[NADA] QUE DECLARAR
2024

The artist approaches a table and begins to empty the contents of their personal items and pockets, gradually removing their shoes and clothing until they are standing only in undergarments. As the artist carries out this action, they reveal piles of sand and soil from inside each of their belongings. The emptied items on the table include a backpack, water bottle, wallet with a passport photo, shoes, sweatpants, t-shirt, and a jacket. With their arms raised, the artist turns their back around to face the wall showing they are not carrying or concealing further items.

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This performance centers the growing military occupation and surveillance across expanding ‘border zones’ of the so-called united states and all occupied lands subjected to colonial borders. Through check-points, reinforced border structures, detention centers, and targeted stop searches, the construction of settler state borders has bred a global mechanism of violence and displacement that dehumanizes those who transit stolen ancestral lands by subjecting bodies and collectives to colonial fictions of ‘otherness.’

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While the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects against arbitrary searches and seizures of people and their property, the Supreme Court ruled that Border Patrol agents have authority to stop and search all persons and vehicles without warrant or probable cause within a “reasonable distance” from the border, defined as 100 miles from all land borders and coastlines. This “100-mile zone,” is home to 65 percent of the U.S. population and includes cities such as New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago, while states like Florida and Michigan lie entirely within this border zone. As this expanding border reaches deeper within the so-called united states, civilians are forcibly subjected to intensified militarization and questioning of their presence and existence on occupied lands.