Geopolitical Bodies |

Fading Borders

2024–present

Performance, tattoo, bioengineered fading ink, video, and photography

Fading Borders is an ongoing performance project that uses bioengineered tattoo ink designed to disappear as the body gradually breaks down its particles. The project grew out of trips I made along the U.S.–Mexico border between 2010 and 2016, where I observed the border wall cutting across mountains, deserts, and eventually extending into the Pacific Ocean near Tijuana. There, salt water and natural forces continuously corrode a political barrier intended to appear permanent.

I translate this relationship between landscape and border onto the human body. A continuous black line is tattooed across the chest using fading ink. Over time, the body absorbs and breaks down the pigment, causing the line to disappear and potentially leaving only a trace or scar. The body becomes both a territory on which a border is imposed and a biological force that gradually dismantles it.

Through live performance, photography, and a multiscreen video installation, I document this process of disappearance. The fading line becomes a drawing in continuous transformation, connecting the instability of political boundaries to the changing surfaces of landscapes and bodies.

I first applied the project to myself and reactivated it with volunteer participants during the NYLAAT Residency on Governors Island, New York, in 2024, followed by the -Central- Performance Festival, organized by Pancho López at Grace Exhibition Space, New York. In November 2025, it was presented at Niebla Performance Festival at Espacio 42B, El Salvador, curated by Lucy Tomasino. It is scheduled for inclusion in Cartographies of Otherness, curated by Vaida Tamoševičiūtė at Meno Parkas Gallery, Kaunas, Lithuania, in November 2026.