Best of Luck With the Wall
2016
HD film, 7 min

Borders begin as fictions. They are performed. They are lines drawn in the sand, spaces that bend and break and make exceptions for certain kinds of bodies. Borders are made real by the policies built around them. The fact that borders are performed does not make them any less real. In the USA, the border is quite literally what gives the nation its shape. The border between the USA and Mexico is a space that has been almost entirely reduced to metaphor and has become disconnected from its geography. With Best of Luck with the Wall, data artist and app developer Josh Begley insists on making that geography visible. In collaboration with filmmaker Laura Poitras and her team at Field of Vision, and with support from sound artist Jace Clayton, Begley created a voyage across the USA-Mexico border, stitched together from 200,000 satellite images. The resulting film visually conveys the enormity of what ‘securing the border’ and ‘building a wall’ would really mean, beckoning its viewers to imagine how this might impact the political subjects of that terrain.