Please check out this new addition to the Reimagining the Border section of our website: “Metabolizing the Border,” by Tanya Aguiñiga. Raised in Tijuana, artist and craftswoman Aguiñiga has spent her career exploring the emotional impact of the border on individuals and communities.

(photo credit: Gina Clyne)

In this extended segment produced for the PBS series on Art in the Twenty-First Century (Season 10, “Borderlands” episode), we see Aguiñiga developing the performance piece, which she performed in 2019. On Aguiñiga’s website, she describes it this way: “Through performative wearables made of blown glass embedded with border fence remnants, Metabolizing the Border explores how the body confronts fragments of the border fence through sight, sound, smell, taste, and tactility.”

It is an incredibly powerful piece of work in which the artist dressed in a suit of glass, walks beside the giant metal fence. In her laborious movement she captures and works through the material and psychological violence of the US-Mexico border.