'Erasing the Border': ASU-backed art projects to transform Mexico-U.S. line
- "Borrando la Frontera" will paint a section of the border fence to look like the landscape.
- "Repellent Fence" will be a sky sculpture made from 10-foot-tall balloons.
- Both projects are part of artist-residency programs sponsored by Arizona State University.
Erasing a border on a map is easy enough: All you need is Photoshop. Erasing borders in real life is a far more daunting quest, but that won’t stop Mexican-American artist Ana Teresa Fernández from trying.
In 2012, the San Diego-based painter crossed over to nearby Tijuana, Baja California, and painted the border fence to match the colors of the beach, sea and sky, making it seem to disappear, at least from a distance.
“I almost got arrested,” Fernández says. “I was really scolded for about an hour by the police, but I think because I was wearing stilettos and a dress, they really couldn’t associate me with a hoodlum. Just because I was in cocktail attire, I think that really threw them off and they let me off the hook.”
(And why was she wearing “cocktail attire”? More on that later.)
This week, Fernández will expand her “Borrando la Frontera” (“Erasing the Border”) installation to Nogales, Sonora — this time with prior permission from Mexican authorities. The project is part of a statewide artist-residency sponsored by Arizona State University, and it’s one of two major public-art installations planned for the Arizona-Mexico border.
The first, dubbed “Repellent Fence,” is to be a sky sculpture made of 10-foot-tall balloons that will stretch over 2 miles intersecting the border near Douglas, Ariz., and Agua Prieta, Sonora. Members of the indigenous art collective Postcommodity started on the sculpture, floating at about 50 feet, Friday.
The balloons are scaled-up replicas of “scare eye” balloons, which are decorated with stark eyelike symbols and used to repel birds. The artists — Raven Chacon, Cristóbal Martínez and Kade L. Twist — say the images resemble indigenous iconography. They hope to spark a dialogue about “contested spaces.”
The project is a culmination of the trio’s work with ASU Art Museum’s International Artist Residency Program.
Meanwhile, Fernández’s “Borrando la Frontera” — which she will be painting over four days starting Monday — is the final piece of a residency sponsored by Performance in the Borderlands, an initiative in ASU’s School of Film, Dance and Theatre.
“Our basic charge is to bridge politics and performance,” says Mary Stephens, producing director of the program and a faculty members. “It’s about creating spaces publicly where we can talk about political issues. …
“We can enter that through a discourse on democracy in town halls, but I think that art specifically allows us to reimagine our surroundings. I think that’s the charge of artists and art, to help us think through complex ideas in new ways. … People will agree or disagree based on ideology and experience, but that’s why we specifically work with artists, to help us get out of those old routines of thinking and to reimagine a new kind of future together.”
Fernández was born in a small town in Mexico and moved as a child to San Diego.
“My mom’s a documentarian, and she’s been documenting the border for over 15 years now,” she says. “So I’ve heard the stories that she’s documented over the years. There’s a part of me that just wants to kick at the fence, hit it until it comes down. But sometimes I think (shouting) with the crowd won’t really expand the voice beyond that. So I thought maybe I could do the opposite, by being a bit more quiet around the border and just use what it is that I do as a weapon, which is paint.”
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Politics is at the heart of Fernández’s art, and in addition to border issues, her work explores gender dynamics.
“When I was growing up, I was often told to be quiet and mind my business and be more of a lady,” she says. “But when we were on the dance floor, it was totally fine for women to be loud with their bodies and really be expressive. So I often felt there was this disconnect between the volume of their bodies and the volume of their voices, and what was appreciated and what was underappreciated.”
So she created performance-art pieces where she would dress up as if for a night on the town, but then do the kind of domestic chores that women were expected to do but are not highly valued for, Fernandez says.
Thus “Borrando la Frontera” also is a performance piece as well as an art installation.
“Thinking that I was cleaning up some political filth by erasing the border, I wore my usual attire to highlight the importance of this chore,” she says. “And also it’s kind of an endurance test, to see if I could do it. … I wanted to demonstrate the power of women, being able to do this difficult physical task while wearing high heels.”
More information: anateresafernandez.com, postcommodity.com.
Reach the reporter at kerry.lengel@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4896. Follow him on Twitter @kerrylengel and Facebook.com/LengelonTheater
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