In August 2022, monsoon rains in Arizona caused major damage to the US/Mexico border wall. Metal gates washed twisted metal and broken floodgates into Mexico. The metal gates and their reinforced structures now in tatters, flowing across the border, provide a starting point and line of flight.
Working alongside water as teacher, and the allied work of wildlife biologists who trace migratory routes, landscape permeability and habitat connectivity across borderland, to open ‘small wildlife passages’ in the wall, this constellation of work aims to recalibrate passage and flow.
I make offerings to the floodgates and the ongoing creation and maintenance of small wildlife passages along the 15-billion-dollar wall. Small passages and floodgates sutured into the border infrastructure allow for the circulation of water and for animal migration and movement, telling a different story of space, time and movement.
Refusing the disaggregation and fragmentation of space, history, memory and subjectivity, these portals reconnect relations across unceded Native Land. As living archives – routes, passages, openings and movement across species and landscapes bring us into geologic and alluvial time, refusing foreclosed futures and the erasure of histories, peoples and kin that are embedded in the land and necessarily entangled within.