Originally published on Frieze.com
An exhibition at RIBA in London details the perilous journey of Central American migrants across Mexico’s frontera sur
Consumed, as we so often are, by the tweeted outbursts of President Trump and his fixation on the US–Mexico border, it’s often forgotten that Mexico’s southern border is a site of considerable friction around mass-migration from Central America. ‘Walk the Line’, an exhibition currently on display at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) for this year’s edition of London Festival of Architecture (LFA), takes Mexico’s frontera sur as its focus while provocatively reinterpreting it as a vertical plane that runs upwards through the southern section of the country. A ‘distributed vertical border’ is how the project’s authors – researcher Pedro Ceñal Murga and curatorial platform Proyector (Tania Tovar Torres and Juan Carlos Espinosa) – describe a network of seven sites connected via the infamous ‘La Bestia’ train network. Also known as ‘El tren de la muerte’, the network carries hundreds of thousands of migrants fleeing violence, drought, poverty and political oppression – predominantly from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras…
Originally published on Frieze.com
