“The stretch between Tijuana and San Diego is long. Very long. And it is as treacherous as it is beautiful. It is unlikely that anybody who has ever crossed it will easily forget it. Its desert like landscape is bound to carve itself equally onto body and soul.” José Ángel Navejas
Ken Light’s cruel photographs, accompanied by Navejas’ insightful writings, accompany us on a journey along the California-Mexico border, a border that today has killed more people than the Berlin Wall in thirty years.
Light, traveling with U.S. border police officers, when in the middle of the night they scour the Otay Mesa in search of illegal migrants, gives us photographs that capture the “foreigners” at their most vulnerable moment, when they are discovered and captured in this cruel hide-and-seek.
In this era of border fetishism, obscured by the shadow of the walls under construction, there is an urgent question that must be answered: what do we see if we look at a border from the other side?
The combination of Light’s photographs and the words of Navejas, who, being a migrant, knows exactly what it means to be on the wrong side of the wall, show us the physical experience of the border, which exists to be constantly perceived and, more, to cause suffering and hurt bodies.
For unwanted travelers, the border feels like humiliation and shame. The border signals that those on the other side are different, unwanted, dangerous, contaminating, even not human.
But it is not only the border itself that builds new subjectivities: violating it also generates them.
€ 450,00
