Valeria Luiselli/Ricardo Giraldo/Leo Heiblum: Echoes from the Borderlands

Caminante, no hay puentes, se hace puentes al andar.–Gloria Anzaldúa Echoes from the Borderlands is a collective comprised of Valeria Luiselli, Ricardo Giraldo, and Leo Heiblum. It also names the 24-hour sound piece that explores and gives voice to areas of interstate violence along the U.S.-Mexico border. At the core of this sonic experience is a living canvas of sorts, a vibrational palimpsest built from binaural and quadraphonic recordings. Into this are woven archival recordings and other voices, authored by Luiselli, which move through the piece as necessary witness and disturbance. The result is a constellation of counternarratives to the official stories that pervade our newscycle, allowing Indigenous, brown, and black perspectives to keep pace with the conventional histories that ignore or kill them. The land itself serves neither as an abstraction nor as a mere foil for sociopolitical musings. It is a witness whose testimony has been buried under weary curricula and the…