Witnessing and Remembering: Community Creation of the Hostile Terrain 94 Exhibition (Undocumented Migration Project)

This workshop is in preparation for the Hostile Terrain 94 Exhibition (https://www.undocumentedmigrationproject.org/hostileterrain94), which illustrates the risks to life borne by clandestine border crossers walking through the Sonora Desert in Arizona. In this workshop, participants will be invited to fill in the toe tags of people who perished in the desert. The toe tags include their names, ages, the location where their remains were discovered, and the cause of death.

Hostile Terrain 94 (HT94) is a participatory project organized by the Undocumented Migration Project (https://www.undocumentedmigrationproject.org), a non-profit research-art-education-media collective, directed by MacArthur Fellow and UCLA anthropologist Jason De León (https://www.jasonpatrickdeleon.com). The exhibition comprises more than 3,200 handwritten toe tags that represent migrants who died trying to cross the Sonoran Desert of Arizona between the mid-1990s and 2019. One-by-one, these tags will be geolocated on a wall map of the desert showing the exact locations where remains were found.

Since the exhibition is participatory, it can only be built and installed with the cooperation of many volunteers. We have to write 3200 tags and pin them up, representing thousands of hours of collective work. Join us!

The exhibit at RIT is one part of a global pop-up installation that will take place simultaneously at a large number of institutions, both nationally and globally in 2021 and 2022. Our exhibit will be open for viewing between Oct. 27–Dec. 5, 2021 in Booth Hall Space (in the hallway outside University Gallery, 2765 Booth Hall).

This library infoguide (http://tinyurl.com/HT94RIT) includes more information about the Hostile Terrain 94 exhibition, related events at RIT, undocumented migration, and book and film resources.

Sign-language interpretation or real-time captioning are provided upon request, subject to availability. Please make your request here: https://myaccess.rit.edu.