Topic: Carceral Geography in El Paso, Texas: Walking Projects

In “Los Muros No So Para Siempre,” one is called to question the many forms a wall takes, consider the wall’s multifunctional existence, hiding in plain sight always. The multiple buses required to travel, the “economic wall” of paying to board the bus, the construct of passageway around the borders of property and within property, the rooms of the house. Bus stations are borders between spaces, as are opinions, and people, underscoring the inherent objectification of borders and bordering. The multiple points of mass marketed goods peddled on the street, in stores, within the backdrop of this heavily bordered region underscores the inherent exploitation of boundaries themselves, the consumption that distracts and entertains. The walk leads to reflections in many directions:

“We live between walls/the industrial landscape that surrounds my house/the airport that isolates me from where the city begins/the wall that won’t save us if a plane falls/but it also delimits public from private/our houses are limited, sectioned, the wall between the bathroom and the living room/between my room and the room of my parents/between the street and my house” (Aragón).

During a talk presented for Walk Listen Create, Polak presented the work while Igloria tuned in while taking an actual walk to an immigration detention center in the outskirts of Chicago. He moved through a suburban landscape that abruptly became industrial as he neared the detention center, in an area of oil refineries. He noted, “I don’t really get a sense of where I am.” This pointed to the way in which immigration detention centers are often located in spaces that are ‘atopias,’ and themselves become ‘atopias.’ What does it mean to intentionally walk in these landscapes as a means of trying to orient in a place that is disorienting by function and design? What tools are being used to orient? (GPS, written description, audio instruction, intuition of curiosity or danger, lettering/ signs on the landscape)?

People who are detained in the immigration detention center only ever walk away from the center (in instances when released to the street). It is therefore potent to make a decision as artists to walk towards a center. This recalls walking/ movement projects (for example, the film The River and the Wall) that trace a border in a way that would be dangerous or deadly for those whose movement the border is currently designed to surveil. What function are these artistic projects playing apart from performing the artists’ privilege of movement?

This project contains a number of approaches that may be pertinent to our own. Sand creates a strong container within which creative work can be generated, by choosing a fixed walking route (with landmarks for pausing along the way), and a fixed set of prompts. This is an exciting example of a way to involve community writing in-place in a way that is achievable and contained.

A central question of Sand’s project again relates to the centrality of attention as a quality that both sound and walking work with: ‘how do I notice what I don’t notice?’

Image from https://walklistencreate.org/walkingevent/locative-maps-agents-of-control-or-tools-for-subversion/