Tijuana Border

        

I wanted to do something with lines. Lines can be aesthetic, lines construct an image and make an image make sense or not.From this, Tijuana Border was made: an audiovisual project from the chair of Universidad Iberoamericana in Tijuana that explores border and migration issues (2017).

Conceptualization, photography and montage by Lorea Arcelus Ortega. 
      
        

We were invited as filmmakers to present an investigation for a chair that took place in the city of Tijuana. We were asked to expose an issue that was being explored in our personal investigations and the goal was that the conversations of academics from all around the world would help us to explore themes about borders and migration.
          

Unfortunately my investigation about arts and technology in the border wasn’t what the academics were expecting, so I was initially rejected for the program I refused to give up. I offered to pay for the plain ticket myself and pleaded my case.They eventually decided to invite me to the whole program, offering to cover the rest of the expenses. 

        

When I was sitting down listening to the discussions in the panels, I couldn’t stop going over the idea of how a line can be interpreted in a human’s life, a line that has so much complexity, but at the end of the day, is really just a line that separates: territory, therefore culture, language, systems, elements that conform the reality and perception of human beings.
I knew wanted to do something with lines...Lines areaesthetic, lines construct an image and make an image make sense, or not. I wanted to follow one of the most complex lines in the world, the most migrated line in the world: the border of Tijuana. SoI just followed the line as long as I could.


         


When I presented the work, I was given recognition as the best peice composed in the program. I was able to do the interviews I was looking for about the the first industrial music group from Tijuana, which came out as a super interesting topic in my investigation. Here I fell in love with the coolest and most interesting city in Mexico, the beautiful city of Tijuana. Where beauty, rawness, complexity and humbleness collide.