Making a lofty statement about border politics
The genesis for a two-mile installation that is about to spring up at the U.S.-Mexico border was a cheap balloon intended to scare off birds.
The colors and pattern of the “scare-eye” balloons bought by artist Kade Twist’s wife to keep birds from plundering their fig tree captured his attention.
Twist, an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation, says he was struck by the way this cheap backyard tool employed indigenous aesthetic themes. “Here’s this consumer object that is laden with meaning,” he says, “and it’s being used to scare away birds — which, traditionally, are considered spiritual mediators.”
Next month, however, Twist and two other artists — Raven Chacon, an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation, and Cristobal Martinez, who is mestizo, of mixed heritage, with Mexican American and some Tewa ancestry — known collectively as Postcommodity, will create a two-mile installation that bisects the U.S.-Mexico border, employing the scare-eye balloon in literal and abstract ways.
Titled “Repellent Fence,” the piece will run for four days starting Oct. 9 and will consist of 28 balloons — each 10 feet in diameter — flying at a height of 75 feet at staggered points in Douglas, Ariz., and Agua Prieta, Sonora, in Mexico.
“At that height, both communities will be able to see it from the city and from positions outside the city,” Chacon says. “It’s about the relationship to the land and the sky and the mountains and the metal fence.”
The project is a way to examine the politics of the border, which has divided Native ethnicities. The Tohono O’odham in Arizona, for example, have members on both the U.S. and Mexico sides of the wall.
“We wanted to reframe the discourse around immigration to acknowledge the indigeneity of the people that are immigrating,” Martinez says. “We wanted to connect it to a long history of immigration in this landscape — we have migrated back and forth on this land since time immemorial.”