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- Welcome to the class border crossing in the media and the arts.
In this class, we are going to explore the representation
of border crossing processes in media,
that is news media mainly, and in the arts.
We are going to introduce different art
projects that concentrate on border crossing.
Yeah, in this slide you can see three screenshots
from news, an American news channel, Fox News,
reporting on migrants approaching the US-Mexico border,
migrants crossing the US-Mexico border,
and this is commented as a threat.
And this is an example of how migration
and borders are often represented in the media
as a place of danger, as a threat to the
security, to the ordered life of a nation.
And that's what you can see in these images here
when you read these messages, the headlines,
and the way this crossing is commented.
(mouse clicks)
Yeah, these are yet other representations of border crossing from film.
These are film stills from a movie from
1958, and the second one from 2006.
What you can see here is that documents are checked,
are controlled, it's a space of control.
Documents, papers that you need in order to cross.
the border legally, in order to stay in
this frame of bordering and ordering.
On this slide, we do learn about a very different form
of representation of border crossing.
These two documentations concentrate on
the identity of dead people, people, corpses
that were found in the desert between the United States
and Mexico, because of the intensified surveillance
in this space, it becomes more and more dangerous
for people to cross, and people die in the desert.
Some of these corpses are non-identifiable,
and that's what these two, the book and the movie, concentrate on.
Like in the movie, "Who is Dayani Cristal?
" It is actually a tattoo that was helping to find
the family of one dead person, and this story is followed in the film.
So the approach to border crossing here
is tracing unknown lives, tracing the identity,
trying to find identity and the story of border crossing
that led to the death of people in the desert.
We discuss different forms of border art, of contemporary border art.
I would like to highlight four different artistic methods
and strategies that we do find in contemporary border art
that focuses on the US-Mexico border.
One is tracing the roots of migration,
or tracing the lives of migrants,
tracing the life of migrants who died in the border,
in the border zone, in the border region,
as we have seen in the previous slide.
A second strategy is collecting things left behind.
So artists use material that they find in the border space,
and use this for different reasons to document
the experience of crossing the border
through such material that they find in the border space.
Re-enacting the third strategy, re-enacting of border crossing.
So re-enacting in the sense that artists try
to approach a situation in which an audience,
a viewer actually might go through a similar experience
of border crossing as the crossers themselves did.
The fourth strategy that I would like to highlight here
is including undocumented migrants, that in more recent times,
many artists have tried to do in order to make those
that are represented in art part of this representation
and the production, the artistic production.
An example of using things left behind is Susan Harbridge Page's work
that I already introduced on the first slide.
She takes photos of things that migrants leave behind
in the desert, taking these photos at daytime,
while most migrants actually cross the border at night.
(mouse clicking)
The artist collects such objects and refers to this as an anti-archive,
an archive collecting things left behind
in order to remember and to kind of also
create ideas of what this crossing is like.
(mouse clicking)
Another example of border art is an installation
and a short film by Alejandro González Inarritu,
"Carne y Arena", virtually present, physically invisible.
And this can be understood as a form of reenacting border crossing.
"Carne y Arena" is an immersive mixed reality installation.
And at the same time, it is a virtual reality experience.
So you go through an experience,
and in that sense, it is a reenacting of border crossing.
Here you see a model of the installation,
an installation that traveled around the globe
that was shown, exhibited in different museums around the globe.
The installation consisted of three parts.
The first one is the waiting room where you take off your shoes
and prepare yourself for the VR experience.
Then you enter the large room that has sand on the floor.
By the way, "Carne y Arena" means flesh or meat, flesh and sand.
And you are on this floor that is actually
covered with sand, imitating a desert space.
And you wear headsets, VR headsets.
And this movie that you are experiencing there
introduces you to a scene of border crossing.
And you take part in a group of migrants
who want to cross the border from Mexico
to the United States until the border patrol and helicopters appear.
And this attempt of crossing the border ends in an arrest.
And that's what you experience there.
You leave the room and then you enter a third room
where you are invited to reflect on your experience.
And this reflection takes place by receiving information
on the identities and the biographies
of the different characters that actually
had joined you in this brief VR experience.
And you learn that these were actual people
who exist and who actually crossed the border themselves.
And you learn about their biographies
and their experiences in this third room.
After the virtual reality experience,
you pick up your shoes and enter the last room.
Here you can watch seven monitors with closeups
of the faces of nine migrants and one border patrol agent
with texts telling their moving stories
as a form of self-representation.
We suddenly realize that what we just experienced
in virtual reality is their true life stories
played by the migrants and border patrol agents themselves.
I invite you to please reflect and think
about what you think and how you perceive
such a reenactment of border crossing,
but please also consider the other strategies
of the representation of border crossing that I introduced.
A critic writes about "Carni e Arena",
"Carni e Arena turns the distant sufferer
into a close and proximate sufferer.
" Please consider this statement
and think of your own reaction to these works of art.
I would like to end this lecture
by bringing attention to some aspects of "Carni
e Arena" that you might want to consider.
The questions at the lower part of this
slide I would like you to please consider.
The question here is, can the gap between
the spectator and the migrant be bridged?
So is that actually successful,
this reenactment between the spectator and the migrant?
Does it turn the distant sufferer into a close and proximate sufferer?
That's a question here.
In the previous slide, I gave you this quote.
Please think about these questions
and I invite you to do further research on border art
and the representation of border crossing.
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