BORDER WALL

2017 - 2018

This collection of images brings us back to a series of artistic performances known as Art Trumps Walls, led by Andrew Sturm, Jill Marie Holslin, and Perry Vasquez, together with activist group Overpass Light Brigade and visual art students from Southwestern College in Chula Vista, California. During the 2016 US presidential campaign, then-candidate Donald Trump promised the construction of a “big, beautiful wall” across the southern border of the United States. Once elected, his administration solicited proposals, selected eight potential border wall designs, and eventually constructed them in Otay Mesa, a neighborhood in the southern fringes of San Diego, steps away from the existing corrugated steel border wall that bisects San Diego and Tijuana. The border wall prototypes aimed to fulfill the presidential campaign promise to reinforce security, redirecting attention to a fabricated immigrant problem. Art Trumps Walls transgressed the border wall with visual narratives projected as light graffiti onto the border wall prototypes that challenged the President’s divisive rhetoric and xenophobic agenda. As Holslin stated, the “intervention clarified the contradictions of border militarization: multibillion dollar expenditures on materials, construction, the latest surveillance technology could be defeated by the simplicity of light waves passing effortlessly through the atmosphere.”