high x 60 feet long.

 

 


 

 

 

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection in the Spring of 2017 issued two Border Wall Concept RFP Solicitations for Multiple Award Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) Task Order Contracts (TOC):

Solicitation No. HSBP1017R0022 for a “Solid, Concrete Border Wall Concept”

Solicitation No. HSBP1017R0023 for an “Other Border Wall Concept”

 

Projects may include, but are not limited to the design and construction of a solid concrete wall prototype and various miles of border wall along the southwest border (i.e. San Diego, CA to Brownsville, TX).

Each IDIQ contract will have a maximum contract value not to exceed $300,000,000.

 

One of the design concepts completed by the Penna Group (pictured above) was developed based on some of the following threshold requirements:

The wall design shall be physically imposing in height. The Government’s nominal concept is for a 30-foot high wall. Offerors should consider this height, but designs with heights of at least 18 feet may be acceptable. Designs with heights of less than 18 feet are not acceptable.

It shall not be possible for a human to climb to the top of the wall or access the top of the wall from either side unassisted (e.g. via the use of a ladder, etc.).

The wall design shall include anti-climb topping features that prevent scaling using common and more sophisticated climbing aids (e.g. grappling hooks, handholds, etc.).

The wall shall prevent digging or tunneling below it for a minimum of 6 feet below the lowest adjacent grade.

The north side of wall (i.e. U.S. facing side) shall be aesthetically pleasing in color, anti-climb texture, etc., to be consistent with general surrounding environment. The manufacturing/construction process should facilitate changes in color and texture pursuant to site specific requirements.

 

 


 

 

 

In a time of national polarization and apprehension, Estamos Buscando ABorder Wall Installation is an immersive, large-scale installation that re-materializes the physicality and psychology of the U.S.-Mexico border as a 12 x 64 foot free-standing wall on 60 tons (120,000 lbs.) of dirt on a nearly 3,000 square foot (45 x 61 feet) footprint.

Constructed with the salvaged sections of fencing from the original border wall, the Mexico side of the installation serves as an altar to support photographic portraits of migrants printed on aluminum, referencing religious iconography of the retablo and votive paintings found in churches throughout Mexico and quietly speaking to the enduring human spirit of the migrant experience.

In contrast, the imposing U.S. side of the installation—based on a 2017 request for proposals from the Department of Homeland Security—foretells a future of isolation and detached nationalism. Various ephemeral materials—including government signage and a tire drag—heighten the presence of national security while the discarded, personal belongings of migrants speak of the border experience as not just a topic of political debate, but rather as a harrowing and longstanding human ordeal.

 

Estamos Buscando A – Border Wall Installations

2017        Museum of Contemporary Art – Tucson, Tucson, Arizona

2015        New Mexico State University Art Gallery, Las Cruces, New Mexico

2013        Mesa College Art Gallery, San Diego, California

2011        University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson, Arizona

2009        West Chester University Art Gallery, West Chester, Pennsylvania

2006        University of San Diego Institute of Peace and Justice, San Diego, California

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

Between Here and There – Paul Turounet and Terri Warpinski

New Mexico State University Art Gallery, Las Cruces, NM, 2015

 

 

 

Acerca de la Cerca / About the Fence

Carmela Castrejon, Maria Teresa Fernandez, Paul Turounet

Mesa College, San Diego, CA, 2013

 

 

 

The Border Project: Soundscapes, Landscapes & Lifescapes

University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson, AZ, 2011

 

 


 

 

Border Fragments

 

 

In addition to the full-scale border wall installation, various sized fragments of the original wall that had been installed in Tijuana and Mexicali have been collected for smaller wall presentations. Selections of these border wall fragments were recently included in the Transborder Biennial 2018 / Bienal Transfronteriza 2018 at the El Paso Museum of Art in El Paso, Texas and the Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico.

 

Archival inkjet pigments on aluminum mounted on salvaged steel border wall

Image | Plate Sizes:  7-3/4 x 9-3/4 inches and verso

Border Wall Fragment:  22 x 48 x 1-1/4 inches

 

 

 

 

 

 

San Diego-based American Paul Turounet is another artist who uses the medium of photography to capture the transience of life at the periphery, and more so than the previously mentioned artists, centers his vision on the stories that unfold before The Wall. Interestingly enough, in works like Estamos Buscando A, he attempts to transcend the limitations of the medium by going beyond the flatness of the photograph and presenting the spectator with an entire mileu to contextualize the images, one that is less observed than inhabited.

 

– Reuben Torres, 7 Artists to Check Out at El Paso and Juarez’s Joint Border Art Biennial, Remezcla

 

 


 

 

Selected Press

 

 

Under the Green Moon with Paul Turounet, featured in Artbound article and on KCET-TV | Los Angeles

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

Estamos Buscando A – Border Wall Installation

Museum of Contemporary Art – Tucson, Tucson, Arizona

October 7 – December 31, 2017

 

The most dramatic of the exhibitions, Estamos Buscando A (We’re Looking For) by Paul Turounet, an artist celebrated for his haunting photos of migrants, is a giant installation occupying the massive Great Hall. It’s nothing less than a re-creation of our militarized border.

A salvaged slice of actual border wall zooms 64 feet from one end of the gallery to the other, dividing the space into the U.S. on the north, and Mexico on the south. The wall is about 12 feet high, a mere fraction of the height of the president’s proposed new wall, and it’s planted on 3,000 square feet of dirt covering the gallery floor.

The northern side of the structure is forbidding and authoritarian. Based on Trump’s design protocols, it “foretells the future of isolation and detached nationalism,” Turounet says. The wall is an impassible stretch of pale metal. Nine “Keep Off” signs are painted on a curb; another sign warns of a “high intensity enforcement area.” What seems to be a door in the wall is really a wire cage. There are no humans to be seen.

In contrast, the Mexican side teems with signs of life. Desert cacti have been planted in mounds of dirt. Evidence of the travelers is everywhere. Turounet has collected migrant discards and scattered them in the dust: a woman’s gray sandal, camouflage pants, a rotting blanket, a hoodie emblazoned with the words “Union Made.”

The faces of people who might have left these things behind are fixed to a corrugated metal wall (ironically, another real-life discard, tossed out by the Border Patrol when a new wall went up a decade ago). Turounet has printed the travelers’ weary faces in sepia on shiny aluminum, making them gleam like retablos, the Mexican folk paintings on tin that record miracles. But these gorgeously made pieces don’t show any rescuing saints: instead they grieve for the wretched of the earth.

In one heartbreaking photo, a confused small girl rides in a truck crowded with migrants; she looks at the photographer, trying to puzzle out what’s going on. Many of the photos portray exhausted men at makeshift camps they’ve constructed by the wall, complete with bedrolls and grills for cooking. One man lies prone on a pillow, barely able to open his eyes; it’s an image that seems to foretell his death.

And a flower-laden shrine, so common on the migrant trail, is mourning a life already lost: propped against the wall are family photos of a smiling man, first as a groom with his bride in happier times, and then as a father with his young son.

 

– Margaret Regan, Tragic Landscapes, Tucson Weekly

 

 


 

 

 

 

Estamos Buscando A (We’re Looking For) is an account of the human cost of the various impediments — walls, fences and natural features — along the Mexico-United States border. In this sense, it is similar to Misrach’s “Border Cantos.” But Turounet’s little book shows things largely from the Mexican side, mostly in Sonora, which borders Arizona. It features a number of portraits of migrants or would-be migrants and written accounts of what the photographer himself saw over many years of studying their crossings. The book, with text in Spanish and English, is ingeniously put together in the form of a guidebook, the kind of thing an NGO or government might issue to people thinking of walking across. The text warns them not to do it, counseling them, instead, to seek legal means of entry. But, wise to human obstinacy and desperation, it also offers them advice on how to proceed if they must, whom to avoid, how to prevent heat stroke and so on. Alongside Turounet’s photographs are a number of illustrations by Tim Schafer. It all makes for an unforgettable act of witness in a compact package.

 

– Teju Cole, The Best Photo Books of 2016, New York Times