Last month the Design Studio was fortunate to have our first
Artist in Residence, Rafael Sanchez, do a performance piece inspired by our
“Bodies Borders and Boundaries” project. 
This project is currently exploring the question, “How can we be
comfortable referring to people’s bodies as illegal?”                                                 

I want to point out a few insights
from his performance to stimulate more conversation and experimentation around
this question in hopes of inspiring more social interventions! That’s what we
do…. lol

Embodiment

Rafael started the performance
running, jumping fences, looking behind him, hiding, running. I imagined that
he was trying to get away, escape. I thought to myself, “What would it feel
like if there were 1000 of us running, looking like we were escaping from
something?” What might that do to in the public as a kind of social
intervention?

Simple shared activity 

The day Rafael performed was hot,
and he took advantage of it by inviting us to “cross the border” via Slip and
Slide (you know, run and slide across the soaking wet plastic slide). I felt a
bit goofy, but I realized that having something to do made me think differently. I had to feel it in a way
that doesn’t happen during inside discussions. My insight from this was having
something outside that’s simple (do something, get a simple message and keep it
moving) could be a way to quickly touch and leave a message with a large number
of people.

Bringing one’s own talents and personalities to bear

Rafael is a performance artist. We
aren’t all performance artists, but we all have talents that we probably don’t
bring to bear (or don’t bring often enough!) during the course of our social
justice work. What could we bring of our performative selves? Are we athletes,
musicians, clowns?  How can we
experiment with addressing and further probing this question?

My hypothetical answer

 How is it that people are
comfortable referring to other bodies as illegal? I call it the distancing
impulse. I thought about this a week or so after Rafael’s performance. When
faced with others’ horror and atrocities we tend to create conceptual and
emotional distance between ourselves and the scene of horror to lessen our
feelings of shame and vulnerability.

“That’s bad but that couldn’t
happen to me. Since it happened to them they must somehow deserve it. And it
certainly wasn’t my fault.”  This
can be as simple as believing that someone was “in the wrong place at the wrong
time, what a shame.”

The problem here is that we all do
it and for good reason. We distance to keep going, to maintain psychic order.
The question is what do we do when our distancing becomes collusion? I’d love
to hear your thoughts about my hypothesis here.

How is this informative to our
work?

Moment in time for social intervention

I think we have a interesting
moment in time for social interventions that render visible the asymmetries
between the movement of US dollars and bodies out into the world and the
movement of other bodies and tenders into the US.I think people have some
understanding that people aren’t risking their lives crossing borders simply
because they want McDonalds and cable TV. We need to somehow break this lull in
consciousness so that the public can make better sense of this phenomenon.  What are your thoughts?

What next…

So now what? Tell us what you are
up to and how you are thinking about bodies borders and boundaries in your work
and activism. We are considering doing a Bodies Borders and Boundaries city
tour to touch more people, generate more ideas and the like. Is this something
you’d be interested in attending and or hosting? If so, let us know and we’ll
see if we can make it happen!