Estamos Buscando A | Paul Turounet

ESTAMOS BUSCANDO A
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, text and photo-based personal narratives, a gallery-based border wall installation, a migrant guide photo book and select border wall fragment works, spanning a 16-year period from 2002 - 2017.

While our national consciousness has continued a long-standing debate over the issue of immigration, I was drawn to the border light to experience this contested physical place and psychological space, which has served as a beacon of hope for those desiring to go from one place to another, both literally and metaphorically

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. At that very moment, faces intimately reveal an unsettling and knowing sense that something is being lost and sacrificed in anticipation of something gained once nightfall finally arrives. Regardless of the demarcation lines of country and culture, we are all migrants in search of something profound and meaningful to our being.
SITE-SPECIFIC INSTALLATIONS
Between 2001 and 2004, the series started as site-specific, public art installations with intimate photographic portraits of migrants waiting to cross. In an effort to create a sense of the process being a collaboration, I used large-format camera with 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 weighed approximately 30 lbs. and had been coated with a gelatin silver emulsion. Once completed, the steel plates were permanently riveted to the border wall in Tijuana, where the migrant had been encountered and photographed.
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.
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 in Tijuana between the Pacific Ocean and the San Ysidro Port of Entry.
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. Due to the harsh desert landscape conditions as well as interventions by the Mexican government in 2004, the photographs eventually deteriorated, leaving the portraits faintly visible – small traces of someone’s identity left behind.
July 20, 2003 - Installation at site Nº4
Traffic crossing the border is light this morning, As usual, I get past the Mexican customs without being checked. I suppose they figure that since I'm on a motorcycle, I'm bringing nothing across. Or they're more concerned with making sure their own citizens are paying the duty taxes on the stuff they're bringing across from Walmart.

Just before the Border Highway spits to go to either Playas or Ensenada, I turn-off on a dirt road that is on a mesa just above Smuggler Gulch, a large canyon notorious for the smuggling of guns, drugs and migrants. The road takes me to the reinforced steel wall at the U.S.-Mexico border where I'm going to install two more steel plate retablos.
Rather than hauling the plates, my tools and camera equipment up the hill in the migrant camp where I'm going to do the installation, I decide to ride the bike up the steep hill so I can park just at the edge of the camp. Once I get to the top, there's nowhere to put the bike and it begins to slide back down the hill. Barely able to hold the bike up, I decide to lay it down.There's no way I can lift the bike up with all the gear on it. I can see a U.S. Border Patrol agent sitting in his Ford Bronco watching through his binoculars from the other side and probably laughing.

There’s no way I can lift the bike up with all the gear on it. I can see a U.S. Border Patrol agent sitting in his Ford Bronco watching through his binoculars from the other side and probably laughing. As I pull the gear off the bike, a group of eight migrants emerges from a ravine just above the camp. I throw my hands out. “Un Gringo Loco.” The migrants laugh and come over to see the problem I’ve gotten myself into. Now, everyone, the Border Patrol agent who has probably explained what is going on over his radio, and the group of migrants are all watching me and wondering what’s going on. Together, the migrants and I lift the bike, but I’m unable to start it. At this moment, all I can think about is how I’m going to get this thing back across the border. After bending the clutch lever back in place, I finally get the bike started and ride it back down to the flat area of the mesa where I started and should have stayed.
While I park the bike, I notice the migrants bringing my bag with the Leica, large-format and video cameras, the tool bag and the case with the two steel plate retablos down the hill – 150 lbs. of stuff. I feel terrible in explaining that I need to bring it all back up the hill. Without hesitation, they lug the two bags and the case into the camp that’s hidden from the Border Patrol agent. As we settle in, I can tell they’re curious about me and what I’m up to. We haven’t really talked and they still have no idea why I’m there. There’s a sense of anticipation and curiosity as I start preparing to do the installation. As I open the case and the contents are revealed, they look at the plates with wonder and approval. Together, we decide where to hang the plates on the border wall. One of the migrants, Enrique, watches the bike down on the mesa, while another migrant, Jose, helps me drill the holes and rivet the plates in place on the wall. I’m sure the Border Patrol agent is curious about what is going on, but never comes over to investigate even with all of the noise of the drilling and riveting.
- Retablo Nº 3 - Jose / Durango, U.S.-Mexico Border, Tijuana, Baja California Norte, Mexico, 2003
- Retablo Nº 4 - Jose / Durango, Pablo / BCN, Carlos / D.F., Arturo / Veracruz, Jose / Chiapas and Martin / Michoacán - left to right, Tijuana, Baja California Norte, Mexico, 2003
As we share water after installing the plates on the wall, I realize that I can only have such an experience as this with only them here in this place.
PHOTOGRAPHS
BORDER WALL INSTALLATIONS
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 aircraft 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 that could be mounted on a gallery wall or as a free-standing wall.
Initially, the installations were mounted on gallery walls as smaller sections for exhibitions at the University of San Diego Peace & Justice Galleries, West Chester University in Pennsylvania and the University of Arizona Museum of Art between 2009 and 2011.

With the opportunity to create larger installations, the Wall was scaled to over 50 feet in length for exhibitions at the Mesa College Art Gallery, San Diego, California in 2013 and the New Mexico State University Art Gallery in 2015, which included ephemeral objects and materials along with the presentation of some of the original site-specific steel plates.

Excerpt of Lauren Rabb, Curator of the University of Arizona Museum of Art on the Estamos Buscando A installation for exhibition, The Border Project: Soundscapes, Landscapes & Lifescapes at the University of Arizona Musuem of Art, 2011.
As printing on steel with such a larger volume of photographs was no longer feasible, the entire series of Polaroid negatives was scanned and digitally printed with archival pigments on 16 x 20 inch aluminum sheets to serve as a reference to the look of the original site-specific steel plates.
- Estamos Buscando A - Border Wall, New Mexico State University Art Gallery, Las Cruces, New Mexico, 2015
- Estamos Buscando A - Site-Specific Works, New Mexico State University Art Gallery, Las Cruces, New Mexico, 2015
TRAGIC LANDSCAPES

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.
- Retablo Nº 16 - Joseline Torres / Leon, Puerto San Miguel, Sonora, Mexico, 2004/2006 (Aluminum Plate)
- Migrant Shrine, Estamos Buscando A - Border Wall, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson, Arizona, 2017
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, 2017
MIGRANT GUIDE
Estamos Buscando A navigates a personal exploration into the migrant experience along the U.S.-Mexico border region in the early 2000's, with a series of intimate portraits, landscape photographs, illustrations, maps, advisories and personal narratives. The book has been designed to reference the migrant safety guides that were given to migrants by Grupos Beta and the Instituto Nacional de Migración of the Mexican government.which works for the protection and defense of human rights of migrants on Mexico's northern and southern borders, through support actions such as search and rescue, humanitarian assistance, legal advice and guidance.

Shortlisted and Runner-Up for 2016 Paris Photo - Aperture Foundation First PhotoBook Award
New York Times - The Best Photo Books of 2016
Humble Arts Foundation - the 17 Best Socially Concerned Photobooks of 2016
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, 2016
Retablo Nº 28 - Rene, Rio Bravo, Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, 2016

Archival Pigments on Aluminum
Plate for Limited and Special Editions of Estamos Buscando A

7 x 5 inches in folder

See Publications for availability.
BORDER WALL FRAGMENTS
Various sized fragments of the original wall that had been installed in Tijuana and Mexicali were 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.
- Sasabe, Sonora, Mexico, 2018
- Rio Bravo, U.S.-Mexico Border Mexico, 2018
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, 2018

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