Invisible Borders 2018

INVISIBLE BORDERS

Since I emigrated to New York already 9 years ago, I’ve been taking photos in the mythic New York Subway of the posters with interventions by artists, delincuents, or simply some passersby. I wasn’t just interested in the pictorial aesthetic, but also how they affected me and evoked in me each time something familiar, that which I was unable to formulate until I began making this project about borders entitled “Invisible Borders.”

In my most remote unconscious, I discovered that those torn faces, scratched, broken or intervened upon, in some way, reminded me of my childhood and adolescence in Chile and the posters of the disappeared. These faces, which are no longer faces, represent the passage of time, the lack of identity, forgetting, of death, and of life itself. I’ve crossed the border a thousand times by plane, bus, train, car, in my dreams, in bed, in food. I bring the border with me, inside, it’s always there. We are border crossers in our being and language.

“Invisible Borders” explores the white wall as a symbol of the division between worlds to emphasize the ruptures and stitching together related to contemporary processes of migration. Migration, displacement and new social fabrics, porous communities, the cultural transfer and clash, languages and idiosyncracies all of which construct our historical present. The constant threats to diversity and creative projects by diverse communities, from such things as walls and borders, are the conceptual axes for “Invisible Borders.” Abstract edges, rituals, indefinable, arbitrary borders, unreachable and more imaginary than real, borders with no end.

 

The exhibition confronts the audience with an interpretation of the City’s many spaces and the public space of the New York metro. Taking these themes as a starting point, an analogy emerges to show the contradiction of what’s called “the globalized world,” where we live and which is full of geopolitical barriers. Using subtle cues and through different mediums (manifestos, poetry, photography, video, and sound), my work will present new approaches, reflections, and inquiries into the concept of borders.

Borders are geopolitical divisions between countries, but for me, borders are spirals where multiple cultures converge and collide, a matrix of possibilities, a theoretical metaphor useful to describe the conditions of millions of wards of the state and nations around the world. It’s not just Chileans and Mexicans in the USA: Pakistanis in London, Moroccans in Spain, Algerians in France, Turks in Germany, and Albanians in Italy. A third of all Latin Americans live outside of Latin America, creating floating cultures, cultural hybrids, cultures in transition… we’re a floating nation.

In the Trump era, the border is an imaginary, just like his wall and his rhetoric…lives however dramatically transformed by them. The question is how to “return”…return to the bloody wound, return to the bloody root, no one is ever finished returning.

PHOTOS

Urban Fragments
2018
Digital Photos
12cm x 12cm
Edition 1/4

Invisible Borders
2018
Digital Photos
30.5cm x 305cm
Edition 1/4

VIDEO

Invisible Borders
2018
Digital Video
3’25”
Edition 1/6