Coyotaje - 2017.
Inflatable Sculpture, Close Circuit Night Vision Video, Sound, and Photograph
Installation Views, Art in General, Brooklyn, NY
Photos Courtesy of Art in General
Photos: Charles Benton

Subserviant to transborder systems, border patrol agents weaponize indigenous knowledge through linguistic and mythological decoys. Within the local indigneous tradition of story and humor, border patrol agents of Mexican heritage recount a metaphysical rupture of a time during which worldviews collide. As if legend, these federal liaisons spin a tale of green glowing eyes eminating from a border agent with night vision goggles. A creature with menacing and illuminated eyes is spotted lurking behind the bushes of the upper sonoran desert. Within the theater of the transborder complex - a military industrial marketplace, the lurking border patrol agent is identified by migrants as Chupacabra! In a moment of sheer terror, migrants scatter to the four directions. As they generate fear and paranoia via paramilitary operations, border patrol use story to subconciously implicate themselves as the indigenous people's monster. This monster speaks to migrants in camoflauge, beconing them to safety — a deceptive lure to captivity. Coyotaje demonstrates how decoys and mythic metaphors function as mediators of strategic expectation. By rendering the intersection of decoy and myth, within this particular work, Postcommodity hacks these mediators, as they are being operationalized in the borderlands and within our larger society, to demonstrate noise and pragmatism.