Re-locating the US-Mexico Borderlands: Susan Harbage Page's Vibrant Contact Zones

Abstract

In the fall of 2016, photographer Susan Harbage Page mounted Objects from the Borderlands, an exhibit at the Greensboro, North Carolina Project Space. This show assembled some of the things she retrieved and the photographs she took along the US-Mexico border between Brownsville, Texas, and Matamoros, Mexico, to Eagle Pass and Piedras Negras starting in 2007. She displayed a selection of objects, ranging from a dusty bible to a child’s pink sneaker, on a raised horizontal surface with a yellow background, each labeled with an archival number and date; she posted maps of the borderlands on the walls; and she installed on a corner table tickertape printed with excerpts from interviews with two local women who had migrated from Mexico to North Carolina, as well as audio recordings of their voices. On opening day, one of the women interviewed came with her family, her friends, and her friend’s dogs, beaming with excitement. Visitors were asked to recount their own experiences with border crossings and given envelopes with the question: What would you bring with you? More than an exhibit, Objects from the Borderlands created openings for conversation among recent migrants to the US, local residents, and visitors. It invited viewers to feel the affective reverberations of complex histories of displacement within a shared space. By re-locating everyday evidence of the ongoing crisis of migration across the US-Mexico border to a North Carolina city with a substantial and growing Mexican population, Harbage Page created a new contact zone in which viewers could potentially access what “vital materialist” philosopher Jane Bennett calls “a strange and incomplete commonality with the out-side” and be induced “to treat other people and things more carefully, more strategically, more ecologically” (17–18). It also brought together many aspects of the artist’s sustained engagement with gender and border politics: for over twenty years, Harbage Page’s diverse body of work has focused on issues of social justice, the meaning of archives, and the effects of militarization on borders in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. She chose to work on the border for this project so that she could speak about the migrant crisis in the US, and the alliances she created through it extended