Begun as a joint Architecture/Landscape Architecture seminar at Ohio State University, this project studies the landscape, political economy and cultural geography of the US/Mexico border. Information on the flows of water, populations, material and capital across the border is mapped in overlapping layers, and a collection of drawings and diagrams catalog and study the infrastructure of border control.
The research and information graphics were originally exhibited as wall panels together with the installation Snagged produced in collaboration with Tom Leader studio at the Rubin Center Gallery at the University of Texas, El Paso and have since been exhibited at the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Los Angeles, presented as a paper at the conference Infrastructurial Worlds at Duke University and published as "Borderland: A Line Constructs the Landscape," in Scapegoat Journal, issue 6: Mexico DF / NAFTA, April 2014
The ASARCOsmelter, now shut down, has historically been an important economic engine for the city of El Paso and a major source of air pollution affecting both sides of the border. It sits on the Rio Grande at the point where a diversion dam channels water out of the river and into the American Canal before it can flow into Mexico.
This is also the site of “Border Marker One,” the first in a series of monuments that mark the border as it stretches west from El Paso/Juarez to the Pacific Ocean. At this point at the border changes from being the river to an abstract surveyor’s line cutting across the landscape.
Landscapes of Demarcation and Control
The US/Mexico border exists in a multivalent state. It is the line along which the edges of two countries, each with their own geography and culture, meet and thus appears as an abstract line drawn across the landscape. This abstract order however, collides with the material realities “on the ground” in which the border is manifest in an array of inter-connected systems of marking, monitoring and control. The double nature of the border is especially evident in El Paso/Juarez as this is the point at which the border line changes from being a landscape feature, the Rio Grande, to being a straight surveyor’s line stretching west. Border infrastructure is often called upon to alleviate the friction between the two regimes as when canyons are filled in the western desert so that a straight borderline can be enforced with fences and patrols or when the river is channelized and diverted to stabilize its course and fix the border in place.
The Osmotic Border
The possibility of a clean or absolute separation at the border exists only in the abstract realm of mapping. In reality the border acts to stop the flow of only certain things. Laws and legal status change abruptly as people and goods travel across the border. The movements of other things: capital, information, water, narcotics, etc. are changed, impeded or disturbed by the border but not stopped. Finally, there are systems like the circulation of air and water, and the pollution carried by them that are hardly effected by the border at all. These differences in permeability result in the creation of various sorts of pressure differentials around the border. These pressures can be harnessed to drive economic engines as has been done in maquiladora manufacturing or explode into the kind of chaos and violence that has plagued Juarez and other border cities.
The “pressurized” zone around the border becomes in many ways a place unto itself with its own economies, ecologies and culture operating across the border. The vast scale of the western landscape brings out much of this is sharp relief. The production logics of the cross-border economy appear as a proliferation of boxes spreading out into the Chihuahuan desert, large boxes for factories, small boxes for the colonias that house their workers, illustrating as clearly as an inhabitable bar-graph the relations of labor and capital. Other dynamics, however, play out in the marginal spaces and excess capacities of everyday life that escape being rationalized into industrial systems. The border attracts people from across the Americas and the world who bring with them a diversity of cultures and ideals, struggles and desires that make the border a space of friction, exchange, transformation and creative destruction.
in collaboration with Sarah Cowles and Tom Leader Studio sound installation by John Also Bennett
Installation Snagged at the Rubin Center Gallery, University of Texas El Paso
Snagged takes the form of the concrete channel built to fix and rationalize the course of the Rio Grande and control the flow of water from the United States into Mexican territory. It is constructed of welded-wire gabions used for erosion control and to stabilize the landscape. With its emptiness and in being suspended above the gallery floor, the piece implies the rest of the border landscape, a single line describing what it is drawn across. The empty wire cage, reading both as a fence and a grid, references the permeability of both the border and the landscape and the multiplicity of systems and flows, both material and abstract, that move through and across it.
The installation was fabricated by a gabion manufacturer and assembled on site with the help of students from the University of Texas El Paso’s curatorial studies and installation practices programs. Cotton was donated by a local cotton broker.
