Rafael Lozano-Hemmer hates searchlights. They evoke surveillance and fear, and in the El Paso-Juárez borderlands, where his most recent artwork debuted this month, the U.S. Border Patrol uses them to hunt down migrants. Yet the Mexico City-born artist, whose work is fraught with contradictions, has incorporated the lights into his large-scale interactive art installations for more than two decades. “I find searchlights absolutely abhorrent,” he says. “That’s why I must work with them.”
High-wattage searchlights form part of Lozano-Hemmer’s ambitious installation project Border Tuner, which for 12 days this month virtually connected people from Juárez and El Paso. The public was invited to operate the searchlights installed at six stations on both sides of the Rio Grande. When two beams of light crossed from opposite sides, microphones and speakers automatically switched on to create what Lozano-Hemmer calls “bridges of voice and light,” allowing people to talk with each other across the wall separating the two cities.
At dusk each night, lines snaked around the listening stations as people waited to take part in a public conversation with someone from the other side. The powerful beams of roving white lights formed vivid, intersecting geometrical designs visible from 10 miles away. Those prompted cross-border conversations, either as individuals or in small groups, usually in Spanish or Spanglish. Sometimes the topics of discussion were political. Many residents on the American side of the river got on the mic to express their pain and disgust with Trump’s anti-Mexican rhetoric. One evening, two women—one in El Paso, one in Juárez—broke out into song spontaneously when they discovered a mutual love of the Mexican rock band Reik. They sang louder and louder as listeners cheered them on.
