Map of a Twin Mind,
2019
Mixed-media installation
16-channel sound interface, mirrors, transducers, steel frame, computer server rack (sound looped, 24 hrs.)
Commissioned work by the Mexico-City-based gallery OMR
Map of a Twin Mind is a site-responsive, mixed-media installation commissioned by the Mexico City-based gallery OMR. It is informed by a multifaceted research process—including fieldwork, oral accounts, and historical data—that examines the hybrid urban thread of the eastern side of the Mexico-US border. A double-sided mirror wall bisects the room of a colonial house, acting as a mechanism for rendering the viewer’s reflection. It suggests a critical dialogue connoting the semantic irony of the Mexico-US border towns’ designation as ‘twin cities.’ The confrontation of the deteriorated walls of the room with the pristine nature of the mirrors points to the US-Mexico border as an apparatus empowering self-centered geopolitics that views the periphery exclusively as scaffolding for transnational trading, labor exploitation, and natural resource extraction.
A set of sixteen concealed sound exciters—devices that convert variations in a physical quantity into sound—distributed across the mirrors enables the double-sided mirror wall to function as a large-format sound reproduction device. The vibrations of strident sound coming from the reflective glass mimic a metal object tapping behind the mirror wall. A 24-hour audio clip reproduces a Morse code translation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), an international treaty that remains central to shaping power dynamics across the Mexican borderlands.