7.5 × 10 inches, 240 pages, softcover
ISBN 978-1-941753-88-0

Design by IN-FO.CO
Published by Inventory Press

Available for Pre-order
Shipping February 2026

This volume critically documents, contextualizes, and theoretically elaborates the ongoing resonance of artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s work Border Tuner | Sintonizador Fronterizo (2019). A large-scale, participatory art installation composed of powerful searchlights forming “bridges of light” that opened live channels for direct communication across the U.S.-Mexico border, the project forged a platform for a wide-range of local voices between El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua at a time of fraught border rhetoric, militarized surveillance, and nationalist violence. In opposition to the modes of control and the regulation of bodies profusely developed along the border line, Lozano-Hemmer proposed a momentary alternative. Border Tuner | Sintonizador Fronterizo made visible and audible the existing relations, interdependence, and co-existence between the two cities that create the largest binational metropolitan area in the Western Hemisphere. To this extent, it is a critically important artistic work that strove to cultivate relations beyond the limits and perpetual violence of the nation-state.

The edition’s twelve essays – composed by a range of historians, theorists, curators, artists, and cultural workers – enter into convivial exchange with the voices and language, bodies and performances of those who activated Border Tuner | Sintonizador Fronterizo. In various turns, the writings contextualize the work, its installation, and its utilization before moving onto a wider-scale assessment of its geopolitical site and moment. Following this, the trajectory of the essays turns to focus on previous instantiations of Lozano-Hemmer’s artistic experimentations with light and shadow, communicational infrastructures, and the varying cultural-political specificities of their assembly. From this constellation, the essays then examine the art at the border line and in the borderlands, more generally. Here, the writings critically assess the project through several perspectives, such as Indigenous sovereignty and its relation to nation-states, modes of outsider extractivism within the frame of local cultural production, within the art historical context of border arts more generally, as well as in relation to the cultural-technological avant-gardes of earlier generations in Mexico, and through the frame of the state’s militarized structures of surveillance in the region. Finally, the edition turns to consider the legacy of Border Tuner | Sintonizador Fronterizo, though not by focusing on the significance of the work itself, but by thinking with the resonance of the actions of its production, the voices of its platforms, the discursive breakthroughs of its forums, and the material infrastructure it established to support border arts practices.