In her book Borderlands, Gloria Anzaldúa refers to the US/Mexico border as an open wound that is still bleeding. Expanding on this metaphor, this installation, composed of groups of ceramic tiles, reflects on territories divided and oppressed by borders and by those who impose them. 

The tiles presented in the space have been made by massaging clay slabs to create forms that evoke landscapes, mounds or anthropomorphic forms, grouped together to form territories – understood here as lands that were originally part of a whole, topographies of collectivity that share wildlife, peoples, languages and cosmologies. Entangled with this idea of continuous geographies is the idea of our individuality, and the body as the smallest territory that we inhabit. 

Responding to the architecture, the arrangement of tiles generates an invisible grid, suggesting a notion of continuity and allowing the viewer to construct the landscape beyond the physical space where the installation takes place. This grid also acts as an element that grounds a conceptual play between different scales: the geographic territory, the architectural space and the human body, suggesting that one module might represent a scaled down portion of a landscape as a fragmented map, or an enlarged depiction of a minuscule area of skin or body tissue. 

Despite our physical distance or proximity to borders, Wounded Territory invites reflection around the ways in which oppressive systems impact us at individual and collective levels, and poses the question: how are we perpetuating them in the societies that we participate in?

Leticia Pardo is a multidisciplinary artist and architect from Mexico City, based in Chicago, whose practice lies in the boundaries between architecture, research & art. Her work reflects on stories about migration, place-making and citizenship across borders, and how these manifest in the built environment.


@leticiapardo_