border

These GIFs were created by artist Alfredo Salazar-Caro to document his project “Border Crossing Beta 2.0,” an installation containing a video game based on interviews with Mexican-American migrant workers. Within the game, users might wander indefinitely in the desert—an approximation of the Arizona/Mexico border—without accomplishing anything. Other users might encounter embedded interviews with the people Salazar-Caro consulted with.

The installation recalls the hostile natural and man-made environment of the country’s southern edge—where, unlike the gateways to many other nations, a visitor is unlikely to find a “welcome” sign, much less infrastructure of comfort or convenience. Instead, many people’s first impressions of the United States are of cinder blocks and barbed-wire.

The bleak landscape of the United States’ obsessively-fortified fringes reflects the increasingly hostile political rhetoric against our neighbors to the South—an obstacle far more frustrating than a hard-to-navigate game. The sandbox is an apt metaphor for the escalating xenophobia and territorial whining of politicians such as Donald Trump—children never seem to want to share their toys, or even “their” patch of shitty desert.