Traces (2010)
Video Essay (Original Language: English)
Fiamma Montezemolo
Introduced by Fiamma Montezemolo
In her experimental 20 minute video-essay, the artist and anthropologist Fiamma Montezemolo combines fieldwork-based research and art forms to create a meditation on border life between the United States and Mexico. Based on years of ethnographic work in Tijuana, and an ascetic shooting schedule of 24 hours, Montezemolo refracts her experience in the region by attempting to sculpt a textured living portrait, a sort of biography, of the wall that separates Tijuana and San Diego. Images of a rusty wall, unruly topography, decaying surveillance structures, furtive moments of undocumented migrant crossings, and dystopian landscapes are interwoven with a mournful voice-over enunciated from a different time and place. The fate of the wall is sealed: its remains are to be collected like forensic evidence by a visitor, perhaps another anthropologist and artist, perhaps another undocumented migrant, from the future.
Some books and articles:
Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, by Nestor Garcia Canclini, University of Minnesota Press, 1995
Transnational Battle Field, by Heriberto Yépez, Commune Editions, 2017
Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, by Cristina Rivera Garza, The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2020
Why Walls Won't Work: Repairing the Us-Mexico Divide, by Michael Dear, Oxford University Press, 2015
Tijuana: Stories on the Border, by Federico Campbell, University of California Press, 1995
Tijuana Dreaming, Life and Art at the Global Border, edited by Josh Kun and Fiamma Montezemolo, Duke Press, 2012
'Tijuana: Hybridity and Beyond: A Conversation with Néstor García Canclini', by Fiamma Montezemolo, Third Text, Volume 23, 2009 - Issue 6, Taylor and Francis