“ An Imagined Border of Safety , Humanitarian Relief , and Creativity ” J . M . Design Studio ’ s Other Border Wall Project

In April 2017, J. M. Design Studio—three Pittsburgh-based artists and designers—responded to the Customs and Border Protection's public request for proposals for a wall along the U.S.Mexico border. J. M. Design Studio then announced its own call for more border "wall" proposals from other artists. The following commentary details these prototype concepts and tracks the executive policies and rhetoric that established a foundation for the border wall. This commentary also shows how J. M. Design Studio’s prototype submission and the subsequent artistic platform it initiated model how creative connection and the co-option of established public channels are themselves acts of political resistance in an era of disrupted democratic participation and ossified partisanship.

From the earliest public moments of his presidential aspirations, Donald Trump conjured an image of the United States under attack by Mexico, describing the border as a dangerously porous zone through which drugs, crime, and "rapists" from the lawless south slip into the peaceable north, threatening the public safety, national security, and economic supremacy of the United States. 1 In his announcement of his run for president in June 2015, Trump made the pledge that would become the figurative and literal symbol of the "America First" isolationism at the heart of his future administration: "I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I'll build them very inexpensively, I will build a great, great wall on our southern border.And I will have Mexico pay for that wall.Mark my words." 2 In the first days of his administration, Trump began to make good on his campaign promise by setting the wall's foundation in Executive Order #13767, "Border Security and Immigration • "shall be physically imposing in height," ideally 30-feet tall but no less than 18-feet • "shall not be possible for a human to climb" • "shall prevent, for at least 30 minutes, a physical breach of the wall by pick-axe, chisel, Oxy/acetylene torch, etc." • "The north side of wall (i.e.U.S. facing side) shall be aesthetically pleasing in color, anticlimb texture, etc., to be consistent with general surrounding environment" The guidelines for the "Other Border Wall" RFP also stipulated "fully developed drawings, details or specifications are not desired or required," allowing the designers some flexibility in approaching their prototypes. 10Along with supplying prototype images, all applicants or "offerors" were required to demonstrate, as part of their submission, their qualifications in terms of experience with large-scale projects and competence to bring the design into fruition.
In April 2017, three Pittsburgh-based artists and designers-Jennifer Meridian, Leah Patgorski, and Tereneh Idia-did just that, submitting their qualifications as "designers, artists, and creatives" under the name J. M. Design Studio, along with six prototype concepts, to the "Other Border Wall" RFP (Figs. 1, 4-8). 11In some illustrations, reproduced here, J. M. Design Studio deployed whimsicality as opposition, following the CBP's guideline of reaching an "physically imposing" height, but doing so with massive pipe organs or White Pine trees, which support a two thousand-mile line of hammocks strung from their thirty-foot trunks (Figs. 4   and 5).Other prototypes make the danger of a restricted border zone explicit: a "wall" comprising a million gravestones becomes a dotted line between the countries, a memorial to the migrants and refugees who have died trying to cross.Or, with hope toward preventing similar deaths, the artists proposed a bastion of lighthouses to guide travelers through the "inhospitable" desert toward safety (Figs.6 and 7).Beyond satire and the knowing implausibility of their proposals, J.M. Design Studio's drawings are embedded with a radical reconceptualization of the border as something other than a barrier-ductile, bi-nationally lucrative, and resonsive to the shifting needs of the environment and its transnational community."A Wall of Clean Water" for example, literalizes their optimism for a "fluid border" by offering an oasis and refuge to travelers in the deserts of both nations (Fig. 8), while "A Wall of Artists Redrawing Borders" shows the border to be based in imagination and, ultimately, arbitrary, negotiable, and propositional at best when confronted in real, physical space (Fig. 9).

Prototype #2 A Wall of Pipe Organs _________________
A semi-continuous wall of nearly 10 million pipe organs, in a line that follows the entire border.For the most part, these stand at approximately 30' high.Every 20' there is a opening, like an archway, which enables people from either side to walk through -but not before sitting down to play a quick (or long) tune on the organ.This is a wall of music, and the only requirement is that every person who passes through must spend at least two minutes playing the organs.

Prototype #1 A Wall of Hammocks _________________
A continuous wall of nearly 3 million hammocks, strung together across the entire border with 30' Western White Pines between them for support.This is the tree of Peace.These hammocks are available for anyone's use -as a place to rest, relax, and dream.As a place to take refuge, recuperate, and move between the two countries with an ease usually only felt when on vacation.We envision this wall as a place of restoration, beauty, and friendship that celebrates, and advocates for, human rights and the end of prosecution for refugees fleeing oppressive and violent regimes.

Prototype #5 A Wall of Lighthouses for the Border _________________
We consider the border between Mexico and the United States a kind of terrifying, dangerous, and inhospitable place as it now stands today.It is much like the coast of a rugged, wild ocean that is covered in giant boulders.We propose to line the entire border with colorful, functional, and beautiful lighthouses.These are no ordinary lighthouses, they are lighthouses for the desert -they are meant to provide the safe guidance and benevolence to all who see them in their dangerous journeys and travels.These lighthouses will stand 30' in the air, as the wall has specified, and be painted in all manner of wonderful colors.The lights themselves will run on solar power, and the people who are the lighthouse keepers will be the refugees themselves who have had training to do this work.Therefore this wall is a form of employment, beauty, and functionality.These are the major ideas we like to stress in our design work.Their submissions were reported by national news outlets that recognized the prototypes as protest, sometimes comparing their deliberate absurdity to the unintentionally absurd concepts submitted in earnest by actual contractors-such as the wall compound comprising a thirty-foot wall, a chain-link fence, motion sensors, a one hundred-foot deep trench lined with "holding cells for nuclear waste processing," and working train tracks, proposed by the Clayton company, also based in the Pittsburgh area.12From more than four hundred submissions, the for connection and an opportunity not just to think critically and creatively about Trump's order and the practicalities of such a wall (price and at whose cost, impact on border cities' environment and families, etc.) but also for reconceptualizing "borders" and "walls" in the first place, calling for others to imagine new possibilities for these zones where neighbors meet.
The call yielded both ludic pitches that met the folly of CBP's solicitation with farce as well as rich meditations of a transnationalist future beyond current U.S. isolationism.
The collective received more than fifty submissions, a selection of which is reproduced  with the neighborly advice: "Build a longer table, not a higher fence" (Fig. 12).Others recharged the wall with literal humanity, suggesting that stand along the border or that the wall itself be made flesh, a soft but eerie membrane.

Figure 12
Emma Brown, Border Some artists took direct aim at Trump and the "alternative facts" on which his administration has based itself.The App Expo group proposed the AppGlass™ Augmented Reality Border Wall, an awkward glass cone that, when worn over the head while facing the "general direction of Mexico," shows the wearer "an alternatively factual wall in your own unique reality," constructing the wall only as figment in one's (i.e., Trump's) imagination (Fig. 13). 14

Figure 13
The

Figure 1
Figure 1 Detail from J.M. Design Studio, "Prototype #3 A Wall of Artists Redrawing Borders" from The Other Border Wall Proposals (2017).Digital scanned image of ink drawing on paper, text.8 ½ X 11 inches.Collection of J. M. Design Studio.

Figure 4 J
Figure 4 J. M. Design Studio, "Prototype #2 A Wall of Pipe Organs" from The Other Border Wall Proposals (2017).Digital scanned image of ink drawing on paper, text.8 ½ X 11 inches.Collection of J. M. Design Studio.

Figure 5 J
Figure 5 J. M. Design Studio, "Prototype #1 A Wall of Hammocks" from The Other Border Wall Proposals (2017).Digital scanned image of ink drawing on paper, text.8 ½ X 11 inches.Collection of J. M. Design Studio.

Figure 6 J
Figure 6 J. M. Design Studio, "Prototype #4 A Wall of Gravestones for Migrants And Refugees (Memorial to Asylum)" from The Other Border Wall Proposals (2017).Digital scanned image of ink drawing on paper, text.8 ½ X 11 inches.Collection of J. M. Design Studio.

Figure 7 J
Figure 7 J. M. Design Studio, "Prototype #5 A Wall of Lighthouses for the Border" from The Other Border Wall Proposals (2017).Digital scanned image of ink drawing on paper, text.8 ½ X 11 inches.Collection of J. M. Design Studio.

Figure 8 J
Figure 8 J. M. Design Studio, "Prototype #6 A Wall of Clean Water" from The Other Border Wall Proposals (2017).Digital scanned image of ink drawing on paper, text.8 ½ X 11 inches.Collection of J. M. Design Studio.

Figure 9 J
Figure 9 J. M. Design Studio, "Prototype #3 A Wall of Artists Redrawing Border Walls" from The Other Border Wall Proposals (2017).Digital scanned image of ink drawing on paper, text.8 ½ X 11 inches.Collection of J. M. Design Studio.
CBP selected eight prototypes to be constructed, at tax-payer expense, in the San Diego border community of Otay Mesa in the fall of 2017.(Unfortunately, J. M. Design Studio was not among them.)Other Border Visions In its commitment to continued resistance, J. M. Design Studio distributed its own Request for Designs online in January 2018, "Other Border Wall Project: How to Build a Non-Wall."The collective sought "visions for the border between Mexico and the United States as a site of connection, creativity, and humanitarian support . . .signaling possibilities for what the future of walls, and borders, can become" as a means to "dismantle the view of the border as a fortified, insurmountable, and destructive barrier." 13Its public solicitation created a platform here.Many had read the CBP/Trump's original call as bizarre and performative, responding in kind with jocular "designs" such as Sofia Caetano's The Border Collie Wall, a herd of collies lined up and sitting at attention, perhaps facing south (Figs.10 and 11).The Porcelain Poodle Patrol looks and sounds no more menacing; each pup in the single-file line of glossy bubblegum-pink poodles sits alert with one fluffy paw raised, not a "HALT!" so much as performing "shake" in hopes of a treat.

Figure 10 & 11
Figure 10 & 11 Sofia Caetano, The Border Collie Wall and Porcelain Poodle Patrol (2018), digital renderings for Other Border Wall Project: How to Build a Non-Wall, 2017.
May 31, 2018, https://www.npr.org/2018/05/31/615753031/trump-administration-imposes-steelaluminum-tariffs-on-eu-canada-and-mexico18BySupreme Court decision, states would be allowed to change their election laws and procedures such as enact voter identification laws, move or eliminate polling locations, and draw redistricting maps without advance federal approval.Adam Liptak, "Supreme Court Invalidates Key Part of Voting Rights Act," New York Times, June 25, 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/26/us/supreme-court-ruling.html 19A January 2017 report from the office of the Director of National Intelligence assesses that "Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election.Russia's goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency.We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump."See Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections, January 6, 2017, https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf 20Facebook's privacy and communication procedures came into question when it became public that they had allowed the firm Cambridge Analytica, associated with the Trump election campaign, to harvest user data.See Michael Riley, Sarah Frier, and Stephanie Baker, "Understanding the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica Story: QuickTake," The Washington Post, April 11, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/understanding-the-facebook-cambridge-analytica-storyquicktake/2018/04/11/071f8c84-3d97-11e8-955b-7d2e19b79966_story.html?utm_term=.5d9df284fa69 App Expo, AppGlass™ Augmented Reality Border Wall (2018) digital rendering for Other Border Wall Project: How to Build a Non-Wall. 14Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway used the phrase on NBC's Meet the Press as she disputed host Chuck Todd that Press Secretary Sean Spicer had lied and inflated the crowd size at the 2017 Presidential Inauguration: "Don't be so overly dramatic about it, Chuck.What you're saying, it's a falsehood. . .Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that [estimated inaugural crowd size]."See transcript of Meet the Press, January 22, 2017, nbcnews.com,January 22, 2017, https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meet-press-01-22-17-n710491St ep 1: Put on y our AppGl ass™ St ep 2: Look i n t he gener al di r ec t i on of Mex i c o St ep 3: See an al t er nat i v el y f ac t ual wal l i n y our own uni que r eal i t y online,