Cross-border, over-border, and de-border. The art of performance on the USA-Mexico border

Abstract

In this interpretive-hermeneutic text we use artistic works carried out on the Mexico-US border to reflect on philosophical and anthropological concepts around the securitization of human mobility and the limit as a central category in the construction of capitalist modernity. The singularity of these works lies in the fact that they intervene performatively the border space to explain the porous, constructed, diffuse, and heterogeneous nature of the borders, the most extensive in the world being a biopolitical laboratory to generalize. They also address a variety of disciplines whose processes involve a poetic transgression of border boundaries. Three categories of performative works on the border emerged from the study of the corpus of works: cross-border, that implies a transgression of the limit through the body; over-bordering, that develops an action that overlaps and operates on the limit itself; and des-border, that advocates the poetic elimination of the limit. Thus, the analyzes address performative cross-bordering as a challenge to the forms of control imposed by border crossings through the use of the body as a playful act, as an expression of difference, and as abjection (To the Rhythm of the Swing, Rocío Boliver, 2012); performative over-bordering, as overwriting of an action on the border of the Rio Bravo, that operates around the mobility / immobility paradox in third country and understanding-creativity (Operation Tumbleweed, K. Yoland, 2018); and performative de-frontiering, as a mechanism to erase the fence for the configuration of a utopian possibility and a world-other without limits that can be read as a political, anthropological, and deconstructive de-boundary (Erasing the Border, Ana Teresa Fernández, 2012). After the analyzes, in the final part of the work, we defend the transdisciplinary and rebellious nature of both the selected works and the activist proposal of their authors.