Ignoring Political Borders
Kyle Palermo
Political borders, and the complexes of surveillance, enforcement, and control that reinforce them, are responsible for humanitarian disasters and repressive systems inside and outside of destination countries. Designers, journalists, artists, and others take both documentary and abstract approaches to the problem of political borders. Yet intentional acts of disobedience, the everyday practice of ignoring unjust laws, technology, and the natural world all present another side to this story, one that casts borders as more permeable than they might appear to an outsider hundreds or thousands of miles away. This thesis explores the harms and injustices of political borders but also attempts to recast them by exploring the peaceful and cooperative interactions that occur through and around them.
My capstone project draws on observations of plants and animals on both sides of the US-Mexico border logged to the iNaturalist web platform. The first component consists of images from iNaturalist that I scraped using Python, curated, printed as 4-color separations, cut and rearranged, and printed in Pratt’s silkscreen studio.
The second component is an interactive web platform that calls iNaturalist’s API with a coordinate from the US-Mexico border and maps all of the observations within a 5 mile radius. Each point in the line represents a plant or animal that an iNaturalist user observed and documented in that location. These forms tell a story not about natural life in the border region and peaceful cooperation that stands in contrast to the political obstacles, nationalist psychology, and state violence that infect border politics.