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1. The Transborder Immigrant Tool

   "Transborder" could (and does) refer to any border: political or otherwise. Yet the use of "border" and "immigrant" in a project emanating from just north of the US-Mexico border, unmistakably signals engagement with incendiary border politics that demonize the undocumented as "illegals," as an incursion of dangerous, job-stealing invaders. This artwork inverts that narrative by marshalling empathy for the border-crosser who has already passed into the United States but who is about to die of thirst. Its tactic: drawing the audience into a ritualistic enactment of that perilous journey. However, by presenting the journey, the work does not aestheticize the undocumented as avatars for first-world observers, but instead, by reframing the journey in life-or-death terms, helps to deny the rhetorical construction of "illegals," by recasting the travelers as immigrants in search of the most human needs: water for their bodies and poetry for their souls.

   Scott Rettberg - 03.07.2013 - 13:50