Postcommodity is Raven Chacon, Cristóbal Martínez, and Kade L. Twist. On today’s episode, we discuss at length their work Repellent Fence. A project almost ten years in the making, Repellent Fence will appear floating over the towns of Agua Prieta, Mexico and Douglas, AZ, USA this October – bisecting the US/Mexico border. The work consists of oversized “scare-eye” balloons – an ineffective bird repellent product which functions for the artists as an indigenous readymade and semiotic vehicle. We discuss this work, land art, borders, and keeping one’s eyes open to the politics of place.
Time Codes:
11:40 Land Art’s positioning
13:12 Designing work to implicate audiences
16:35 Asking questions of one’s audience
17:05 Layers of noise as fertile ground
19:00 Pointing an indigenous lens and offering a view through it
24:00 Seeing and Looking back
25:00 Open eye iconography and indigenous readymades
26:20 Scare-eye balloons: Powerful semiotic vehicles of Indigeneity
28:00 Having eyes open to what is going on
36:00 Borders as microcosms
38:00 The potential politics of aesthetic choices
Music: Four Tet – Parallel Jalebi