“Border Tuner” was a large-scale, participatory art installation on the US-Mexico border between the cities of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua that took place in November of 2019. Powerful searchlights made “bridges of light” that opened live sound channels for communication across the border, creating a fluid canopy of light visible for up to 10 miles that could be modified by visitors to six interactive stations, three in each city.

Each of the stations featured a microphone, a speaker and a large wheel or dial. As a participant turned the dial, three nearby searchlights created an “arm” of light that followed the movement of the dial, automatically scanning the horizon. When two such “arms of light” met in the sky and intersected, a bidirectional channel of sound was automatically opened between the people at the two remote stations. As they spoke to one another the brightness of the “light bridge” modulated in sync, —a glimmer similar to a Morse code scintillation. Every interactive station could be tuned into any other, so for example a participant in Mexico could connect to the three US-based stations or to the other two in Mexico, as they wished.

Each evening began with an hour-long curated program while the piece was set to a special mode where all of the lights intersected and all six stations could hear each other.  Community leaders from both cities reached out to existing networks to create topic-specific, cross-border conversations and performances.  These featured local poets, rappers, drag queens, musicians, first nations speakers, youth, historians and more, representing a diverse constellation of voices, some who had been working across borders for decades, others collaborating for the first time.  For the rest of the evening the piece was open to the public.   Over twelve nights the binational campus received more than 12,000 in-person visitors who engaged in spontaneous conversation, sang songs, asked questions, told jokes, made appointments to reconnect with loved ones, read speeches, poems and reflections in both Spanish and English, all aided by a team of bilingual docents present at each station throughout.  A final aspect of the project was a nightly forum, where a dynamic list of visiting artists, activists and scholars provided art historical and socio-political content to complement  the piece, engaging audiences through bi-national presentations, panels and conversations.

“Border Tuner” set out not only to create new connections between the communities on both sides of the border, but also to make visible the relationships that were already in place: magnifying existing collaborations, conversations and culture in the largest bi-national metropolitan area in the western hemisphere.  The documentation of the piece through photo and video provides an archive of this particular moment in time, highlighting the diversity of experiences and perspectives from participants who negotiate this dual reality on a daily basis.  One of the legacies of the piece was the creation of “The Fund for the Ethical Practices of Transborder Art” which beginning this summer will provide grants to support cross-border collaboration by local artists, a resource that has become all the more important as the two cities struggle with a new set of challenges presented by the global pandemic.

The project was conceived and directed by Mexican artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and curated by Kerry Doyle, León de la Rosa and Edgar Picazo.

Link: http://www.bordertuner.neta