Dead End is a visual investigation of the United States–Mexico border carried out entirely without ever setting foot on its soil. Developed during the pandemic years, the project proposes a form of digital fieldwork expanded by archival research, where the act of documenting unfolds through digital proxies as well as other media such as books, prints, and historical records.
At its core lies the “dead end”—both literal and metaphorical—as encountered through the unfiltered, hyper-surveillance gaze of Street View. Roads cut short, landscapes broken by fences, traces of human presence, and abrupt interruptions become recurring motifs.
The process of virtually navigating these spaces is paired with the collection of surrounding evidence: historical documents, vintage postcards, antique prints, government reports, fragments of interviews, social media, poems, and songs. This multilayered assembly constructs a suspended narrative that mirrors the condition of the borderlands themselves: a place where movement halts, continuity fractures, and meaning remains elusive.
Dead End ultimately proposes an alternative cartography: a scopic archaeology of distance where images act as fossils of social memory and the border becomes an interpretive device to rethink geography, history, and the limits of perception.