HOSTILE TERRAIN 94: ARTS & BORDERS By Natalie Gomez have attempted to cross the deadly Sonoran desert of Arizona, known for its extreme heat and dryness, in search of a better life. They were all part of the art installation in front of them called Hostile Terrain 94.
EXAMPLE OF COMPLETED WALL MAP
Hostile Terrain 94 is global pop-up exhibit put on by the Los Angeles-based non-profit organization the Undocumented Migration Project, founded by De León in 2009. The exhibit aims to confront community members with the often overlooked, harsh realities of undocumented migration at the Mexican-U.S. border by requiring the participation of community members to complete the installation — a 25-footlong wall map of the Arizona-Mexico border with over 3,200 toe tags attached. Each toe tag represents a dead body that has been found in the Sonoran desert between the mid-1990s and 2019 and contains the available and identifiable information of that person — case number, name, age, sex, date the body was located, condition of the body, cause of death and coordinates where the remains were found — handwritten by the public.
On their first Friday back at UC Santa Barbara after returning from Winter Break, a group of student-interns walked into a new exhibit they were assigned to facilitate at the Art, Design & Architecture Museum. Skylar Lines, a 20-year old from Napa, California, gawked at the large wall immediately apparent from the entrance Lines, along with this group of interns, would be the — remarkable not for its artistic extravagance but its first to write these devastating details on the toe tags, blankness. kickstarting UCSB’s very own HT94 exhibition which also includes items recovered by De León while he As a third year student majoring in the history of art and was conducting his anthropological research in the architecture, Lines was trained to know that this bare desert. “Writing names is powerful,” Lines said, when wall, systematically covered with a series of white printer reflecting on how filling out a toe tag for a 19-year-old papers each denoting a large letter and number, would girl really hit home. normally be the focus of any installation. And, in only a few hours, the museum would hold its Winter Opening Reception for wealthy donors to come get an early access look at what their money has contributed to. Staring at this grid-like image, she mumbled to her peers, “Shouldn’t the exhibit be finished by now?” But as she was forced to move deeper in the room to make space for the other interns, circling around the large tables at the center of the gallery, she caught sight of the collage made of clearly worn, dirty t-shirts pinned around the doorway she had just passed through, opposite from the main wall, and a spark of understanding shone in her eyes.
“The shock invites you to ask, ‘How can I change this?’ and take action.” -Skylar Lines
Over the next few months, the rest of the toe tags will be filled out by the Santa Barbara, Goleta and UCSB communities and transported to the wall map depicting the Arizona desert at the border. Museum interns and staff will geolocate the toe tags to the exact coordinates where each person’s body was discovered. When finished, 3,200 toe tags will be hanging from red map pins and all paper grids, which correspond “This is history,” Lines said she remembered thinking. to manila folders holding the bodies of that zone’s information, will be gone. “Not just any ordinary art show.” As Lines and the other museum interns would soon learn from the visiting head curator himself, UCLA Professor Jason De León, those t-shirts on the wall are just some of the objects left behind by the millions of migrants who
Lines was pleasantly surprised that the AD&A Museum was bringing in such a politically charged exhibition to Santa Barbara County, which as of July 2018 had a population of nearly 450,000 people, according
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