Border Cantos, a unique collaboration between American photographer Richard Misrach and Mexican American sculptor/composer Guillermo Galindo, uses the power of art to explore and humanize the complex issues surrounding the United States-Mexico border.
Responding to these photographs, Galindo fashioned sound-generating devices from items Misrach collected along the border, such as water bottles, Border Patrol “drag tires,” spent shotgun shells, ladders, and sections of the border wall itself. The sounds they produce give voices to people through the personal belongings they have left behind.
Border Cantos premiered at San Jose Museum of Art and traveled to the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Crystal Bridges and is now dshown at Pace Gallery in New York until .
The Nation:
https://www.thenation.com/article/requiem-along-the-wall/
Salt Lake Tribune:
http://www.sltrib.com/entertainment/4414025-155/crossing-borders-and-disciplines-is-a
New York Times
The New Republic
https://newrepublic.com/article/132220/requiem-border-wall
NPR All Things Considered.
http://www.npr.org/2014/11/22/365937723/lost-then-found-along-the-border-objects-become-art
BBC Outlook:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02lpfst
California Sunday Magazine:
https://stories.californiasunday.com/2014-11-02/richard-misrach-border-signs/
GUIllEERMO GALINDO’S GRAPHIC SCORES
http://www.magnoliaeditions.com/artists/guillermo-galindo/
Magnolia Editions’ 2015 publications by innovative and genre-defying composer, performer, visual and sound artist Guillermo Galindo incorporate artifacts found at the border between the United States and Mexico by Galindo and photographer Richard Misrach.
Galindo’s Flag works are printed directly onto a group of faded, weathered flags found at the border. Donated to the project by the humanitarian citizen organization Water Stations, these discarded flags were once used to indicate the presence of water tanks placed in the Calexico desert. Ominously empty boxes of bullets have been reproduced at an enlarged scale in his Ammo Boxes prints; likewise, Color Caravan’s background is a photograph of spent shell casings taken at the border by Misrach.
The surface of each image is traversed by one of Galindo’s signature musical scores, printed in a variety of unique systems of notation that recall the graphic scores of John Cage, Cornelius Cardew, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Each work vibrates at its own distinctive visual frequency: where Voces Flag is crisply printed with straightforward, rebus-like instructions for a performance, Sarape Flag’s abstractions of line and color approach the playful improvisations of a Joan Miro painting.
Galindo’s practice often incorporates playable instruments he has fabricated from objects found at the border. Here, too, he uses the rhythms and patterns of music — as filtered through various inventive modes of visual representation – to elegantly summon a living history from that which has been discarded and forgotten.
– Nick Stone