Mirror VI

Mirror VI : Border, is a two-channel video installation designed for presentation in museum or gallery contexts.

Over a period of two years of field research, Cotterrell identified locations, which allowed line-of-sight connections between both sides of the border. Through liaison with the Mexican Military, Federal Bureau of Land Management, and US Border Patrol reluctant permissions were gained to broadcast messages and film the results within the contentious border landscape.

The research focuses on the issue of migrant labour, its ongoing economic imperative, and its enduring status as a target for social and political prejudice. The project is situated at the busiest border within the USA, where there are an estimated sixty million documented crossings (each way) per year. The Tijuana-Tecate area has been the focus for much of the politics of xenophobia directed at the perceived threat of mass migration into the USA, but also houses a vast array of US manufacturing plants that rely on the free movement of money, goods, and workforce across this border.

The project references a historical narrative, which serves as a poignant allegory for some of the complex relationships that still persist. In 1942 the US Congress established the ‘Bracero’ program permitting millions of Mexican workers temporary visas to visit and work as farm labourers in the USA. The opportunity was welcomed by many but they found that they were often subject to harsh conditions, prejudice, and suspicion. Despite valuing the labour resource, the US government was anxious to any damaging testimonies causing damage to its ongoing recruitment drives and was also sensitive to the fear of US communities of these temporary visas being used to encourage longer-term settlement of the migrants. As a result, the US postal service was instructed not to deliver many of the Bracero men’s letters back to their families in Mexico. In 2020 Stanford University published twenty-four of these undelivered hand-written letters and raised awareness of this historic censorship.

The artist, David Cotterrell, sought to symbolically broadcast these letters across the fortified Southern US border. The original texts were transcribed and two modified systems were designed to enable the automated broadcast of morse-code messages using the headlights of cars and trucks.

Materials:

Two Channel 4k Video projection, MacMini, Matrox Vision Distribution

Collaborator: Thomas Vann Altheimer (Project development, second camera crew, and research support).