Behind the Panels

 The Project Today

Separated: Border Wall Witness (SBWW) is a project that continues to evolve with different venues as well as ever-changing immigration and refugee crises. The panels as they appear in this book are the project’s third iteration, in continued conversation with events that have unfolded during the pandemic at the border and the disruption in access to art exhibits. 

The wood panel version of SBWW, which has been replicated in this book, was one of our final installations before COVID-19 overwhelmed the United States in the early months of 2020. Two years later, as we strain towards a return to “normal,” this book offers a meditation that challenges us to consider the American identity we seek to restore.

This is Camino Creative’s most important foundational belief: 

The boundaries of our conceptualization of the problems in front of us and the solutions we feel empowered to pursue must be challenged.

The project, now in book form, has evolved yet again to meet a new moment. Certain elements of each prior version have carried over – the first similarity is that the panels are presented in an unbroken, consecutive stream. The enormity of the border is invoked with no distractions: the winding Rio Grande in Texas gives way to open desert and mountainous horizons in New Mexico and Arizona, culminating in a coastal, urban grassland in San Diego and Tijuana. Open desert is occasionally interrupted by metal fences, rust brown symbols of dominance and intimidation.

Another equally crucial motif comes in the interaction and agency of the viewer in the piece. Each copy of the book represents a unique relationship that the reader has to the journey contained within. While prior installations encouraged participants to walk, in this book they must travel the path with their hands. With each turn of the page, the reader traverses almost a hundred miles – the impossible weight of unfulfilled American promises. The essence of the journey from one end of the border to the other lives in SBWW. Unthinking and unfeeling landscape, existing true to itself without any theory or contemplation of people, stained with human conflict.

Altogether the project is massive and intimate, far away and directly in front of you. The wall itself is a paradox: a hideous scar on the landscape and a massive affront to the ideals of the country it attempts to enclose. It separates the politics from the human beings whose lives belong to this struggle.