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In Josh Begley’s film, Best of Luck with the Wall (2016), a comment on the proposed border wall between the US and Mexico by American President Donald Trump, Begley states:
What would it mean to try to ‘see’ the entire south-west border at once? To travel the whole 1,954 miles in, say, six minutes?…
According to Google Maps, it would take 34 hours to drive its entire length.
We wondered, why six minutes? Why should this heavily politicised place, much of which is inhabited and sees a million people officially cross the border every day, be temporally reduced and become the visual equivalent of what Begley terms is “a place abstracted into a sound bite”?
Employing the same tools and processes as the original, this film addresses the issue by providing a slowed-down 34-hour variant. The result is a video that traverses the landscape simulating the experience of travelling the length of the wall as if travelling at the speed of a car. The scale of the proposed construction is emphasised and each place that it will pass through can be seen and identified. The video is accompanied by the original soundtrack torturously stretched to the point of being noise and as a result uncomfortable to listen at length, reminding the viewer of the film’s disturbing subject matter.
In collaboration with Garrett Lynch.
