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Research article

Dark spaces: borderwalls in the cultural, political and artistic imagination

Author
  • Uli Linke orcid logo (Professor, Sociology and Anthropology Department, Rochester Institute of Technology, NY, USA)

Abstract

The article examines the phenomenon of border fortification in the twenty-first century. It proposes that borderwalls are not just physical barriers but symbolic forms that embody and enact a state’s political visions and phantasms about national belonging and exclusion. It analyses how the visual apparatus of borders is tied to state power and to the use of electronic surveillance technologies to create a seemingly totalising panoptic regime. Central to the investigation are the tactics of state territorial control that unfold in the ‘dark spaces’ or ‘hidden topographies of power’ beyond the visible corporeality of the borderwall, where state violence and migrant deaths often occur unnoticed. When so expunged from public discourse, visual fields, maps and memory, how can these hidden border zones be reimagined? In contrast to the official optics, the article presents the making of counter-visualities through an analysis of border art installations. Such artistic endeavours are analysed as examples of how art can challenge hegemonic narratives and humanise border experiences. The article probes instances of artistic experimentation and visual radicalism (performances, installations, public works) along the US–Mexico border as counter-visual platforms for digital knowledge production, witnessing, political agency and cross-border community collaboration.

Keywords: spatial injustice, surveillance, materiality, visual culture

How to Cite: Linke, U. ‘Dark spaces: borderwalls in the cultural, political and artistic imagination’. Architecture_MPS 33, 1 (2026): 4. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.amps.2026v33i1.004.

Rights: 2026, Uli Linke.

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Published on
01 Apr 2026
Peer Reviewed
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Creative Commons Attribution 4.0

Introduction

The practice of border fortification has gained momentum as a worldwide phenomenon in the twenty-first century, an era marked by the enduring racialisation of space and the persistence of colonial logics that uphold territorial divides as constitutive of statehood, citizenship and global politics.1 In this context, the pursuit of a critical analysis of the visual, imaginative and symbolic modalities of border topographies reveals the enduring entanglements of aesthetic regimes with imperialist politics, state formation and national space. How do visualities, including the hidden and unseen or ‘dark’ spaces of power, ‘shape the geopolitical world’ of international borders?2 This article explores how borderwalls come into being and are given form within a visual system to enact a state’s phantasms about national belonging or exclusion. The building of walls, fences and barriers make tangible an otherwise imperceptible territorial border divide. ‘Why do governments’, asks Anne-Laure Amilhat Szary, ‘take the decision to materialize’ and ‘make visible’ the ‘territorial limits of national space’? What do borderwalls signify? They may be designed to convey a multitude of political messages: ‘protection, consolidation of territorial gains’ and ‘separation’ or ‘border closure’ and exclusion when constituted as impenetrable ‘barriers’.3 As physical manifestations of a political apparatus, borderwalls act as stand-ins, as prosthetic extensions of state power. As symbolic forms, to invoke Ernst Cassirer,4 territorial divides can represent different ideological platforms. For instance, under the racial state,5 the border operates as a racialised partition: the use of bio-political cyphers, such as the (Eurocentric) colour line, identifies ‘bodies as foreign, different, and as outsider’,6 and racially codes transnational migration as an existential societal threat. The racial state, Nicholas Mirzoeff elaborates, ‘operates a [border] control that seeks to separate the “host population”’, the citizenry, from migrant border-crossers ‘as if quarantining the former from infection by the latter’.7 As such, border fortification proceeds by implementing a state’s vision of world space. Furthermore, following Marita Sturken’s work, a wall ‘acts as a screen’ for a multitude of political and ‘cultural projections’ and is ‘easily appropriated for a variety of interpretations’.8 While the meanings attributed to dividing barriers shift with historical contexts, the visual apparatus of borders is intimately linked to power and the state.

Border fortification has resurfaced around the globe as ‘the centrepiece of global policies’ supportive of militarised defence systems.9 Often situated along territorial divides of countries with ongoing civil wars or political conflicts, and integral to a nation’s ‘militarised zones of enforcement’, the practice of borderwalling has emerged as a distinctly contemporary phenomenon.10 How did this come to pass? The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was widely imagined as a portent of a future promise: a borderless world. The demolition of this iconic wall that had divided a city (Berlin) and a country (Germany) for nearly 30 years became a worldwide spectacle, broadcast globally for millions of spectators. For many onlookers, the event ‘marked the beginning of a world without walls, a celebration of globalization, mobility, and freedom’.11 These popular passions for open borders endorsed German unification and the subsequent formation of the European Union. Yet, in the wake of Cold War nation-building and the terrorist attacks of September 11 in 2001, the construction of ever-new border divides intensified: ‘walls remain an ever-present and uncanny apparition’ of exclusion.12 As the ‘sheer volume of border infrastructures and barbed wire multiplied across Europe’, such a transmutation of political spaces into protective fortresses gained resonance on a planetary scale.13 Nation states began to erect walls along their borders to keep migrants out.14 We observe a radical turn against unsanctioned immigration by closing borders, by building walls and by deploying panoptic technologies of population control and surveillance. As Miguel Díaz-Barriga and Margaret E. Dorsey note, ‘concrete walls, metal fences, and concertina wire speak to the overwhelmingly militaristic logic that guides the prevailing approach to borders’.15 In the afterlife of the Cold War, and since the early twenty-first century, an era marked by the War on Terror, dozens of countries have constructed such fortified border barriers. In Fencing in Democracy, Díaz-Barriga and Dorsey chronicle this borderwalling phenomenon: for instance, walls now separate Spain from Morocco, India from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Kashmir, Saudi Arabia from Iraq and Yemen, Botswana from Zimbabwe, China from North Korea, Turkey from Syria and the USA from Mexico.16 Under global neoliberalism, where local life experiences of individuals and communities are increasingly affected by uncertainty and unpredictability, the construction of colossal borderwalls undoubtedly communicates political messages about societal order and state control. The rise of ethno-racial solidarities, neo-fascist movements, border conflicts, territorial wars and a global ‘resurgence of nationalist commitments’, ‘matched by anti-immigrant and anti-refugee sentiments’ across Europe, Australia, the USA and Asia, have further eroded public trust in world affairs.17 By transforming nations into walled fortresses, governments seek to impose a lockdown on cross-border movements to inhibit unauthorised migration into sovereign space.

In a globalised world, the practice of border fortification and this attempt to engineer life in a closed society, a walled stronghold built in defence against outside incursions, requires a complex monitoring system, including militarised borders, weaponised or ‘seeing’ walls, securitised spaces, border patrols and other surveillance tactics. In this undertaking, the use of visual technologies, such as cameras, drones and aerial oversight, is central. In the twenty-first century, border protection has become contingent on vision and sight. Video feeds, optics, visualisation, digital imaging and profiling contribute towards a totalising panoptic regime, as theorised by Michel Foucault,18 maximising the visual capacity of the apparatus of power at the border. How can these various (often computer-mediated) pictorial data-systems support and sustain the machinations of state? And in what ways can a montage of what Leslie Devereaux calls ‘fields of vision’19 inform the realist fictions of border protection? This article interrogates these entanglements of space, power and vision with a focus on the US–Mexico border. In this analytic endeavour, the combined techniques of discovery and cultural criticism, following Walter Benjamin’s lead,20 promise to yield theoretical as well as practical insights.

In the article, the US southern borderwall is understood both as an architectural model that embodies and represents state power and as a tactical instrument for the operation of governing power in space. As a state-made artefact, the borderwall has been infused with political power, which it materialises, aestheticises and performs. When further analysing the borderwall in the contexts of territorial demarcation, national closure and exclusion, the centrality of the interrelation of vision, visibility and power is rendered apparent. At the US–Mexico border, on the edge of sovereign space, as Foucault observes, ‘power itself is made visible, brought out into the open, put constantly on display’.21 As a site of power, the US–Mexico borderwall projects a visible aura, an optical presence, reified by spectatorship, media and political theatrics. This visible field of power extends from the wall’s architectural design and tangible form to the instrumental practices of border closure and fortification, affirmed by images of controlled exclusion: ‘those on whom power operates’, the multitude of migrants at the border, who are denied entry into the USA, ‘are made the most visible’.22 According to Mirzoeff, however, this perpetual visibility of potential border-crossers is not intended to facilitate discipline or reform; rather, it is a tactic of population control. Twenty-first-century globalisation, marked by the prevalence of electronic media and transnational migration, following Mirzoeff, has ushered in a post-panoptic governance, whereby ‘violence is the standard operating procedure of visuality’.23 The US–Mexico border regime brings into evidence governing procedures that enforce the racialised distinction between citizens and migrants by physical means, militarised violence and lethal force. While border closure and anti-immigration enforcement are rendered hyper-visible (detention, caging, family separation, deportation), other more violent and potentially fatal tactics remain hidden, carried out in the terrain beyond the wall, where inhospitable environments are deployed as ‘natural’ killing fields. Nicholas Mirzoeff refers to these post-panoptic modes of population control as ‘necropolitical regimes of separation’, which operate with visible manifestations of power at the borderwall and ‘hidden topographies of power’24 in the interior borderlands. What insights can we uncover about these domains of concealment along the border?

The lifeworlds and human habitats on the margins of the wall’s visible manifestation ‘are kept in the shadows, appearing only at the edges of power’s brilliant glow’.25 In the borderlands, local environments are cast into a mediated darkness – the invisible and hidden topographies – where, concealed from public sight, forms of dispossession and political violence are perpetrated by the sovereign state: a necropolitical regime.26 In these phantom blind zones, ‘outside of the scope of sanctioned vision’,27 the state’s reach of power controls life and death – unseen, unnoticed and uncontested. Banished from the visual field, these ‘blind spots of visuality’ or ‘blank spaces of the map’, as Mirzoeff asserts, are ‘not accidental’ but integral to political practice.28 An optic of the unseen, according to Giorgio Agamben, creates ‘zones of indifference’ by routinising inattention to human life and suffering.29 When perpetually concealed from sight, such spatial voids produce, in Paul Virilio’s words, a form of ‘topographical amnesia’,30 a dispossession of spatial memory and public place awareness. The expansion of a militarised, necropolitical border regime into the US–Mexico borderlands proceeds under cover into unseen or dark spaces and hidden topographies. Postcolonial critics, such as Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak, have explored how this visual logic of concealment, these optics of the unseen, became integral to colonial discourse and practice. The depictions of borderlands as negative spaces, as empty, barren, unproductive voids, absent of life, and as uncharted wild zones, have served as tropes in a political imagination that legitimated the militarised expansion into and colonial domination of Indigenous lands.31 Such an erasure of spaces and lifeworlds from sight and memory requires, in Michael Dear’s words, ‘new ways of seeing’32 or, following Nicholas Mirzoeff, multimodal and polycentric ‘practices of looking’.33

In pursuing this line of inquiry, the work presented here builds on research carried out over the past few decades. Drawing on expertise in multimodal methodologies (including ethnography, visual culture studies and discourse analysis), this article expands its focus to urban injustice, racial divides and anti-immigrant violence to border politics.34 Informed by an aggregate of ethnographic and visual research on border regimes, migration and state power, this article draws on US–Mexico border scholarship by academics, design professionals and activists from diverse disciplines, including art, architecture, cultural studies, anthropology and urban geography.35 The investigation opens with a comparative visual analysis of the US–Mexico borderwall (political realism versus representational art), followed by a brief overview of US border practices in a political context. The article proceeds from a transdisciplinary and cross-methodological inquiry into migrant fatalities towards the contemporary arena of representation and locally situated knowledge of life in the borderlands. The article's final segment turns its attention to border art to analyse how counter-visual projects are staged against dehumanising border hegemonies. Insights from the confluence of art, visual culture and architecture36 probe instances of artistic experimentation at or about the US–Mexico borderwall as platforms for knowledge production and cross-border community building.

Borderwall optics: visual modalities of representation

Attempts to decipher borderwall images rely on context and comparison to make sense of what is seen, ‘what is offered up to be seen’ and what might be hidden or concealed from view.37 This is particularly important when analysing the politics of representation at the US–Mexico border. What image-making practices can we identify? When tracing the history of visuality from colonialism, fascism and the Cold War to the global present, Mirzoeff observes that ‘the place of visualization has literally and metaphorically continued to distance itself from the subject being viewed’, shifting from the panorama to aerial (drone) photography ‘and more recently to that of satellites, a practical means of domination and surveillance’.38 In order to more fully explore these complex entanglements of space, power and vision, we turn to a comparative analysis of political realism versus representational art.

We begin with an aerial (drone-produced) view of the US–Mexico borderwall in Arizona (Figure 1). The eye of the drone camera is trained on the border fence, a reddish-brown metal construct that rises from the ground to tower above the treetops and extends in a linear trajectory across the landscape. The endless, seamless border barrier hugs the topography, snaking up and down, gliding over small hills and across shallow valleys. The wall barrier cuts through the desert brushland, dividing a vast terrain, as its rust-brown metallic body moves towards the distant mountains on the horizon. The image prompts us to consider the scope of this border construct, its monumental design. The rust-red border fence is a human-made artefact that provides a tangible, visible marker of the territorial divide between the USA and Mexico. Here, the natural terrain (much like a palimpsest) is at once also rendered a historically constructed political space. The steel wall serves as an indexical sign of the otherwise intangible political border that separates two nations. Although the southern US borderwall traverses a variety of terrains, ranging from urban areas to deserts, ‘the people who live at, along, and within the borderlands’39 are absent from the visual field. In this aerial image, the focus is less on population control than on the capacity of the massive borderwall to divide, separate and dominate geopolitical space.

Figure 1
Figure 1

The borderwall between the USA and Mexico, Sonora, Arizona, 2023 (Source: photo © Valerie Macon/AFP via Getty Images) 

These optics of the Arizona–Mexico borderwall are juxtaposed with the visual record of a colossal artwork exhibited in real geopolitical space, a simulacrum of a border barrier, which materialises the artists’ critical engagement with the practice of border-fencing (Figure 2). What insights can we uncover from such a visual comparison? Can we identify possible alternatives to the dominant visual practice, whether by a shift in vantage points, termed ‘the oppositional gaze’ by bell hooks,40 or by the formation of radically different representations of reality, theorised as ‘counter visualities’ by Nicholas Mirzoeff?41 In order to probe deeper into these complex dynamics of the border, we turn to another image production: a public art installation titled Running Fence in northern California.

Figure 2
Figure 2

Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Running Fence, Sonoma and Marin counties, California, 1972–6 (Source: photo by Wolfgang Volz © Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation) 

This project, by artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, while curated close to 50 years ago, speaks to (and against) the practice of border fortification worldwide.42 Known for their large-scale art installations, including critical border art, the artists insisted that their Running Fence project conveyed a political message: a ‘scream for freedom’.43 The installation’s design, including its material, colour and scale, modelled a work of representational art that brought to life (and visibility) an alternative border imagination in three-dimensional space – a counter-visual form of borderwalling. The Running Fence was a colossal construct: it stretched across 24 miles and achieved a vertical height of 18 feet; it consisted of 2 million square feet of white nylon fabric panels held aloft by steel poles and cables; it extended from the outskirts of the California city of Petaluma, over the hills and pastures of Sonoma and Marin counties, and down into the Pacific Ocean at Bodega Bay.44 As captured by the photographic image, the installation revealed an enormous bright-white artefact that covered the California foothills and wound its way along the mountain peaks. The ground, a brown and arid landscape, produced a stark colour contrast that rendered the whiteness of the installation hyper-visible. This whiteness of the Running Fence further intensified where rays of sunlight illuminated the nylon fabric, causing it to emit a reflective sheen or glare, transmuting its colour to a neon white. Such a colour coding is evocative of the racialist US–Mexico borderwall, seen as a trace of the colonial project, whereby white sovereignty asserts dominance over a political territory to prohibit Latin American migrants from entering the USA.

The Running Fence was not intended as a mere reproduction or simple imitation of a border barrier. In contrast to the US–Mexico borderwall in Arizona, the art installation did not consist of a linear (modernist) design that rendered an imperceptible political border visible, tangible and natural. The Running Fence installation materialised and projected a very different aesthetic. It meandered, twisted and turned without directional intent. As its white body snaked over the terrain, it appeared to float above the ground. Although the installation crossed 14 roads and a town, the elevation of the white fabric panels and the intermittent gaps or fence openings in urban areas enabled the passage of people, cars, cattle and wildlife. In this manner, life on the ground, below the fence, could proceed unimpeded. As such, the installation did not separate space or people by a geopolitical or ethno-racial divide: a discernible territorial distinction of inside and outside was absent. In consequence, the mandate to include or exclude people was rendered absurd. The Running Fence contested the instrumental intent of the real-world borderwall in the southern USA: it was porous, discontinuous, refused to block movement and mobility and negated closure, separation and exclusion. The installation conjured a counter-hegemonic imagination of border fortification. While situated in a natural terrain, the installation’s material design and visual properties, including the nylon fabric, its artificial whiteness, its form and its route, defied naturalisation. Art-inspired neorealism ‘wants to make the continuing realities of segregation – the combination of spatial and racial politics – visible and to overcome that segregation by imagining a new reality’.45 In the terrain of the California landscape, the Running Fence drew attention as an object out of place, an artefact that contested and called into question the legitimacy of borderwalls while simultaneously proposing a counter-reality.

The US–Mexico borderwall: a prosthetic of state power

Borderwalls are physical constructs, built to enclose, protect, exclude and divide. As tangible signifiers of state sovereignty and power, walling accomplishes border defence in several ways: a borderwall is ‘a physical object’ ‘with the qualities of verticality, closure, and immovability’; it ‘blocks movements’, ‘hinders vision and sound’ and has ‘the power to separate space’ and thereby ‘creates new geographies’ and sensorial experiences of territoriality.46 Borderwalling transforms tropes of globality (liquidity, flow, mobility, openness) into images of threat when applied to human beings. Far from creating a world without borders, contemporary globalisation has generated a proliferation of borders and borderwalls in a push to impede asylum and migration from the racialised spaces of the Global South.47 The recognition of these uneven developments, that is, unrestricted mobility in the inner spaces of the nation state’s geobody and ‘the biometric closure of borders’ along the outer perimeter, inspired Achille Mbembe’s critical appraisal of ‘the idea of a borderless world’.48 Such theorising interventions, posited with a decolonising stance,49 expose the longue durée of violent border regimes.

Entwined with histories of empire, coloniality and nation state, borderwalls – these carceral architectures of territoriality – are often ‘built on the ruins of war and genocide’.50 Dehumanising practices and violent exclusion are among the basic building blocks of borderwall regimes, as is evident in the context of the US–Mexico border (Figure 3). In the USA, under Donald Trump’s first-term presidency, the fortification of the border became a central matter of state. The president directed his advisers ‘to shut down the entire 2,000-mile border with Mexico’.51 In addition, he proposed an impenetrable wall design, with structural properties of height and steel, as evidence of the government’s ‘absolute power’ over territorial sovereignty. The wall construction along the US–Mexico border was to follow ‘a medieval design – painted black so that it would burn the skin of those trying to scale it, with spikes at the top, to cause anticipated injuries’.52 Furthermore, with aides,

the president had often talked about fortifying the borderwall with a water-filled trench, stocked with snakes or alligators, prompting aides to seek a cost estimate. He wanted the wall electrified, [and again] with spikes on top that could pierce human flesh. After publicly suggesting that soldiers shoot migrants if they threw rocks, the president backed off when his staff told him that was illegal. But later in a meeting … he suggested that they shoot migrants in the legs to slow them down.53

Such violent, even murderous, fantasies were widely popularised, accompanied by media images of migrant children in cages,54 and presented as necessary measures against the abject figure of the border- crosser, who was conjured as an invasive force, a contagion, a deadly threat. How can such border practices or imaginaries be altered, when, as Deniz Göktürk asserts, ‘border control has become a litmus test for governments, democracies, and civil societies around the world’?55

Figure 3
Figure 3

Migrants waiting to cross the US border on the banks of the Rio Grande, Mexico, 2022 (Source: Jose Zamora/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images) 

In forging a scalable global imagination of borders, we need to depart from ‘the taken-for-granted, state-centric model or image of world-space’56 and recalibrate our visual field and investigative commitment to ‘the human scale’,57 the social ground, with attention to people’s lifeworlds, perspectives and experiences.58 Yet how can such attention to border-induced human suffering not merely incite ‘spectatorial empathy’59 but engender action, even change? ‘Are there alternatives to passively watching the pain of others, the suffering of refugees detained at borders, rescued at sea or trapped in camps?’60 How can people begin to imagine possibilities of coexistence, collaboration and a shared future in their encounters with the divisive wall?61 Drawing on the work of scholars, activists and visual artists who attempt ‘to challenge power relations, claim visibility, reinvent a culture of coexistence and sharing, and produce hybrid common spaces’,62 we may glimpse the transformative potential of a ‘radically humanist’ practice.63

Death beyond the borderwall: hidden traces of state violence

Borderwalls are artefacts of a political order. As constructs of the territorial state, such fortification architectures are enhanced by the defensive arsenal of a militarised border regime: from barbed wire, watchtowers, armed guards, minefields and death-strips or kill zones to surveillance technologies.64 Engineered to defend and protect, ‘borderwalls are, of course, about exclusion and defining who can live and who is killable’.65 In the USA, as in Europe and elsewhere, the design of the wall and border controls have become powerful symbols of a ‘restorative promise of protection, security, and white nationalism within a bounded nation-state’.66 Seen from a single vantage point – the state – border protection is unleashed with unpredictability and brutality. The infliction of pain, suffering, even death is justified to safeguard the nation ‘against an outside seen as hostile or predatory’.67 Under the political spectacle of the ‘big, beautiful wall’,68 the border regime’s deadliness has been visually obscured. The tactics of violence, including migrant tracking, detention, caging and entrapment, have become commonplace.69 With the accelerated fortification of the US–Mexico frontier in the twenty-first century, the southern borderlands, with stretches of desert, ranches, towns and cities straddling the border, a region home to Indigenous nations (T’ohono O’odham), changed ‘from interconnected communities and interdependent economies to a militarized region reminiscent of a war zone’.70 Political divides, such as the US–Mexico borderwall, have devastating human costs.

Anthropologist Jason De León has centred his work on uncovering these violent realities of undocumented crossings at the US southern border. In The Land of Open Graves, De León details the suffering and death that occurs daily in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona, as thousands of migrants attempt the journey into the USA.71 Combining ethnography, archaeology and forensic science, De León’s research findings uncover the deadliness of US border-enforcement policy. Heightened security measures at urban points of entry force migrants to traverse highly treacherous environments beyond the wall, a land that US Border Patrol dubs ‘hostile terrain’. Due to this tactic, migrants are routed to cross the border at ‘unguarded but inhospitable areas of desert expanse, often ending in death’.72 These deaths are attributed to the harsh environment, weaponising the desert by deploying it as a natural killing field.73 De León regards this weaponisation of the desert as an insidious, intangible form of state violence. His work chronicles the journey of migrants across the US border, uncovering the stories, histories and former lives of the objects and bodies left behind in the desert. As he notes, ‘one can find a variety of things in the Arizona desert related to undocumented migration, and this is a range of things from empty water bottles, food wrappers, and abandoned clothes to the evidence of Border Patrol presence: handcuffs, bullet casings, as well as human remains’.74 The goal is to find traces of those ‘who have disappeared during this process’; in De León’s words, ‘perhaps through archaeology and forensic work, we can somehow bring closure to the families by recovering bodies or at least raise public awareness about this issue’.75

De León wants to make visible what was not (to be) seen. His 2021 exhibition project Hostile Terrain 94 was to raise public awareness of the human fatalities at the US southern border (Figure 4).76 Installed in 150 locations simultaneously on six continents, the project was ‘part of a global pop-up exhibition’.77 The installation consisted of approximately 3,200 toe tags that memorialise those human beings who died trying to cross the border via the Sonoran Desert from the mid-1990s to 2019. The tags were geolocated on a wall map of the Arizona/Mexico border, each showing the exact locations where human remains were found. The exhibition assembly relied on teams of volunteers from each hosting location. Volunteers participated in toe-tag-filling workshops, where they handwrote the biographic details of the dead onto the tags. The installation’s design was impactful. Writing out the names and information of the dead moved volunteers to engage with the memory record of those who had died. This participatory practice of handwriting, thereby acknowledging and remembering the dead, a form of embodied attention, became an act of individual and collective witnessing (around the globe).78 In its finished form, Hostile Terrain 94 reveals a mapped record – a visible archive – of human deaths beyond the US–Mexico borderline.

Figure 4
Figure 4

Making migrant deaths visible: Hostile Terrain 94 installation, Rochester, New York, 2021–2 (Source: photo by Elizabeth Lamark and A. Sue Weisler © Rochester Institute of Technology) 

Life at the borderwall: making visible unseen worlds

We tend to avert our gaze from this border region, this edge-zone of life and death in the southern US. For decades, the public eye has been trained on the towering, seemingly endless borderwall that stands firm against the approaching ‘multitude’.79 The lands beyond this contact zone of nation state and border-crossers are expunged from our field of vision. Media images-industries mute public awareness of these southern borderlands by offering no more than glimpses of a barren, inhospitable terrain, a wasteland, a lawless dead zone – absent of people.80 While deployed as a canvas for representation, this ‘barren terrain’ is not uninhabited or void of people.81 There is life lived in these unseen border regions, which ‘thrive not only as deserts but also as binational communities, wildlife refuges, and nodes of hemispheric trade. [They are] home to small towns and cities, parks, ranches, and farms.’82 Residents note ‘the bilingual, bicultural, and binational skills that characterize border regions [and] form part of a wider border culture that embraces diversity’.83 The borderwall cuts through these landscapes, environments and communities, inhibiting sociality across languages, cultures and nations. Local people reveal that they ‘miss the “organic quality” of the old border [without the barrier or fence] that allowed communities in the US and Mexico to visit and celebrate events together’.84 How can people ‘reclaim a pluralistic vision of national belonging’ when the borderwall divides and obstructs local life?85

Such ethnographic details regarding the negative impact of the US–Mexico borderwall on local worlds indicate the urgent need for an altered public imagination, one that firmly embraces notions of socio-spatial justice and rights. Several scholars and practitioners have incorporated such commitments into their professional work. In Borderwall as Architecture, Ronald Rael details a range of initiatives for protest and cross-borderwall interactions.86 His projects, illustrated with models and diagrammatic blueprints, feature participatory and inclusive approaches to transborder contact. Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman likewise engage with border projects in practice.87 In Spatializing Justice, a handbook for new modalities of borderland activism, the authors reconnect design experimentation with social responsibility. In such activist endeavours, visual communication tactics are crucial. In the words of the authors, ‘every project must acknowledge by visualizing the contested histories inscribed in space, the lineage of racism and marginalization, displacement and disinvestment, ownership and belonging to expose the neoliberal fallacy of terra nullius and speculative [local] territories of amnesia’.88 In a subsequent publication, Socializing Architecture, Cruz and Forman assembled their decade-long research in the Tijuana–San Diego border region, where pictorial media and data visualisation serve as powerful tools in initiating cross-border dialogues. Among the innovative approaches to contesting the US southern border regime are the ‘unwalling experiments’ curated by Cruz and Forman, cultural intervention projects ‘supported by visual tools that facilitate the broader recognition of our cross-border citizenship as well as cross-border public knowledge and sentiment’.89 When organising such collaborative community events to make the physical border barrier more porous and to mitigate divisive social attitudes, such strategic productions deeply engage visual as well as other sensory experiences to achieve these goals.

Some art-activists similarly route their visual choices towards a liberative politics.90 The work of the Tunisian French photographer and street artist known as JR exemplifies this approach.91 Since his teenage years, growing up in the banlieues of Paris, JR has been committed to making those who have money, power and privilege see what has been hidden or ignored: to empower those who endure in silence, whose struggle is concealed from public view. As JR puts it, ‘it’s important to have that visibility. If you are not seen, you are invisible, and people don’t know that your problems exist.’92 JR is drawn to places ‘where people’s humanity and personhood are habitually ignored or subsumed in political rhetoric’.93 ‘Using unexpected canvasses, the artist wants to give global voice to everyday people through a genre-blending combination of public art, photography, and large format spectacle.’94 JR’s use of photographic monumentalism in ordinary settings and commonplace spaces creates temporary dis/ruptures that can be seized by local people and communities as opportunities for self-expression, agency and action.95

When learning about the US’s intention to build a permanent wall along the southern border in 2017, JR travelled to the city of Tecate in Mexico. He explains: ‘I wanted to find a place where I could do an installation that would play with the wall but not touch the wall. We started looking around Tecate (which is not even an hour from Tijuana and a couple of hours from San Diego)’ and after ‘we passed the border checkpoint into Mexico, we looked for a house closest to the wall, and we went and knocked on the door. There was a little garden in front, and some chickens, and a dog, the grandparents were outside, and there was a baby in his crib.’96 JR photographed the infant, Kikito, and, after obtaining permission, began to install his project, which included building a support frame for the exhibition three times the height of the borderwall. As a visual commentary on arbitrary national distinctions, JR turned the borderwall into an art gallery, mounting a photograph of a smiling toddler onto 65-foot scaffolding on Mexican territory (Figure 5). Seen from the American side, the child playfully peeks over the border fence: innocent, adorable, harmless. The artist, according to the boy’s mother, ‘has given a face to what many distort. A place that nobody noticed, he made stand out. No one looked at these faces that live here, until he made them big.’97 The child’s father adds:

We live directly on the border. People have the wrong impression of us. [JR’s] image [of our child], I say, is to make people understand that we are not criminals. We are people who work. Honest, sincere, we try to strive. And in breaking those walls, barriers, I want to give a better future to our children, to our family, to our parents as well.98

Figure 5
Figure 5

Kikito and the US Border Patrol, art installation at the US–Mexico border by JR, Tecate, Mexico, 2017 (Source: © JR) 

JR publicised the work on Instagram.99 ‘What I’m hoping the most’, says JR, ‘is not only that people will see the photo (on social media) but that they’ll decide to go there themselves. They’ll talk to Border Patrol; they’ll talk to people on the other side, who they can see through the fence.’100 This hope became a reality. For several weeks, cross-border interactions at the site of JR’s photo project included several such communicative practices. JR elaborates: ‘I had hoped that people go to this place and take photos, take selfies. Then they would see others through the border fence doing the same thing. But what happened, I had not planned. People started exchanging their phones through the fence, taking photos of each other, connecting, talking.’101 These transnational encounters inspired the artist to add a final event to the project. On the last day of the photo-installation, JR organised a picnic around a long table on both sides of the border (Figure 6). Community members, borderland residents and ‘hundreds of visitors from both the USA and Mexico came together to share a meal’.102 ‘The table goes through the wall, and people eat the same food and drink the same water and listen to the same music,’ says JR. ‘For a minute, we were forgetting about [the border divide], passing salt and water and drinks as if there were no wall.’103 With this momentary transformation of the borderwall into a positive space, a site of artistic expression, creative agency and social life, JR wanted to foreground evidence of a shared humanity.

Figure 6
Figure 6

Giant Picnic Across the Mexico–USA Border, installation by JR, Tecate, Mexico, 2017 (Source: © JR) 

Concluding remarks

Border art makes visible alternative ways of being human by realigning hegemonic logics of separation, exclusion and marginalisation. In seizing the US–Mexico borderwall as a platform for site-specific performances, artists, such as JR, not only engage the racially coded border terrain but also unsettle the militarised logic of concealment by rendering hidden lifeworlds visually present. The imaginative staging of these counter-visual realities of border territories, we argue, is crucial in the democratisation of the public sphere. Such art activism, with its deconstructive, interruptive and oppositional practice, calls into question the normalised, hegemonic, necropolitical US border discourse by opening a space for truth-telling, eye-witnessing, and showcasing alternative imaginings of cross-border contact and collaboration. ‘As both material and virtual artworks,’ according to Megan Morrissey, ‘JR’s Kikito and Giant Picnic installations are provocative’ in so far as these forms of border art ‘speak to, with, and against the popularly circulated [machination] that the border is a militarized zone of enforcement’, while mobilising the relational possibilities among ‘people, communities, and nations’.104 Given the hyper-visibility of border control and the hidden topographies of state power along the US southern borderwall, these paradoxes of (in)visibility, visualisation and the longing for visual access to hidden and forbidden spaces are central to such artistic endeavours. As Irit Rogoff succinctly elaborates, ‘[w]hat are the visual codes by which some are allowed to look, others to hazard a peek, and still others are forbidden to look altogether? In what political discourses can we understand looking and returning the gaze as an act of political resistance?’105 JR’s monumental Kikito installation centres on the cultural politics of ‘looking relations’, and the power of the ‘oppositional gaze’,106 by featuring a close-up photograph of a one-year-old boy, whose ‘larger-than-life frame appears to have climbed the Mexican side of the border barrier, just enough to peer down over the wall’s edge’,107 visually exploring the forbidden US border terrain. While this image of a young child seems ‘out of place in the brown, sun-soaked desert’, it offers ‘a glimpse of something human and vulnerable in a space that is often characterized as unforgiving and highly militarized’.108 The installation contests the racialist US–Mexico border divide ‘by claiming the right to look, and to be seen’, ‘as a human’.109 The magnified 70-foot photograph shows an ‘image of a young boy whose family lives within walking distance of the installation’,110 in a house on a hill. The realist photographic representation of the child signifies, in visualisable and recognisable form, the existence of ordinary life south of the border, compelling us to acknowledge the infant’s bond with his family, home and community. Furthermore, the ‘towering, highly detailed black and white photograph’111 does not project an exoticised figuration that garners attention by accentuating cultural difference. JR’s installation ‘does not participate in the racialized or sexualized caricature’ of Mexican or Latin American nationals ‘that is so common’ in those US political imaginaries that seek to legitimate the borderwall and its fortification.112 The second art installation, the Giant Picnic, incorporates similar modalities and motifs: ‘JR’s work calls on people to consider the space of the border as a zone of connection rather than crossing, and in so doing, produces the opportunity to imagine–and indeed to materialize–different relational configurations.’113 These forms of border art furnish an ‘anti-imperial and antiracist countervisuality’114 and thereby reveal ‘the emancipatory potential of aesthetic and artistic strategies’.115 Such creative endeavours, which attempt to ‘chart novel ways of emancipatory resistance and transformative action’,116 can serve as critical signposts for broader societal struggles to decolonise the geospatial and racial imagination of borderwall politics.

Notes

  1. Balibar, ‘Strangers as enemies’, 10; Goldberg, The Racial State; Morrissey, ‘Border matters’, 3. ⮭
  2. Moze and Spiegel, ‘The aesthetic turn in border studies’. ⮭
  3. Amilhat Szary, ‘Walls and border art’, 214–15. ⮭
  4. Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. ⮭
  5. See Goldberg, The Racial State. Goldberg argues that race is integral to the emergence of modern nation-state formation and the persistence of racial distinction, exclusion, population management and terror. ⮭
  6. Morrissey, ‘Border matters’, 6 (emphasis in the original). ⮭
  7. Mirzoeff, The Right to Look, 278–9. ⮭
  8. Sturken, ‘The wall, the screen, and the image’, 172. ⮭
  9. Díaz-Barriga and Dorsey, ‘Anthropology’, 69. ⮭
  10. Morrissey, ‘Border matters’, 7. See also Brown, Walled States; Molnar, The Walls Have Eyes. ⮭
  11. Díaz-Barriga and Dorsey, Fencing in Democracy, 7. ⮭
  12. Stoetzer, ‘Europe’s other walls’; see also Brown, Walled States; Stone, ‘The EU’. ⮭
  13. Stoetzer, ‘Europe’s other walls’, 104. ⮭
  14. See Stone, ‘The EU’; Linke, ‘Fortress Europe’. ⮭
  15. Díaz-Barriga and Dorsey, ‘Anthropology’, 69. ⮭
  16. Díaz-Barriga and Dorsey, Fencing in Democracy, 9–10. ⮭
  17. Mirzoeff, The Right to Look, 257. ⮭
  18. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 200, 205. ⮭
  19. Deveraux, ‘Introductory essay’. ⮭
  20. Benjamin, Illuminations. ⮭
  21. Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault, 159. ⮭
  22. Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault, 159. ⮭
  23. Mirzoeff, The Right to Look, 292 and 278–9. ⮭
  24. Mirzoeff, The Right to Look, 278 and 279. ⮭
  25. Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault, 159. ⮭
  26. See Mbembe, Necropolitics. Necropolitics is a concept developed by Mbembe and refers to the ways in which political systems use power to kill, or to control, who lives and who dies to maintain their dominance. ⮭
  27. Rogoff, ‘Studying visual culture’, 17. ⮭
  28. Cited from ‘Introduction’, The Right to Look, 24, and Mirzoeff, ‘Introduction to Part Two’, 128. ⮭
  29. Agamben, State of Exception, 23. ⮭
  30. Virilio, ‘A topographical amnesia’. ⮭
  31. See here: Said, Orientalism; Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. ⮭
  32. Dear, Border Witness, 4. ⮭
  33. Mirzoeff, The Right to Look, 1. ⮭
  34. A brief synopsis of this research places the current project on the US–Mexico borderwall in context. Ethnographic research in Berlin, beginning in the 1980s, centred on urban life and political activism in a divided city (see Berdahl, Where the World Ended; Borneman, Belonging in the Two Berlins; Linke, German Bodies; Stoetzer, Ruderal City). Such long-term research in a walled metropolis was enriched by urban development studies in Oslo, London, Istanbul and Toronto, cities marked by divisions of class, wealth and ethnic solidarities. Short-term research in Zagreb, a city ravaged by the Yugoslav border war, made visible how urban communities here and elsewhere sought recovery from past trauma by participating in theatre and art performances (see Sontag, ‘Godot comes to Sarajevo’). Additional research into family archives and the memories of survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto and Dachau concentration camp revealed the impact of state terror on bodies and souls in walled killing centres in cities and rural-urban hinterlands (see, for instance, Linke, German Bodies). Subsequent comparative research on ghettos, slums and favelas (in the Americas, Europe and Africa) uncovered similar tactics of population management at the spatial margins of global cities worldwide, including racialisation, dispossession and spatial ordering. Such research, with a turn to visual inquiry, explored the role of European artists and photographers in creating and globally circulating representational images of informal urban architecture and housing (see Linke, ‘The Optics of Dispossession’; Linke, ‘ICONi©Cities’; Linke, ‘Racializing Cities, Naturalizing Space’). ⮭
  35. See Dear, Border Witness; Marcello Di Cintio, Walls; Gouvias, Petropoulou and Tsavdaroglou, eds., Contested Borderscapes; Jusionyte, Threshold; Molnar, The Walls Have Eyes; Rael, Borderwall as Architecture; Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism. ⮭
  36. See Cruz and Forman, Spatializing Justice; Cruz and Forman, Socializing Architecture; Rael, Borderwall as Architecture. ⮭
  37. Mirzoeff, The Right to Look, 16. ⮭
  38. Mirzoeff, The Right to Look, 17. ⮭
  39. Morrissey, ‘Border matters’, 6. ⮭
  40. hooks, Black Looks, 115–32. ⮭
  41. Mirzoeff, The Right to Look. ⮭
  42. Empire Runners, ‘Lost photos’. ⮭
  43. See Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation, ‘Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Life and work’; Empire Runners, ‘Lost photos’, 3; Chamberlain, ‘Politics’. ⮭
  44. Paraphrased from Chamberlain, ‘Politics’, 33. For a description of the technical details of the installation, see Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation, ‘Running Fence’. Although ‘the Running Fence was completed on September 10, 1976’, the final installation followed four years of local community engagement: ‘The art project consisted of 42 months of collaborative efforts, the ranchers’ participation, eighteen public hearings, three sessions at the Superior Courts of California, the drafting of a 450-page Environmental Impact Report and the temporary use of the hills, the sky and the ocean’ (Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation, ‘Running Fence’). ⮭
  45. Mirzoeff, The Right to Look, 238. ⮭
  46. Benta and Davison, ‘Introduction’, 2–3. ⮭
  47. Linke, ‘ICONi©Cities’, 345–58; Mezzadra and Neilson, Border as Method. ⮭
  48. Mbembe, ‘The idea of a borderless world’. ⮭
  49. Bolles, ‘Decolonizing anthropology’; Gupta and Stoolman, ‘Decolonizing US anthropology’; Mbembe, ‘Aesthetics of superfluity’. ⮭
  50. Stoetzer, ‘Europe’s other walls’, 100–7. ⮭
  51. Shear and Hirschfeld Davis, ‘Shoot migrants’ legs’. ⮭
  52. Miroff and Dawsey, ‘Trump wants his border barrier’; see also Kray and Linke, ‘Introduction’, 5–6; Shear and Davis, ‘Shoot migrants’ legs’. ⮭
  53. Kray and Linke, ‘Introduction’, 5–6; quoted from Shear and Davis, ‘Shoot migrants’ legs’. ⮭
  54. Soboroff, Separated. ⮭
  55. Göktürk, ‘Modeling a world city’, 82. ⮭
  56. Beaverstock et al., ‘World-city network’, 97; Römhild, ‘Beyond the bounds of the ethnic’; Scott, Seeing Like a State. ⮭
  57. Andreas M. Dalsgaard, director, The Human Scale: Bringing Cities to Life. Documentary film, 1 hour, 32 min (final cut for Real and Xanadu Film, 2012). ⮭
  58. Bolles, ‘Decolonizing anthropology’, 521. ⮭
  59. Göktürk, ‘Modeling a world city’, 82. ⮭
  60. Göktürk, ‘Modeling a world city’, 82. ⮭
  61. Stoetzer, ‘Europe’s other walls’, 106–7; Göktürk, ‘Modeling a world city’, 88. ⮭
  62. Tsavdaroglou, ‘“Refugee TV” and “Refugees Got Talent” Projects’, 179. ⮭
  63. Thomas and Clark, ‘Can anthropology be decolonized?’ ⮭
  64. Bowman, ‘Walling as encystation: A socio-historical inquiry’, 75–88; Campbell, ‘Anthropology of borders’; Horvath et al., ‘Introduction’, 2–3; Molnar, The Walls Have Eyes, 1–38. ⮭
  65. Díaz-Barriga and Dorsey, ‘Trump’s wall’. ⮭
  66. Römhild, ‘Beyond the bounds of the ethnic’, 69. ⮭
  67. Bowman, ‘Walling as encystation’, 75–6; Stone, ‘The EU’. ⮭
  68. Davison, ‘Identities frozen’, 172. ⮭
  69. Di Cintio, Walls; Dear, Border Witness; Jusionyte, Threshold. ⮭
  70. Davison, ‘Identities frozen’, 175. ⮭
  71. De León, The Land of Open Graves. ⮭
  72. Davison, ‘Identities frozen’, 174–5. ⮭
  73. De León, The Land of Open Graves; De León, ‘Making undocumented migration visible’; Díaz-Barriga and Dorsey, ‘Trump’s wall’, e83–6. ⮭
  74. De León, ‘Making undocumented migration visible’. ⮭
  75. De León, ‘Making undocumented migration visible’. De León, Land of Open Graves; Dear, Border Witness; De León et al., ‘Prevention through deterrence’; Jusionyte, Threshold; Rael, Borderwall as Architecture. ⮭
  76. De León, ‘Making undocumented migration visible’. ⮭
  77. Kray, ‘RIT volunteers’. ⮭
  78. See the website for Hostile Terrain 94 sponsored by the Undocumented Migration Project: https://www.undocumentedmigrationproject.org/hostileterrain94. ⮭
  79. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 119–88. ⮭
  80. Dear, Border Witness, 99; Díaz-Barriga and Margaret Dorsey, ‘Trump’s wall and the dictator aesthetic’; Dorsey and Díaz-Barriga, ‘Beyond surveillance and moonscapes’; Davison, ‘Identities frozen’. ⮭
  81. Dear, Border Witness, 99. ⮭
  82. Dorsey and Díaz-Barriga, ‘Beyond surveillance’, 132, 135. ⮭
  83. Davison, ‘Identities frozen’, 176. ⮭
  84. Davison, ‘Identities frozen’, 175–6; Dear, Border Witness, 234. ⮭
  85. Martin, ‘Reframing the US-Mexico border crisis’, 194. ⮭
  86. Rael, Borderwall as Architecture. ⮭
  87. See Cruz and Forman, Spatializing Justice; Cruz and Forman, Socializing Architecture. ⮭
  88. Cruz and Forman, Spatializing Justice, 32. ⮭
  89. Cruz and Forman, Socializing Architecture, 501. ⮭
  90. Linke, ‘Optics of dispossession’, 10–14; JR, Can Art Change the World? ⮭
  91. Arabindoo, ‘Rhetoric of the “Slum”’, 341. ⮭
  92. In Cadwalladr, ‘JR: “I realised I was giving people a voice”’. ⮭
  93. Schwartz, ‘Artist JR’; Ryzik, ‘JR’s latest’. ⮭
  94. See JR, Paper and Glue, cover text. ⮭
  95. Khatchadourian, ‘In the Picture’. ⮭
  96. JR, ‘JR on Giant Kikito’. ⮭
  97. JR, director, Paper & Glue. ⮭
  98. JR, ‘Kikito, Tecate, 2017’. ⮭
  99. Alter, ‘Picnic at the border’; Schwartz, ‘Artist JR’; JR, ‘News’. ⮭
  100. JR, Can Art Change the World?, 272–3; JR, ‘Giants’. ⮭
  101. JR, Paper and Glue, 12:40–13:25; JR, ‘JR on Giant Kikito’, 06:01–07:36. ⮭
  102. See JR, Can Art Change the World?, 270; JR, ‘Migrants’; JR, ‘On Migrants’. ⮭
  103. Quoted in Alter, ‘Picnic at the border’. See also: JR, Can Art Change the World?, 270, 272–3; JR, ‘Giants’. ⮭
  104. Morrissey, ‘Border matters’, 3, 5. ⮭
  105. Rogoff, ‘Studying visual culture’, 16. ⮭
  106. hooks, Black Looks, 115–32. ⮭
  107. Morrissey, ‘Border matters’, 3. ⮭
  108. Morrissey, ‘Border matters’, 3. ⮭
  109. Mirzoeff, Right to Look, 148, 150. ⮭
  110. Morrissey, ‘Border matters’, 3. ⮭
  111. Morrissey, ‘Border matters’, 3. ⮭
  112. Mirzoeff, Right to Look, 156, 165. ⮭
  113. Morrissey, ‘Border matters’, 7. ⮭
  114. Mirzoeff, Right to Look, 151, 156. ⮭
  115. Räber, ‘Introduction’, 321. ⮭
  116. Räber, ‘Introduction’, 320. ⮭

Declarations and conflict of interests

Research ethics statement

Not applicable to this article.

Consent for publication statement

Not applicable to this article.

Conflicts of interest statement

The author declares no conflicts of interests with this work. All efforts to sufficiently anonymise the author during peer review of this article have been made. The author declares no further conflicts with this article.

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