Echoes from the borderlands is a collective formed by Valeria Luiselli, Ricardo Giraldo, and Leo Heiblum, as well as the title of a series of sound studies about the U.S.–Mexico border. The collective’s work is conceived as a collection of “echoes”, stemming from the premise that everything they document is a trace left by an event, which will continue to ripple and reverberate across time and space.

Echoes from the borderlands: study two is a 24-hour “sonic documentary-fiction”, in the artists’ words, that asks the question: What do the borderlands sound like? The piece is a timely meditation on a long-contested terrain, structured like a road trip along the U.S. side of the border, from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. It passes through detention-center complexes, artichoke fields, military proving grounds, reservations, desert dust storms, bends of the Rio Grande, and rocket-launching sites, among many other soundscapes.

In the exhibition at Dia Chelsea, visitors can immerse themselves in a quadraphonic experience of the borderlands in the gallery space and binaurally through headphones. At the work’s sonic core is the “canvas”, a layer of recordings from the border states. The canvas is an enduring element, and even when the piece appears nearly silent, the canvas is always there. Dozens of recordings reveal the everyday activity of plants, people, and animals, and sounds of the landscape, presented in nonlinear, at times overlapping layers. The artists have threaded into the canvas field recordings, their conversations with people, and sparse notes made along the way about the recording process itself.

The 24 hours of recordings of Echoes from the borderlands: study two are divided equally into four sections representing the U.S. border states: California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. The sections can be listened to over the course of four days, each one focused on a single state and lasting six hours. Together they aim to construct a 24-hour day, and when overlapped, they capture the linear passage of time, from dawn to dawn. As a nod to the entirety of the durational piece, each section begins at sunrise with an underwater prologue in the Pacific and ends with a corresponding underwater epilogue at the following sunrise in the Gulf of Mexico.

Echoes from the borderlands: study two lies within Dia’s extensive support of Land art since the 1970s and of contemporary artists’ continued examinations of the meaning and value of land. Addressing both historic and contemporary mechanisms of systemic violence and exploitation, Study Two is an assemblage of narratives and subjects: the romanticized, foundational myths of the Wild West; the genocide of Native peoples; vigilante culture; migratory flux and anti-immigrant sentiments; nuclear testing; extractivism; the detention-center industry; and the revival of space travel. The artists have also captured key voices of hope, resistance, and resilience that talk about rain, animals, mountains, rivers, languages, humor, legends, memory, and imagination.

The piece deploys sound to transport visitors to the region and uses an echo as a central metaphor. The multiple layers add nuance and depth to the collective understanding of the border, emphasizing the stories of those who have lived through its tumultuous history. The listener is then enveloped by the vastness of the borderlands and can feel the passage of time.

(Text by Kamilah N. Foreman and Humberto Moro)