Film short abstract:

This 2-minute looping experimental ethnographic short uses glitching and spectrogramming to digitally conjure up the specters that haunt images of and daily life in Tijuana, Mexico.

Film long abstract:

In the Mexico-U.S. border city of Tijuana, material manifestations of violence exist alongside everyday violence as a haunting presence. This is a ghostly or spectral aesthetics that permeates the familiar through uncertainty and manifests in sensory, affective, and embodied registers. The lived experience of spectral everyday violence poses a challenge for ethnographic description and representation. How do you (re)present these things that are felt so loudly but can’t be seen? “Border Specters | Espectros Fronterizos” confronts this question by exploring the spectral dimensions of everyday violence as liminal processes via the glitching and spectrogramming of specific sites and imagery: the border wall, icons such as Malverde, la Santa Muerte, and la Mona, the aftermath of a Dia de la Mujer march protesting femicide, among others. By employing these digital in-between interventions, the film finds specters hidden within the medium and generates a cyclical (looping) affective and aesthetic experience in time. In doing so, the project aims to undo and expand the conventions of ethnographic filmmaking by experimenting with some of the formal and theoretical possibilities of making film.