#34: place matters; re/flecting the border
The #100hartruths about fake news aren’t easy. They are complex, complicated, contradictory. Like this one. For many of the past 34 posts, I’ve been celebrating the material as a check to #fakenews. I make strong claims like “Place Matters.” Yet in this post, in the same breath, I honor artistic illusions, photo-mirages. Today, it is the press of the imagination alongside the image, the aesthetic amidst the indexical, the affective within the factual that render the even harder truths that are allowing me to see.“Last Sunday, just a few meters from Ana Teresa Fernández’s intervention [Erasing the Border (Borrando la Frontera)], Marcos Ramírez, better known as ERRE, staged a performative work titled Re/flecting the Border. A collaboration with fellow artist Margarita Garcia Asperas, the piece involved placing a tall mirror against the border, with a 16-by-4-foot table jutting out from it along the Mexican side. A communal dinner was held there, its reflection in the mirror creating the appearance of a cross-border meal. ‘With the reflection, you have a 32-by-4-foot-long table with people on both sides, but it’s just an illusion,’ ERRE says. ‘It’s like a mirage.'” (“For Artists, the U.S.-Mexico Border is Fertile Territory,” Matt Stromberg)
See More:
- Erasing the Border (Borrando la Frontera)
- Tijuana Dreaming: Life and Art at the Global Border, eds., Fiamma Montezemolo and Josh Kun