Fernandez de Castro, Miguel “Involuntary Archives: On the Theater of Surveillance.”Miguel Fernandez de Castro is a visual artist from Sonora who works within various mediums including photography, video, sculpture, and writing. His work is geographical in nature in that it “examines how extractive and criminal economies materially transform a territory” (Artist Statement). His work has been widely received in many museums and countries and “Grammar of Gates” was selected by Ballroom Marfa to be shown in the Artists Film International in 2020.
“Grammar of Gates” (2019) responds to the various modern and historical artifacts from various sources through a video collage that definitively maps the carceral space of the Tohono O’odham lands sandwiched between the US border near Tucson, Arizona and the Mexican border in Sonora. The artist evocatively uses found objects in the forms of video, archival photographs and video clips, and an official US Border Patrol handbook of Spanish grammar to document the carcerality of the geography into a testament of the effects of carceral state power on a social, cultural, and geographical landscape.
The soundscapes of “Grammar of Gates” vacillate between discomfort and banality to illustrate the day-to-day reality of border politics. A male voice reads Spanish sentences in various verb conjugates with the English translation in utter deadpan with American accent (including a soft “qu” and American “l” for Spanish “ll”) as various images and footage play out on the screen. For several very uncomfortable minutes, this voiceover is mixed with the dragging sound of a dead longhorn cow being dragged by a vehicle down a dirt road, leaving the viewer dreading a culmination that does not come; the cow’s body does not fall apart and disconnect from the rope, and the banal mispronunciation of basic Spanish sentences does not stop. Through this film, viewers learn about the Tohono O’odham lands being the site of intense surveillance and occupation of the state seeking to apprehend drug smugglers, again, through the medium of a soundscape declaring such in rote recitation of translated simple sentences in Spanish and English.
“Grammar of Gates” as well as “Involuntary Archives” (an exhibit of repurposed border related archival material from the Arizona Historical Society) challenges us to consider the power of the state from the perspective of the natural landscape and the natural social scape. The dead and degraded cow has no power of consent, the language cannot speak up and demand to be understood for its truth, the Tohono O’odham lands are surrounded on all sides by an all powerful state with multiple mechanisms of control. It is transformative work in the sense that it brings attention to the actuality of militarization, a concept that is theoretical to many Americans. These issues and themes are often addressed through news media and academia, but the use of artistic means to illustrate the issues puts the nuance that is missing in the former into the front and center.
Defacing the Monument by 