The border is more than a national boundary or barrier; it’s the feeling of subjectivity that we are not where we belong. These borders can manifest anywhere, in space or in our minds. They can be static or meander around and through us.

For this open studio, I present two works —one nearing completion and one just beginning.

The first is a series of images called The Other Architecture, which documents the building and infrastructural typologies that appear along political boundaries. These types articulate the borders that expand from within the interior of common social junctures to the formatting of geographies and the military networks for controlling and breaching the atmosphere. These typologies are re-arranged into three speculative scenes called The Other World, a third space where systems of control might be renegotiated to produce rupture and change, allowing new identities to be affirmed. This work is part of an upcoming book called Exclusions, Edges, and Ecologies, co-authored with Jeffrey Nesbit.

The second is Borderlands Lens, a visual display that uncovers the latent boundaries and enclosures that have shaped my identity as a border subject. At the center is the border between Ciudad Juarez (Mexico) and El Paso (United States), overlaid by the personal experiences that straddled it over time. These visuals are constructed entirely by memory, hence their fragmented appearance from the hospital where my birth was strategically timed to gain birthright U.S. citizenship to spaces where my identity would be further riddled. The combination of architectural drafting techniques, dry-point etchings, and 3D print reliefs leverage depth and tactility to represent layers of space and their political and psychological dimensions.

Bio

César A. Lopez is a first-generation Mexican-American architectural designer, researcher, and educator who draws from his life in the Mexico-United States Border Region as critical knowledge to explore the entanglements between architecture, territory, and the politics that dictate them. He is a co-director of FRONTERA-NATION, a platform/practice dedicated to coalescing border subjects and speculating an empowered future.

César is an Assistant Professor at the University of New Mexico, School of Architecture + Planning. His work and collaborations have been exhibited internationally and published in journals such as ARQ, inForma, Bracket, and Pidgin. He is co-authoring an upcoming book titled Exclusions, Edges, and Ecologies (ACTAR Publishers), which documents the infrastructural and architectural typologies along political boundaries. He obtained his Bachelor of Science in Architecture from Texas Tech University College of Architecture in El Paso and his Master of Architecture from California College of the Arts.

He is the Arnold W. Brunner/Frances Barker Tracy/Katherine Edwards Gordon Rome Prize in Architecture.