O-1 Visas
In theater, the fourth wall refers to the imagined barrier between audience and actors, belief in which is crucial to the self-containment of the fiction being performed onstage. José De Sancristóbal, an artist born in Mexico and currently living in the United States, breaks not only this fourth wall but, arguably, an entirely new fifth one, in his curiously moving two-channel video, featured in an exhibition at Luminarts Foundation in Chicago this past spring. “Given the right conditions, any sound can pass through a wall” occupies a room divided in two by metal struts. One side, with chairs to sit in, features a large projection on which plays a narrative film of a man who walks across the border to Ciudad Juarez, enters a photo studio, and sits for a passport photograph. The other side, standing room only, has a smaller monitor showing the Evanston recording studio where the sound for the film was generated by the artist’s neighbor, a man born in Ciudad Juarez who cannot freely return because he is undocumented. Using standard foley methods, he creates the sound of walking, opening and closing a door, clicking a camera shutter—noises needed for the part that was shot in his unreachable hometown. So far so good, and really, it would be enough if Sancristóbal had stopped there, using artistry to breach the US-Mexico border wall, that fifth wall. But strange things begin to happen: the developed photographs are wrong, lapping waves can be heard through the wall of the photo studio. The audience must go back and forth, from screen to screen, one side of the wall to the other, to see it all. But no matter how freely we travel, the legal fiction of immigration, borders, and visas can never make sense.
—Lori Waxman 2024-07-16 9:40 AM