Fourteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

This study documents a series of conceptual, performance art interventions that engage with the ecological and cultural violence of the US/Mexico border fence. These projects approach transcultural, transspecies, and transmaterial interrelations through the lense of soil ecology in ways that question the conventional (Western) parameters of communication, and the species-centric humanism on which they are grounded. The projects have involved designing and building sculptural radios used in a variety of environments, including hooking up to the border fence itself and using it as an antenna for broadcasting our written work in Spanish and Morse Code. Other cross-border communications are also being done using sculptural radio buoys offshore. The goals of the projects have been to engage students in transdisciplinary thinking and socially empowering art practices that exemplify the power of humor to convey ideas to potentially unreceptive audiences, and to diffuse animosity and violence. In addition to the physical ‘transgressions’ of the radio communications we are also working on a liminal level, conceptually exploring the spaces in between signals. The radios built by my students and I work with no power source other than radio waves. As a result they are extremely quiet and searching for a signal is almost an act of meditation in its own right. We have coined them “border whisperers,” playing with the term “border blasters,” referring to high power Mexican commercial stations. The intersections between ‘primitive,’ liminal radio communication and ecology are the subjects of our ongoing theoretical and practice based explorations.