On October 15, 2023, Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) 3.0 and Annabel Turrado performed simultaneously on the border between Mexicali and Calexico during the 2022/23 MexiCali Biennial Land of Milk & Honey. I was one of the Biennial curators, and these recollections are gathered from my notes, recordings, and impressions that day.
Scene 1
A lone singer belts out ballads about heartbreak, boombox strapped to his body. He’s on the border in Mexicali, working Cristóbal Colón at Parque Héroes de Chapultepec. The NEW WORLD seems far from his mind, the BATTLE OF CHAPULTEPEC, too. He’s got his own line. He twirls and dips as cars inch toward the port of entry. They will always come. It’s an endless audience, a captive one, too — in many senses. Some give money. Others hum along.
Today, the drones hum, too. Electronic Disturbance Theater 3.0 shares the stage, performing a history of drone technology and border surveillance to a chorus of “What drones pollinate Imperial Valley?” and “What palindrones cross-pollinate the Land of Milk and Honey?”
As the drones get louder, so does the singer’s voice. A summoning. An “echology.”
Scene 2
A vendor sells raspados. Piña, fresa, limón y más. Her cart steers between car lanes, its umbrella as colorful as her iced delights.
Nearby, Annabel Turrado abolishes ICE. Her performance is an exercise in endurance. With raspadero in hand, she shaves down the frozen block. Every scrape conjures the end of the carceral state.
Turrado remains silent throughout. Both she and the ICE block melt in the desert sun, its rays reflect off a puddle and the sweat on her brow.
Viewers partake in the consumption of ice. An audience member makes their way to the vendor’s cart to buy a fruit-flavoredsnack. Later, a man at the park asks Turrado for shaved ice. She nods and fills his plastic bottle. “Un poco más?” She offers more. ICE melts in his water. The performance continues.
Interferences
Wearing red “MAKE AMERICA GREATER MEXICO AGAIN” hats and orange hazmat suits, EDT 3.0 performed scene three of “Three Echologies: An Á/Area/Aria X Play.” Half of the collective was positioned on the Calexico side of the border, the other half in Mexicali, a configuration that resembled past Mexicali Biennial performances such as Mike Rogers’ Telephone (2006) and Homeless Collective’s Transborder Game (2010). Their “palindrone” searched out, signaled, and shared the play with Homeland Security through an “echolocating” sound gesture that summoned subaltern knowledge of past, present, and future farmworkers, migrant laborers, and Zapatistas in an area reconfigured as X.
Down the street, Annabel Turrado’s durational performance Raspado: Abolish ICE took place simultaneously. For around four hours, the artist scraped away at a large, rectangular block of ice using a raspadero,a tool commonly used to make Mexican shaved ice. ICE refers both to the material used in the performance and to the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency that enforces laws governing border control and immigration, and trade and has been a key force in the increasingly violent surveillance, detention, and deportation of undocumented migrants.
The Biennial performances interfered with the everyday commerce and culture of Mexicali’s border zone – and vice versa. The acts of the performers, the labor of the singer and vendor, and the participation of the public combined in a grand gesture of frequency changes, frictions, and feedback.
The Border as Parergon
. . . every analytic of aesthetic judgment presupposes that we can rigorously distinguish between the intrinsic and the extrinsic. Aesthetic judgment must concern intrinsic beauty, and not the around and about. It is therefore necessary to know—this is the fundamental presupposition, the foundation—how to define the intrinsic, the framed, and what to exclude as frame and beyond the frame.
Jacques Derrida, “The Parergon,” October (Summer, 1979)
In his essay on Kant’s concept of the “parergon” or ornament Derrida famously interrogates the status of the aesthetic as the necessary mediator between pure and practical reason. Even as the aesthetic seeks to challenge the violence of instrumental reason, defined by the ontological bifurcation between individual consciousness and the external world, it carries forward its own form of monological closure. Thus, Kant struggles to differentiate those modes of experience that are “intrinsic” to the aesthetic and those which are merely accessory. In this manner, Derrida’s analysis gestures towards a series of interrelated divisions; between art and vernacular culture, between art and activism, and between the artist and the broader public. Inside and outside, purity and impurity, art and not-art have become defining oppositions across the broader history of modernism. The US/Mexico border crossing offers a cognate geopolitical expression of this binary system. The border crossing is a liminal zone; a zone of mediation between two rationalist systems. It is a space of containment and canalization; of passage and the denial of passage; of inspection and surveillance, of sudden movement and inexplicable delay. But it is also a site of provisional community; bound together by shared subordination to the spatial contingencies of the state. What does it mean to “intervene” in such a space, far from the comfortingly familiar constraints of the institutional art world against which an “ornamental” criticality is so often acted out?
EDT 3.0’s play Social Echologies is performed within and beyond the border crossing. In the final act, the “Palindrone” hovers in the air, linking the two sides of the border through movement and transmission. Beneath it a singer entertains the slowly moving line of cars, accompanied by a boom box. Not far away Annabel Turrado methodically shaves down a large block of ice, creating raspados in the hot sun. Here “ICE” is melted down into refreshment for thirsty travelers awaiting the crossing. The pun and the palindrome co-exist as forms of wordplay. While the pun is defined by a generative dilation of meaning, in which one referent shadows another, the palindrome is defined by repetition and mirroring, as meaning remains unchanged from either direction. It suggests an ontological dynamic of sameness that parallels echo-location, in which the searching voice, like narcissus, is in dialogue only with itself. Social Echologies speaks of our transformation from “a species with roots” to a “species with antennas,” from a self defined by reciprocal integration with the world around us, to an identity that passively receives transmissions from a broadcasting center. The border zone is predicated on the containerization and fixity of subjectivity, between Mexican and American, between legal and illegal, between one self and another. The work of Annabel Turrado and EDT 3.0 ask how we might recover our rootedness in a broader community of resistance, while retaining our autonomy from the petrified forms of identity imposed by the border itself.
