Photo essay: The magma of dreams and nightmares of the US-Mexico border wall
Spanish photographer Daniel Ochoa de Olza has spent six years completing his work ‘The Gap,’ which sums up, with its turbulent beauty, the drama of this abrupt barrier between two countries and two continents
Wall. Rarely have four letters hidden so much behind them. Thousands of miles, millions of people, two countries. Rarely has a barrier opened the mind so much. The wall that separates Mexico and the United States — the wall, in the singular, because probably no other wall in the collective imagination is as recurrent as this one today — leaves a mark when it is seen for the first time. A mark that prompted Spanish photographer Daniel Ochoa de Olza to spend the last six years working on a “rather sinister” project which examines how humans can build a 1,800-mile feat of engineering just to “screw” people over.
The Gap is a cutting, tenacious work of monumental beauty, the kind of beauty that can only come from something that unites both Mexico and the United States. It reveals the gaps left by the wall along a border that, in practice, hardly exists: it constantly appears and disappears, leaving spaces through which, with little more than a piece of wood and a few nails to improvise a ladder, it’s possible to cross.
A gap, too, that hides the worst of human beings: the division between two peoples, a continent that is split in two. On one side, the great dream; on the other, the nightmare. Though sometimes, it’s hard to say which is which. Just ask the millions of people who try to cross into the United States each year, risking not only their lives in northern Mexico. For many, even getting that far becomes a dream after surviving the hell of traveling through the country as a migrant.
A gap that is constantly watched: not just by the U.S. border guards who act as Cerberus-like gatekeepers, but also by the armed group who sent a man to watch over Ochoa de Olza while he photographed a goalpost standing before the wall — after all, isn’t any place good for taking a shot at luck? “The armed men who are coming sent me,” they told him, uncertain of who the man taking photos was. Because behind a wall, behind these four letters, there’s always uncertainty.
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