Why the border wall will always be a canvas

“We think of the border as a non-place.” No Images? [Click here]( Welcome to a special-edition newsletter from Curbed, a pop-up we'll send you twice weekly in advance of a project we’re launching on October 24th exploring four themes affecting California and Texas residents in the towns and cities where they live. Until then, we hope this email-only interview series—with inspiring folks from those two states, and conducted by senior reporter Patrick Sisson—will provide you with some enlightening context. For Tijuana-based artist [Jill Marie Holslin](, increasingly rigid debates about immigration only make her more inspired to explore the fluid nature of the U.S.–Mexico border. A longtime San Diegan who moved across the border to Tijuana a decade ago, Holslin has made a career out of hopscotching the divide, working as a journalist, university lecturer, photographer, and installation artist. One of her last collaborative projects beamed [the outline of a ladder on a border wall prototype](, part of a proliferation of artwork that, [since the 1980s](, takes place on, and talks about, the border. “Our collective imagination of the border has been shaped so strongly by a discourse of prohibition, and a narrative of violence and militarization,” she says. “Visually, our idea has been shaped by a cinematic shot of the border wall going off into the distance, that it’s some natural feature of the topography that was always there.” From her home in Mexico, Holslin spoke about her current project—videotaping excursions through un-fenced areas of the border—and the need to dispel stereotypes about the partitions between the two countries. Patrick Sisson: Have San Diego and Tijuana become more tightly knit, despite efforts by the U.S. federal government to enact stronger border controls? Jill Marie Holslin: Yes. It really started gaining momentum in 2009 to 2010. The common narrative was that, after a decade of violence, Tijuana was going through a renaissance in arts, music, culture, food, wine, and beer. Around that time, a group of local artists and cultural and business organizations got together and said, “Listen, we’re going to take back the city, and it’s going to be a city for us—not the lowest common denominator for tourism, drinking, and prostitution.” There’s a young generation of entrepreneurs who have turned things around and developed all of these cross-border connections with architects, creatives, and others in San Diego. There’s been a focus on a higher-end kind of cultural marketing, gourmet coffee shops, vegan restaurants, and those sorts of things. I’m sure binational groups like this existed before, but the synergy now is very powerful. I’m not sure the people in San Diego feel it as much, but we really feel it in Tijuana. Your work, with border walls and the graffiti on border fences, explores how notions of the border have changed over time. What attracted you to the subject? What interests me about graffiti isn’t so much the style or aesthetics. It’s the way people appropriate space and make it their own. We think of the border and border wall as a non-place, like a freeway or airport, an empty shell people merely pass through. What fascinates me as I walk up and down the wall and the border is all the messages you see. Many are from those who pass through and left. But I’ve spoken to homeless and migrant camps along the border and found that they recognized many of the names. There’s a community growing up along the wall, however ephemeral and temporary. It speaks to our perceptions of the border and community. Do you feel Trump’s proposed wall, and any other border fence or partition, will continue to be used as both a wall and a canvas? The border has been a canvas since the first border wall was built, when they took old metal landing mats from the Vietnam era and began building a wall in the early ‘90s. San Diego has built fences since the ‘60s and ‘70s. There’s been this constant process of infrastructure and art. It’s not about beautifying the wall. To beautify the wall is silly; that’s not the point. It can never be beautified. We can never forget that it’s a wall. We're also talking Texas and California in a new Facebook group: [Click to join.]( Photos by Cayce Clifford. [Facebook]( [Instagram]( [Website]( This newsletter is brought to you by Curbed. [Forward]( [Preferences]( | [Unsubscribe](