“Last Sunday, just a few meters from Ana Teresa Fernández’s intervention [Erasing the Border (Borrando la Frontera)], Marcos RamÃrez, 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)
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.