promising to process 25,000 migrants with active claims in the coming weeks, but the future for many migrants remains unclear. “It is good that these people are not going to be living here anymore, hopefully, but that’s not going to solve the problem,” Bermúdez says. “The problem goes way beyond that. … This is very intrinsic in the U.S government and goes beyond who is the president of the United States.” The tragic results of U.S. border policy can be traced back decades at least, she says, back to a Border Patrol strategy from the 1990s — known as “prevention through deterrence” — that has transcended Republican and Democratic administrations and coincided with thousands of migrant fatalities. It’s the deaths of some 3,200 people in the Sonoran Desert since 2000 in particular that are the subject of Hostile Terrain 94, an international participatory art project designed by anthropologist Jason De León and co-facilitated at CU Boulder by Bermúdez and Arielle Milkman, whose Ph.D. work in anthropology focuses on migration and labor. De León is an anthropologist by training, with his academic home at UCLA, but he’s also a filmmaker, photographer and exhibition artist whose work blurs the boundaries between art and data with the hope of making his social science research more comprehensible to the general public. Data, he says, often lives in spreadsheets hidden in some recess of the internet, without conveying the humanity of the people involved, or the gravity of each life lost. “For us, the exhibition work really is a way to take this kind of sterile database and have people help us breathe life into it,” he says. Prior to Hostile Terrain 94, De León created a large vinyl map of migrant deaths in the Sonoran Desert, using an image from Google and red dots, each representing a recovered body since 2000. But it didn’t engage the audience with the reality of the situation or carry the same weight as he had hoped. So, he enlisted students at the University of Michigan to fill out toe tags representing each migrant and pinned them to a 20-by-16-foot map based on the geographic coordinates where they were found. He piloted the project in several locations in 2019, with plans for rolling exhibitions around the world into 2022, each installation created in local community workshops with partner organizations. “I figured rather than us constructing a wall map that people can come and gawk at, what if we asked the audience to then commit themselves to making this thing and to being a part of it,” he says. “And that’s really the most crucial part of this whole experience.” It’s an expression of social practice, an art form where community participation is required, and the colBOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE
ANTHROPOLOGIST JASON De León (right) designed Hostile Terrain 94 as a way of engaging the community with the tragic results of U.S. border policies.
laborative process is seen as equally — if not more — important than the finished work. With roots in the 1970s, social practice is used by artists to raise awareness and start conversations around certain political or societal issues, says Sandra Firmin, director of CU Art Museum, which will be exhibiting Hostile Terrain 94 in Spring 2022. “And it’s related to political activism, starting with artists that were looking at fair labor practices or artists that were engaged in a feminist-based practice,” she adds. “Often it really is trying to make visible or center people’s lives and experiences that are not part of or are often seen as invisible from the dominant perspective.” The art exists in each step of the process. With Hostile Terrain 94, it is in the workshop conversations, and the filling out of toe tags, and the discussions between museum staff and volunteers as the work is installed. It’s in the interaction between viewer and each handwritten tag, some with additional notes and personal thoughts on the back, connecting them not only to the migrant who passed, but also to the participant who filled it out. It brings together academics and artists, museum personnel with social justice and activist circles, while also engaging the community more broadly by inviting organizations, companies and other community groups to participate in the workshops with supI
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port from the Boulder Arts Commission. “It decenters where the art is,” Firmin says. “With a painting, the art is the object on the wall, and it hopefully will illicit some sort of emotional or intellectual response. But here, the art not only exists in what we see, the object, the final product, but also in the conversations and the relationships that develop over time as the installation is made.” As a partner, CU Boulder joins more than 150 museums and organizations creating similar installations this year across the U.S. and in countries around the world, many of which have their own controversial immigration policies. There will be Hostile Terrain 94 exhibits circling the Mediterranean Sea — Italy, Greece and Morocco — as well as in Australia, Germany, the U.K. and countries throughout Latin America — Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Brazil — all of whose governments have faced criticism over their handling of the migrant crisis. “This crisis that we’re living through right now, this migration crisis, is a global phenomenon and it’s not just the U.S.-Mexico border,” De León says. “And this project [is] a way to raise awareness about a particular geographic location, but then by installing it in these other places, it’s a way to connect with what’s happening in those locales to this larger conversation about migration.” Overall, the partner exhibitions are self-sufficient, with support from De León’s Undocumented Migration Project, which ships a kit of toe tags and instructions to each location. It’s also developed an augmented reality experience through a phone-based app to accompany the final piece. But it’s up to each partner to decide how best to involve the community and install the exhibit. They also develop their own programming to figure out how to connect their own communities with the effects of national immigration policies. “Because the Undocumented Migration Project is doing this in this decentralized way,” Milkman says, “we have a chance to have conversations with our communities about what’s happening in migration in our state, in Colorado, for example.” Milkman and Bermúdez have already held some virtual workshops with students and faculty at CU, with plans for several more around the community throughout the year. In each, they introduce the project, talk about their own research, and then give participants time to fill out assigned toe tags before coming back together for a closing conversation. Manila tags are see HOSTILE TERRAIN Page 14
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