The art of reimagining borders in Patricia Vázquez Gómez’s BorderXer

Abstract

ABSTRACT Geopolitical bordering practices affect not only migrants and refugees, but also non-human animals, environments, and Indigenous communities. But metaphorical borders also exist inside and are imposed on everyone. These include emotional, psychic, and cultural borders that limit freedoms. This article examines the potential solidarities for and multi-scalar politics of building an abolitionist praxis rooted in this expansive notion of borders and our collective struggles to cross or abolish them altogether. It examines US-based artist Patricia Vázquez Gómez’s art exhibition BorderXer, first exhibited in Portland, Oregon, U.S.A. in 2019, to develop a geographical analysis of ‘borderXers’ (border crossers) that operates at scales from the flesh, to body, to community, to the transnational. The artist uses photographic, installation, textual, and video works to connect audiences’ own experiences of borders imposed on their bodies and psyches to the material geographies of the US/México borderlands. These borders limit both freedom of movement and freedom to be in relation and community with others. These works unsettle dominant and dominating notions of borders and reveal possibilities for the remaking of exclusionary border relationalities. I argue that the aesthetics of the exhibition develop an abolitionist perspective on borders that exceeds the artist’s explicit calls for ‘open borders’.