Land marks

Justin Beal

Miguel Fernández de Castro (b. Sonora, 1986– ), Curro: Los Murmullos, 2023. Film stills. Courtesy of the artist.

Miguel Fernández de Castro (b. Sonora, 1986– ), Curro: Los Murmullos, 2023. Film stills. Courtesy of the artist.

“The roadrunner was revered as a sacred animal because of the footprint it leaves when walking. Its zygodactyl foot imprints an X with four equal points on the sand that makes it impossible to know in which direction it is moving.” So begins La Sombra de La Tierra, written by the anthropologist Natalia Mendoza for an exhibition of the same name by her partner and frequent collaborator Miguel Fernández de Castro, presented at the Fundación Marso, Mexico City, in February 2023.

Mendoza and Fernández de Castro live and work in the rural town of Altar, in Sonora, a common way station for migrants crossing from Mexico into Arizona. These borderlands are among the least populated places on earth, and among the most heavily surveilled. In recent years, a cottage industry of “slipper” manufacture has established itself in Altar, catering to those hoping to pass through the desert undetected. The slippers – overshoes really – are made of fragments of carpet and camouflage nylon. They are designed to be worn over a migrant’s boots to render their footprints, like the tracks of the roadrunner, illegible in the desert sand.

The clandestine movement of bodies – human, animal, vehicular – is the central concern of La Sombra de la Tierra. The exhibition’s focal point is a seven-minute film titled Coro: Los Murmullos, which combines footage of workers at sewing machines with scenes from the surrounding desert: unassembled sections of border fence, piled in rusty stacks; a Peregrine falcon with leather anklets and jesses; a truck dragging five old tires chained together into an improvised harrow to clear tracks from a sandy road. Sweeping landscapes filmed by drone, the falcon’s mechanical surrogate, are cut together with intimate shots taken in the workshop. At moments, closely cropped details of worn carpet resemble the texture and contour of the desert floor itself.

Lucy Raven (American, 1977– ), Ready Mix, 2021. Installation view. Dia Chelsea, New York, © Lucy Raven. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio, New York.

Lucy Raven (American, 1977– ), Ready Mix, 2021. Installation view. Dia Chelsea, New York, © Lucy Raven. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio, New York.

Sand is not a material in the way copper or obsidian are materials. It is not one thing, but a granular assortment of different parts—crystalline bits of quartz, metamorphic fragments of feldspar and basalt, metals like magnesium, or calcium carbonate from corral or shells or bone.

In his 1941 study The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes, the British officer and amateur scientist Ralph Bagnold offered an intriguing definition. He speculated that sand might be defined as a rock particle small enough to be moved by the wind, but heavy enough not to remain in aloft in indefinite, dusty suspension – a material defined by its relationship to gravity.

These subtle distinctions between gravel, dust, silt and sand are a central concern of another film, Lucy Raven’s Ready Mix, which premiered at the Dia Foundation in New York in 2021. The readymade in Ready-mix is an open-air concrete processing plant on the alluvial plains of southern Idaho whose central conveyor belt draws raw material through a series of operations. We see washers spraying, screens sifting, classifiers sorting. Wet pebbles bounce like water on a hot skillet as the material lurches and rattles into various aggregates and binders. Raven, too, shoots from above with a drone, mimicking the precise movements of the loaders below. This aerial footage is cut together with glimpses inside a churning mixer. As the film draws to a close, excess concrete is poured into a form and added to a retaining wall, integrating itself back into the landscape.

Lucy Raven (American, 1977– ), Ready Mix, 2021. Film still. Courtesy of the artist.

Lucy Raven (American, 1977– ), Ready Mix, 2021. Film still. Courtesy of the artist.

Since I first saw them, Coro: Los Murmullos and Ready Mix have played on a split screen in my mind. Both films are beautiful and unsettling, linked by materiality, pace and mood. There are moments of uncanny compositional similarity: the truck pulling the tire harrow across the desert floor; the teeth of a loader scraping the pit’s gravel surface; the walls. They are connected, too, by the Sonoran Desert itself. The horseshoe-shaped territory encompasses both Altar and Raven’s hometown of Tucson on the opposite side of the border.

I am unsure what exactly to make of these synchronicities.  It is tempting to situate the two projects within the context of land art, but Raven and Fernández de Castro are less interested in leaving their mark on the land than in deciphering the marks made by others. Another approach might be through the work of the Algerian scholar Samia Henni, who has argued that the historical depiction of deserts as inhospitable, violent spaces serves the interests of those invested in extracting the resources from the land. Her collaborator Brahim El Guabli calls this ideological framework “Saharanism”—a term that applies just as much to North American deserts as it does to the Sahara itself.

The sand in the Sonoran Desert is not suitable for making concrete. Over time, desert winds wear down the angular edges of the grains until they are too smooth to bind well with cement. Sand formed by rivers, however, like that found in the Snake River Basin where Raven filmed Ready Mix, tends to have the sharp angular edges ideal for making concrete. About half of the sand extracted annually goes into concrete, the most prevalent artificial material in the world. The only thing we consume more of is water, but unlike water, sand takes centuries to form naturally. It is a non-renewable resource over human timescales.

It is in extraction that Raven and Fernández de Castro’s concerns converge. Both films spiral outward to consider the cultural, political, and economic implications of material excavation. Even the improvised slippers in La Sombra de La Tierra trace their origins back to the aftermath of extraction: after thousands of gallons of cyanide solution were spilled in the El Chanate gold mine in Altar in 2016, the mining conglomerate responsible donated sewing machines to the local community. It was a cynical gesture of reconciliation. The machines were of no particular use, until an enterprising group of citizens began producing sandals to help migrants move across the desert sand without leaving a legible mark on the land.

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Justin Beal is an artist and writer based in New York. His work has been reviewed in the New York Times, the New Yorker, Artforum, Frieze, Art in America, and the Los Angeles Times and is included in the permanent collections of the Albright Knox Museum, the Hammer Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles. His first book, Sandfuture, was published by the MIT Press in September 2021 and his writing has recently appeared in Frieze, Harper’s and The Architect’s Newspaper. Beal teaches at Hunter College.