Borrando la Frontera (Erasing the Border)

This video documents a performance Ana Teresa Fernández staged at the border wall separating Mexico’s Playas de Tijuana from San Diego’s Border Field State Park—a border she first crossed as a child with her father. Wearing a black cocktail dress and stiletto heels, Fernández climbed a ladder and began painting the wall’s bars pale blue. When two police officers arrived and told her to stop, the formality and femininity of her garb gave them pause. “I realized that I had an entry point,” Fernández recalls. “I said, ‘Let me just finish what I started.’ They said, ‘Okay,’ and five hours later I’d painted the whole thing out.” The blue paint blends into the surrounding sea and sky, producing the optical illusion of a breach in the wall. Fernández’s intervention encourages us to reimagine one of the most heavily militarized borders in the world and erase the psychological barriers dividing us from “those we do not know, so that we may begin to feel and empathize.”