Nicola Moscelli, Rancho Anapra, Chihuahua, detail of panoramic image digitally elaborated from Streetview captures of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands

Cover graphic of "Dead End. A New Border Narrative" by Roberto Vito D'Amico.

Nicola Moscelli we are glad to introduce your ongoing crowd funding campaign "Dead End. A New Border Narrative". In the last decade, the border between Mexico and the United States has captured the attention of international public opinion, raising new concerns on border policies and even becoming a cornerstone of the Republican presidential campaign. What prompted you to investigate the Dead End as an impossibility, limit, and perhaps metaphor of blindness or partial/flawed understanding of migratory phenomena?

NICOLA MOSCELLI (NM): The border between the two states generates fascination. To borrow a mathematical term, it is a purely artificial discontinuity of the space-function, a line that seen on a map, from above, often appears as completely arbitrary to the casual observer.
The operation of taking the little yellow man (from Google Maps, ed.) to navigate it stems from the genuine curiosity of observing firsthand and understanding why in recent years borders are increasingly at the center of controversies and debates in media and public opinion. In recent years, the world has been witnessing a rapid and relentless process of border reinforcement and fortification. It is a process that has not spared Europe, either: border walls have become a straightforward and convenient solution to the attempt of keeping national economies and public opinions unaffected by neighbouring wars, epidemics, and humanitarian crises caused by climatic changes. The border between U.S.A. and Mexico is certainly the most controversial and discussed, thus it represents the archetype of this worldwide phenomenon. In a way, documenting this border takes on a particular meaning, because it highlights the problems that sooner or later the newly fortified borders will experience in the rest of the world.

Nicola Moscelli, Tijuana, Baja_California, detail of panoramic image digitally elaborated from Streetview captures of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands

Postcard, Border, Nogales wall, 1959, private collection

Your research first recognizes the impact of new technologies on the formation of new spatial imaginaries and on the ways of accessing new virtual geo-realities. Using dynamic Street View recordings, you have extensively explored and investigated the US border. Tell us from a methodological point of view how did you develop this research? And what choices did you make in selecting and editing the processed archive?

NM: Without a doubt, an important phase of the visual research consisted in navigating the border on both sides, taking notes, and deciphering what I was observing. Starting from the notes I was taking, a second phase of research was carried out, aimed at contextualizing and studying what I had just observed. For this kind of research, I made use of a vast range of sources. It quickly became an iterative process, in which while reading I was finding indications of new areas to explore, and the other places were inspiring me to explore new themes. For example, a newspaper article about the longest drug tunnel recently discovered reported the address of the industrial building that hid it.
The images captured for the book are in all respects faithful to what is shown on the web. The only adjustments made were a slight sharpening and the toning to black and white, to establish a virtual continuity with the American tradition of documentary landscape photography.

Nicola Moscelli, Fort Hancock, Texas, panoramic image digitally elaborated from Streetview captures of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands

Sticking to the same theme, how can this availability of visual spatial recognition tools raise critical attention on the production of the territory by revealing unprecedented but controversial aspects? Can you give us some examples concerning the object of your research?

NM: Your question immediately brought to mind the first time I navigated at the address of a villa in Ciudad Juárez that had been the scene of an infamous, gratuitous massacre perpetrated by the narcos. Streetview showed me the image of the memorial that today replaces that villa in memory of the victims, but I then realized that the Google car had also passed 8 months before the tragic event. Seeing that house with a basketball hoop in front of it moved me beyond measure. I think this example alone gives a good idea of the power of this tool for the purpose of visual investigation.

Nicola Moscelli, Ciudad_Juárez, Chihuahua, panoramic image digitally elaborated from Streetview captures of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands

The investigated images are like junctions that open up possibilities for further study. What are the sources you drew on to make these thematic forays?

NM: The sources I used are diverse: they reflect in some way the complexity of the border, which has its own history, its own impact on the territory, and influences cross-border culture and everyday life. Thus, in order to render this multifaceted complexity, I felt mandatory to consult academic publications, books, information sites, as well as blogs, video documentaries, social media, and even a patent.

Vintage Postcard, "I am in Texas, With My Ass in Mexico", private collection

In the video made for the crowdfunding campaign, you also talk about an outdated patent. What is it about?

NM: The cited patent describes how to produce modern chewing gum. Strangely enough, I came across it while researching the famous Battle of the Alamo. In the collective imagination, chewing gum is perhaps among one of the world’s most known Yankee symbols. There is a reason why in Italian we also call chewing gum “American gum”. Landed in Europe in the rations of American soldiers during World War II, its consumption began to rapidly spread after the war. Yet not many people are aware that chewing gum is an example of cultural appropriation. American inventor Thomas Adams invented modern chewing gum by accident, after spending some time in the company of former Mexican president and general Antonio López de Santa Anna (who spent part of his late years in the United States). Santa Anna – like many contemporary Mexicans and their Mayan and Aztec ancestors – used to chew chicle resin, a traditional Mexican plant. This story is even more curious when one considers that Santa Anna had been a bitter enemy of the Americans during the Texas War of Independence and the Mexican-American War. He won the Battle of the Alamo and massacred the Texan revolutionaries who survived the battle (David Crockett was one of them).

"Dead End" establishes a reciprocity in the border representation, placing the viewer unequivocally on both sides of the problem. Understanding the plurality of what is at stake requires a dialogue between positions, a mediation rather than a synthesis. Some images document a coexistence dictated by economic or convenience reasons.

NM: Absolutely. I played a lot with this reciprocity on both sides of the border. You can see it clearly from the pictures, but also by consulting the insights I wrote. For every issue explored in the book, cause-and-effect relationships always emerge: a cause on one side of the border and an effect on the other side. For example, it is proven that weapons sold or stolen in gun shops in the United States end up being supplied to Narcos across the border, thus contributing to violence increase on Mexican territory. Furthermore, the industrial warehouses hiding drug tunnels and clinics for drug addicts in the U.S. are clear signs of the still ongoing war on drugs.
The two countries are interdependent: it occurs to me that there is a lot of Mexico in the United States and there is a lot of the United States in Mexico. This stems from the very birth of both countries. Ultimately, this contamination is part of their essence.

Nicola Moscelli, Ponciano Arriaga, Pte Allende, Coahuila, detail panoramic image digitally elaborated from Streetview captures of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands

Nicola Moscelli, Los Fresnos Loop, Laredo, Texas, detail panoramic image digitally elaborated from Streetview captures of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands

The book offers a dynamic reading that allows the reader to move through time, recognizing the importance of historical events and the changing nature of the border itself. From this point of view, is the story that intersects the life of the native populations emblematic?

NM: In my opinion, the words used by Geronimo to report his first encounter with white men are the emblem of the genuine naivety of the Native Americans, who had to endure the division of their territories.

“We heard that some white men were measuring land to the south of us. In company with a number of other warriors I went to visit them. We could not understand them very well, for we had no interpreter, but we made a treaty with them by shaking hands and promising to be brothers. … Every day they measured land with curious instruments and put down marks which we could not understand. They were good men, and we were sorry when they had gone on into the west. They were not soldiers. These were the first white men I ever saw.”

© Frank Rinehart, Geronimo 1898

Yet, once they assimilated the new rules of the game, they understood how to exploit them to their advantage: before being confined in Indian reservations, the Apache often raided Mexican border villages and then returned to American soil, aware of the fact that the Mexican army could not pursue them across the border.
In the book, I also tried to objectively show the conditions in which Native Americans live today, drawing on data and statistics from the American census.

Which difficulties did you encounter in this visual anthropology investigation capable of offering the reader a tool to measure the issue's complexity that is still dramatically current today, even in other geographical regions?

NM: The real difficulty has been finding the key to present what I was gradually discovering and noting down. Early on I realized that in many situations the image alone was not enough to render an idea of why I had chosen it. Hence the urgency to create a textual body that would support the visual material. We live in times where all kinds of information are just a click away: a work of this scale in the past would have been unthinkable. Yet the task of aggregating information is far from trivial and can be particularly tedious, especially when it comes to cross-checking sources and ascertaining their authenticity.

Nicola Moscelli, Combus, New Mexico, detail of panoramic image digitally elaborated from Streetview captures of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands

© Mexicans lined up for execution, Unidentified Photographer, private collection

Although built starting from a broad and tiring visual exploration of the border, "Dead End" is almost an essay to be read thanks to a decidedly rich and varied textual apparatus. Somehow compared to other volumes, even valuable on the subject, think for all of the amazing work of Richard Misrach, "Dead End" appears significant as an "other" possible reading device. As you defined it, "A New Border Narrative." It's transdisciplinary, almost computational, and hard to label, somehow in discontinuity with the publishing landscape. How did this concept come about, and what criteria and how are they translated into form in the publication?

NM: Before developing this concept, I studied various visual documentaries on that border, as well as post-photographic works that were created using Google Streetview. In my opinion, there was a risk of creating a work in which the use of Streetview imagery may be seen as gimmicky. Therefore, I set myself the problem of creating a narrative capable of reporting to the reader's eyes the historical, cultural, and poetic dimension that the places observed along the border evoke. Hence the idea of using quotes, excerpts from government documents, interviews, poems, and song lyrics. The aim is to create a thought-provoking short circuit between images and quotes, something that would prompt the reader to reflect and question what he sees.

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