Borders like sovereignty and all their ramifications are social constructs invented by humans to segregate populations utilizing fictitious boundaries delineated by architectural structures erected across the globe. Humankind is the only species that vilifies migration while overpowering communities far from their ancestral homelands. Beyond trauma and its residue, surpassing a continuous surplus of pain, and in the absence of excessive violence, undocumented people thrive every day; yet those who experience joy within undocumentedness are deemed heretics.
Francisco Donoso’s oeuvre provides a protective aesthetic ecosystem by which to explore the precariousness of belonging to the undocumented community. Challenging the structural configuration of the architectural chain-link fence and subverting its utility allows Donoso to conceive of the potentiality of a site of infinite healing located deep within the bounds and contours of undocumented existence.
Donoso, a DACA recipient himself, visually rejects and grounds boundaries contemporaneously to aesthetically unfold the perpetual evolutions of belonging and becoming that one must endure upon being deemed undocumented. Reshaping fences endlessly allows Donoso to question the psychological monumentality afforded to the fundamentality of a basic wire structure. By conceiving and simultaneously rendering the potentiality of existence where negative and positive space coalesces, Donoso transcends the physical limitations of the chain-link fence to displace its psychological weight and give passage to that which is seldom articulated; undocumented bliss, pleasure, and beauty.
The heaviness of the chain-link fence thus vanishes to give way to an architectural structure that transcends its connotations, becoming a visual playground. Donoso thus destroys the symbolism of the fence while revealing the allegories found deep within its structure and further utilizes them as analogies to render the landscape of undocumentedness aesthetically.
Intimately within Donoso’s creations, color transcends its limitations and becomes liminal as it emphasizes infinite internal temporaries, not of separation nor division, but instead of interconnected passages that surrender to heterotopic positionalities by which aesthetic immigration is simultaneously restorative and celebrated.
Undocumentedness axis Donoso’s ecology, within it fences dance and cascade; they are challenged, deconstructed, reconstructed, and provoked tirelessly until they become familiar, welcoming, tender, loving, and kind. Within this environment, borders disappear, countries dissolve, sovereignty is rendered useless, and citizenship vanishes to give way to an aesthetic-driven site unrestricted by trauma and violence, where joy and undocumentedness go hand in hand; a home to honor the journey of each immigrant currently residing away from their ancestral homeland.
For Anzaldua, Nepantla was a space of transformation between two worlds where the self-transformed; for Donoso, self is faultless; it is the space which is questioned and metamorphosed. Aesthetically rethinking the landscape of undocumentedness allows Donoso to invalidate culpability from self and extricate the magnificence of immigration. Therefore in rendering dancing fences, Donoso invites the unseen to take center stage, and a visual language of undocumentedness emerges from within.
If we could abstract the brutality of immigration,
would we be left with dancing fences?
SPRING/BREAK Art Show LA 2022 opens February 16th. Over 50 Exhibitors, over 100 artists, all under our 2021-2022 theme, HEARSAY:HERESY.
PLAN YOUR VISIT NOW -- either to our festive OPENING NIGHT, our Frieze Opening-concurrent VIP PREVIEW February 17th, or our weekend PUBLIC SHOW DAYS February 18th - 20th.
LOCATION: Skylight Culver City 5880 Adams, Culver City, CA
First Look | Wednesday, February 16th, 2PM - 5PM (Invitation Only)
Opening Night | Wednesday, February 16th, 5PM - 8PM
VIP Preview | Thursday, February 17th, 11AM - 7PM
Regular Show Days| Friday, February 18th - Sunday, February 20th, 11AM - 7PM
