Borders

The concept of borders is meant to separate. In our world, they have served to demarcate what land belongs to who. As useful as it is to divide land to make governing easier, it has inevitably led to othering and xenophobia. The ultimate vision is to create a world without physical borders like walls, in which we can all work together and appreciate all cultures rather than harshly dividing us. I believe that this can be done by building the communities that reside in borderlands. In interacting and learning from each other, we can begin to lessen the impact of physical borders, eventually eradicating their need. Though a bit ambitious, I would like to do this by hosting a binational open mic at the US-MX border. However, I am not too worried, as I know that an event like this has been hosted before. I would reach out to Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, who has hosted an event like this, and my professor John-Phillip Santos, who is an artist particularly interested in borderlands. Additionally, I would reach out to local changemakers in Mexico who can organize this event on their end. Some of the drawbacks of this activity are that I would have to contact U.S. Border Patrol and explain to them this event. It has been done before, therefore having the support of people who have undergone this will be very helpful. Nonetheless, understanding how to grapple with such a big organization who have directly impacted my life will certainly be tough. Additionally, their inevitable presence may retraumatize or deter people from participating in this project. The reasoning behind this project is to demonstrate that at the core, we are all creative humans with unique perspectives and stories to tell. Collaboration is necessary, and I believe that this project can be a great way to demonstrate that. A big counterargument for this project is working with border patrol. We will not work with them, but to avoid them posing any of our participants danger, it is vital to at least let them know about the event. Not to mention, the chances of seeing traumatizing things could be quite high, so it would be important to prepare our participants for this possibility. In general, reaching out to Rafael could be quite hard, as he is very busy artist. Overall, there could be a lot of backlash from people who see the potent change that creating binational connections that reach past the borders could create. I would need to research what exact permissions from the city an event like this would need. I would like to rehost on the El Paso border, but honestly any border town in Texas would work. Overall, it seems daunting, but I genuinely believe this is a project I could mobilize again.