Miguel Fernández de Castro, A Grammar of Gates

 

Join us at Bar Laika for a screening of Miguel Fernández de Castro’s Grammar of Gates (2019). 

A Practical Spanish Grammar for Border Patrol Officers is a textbook edited by the Justice Department in which the learning of a language is indissociable from its deployment in a particular territory. A Grammar of Gates (Gramática de las puertas) takes us to the Tohono O’odham Nation, an indigenous people living on the Sonora-Arizona borderlands whose territory is currently occupied by the US Border Patrol. Within the reservation, the vision technologies of a scientific observatory—built on the top of a sacred mountain—coexist with those of homeland security surveillance. This video examines how the rush to explore an unknown cosmic frontier is carried further while sustaining the colonization of the indigenous lands and the violence against aliens. A landscape that has been historically understood as a frontier appears inhabited by a grammar of deterrence.

Miguel Fernández de Castro (Sonora, 1986) is a visual artist whose work examines how extractive and criminal economies materially transform a territory. His work creates a critical geology based on the language and images of earthly marginal changes—such as erosion, deposits, and cracks—that function as symbolic expressions of larger social processes. Through long-term projects, he has developed a body of work spanning photography, video, sculpture, and writing. His work has been shown at Museo de Geología, UNAM, Mexico City; Spazio Veda, Florence; The Wren Library, Cambridge; Museo Artium, Vitoria; Proyecto Paralelo, Mexico City; Casa del Lago, Mexico City; Ashkal Alwan, Beirut; Museo de Arte Moderno de México, Mexico City; Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver; Bikini Wax, Mexico City; Museum of Latin American Art, Los Angeles; among others. Recently, he has been resident at PAOS, Guadalajara and at Casa Gallina-InSite, Mexico City.

For more information, contact laika@e-flux.com.