On the Uses of Walls for Politics (8)

Israel-Egypt border. Photograph © Moshe Milner / GPO.

Wall On Wall

One of my FB friends - Linda Ferrari from Photo Berlin - sent me a link to this intriguing project Wall On Wall by  Kai Wiedenhoefer. The project is meant to use the Berlin Wall as a space for exhibiting large format images Wiendenhoefer has made of other places - in this instance the border fence on the U.S.-Mexico border. There is a Kickstarter campaign under way to underwrite the enterprise.

It seems to me that this project prompts serious thought about a theme I have pursued here pretty regularly - the diverse political uses of walls, the nature of borders, the politics of distinction and difference. Keep an eye on it!

Interview: Teddy Cruz

My colleague Fonna Forman from UCSD forwarded this link to an interview with Teddy Cruz, a remarkable artist who works on all sorts of projects having to do with the border Tijuana-San Diego border and the ways people cross and use it. I've posted on Cruz's work here a couple of times before.

David Taylor ~ Working the Line

Detention Cell 3 (with Serape), NM, 2007.
Photograph © David Taylor.

Border Monument # 184, 2010. Photograph © David Taylor.

US/Mexico Border Near El Paso/Juarez, 2007.
Photograph © David Taylor.

Borders are simultaneously historical, geographical, political, cultural in complex and arbitrary ways. That much is a truism. These three images are from a new book Working the Line by photographer David Taylor. The border monument is one among nearly 300, erected in the late 19th Century, that Taylor has photographed. Taylor lives and teaches in Las Cruces, New Mexico but has photographed the border from Texas through California. This is good work.

On the Usefulness of Walls for Politics (7) ~ Visualizing Transcience

"Events, by definition, are occurrences that interrupt routine
processes and routine procedures." ~ Hannah Arendt

"If this proposal is correct, then it is easy to appreciate why
we so often identify or describe events in terms of their causes
and effects. Not only are these features that often interest us
about events, but they are features guaranteed to individuate
them in the sense not only of telling them apart but also of
telling them together." ~ Donald Davidson

A short while ago I posted links to a couple of essays, reflections on the collapse of communism in 1989 and the aftermath of that event actually set of events. Today I came across this pretty impressive photo essay at Spiegel Online. The series - entitled "The East-West German Border, Then & Now" - is by Jürgen Ritter and, as the title indicates, is a sort of 'before and after,' affair. In many respects it brings to mind the similar project by Brian Rose about which I posted here a couple of years back. Here, though, many of the photographs depict changes in patterns of activity, prompting one to imagine how the inhabitants now tell together things that they used to tell apart.
__________
Both Photographs © Jürgen Ritter. Here are his captions:

(1) "The border on the peak of a mountain, 1984: The border ran along the top of the Junker Mountain by a Thuringian town called Lindewerra, in what used to be East Germany. At this altitude, Lindewerra was one of the few villages that could be observed directly from the West. This photograph was taken in 1984 in what was then the Erfurt region."

(2) "Junker's Peak, 2009: Now the only thing dividing the scenic Thuringian region is the Werra River. The scar created by the border is also slowly healing."

On the Usefulness of Walls for Politics (4)

Heinersdorf, East/West German Border, 1987 © Brian Rose

In 1985 or so Brian Rose began to document the "Iron Curtain" that divided East and West Germany. Eventually, of course, that border ceased to have any official status. But he continued to document the border after the demise of Communism in 1989. The results are in his book project The Lost Border. We could do with a few more disappearing walls and curtains and fences.

The Usefulness of Walls for Politics (3)

Sept. 22., 5 a.m.: The border near Naco, Ariz.,

under the watchful glare of security lights.

Sept. 19, 4 a.m.: Two towns called Nogales, one in Arizona
(foreground) and one in Mexico.
Both photographs © Simon Norfolk/NB Pictures (2006),
for The New York Times

I came across these images by Simon Norfolk in this retrospective of his terrific work over the past half dozen years for The Times. They seem like an appropriate way to extend my series of posts on walls and politics [1] [2].

Teddy Cruz

One of the chapters in Rebecca Solnit's new book is an essay she wrote under the auspices of the Center for Arts Policy at Columbia College, Chicago. The Center has commissioned a set of profiles entitled Democratic Vistas. As part of that series Solnit has written an essay entitled "Non-Conforming Uses: Architect Teddy Cruz at the Borders of Tomorrow" on ex-patriot Guatemalan architect Teddy Cruz. You can find a pdf version of her essay here. And you can find a recent story on Cruz from The New York Times here. Basically, Cruz works on the border of San Diego & Tijuana looking at the insights that flow in both directions as practices and living patterns on each side cross back and forth at the border. In April 2005 Cruz delivered the James Stirling Memorial Lectures on the City under the title "Border Postcards: Chronicles from the Edge." Solnit reproduces the image at right - Border Wall Sequence, 2004 © estudio Teddy Cruz - as part of her discussion.