Mexican border brings artists together

The back and forth, or as Oakland composer Guillermo Galindo puts it, the “call and response,” lies at the heart of his collaboration with Berkeley photographer Richard Misrach.

For three years, Misrach has been photographing the approximately 2,000-mile border between the United States and Mexico, and bringing back to Galindo objects that he’s found along the way — battered shoes, children’s clothing, backpacks, water bottles, border police shotgun shells, even parts of the border wall itself.

The composer would build the scavenged debris into instruments and record, in turn giving the photographer more ideas.

The Border Patrol ranged from really nice guys who were really helpful sometimes — they’d show me their pictures — to others who were totally hostile.

The feeling around the discards hit home for Galindo, a Mexico City-born U.S. citizen and California College of the Arts instructor.

“It is painful to see my own people escaping from unbearable violence and poverty and risking their lives through the scorching desert in search of a better life just to be treated worse than animals,” says Galindo, who invokes pre-Columbian animistic beliefs about the connection between an instrument and its materials when talking about his work.

Misrach began photographing the border in 2009, across four states, from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, as part of his continuing work on his landmark “Desert Cantos” series.

A lot of my work has been about photographing floods, fires, nuclear test sites and bombing ranges, but the border issue is a 21st century issue.

Faced with such powerful work as Galindo’s large sculptural, gallows-like gong, “Ángel Exterminador (Exterminating Angel)” — an effort at “reverse musicology,” as its creator describes it — and Misrach’s images of epic desert expanses bisected by a wall, assistant curator Rory Padeken says the main challenge around the exhibition lay simply in selecting the work that reflected the project’s breadth and depth, as well as the individuals who cross (or attempt to cross) the border, so often left out of conversations on immigration.

“Let’s face it, immigration has always been and continues to be a hot topic for discussion and debate in this country, even more so with the current presidential campaigns and the coming election,” Padeken says.