Boarder Crossings: Patinetas, Paz y DIY Democracy
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The Tijuana-san Diego border is the world’s leading hub for skateboard production. This is where the material globalization of skate culture and all it entails originates; from here, its products traverse the seven continents. At the same time, many of its practitioners are denied this very freedom of movement, trapped by borders real and allegorical.
Boarder Crossings: Patinetas, Paz, y DIY Democracy, a project of the Fred J. Hansen Peace Chair at San Diego State University, recognizes the humble skateboard, seven layers of glued-together wood, as a window through which to understand community, control, and networks of exchange within and against the border regime.
In the shadow of the border fences, is there a grassroots community skating back to power and inspiring new pragmatic approaches to democracy? By learning from the practical and political ethos at the heart of these communities, might we speak of a ‘DIY Democracy’?
Multiple artists, artificially separated by the border, provide a tangible response to these questions through numerous works created on boards produced in Tijuana’s maquiladoras, each depicting a border that is at once fixed and fragile – a place of deafening proclamations and silent experiences of counter-power. Positioning itself at the heart of the contradiction between mobile objects and immobilized people, Boarder Crossings imagines mending this artificial rift.
The Boarder Crossings project features a total of 52 board-based artworks. The pieces not on display here are currently hanging on the walls of the Sala Central at the Centro Cultural de Tijuana (June 21–September 27). The pieces you see here are additions or works that have come from CECUT, crossing the border. while those artworks you see here are displayed here in San Diego, the "voids" left in Tijuana are symbolic of the absences many artists and people along the border live with daily, marked by family separations, deportations, desires for mobility, and severed friendships and affections.
As spectators in Tijuana are doing right now, please gaze at these works, immerse yourself in their creativity, feel the absence they mark across the border, and reflect on how we might collectively build "DIY democracy" from the bottom up.
