Well, my name is Xavier Tavera. I am mostly a photographer. Sometimes I am a filmmaker, but mostly a photographer. Yeah. It’s a very nice compliment, the two works. One which are Richard Misrach plays with this time-based media, that is photography. He’s giving us probably a fraction of a second, and Guillermo is also having that same notion of time. He is grabbing discarded objects collected from, from the border, collected from possibly migrants. And he has a notion of the past use of that item, but also the possibilities of a future use for that item. So he arranges these objects to give him life through sound with strings or whatnot. So the time aspect in both is prevalent – time and light with Richard Misrach, and time and sound with Guillermo Galindo. I think in both works of the two artists, it has that prevalence of absence. And this discourse of absence is important because also it gives the viewer agency to imagine who cross a border, who owned these artifacts, what previous life these artifacts used to have. 

In my work, I actually do the quite opposite, right? When you go on and talk to people, they have first and last names, and they have a unique personality and they have very unique reason why are they coming here and why are there crossing the border. Why are they risking their lives, the lives of their family and whatnot? And for me, going through portraiture is putting a first and last name on people that we might have a more direct relationship with.

If have the notion of migrants in general, it’s this abstract. If we have the notion of Pedro Juan De Dios Perez from Michoacán, Mexico, then, right, that is completely different. We can relate, we have seen these people, we have seen and we have talked to them or they have talked to us. We can relate and we can change the discourse to something that is more human. What I like about the work of Misrach and Galindo is that there’s that absence and we can wonder in a positive way: Who were these people? What was the struggle? What did they went through? Where are they now? What, what happens in these landscapes? What happens in the land? What happens to these people and to their stories?