“Anti-Border Futures” Exhibition at Centro Cultural de la Raza

Algún día caerá, 2022, 15:33, digital video, color

Cruces, 2024, 3:15, digital video, b&w

Two of my video works, Algún día caerá and Cruces, were featured as part of the group exhibition “Anti-Border Futures” at Centro Cultural de la Raza on occupied Kumeyaay Land. Below are some images and text from the exhibition:

“We face a day-today reality where border walls and immigration checkpoints have long structured the parameters of a national-territorial, border-centered, global, interstate system/regime set on producing precarity and deportability in the service of political and economic elite bent on maximizing profit margins on the backs of racialized/gendered working-class communities. We are seeing such parameters “erode” as the logic of policing that it rests upon is being extended in previously unimaginable ways, including into our most intimate of spaces. There are no “safe spaces” under encroaching fascism, not simply because the term triggers fascists, but because the raison d’être (reason of being) of a bordering and policing colonial logic is to contain and control. In a world turned upside down, such approach to control, ironically rests upon breaking past “borders” or limits of the unimaginable, crafting new rationalities and technologies of power and surveillance, expanding the imagination of domination, however paradoxical it may sound. Yet, its purpose is to freeze and contain our own imaginations, our own dreams and yearnings for freedom, liberation, autonomy and self-determination.

However, one crucial element that all totalitarian and fascist encroachments and aspirations always undermine is the creative spirit that undergirds and sustains all life forms, both in their resistant modes and generative forms. Understood another way, no matter the oppressive logics and practices that seek to impose a monotone, monolithic existence, the raison d’être (reason of being) of los/las/les de abajo is to create, in multifold ways—artistically, politically, spiritually, and materially—that foreground what many communities call the beauty way. Let us dream, imagine, envision and bring to fruition the process of manifesting and actively creating alternative futures that challenge existing structures, norms, borders, and dominant narratives that seek to contain our freedom, our bodies, our feeling/thinking, our creative spirit. In sentipensandoser (feeling-thinking-being) an anti-border “future” into existence, in ways that defy the past-present-future triad that defines the West, the dominant order, the current structuring and bordering of nation-states, and the future-oriented/orientalism of modernity/coloniality, let us shift beyond equally constraining prescribed futures “over there” to be the rupture(s), the unbound, the at-once potentiality and always becoming that continues to transform.”