Repellent Fence

Social practice, landscape art work which imaginatively engages with a utopian, borderless conception of communication, breaks through human-centered notions of "airspace" as territory. Art in the clouds, thinking about "the cloud" and floating and virtuality, and resisting nationalist concepts of culture and identity.  Also thinking about cross-cultural communication, intercultural as well as interspecies relationships and indigenous forms of medicine. Also note, the collective and collaborative nature of their practice.  And the reference to fences makes me think about another imaginative fence - Christo's "Running Fence."

artist study of balloon installed near the border fence

From their website:

"The Repellent Fence is a social collaborative project among individuals, communities, institutional organizations, publics, and sovereigns that culminate with the establishment of a large-scale temporary monument located near Douglas, Arizona and Agua Prieta, Sonora. This land-art work is comprised of 28 tethered balloons, that are each 10 feet in diameter, and float 50 feet above the desert landscape. The balloons that comprise Repellent Fence are enlarged replicas of an ineffective bird repellent product. Coincidently, these balloons use indigenous medicine colors and iconography -- the same graphic used by indigenous peoples from South America to Canada for thousands of years. The purpose of this monument is to bi-directionally reach across the U.S./Mexico border as a suture that stitches the peoples of the Americas together—symbolically demonstrating the interconnectedness of the Western Hemisphere by recognizing the land, indigenous peoples, history, relationships, movement and communication."