Throughout the latter part of the 20th Century and up until today, international borders have become an area of conflict and transit, a symbol of economic disparity, where illegal migration, drug smuggling, human trafficking, violence, and a wide range of black market activities seem to flourish. In the last two decades, and more alarmingly, in the last couple of years, political strategies born out of nationalistic and xenophobic views have gained popularity and wide support across the globe. The notion of the political space as a vulnerable territory in constant threat of “the outsider,” has redirected attention to the symbolic nature of borders and the apparent necessity for lifting more and higher walls.
The Frontera project, which began in late 2014, seeks to alter this conversation by approaching the subject of the territorial border from a new perspective, which precedes the birth of this contradictory space. The notion of the border is redirected to the physicality of the landscape itself, which acts as a primordial space that comes before discourse and urban expansion. The border appears as a scar in the topography of the region, a barrier inscribed in nature, whose imposing conditions are eventually determined by man. The aerial perspective allows for the border to become an abstraction, a line, a construct, providing the necessary space to reflect on its complex implications, and the ways it has acquired its symbolic charge.
