Mourning Absence: Place, Augmented Reality (AR), and Materiality in Border Memorial
by Alyssa Quintanilla
Abstract:
Thousands of migrants have died trying to cross the United States-Mexico border since the institution of Prevention through Deterrence in 1994. In the Sonoran Desert of Southern Arizona, migrants are intentionally exposed to dangerous environmental conditions that not only place their lives in danger but erase their deaths from public view. Many of these deaths are never publicly acknowledged or mourned, amounting to a pervasive and state-sanctioned crisis. John Craig Freeman’s augmented reality piece, Border Memorial: Frontera de los Muertos, works to grieve for those who have been erased under the weight of American sovereignty at the border. The piece plots the places where migrant bodies were recovered and memorializes each migrant through a digital calaca. Using Border Memorial and its digital calacas, this article examines the overlapping anti-immigration systems that deliberately hide the deaths of thousands of migrants. Looking at Border Memorial, I consider the importance of place, the environment, and the materiality of digital memorials as essential to understanding how migrants are continuously unacknowledged and unmourned. Examined at the intersection of new materialism and ecocriticism, I consider how each digital calacas has an effect beyond the screen and radically shifts the desert space itself. Border Memorial is just one of a few digital art pieces that memorializes those lost in the desert, but the augmented reality app that hosted the piece is no longer available. While the piece has reached obsolescence, its approach to the material body, experience of place, and need for continuous mourning remain.
Keywords: borderlands, digital memorial, mourning, place, desert, materiality
How to cite:
MLA (9th edition):
Quintanilla, Alyssa. “Mourning Absence: Place, Augmented Reality (AR), and Materiality in Border Memorial.” MAST, vol. 1, no. 2, Nov. 2020, pp. 103–123.
APA (7th edition):
Quintanilla, A. (2020). Mourning absence: Place, augmented reality (AR), and materiality in border memorial. MAST, 1(2), 103–123.
Chicago (17th edition):
Quintanilla, Alyssa. “Mourning Absence: Place, Augmented Reality (AR), and Materiality in Border Memorial.” MAST 1, no. 2 (November 2020): 103–123.
Licensing:
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
Copyright:
Authors retain the copyright and full publishing rights without restrictions and may reuse/republish their article as part of a book or other materials, providing acknowledgment is given to MAST as the original source and place of publication. Authors can also post a copy of their accepted/published article on their websites and on their Institutional repository, citing that the article was originally published in MAST.
© 2020 Alyssa Quintanilla
Issue: vol. 1 no. 2 (2020): Special Issue: Media, Materiality, and Emergency
Section: Article
Guest Editor: Timothy Barker
Submitted: July 31, 2020
Accepted: Sep 18, 2020
Published: Nov 13, 2020
