Re-locating the US-Mexico Borderlands: Susan Harbage Page's Vibrant Contact Zones

In the fall of 2016, photographer Susan Harbage Page mounted Objects from the Borderlands, an exhibit at the Greensboro, North Carolina Project Space. This show assembled some of the things she retrieved and the photographs she took along the US-Mexico border between Brownsville, Texas, and Matamoros, Mexico, to Eagle Pass and Piedras Negras starting in 2007. She displayed a selection of objects, ranging from a dusty bible to a child's pink sneaker, on a raised horizontal surface with a yellow background, each labeled with an archival number and date; she posted maps of the borderlands on the walls; and she installed on a corner table ticker-tape printed with excerpts from interviews with two local women who had migrated from Mexico to North Carolina, as well as audio recordings of their voices. On opening day, one of the women interviewed came with her family, her friends, and her friend's dogs, beaming with excitement. Visitors were asked to recount their own experiences with border crossings and given envelopes with the question: What would you bring with you?

More than an exhibit, Objects from the Borderlands created openings for conversation among recent migrants to the US, local residents, and visitors. It invited viewers to feel the affective reverberations of complex histories of displacement within a shared space. By re-locating everyday evidence of the ongoing crisis of migration across the US-Mexico border to a North Carolina city with a substantial and growing Mexican population, Harbage Page created a new contact zone in which viewers could potentially access what "vital materialist" philosopher Jane Bennett calls "a strange and incomplete commonality with the out-side" and be induced "to treat other people and things more carefully, more strategically, more ecologically" (17–18). It also brought together many aspects of the artist's sustained engagement with gender and border politics: for over twenty years, Harbage Page's diverse body of work has focused on issues of social justice, the meaning of archives, and the effects of militarization on borders in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. She chose to work on the border for this project so that she could speak about the migrant crisis in the US, and the alliances she created through it extended her long-term commitment to expose injustice and to explore ways that women of different classes, races, and nationalities remain vulnerable to exploitation when they work at the margins of dominant and patriarchal cultures. Through her performance pieces and photography, Harbage Page has explored women's work in Charlotte, North Carolina (Working Women 1992), in Israel's Negev Desert (Almost Invisible 1996, 2016), and in Umbria, Italy (Merletti/Lace Spello, Italy, 2012 and Textiles: A Metaphorical Tracing 2012–); legacies of racism and perceptions of privilege in the US South (Postcards from Home 2007 and The White Box Performance 2011); and the militarization of borders in North America and Europe (including Memorialization of the Inner German Border 2012).¹ These varied projects show how women everywhere "have much to work out from not being at home in the world," as Sara Ahmed characterizes one aspect of "living a feminist life" (7).

Objects from the Borderlands recognizes that the US-Mexico border itself has long been a site of highly charged political and symbolic conflict regarding national security and identity; "undocumented migration, and Mexican migration in particular, has been rendered synonymous with the US nation-state's purported 'loss of control' of its borders and has supplied the pretext for what has in fact been a continuous intensification of militarized control on the US-Mexico border," as Nicolas de Genova claims (436). Due to the accelerated rate of Latino/a migration to the United States in the past few decades, the intensification of border rhetoric during the approach to the 2016 Presidential election in the US, and ongoing migration crises across Europe, Harbage Page's exhibit in Greensboro unfolded within multiple transnational and global contexts. At the same time, however, the exhibit sought to relocate the crisis and redefine the terms of conversation about it to communities...