Pushing Border Art’s Borders - session #1

Invited Speaker :  lla N. Sheren (Washington University in St. Louis)

This lecture aims to think through the confluence of border art and eco art as two interlocking categories. What happens when we enfold narratives of human and more-than-human together at the international border? The U.S.-Mexico borderlands are a space defined geographically by river valley, desert, estuary and ocean, but perhaps even more so by competing narratives concerning migration and its effects. These narratives gain political power for their ability to define (and re-define) humanity. In my work, I analyze how the material conditions of the U.S.-Mexico border region — its ecology, terrain, landscape, and infrastructure — determine the texture of the stories told about immigration. I pay careful attention to the ways that these visual narratives both intersect with and work to undermine conditions of necropolitics and dehumanization.

This approach allows me to expand the idea of narrative to include not only human- centered work, but also stories of objects and landscape. These enfold the more-than- human factors whose agency is often lost within the broader picture.

This talk will focus on the ways that two different artists evoke the concerns of the borderlands as an ecological continuity. Taking place just after the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall, and informed by the nascent ecological movements of the 70s and 80s, Michael Tracy’s River Pierce, Sacrifice II, was one of the earliest performances to link international divides with environmental degradation. I find that this period, and this artwork specifically, has significant resonances with the contemporary situation. Karla García’s nomadic cactus sculptures of her ongoing project, La Linea Imaginária ask viewers to think through the relationship between human and non-human movement in the region and beyond. La Linea Imaginária charts the North-South line that connects El Paso with Ciudad Juárez, not the fence that divides it. García’s clay cacti trace a journey of discovery and communion with the land. García’s clay cacti traverse the river, the desert, they look towards the stars and survive the brutal heat of the desert. They are uniquely of the land. Tracy and García both make work located on the border, but each expands the scope of “Border Art” in productive ways. By centering ecology and drawing equivalencies between human and more-than-human experiences, these artworks attune viewers to consider human-nonhuman alignments, which have the capacity to re-orient the direction of “crisis” in the borderlands.

Please register following this links : https://univ-grenoble-alpes-fr.zoom.us/meeting/register/DFsXKt2ORV2IdsCc2C2S4w 

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