Wall Installation on Stairway, First Floor.
Dates subject to change
Hostile Terrain 94 is a participatory art project sponsored and organized by the Undocumented Migration Project. The installation is composed of more than 3000 hand-written toe tags, each representing a migrant who has died trying to cross the US-Mexico border at the Sonoran Desert of Arizona between the mid-1990s and 2019.
This installation takes place simultaneously at more than 100 institutions around the world and is presented by the Anderson Collection in collaboration with students and faculty from the department of Anthropology at Stanford University.
Hostile Terrain 94 Virtual Tour
Migration is often depicted in numbers and percentages, without names or faces or histories of lives lived. Hostile Terrain 94 turns that data into a visual representation of individual migrants, at once absolutely horrifying and strikingly beautiful. It is in that beauty that we are asked to look closer, to look at the black line, the dots, and the thousands of hanging rectangles as they shift ever so slightly with the movement of passersby.
In this virtual tour, the Anderson Collection strives to bring the issues of migration to a wider audience, bringing to light the names of those who perished, and the humanity of migration not to be degraded to numbers and policies. We hope you can explore these issues through your personal experiences and areas of study.
Hostile Terrain 94 accompanying publication
This publication is written entirely by students at Stanford University, and includes essays from graduate students Koji Lau-Ozawa, a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology; Jon Ayon Alonso, MFA candidate in Documentary Film and Video Studies; and undergraduate students Ekalan Hou, Melissa Santos, and Georgia Gardner.
The installation will be on display in the first floor of the Anderson Collection at Stanford University upon reopening and through the Spring of 2021.
Hostile Terrain 94 Video
Filmed by Jon Ayon Alonso, MFA candidate in Documentary Film and Video Studies and narrated by Koji Lau-Ozawa, a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology, Stanford University.
Additional Events
The Undocumented Migration Project Exhibition at Stanford, a class listed in Chicano/Latino Politics/CSRE, will be taught by Gina Hernandez-Clarke and Koji Lau-Ozawa in fall quarter 2020.
11/5 Panel discussion: Jason De León, Angela Garcia, Jon Ayon Alonso
Watch the creator/director of the program, UCLA faculty and anthropologist Jason De Leon, at a panel discussion including Stanford faculty from the department of Anthropology, the Bill Lane Center for the West, and others.
9/25 Virtual Q&A session for Border South
Artist and filmmaker Raúl O. Paz Pastrana and anthropologist Jason De León explore this documentary film during a Q&A Session.
9/24 and 9/25 Virtual screening of Border South
A documentary following the Central American migrant trail across Mexico and into the Sonoran Desert of Arizona.
