From Richard Mosse'installation on the refugee crisis,Incoming. Photographer: Huda Tayob.In April of last year, artist Ana Teresa Fernández and members of the Border/Arte collective carried out a project titled Borrando la Frontera, or Erasing the Border, in which they painted parts of the Mexico-US border fence in such a way as to make it visually disappear into the background. In Fernández’s words, the project aimed “to symbolically erase a long-standing physical barrier that separates families and causes widespread misery.” More recently, the same border became the subject of an architectural competition titled “Building the Border Wall?” and organized by the Third Mind Foundation as a critical commentary on President Trump’s related endeavors. Most of the competition’s winning entries are characterized by an attempt to integrate the future wall into the surrounding ecologies, albeit leaving intact its physically separating function; they include an inflatable structure powered by the sun, rain and wind, a proposal to use both sides of the wall as a public park, and one in which the wall doubles as irrigation canal to bring prosperity to the Mexican side of the border.
From the winners of the International Design Competition to re-concsptualise the U.S.– Mexican Border Wall.Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, the US has been busy commissioning a new venue for its London Embassy. The building’s architect, Kieran Timberlake, seems to have taken on board the criticism leveled over the past few years by senior figures of the US administration like John Kerry, according to whom his country’s embassies are among some of the world’s “ugliest” and furthest out of touch with the public. The architect has demarcated the embassy complex from its surroundings not with “high perimeter walls and fences” but with “a park containing a pond, walkways, seating, and landscape along its edges, all open to the citizens of London.”
These are but few of the various examples demonstrating creative practitioners’ increasing preoccupation with border architectures today, whether as geographical divides bearing upon transnational migration and displacement or as urban ones affecting public space in cities. This preoccupation is often motivated by a critique of mainstream walls, fences and barriers, and more specifically, by that of the social and environmental burden these structures are thought to place on their immediate surroundings.
