Mourning Absence: Place, Augmented Reality (AR), and Materiality in Border Memorial

Abstract

Thousands of migrants have died trying to cross the United States-Mexico border since the institution of Prevention through Deterrence in 1994. In the Sonoran Desert of Southern Arizona, migrants are intentionally exposed to dangerous environmental conditions that not only place their lives in danger but erase their deaths from public view. Many of these deaths are never publicly acknowledged or mourned, amounting to a pervasive and state-sanctioned crisis. John Craig Freeman’s augmented reality piece, Border Memorial: Frontera de los Muertos, works to grieve for those who have been erased under the weight of American sovereignty at the border. The piece plots the places where migrant bodies were recovered and memorializes each migrant through a digital calaca. Using Border Memorial and its digital calacas, this article examines the overlapping anti-immigration systems that deliberately hide the deaths of thousands of migrants. Looking at Border Memorial, I consider the importance of place, the environment, and the materiality of digital memorials as essential to understanding how migrants are continuously unacknowledged and unmourned. Examined at the intersection of new materialism and ecocriticism, I consider how each digital calacas has an effect beyond the screen and radically shifts the desert space itself. Border Memorial is just one of a few digital art pieces that memorializes those lost in the desert, but the augmented reality app that hosted the piece is no longer available. While the piece has reached obsolescence, its approach to the material body, experience of place, and need for continuous mourning remain. MAST | Vol.1 | No.2 | November 2020 104