ELEMENTS
OF ERASURE
Ambivalent feelings are floundering authoritarian arenas like the borderlands where alienated bodies fear, hope and doubt at all times building a tolerance for ambiguity to understand the in-betweenness of things, where layers, wrappers, and pleated folds clashes with a possibility of being stable and surrender, but they choose not to, permeating glimpses of self-governance on the materialities that surround them.
Materialities at the borderlands compose an extension of plural bodies: objects, feelings, structures, tools, and laws that together collide with the institutional ways of administering them like a boundary marker and a treaty. Through the lens of legality as a way of collecting, I collaged different border treatises about land and water throughout the history of the boundaries between México and USA, together with a colonial memoir from the demarcation of boundaries in Nigeria. By making visible the different styles and typographies of the files, I am interested in their materiality as found objects on the internet, highlighting the arbitrary gesture of gluing them together, erasing locations and names to question legality as a tool that updates and deploys a border anywhere.
Materialities at the borderlands compose an extension of plural bodies: objects, feelings, structures, tools, and laws that together collide with the institutional ways of administering them like a boundary marker and a treaty. Through the lens of legality as a way of collecting, I collaged different border treatises about land and water throughout the history of the boundaries between México and USA, together with a colonial memoir from the demarcation of boundaries in Nigeria. By making visible the different styles and typographies of the files, I am interested in their materiality as found objects on the internet, highlighting the arbitrary gesture of gluing them together, erasing locations and names to question legality as a tool that updates and deploys a border anywhere.
