In Search of Lost Space

On Miguel Buenrostro's Trilogy on Space

Abstract

Tijuana's border condition has increasingly become a ghost-hunting device, exorcising forms of a lost Mexican identity. To account for this ghostly mutation in the city, we will explore Trilogy on Space (2018), an audiovisual project by artist Miguel Buenrostro composed of three short documentaries: “Building,” “Death and Life of a Portal,” and “Heterotopias.” Trilogy on Space explores different, almost apocalyptic vignettes of what we might call a “border of dwelling,” that is, of spaces pushed to the extreme limits of their possible social occupation: abandoned housing developments, Chinese migrants displaced from a gentrified neighborhood, portals to cross into parallel cities, or buildings where a guard and his ghosts wander. Amidst post-apocalyptic landscapes, a border dwelling playfully emerges and reclaims its lost possibilities.