Performing The Border, 1999

Betacam SP, PAL, couleur, son


Performing the Border is a documentary video filmed on the border between the United States and Mexico, in the city of Ciudad Juarez, on the Mexican side. It was shot in a zone near El Paso, in Texas, where the American industries have built assembly plants for electronic and digital components. Ursula Biemann observes the border through the prism of the growing feminisation of its labour sector, prostitution, leisure activities and acts of violence. In the form of an investigation, the artist integrates different sources of documentation into her video: interviews with women working in the plants, prostitutes, activists and journalists. These interviews are punctuated by the artist's voice-over narration – analysing the concept of borders – but also by citations and archive images. All of these sources are integrated in a rapid, almost televisual, editing style that is enriched with images of the actual border and the surrounding desert. Ursula Biemann suggests that we reflect on what the notion of the border represents, and to what extent it influences the living and working conditions of women, through the example of Ciudad Juarez. The video comprises several chapters: firstly, a presentation of the border as a geographical space and a “zone of performance”, then the situation of women and the absence of labour laws, and finally, the prostitution and murders whose victims are the women of the region.


Ursula Biemann takes an advertisement offering a female Mexican workforce to the United States for a dollar an hour as a starting point. She draws several parallels between the disproportion of the wealth of American companies and the poverty in which Mexican women live. Through the NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) established in 1994, American companies can be implanted on the border. These factories attract young women in particular, whose work consists of assembling high-tech objects on a production line. These maquiladoras (golden mills) have gradually introduced a new technological culture into the desert cities. However, paradoxically, while the female workers contribute to the development of this industry, they do not constitute its primary beneficiaries.


The maquiladora workers form the majority of the population of the border city. They have created new living spaces and ways of life there. The title of the video refers to the border as a metaphor for a performance that is constructed and deconstructed according to the movements of people and sources of wealth that traverse it. The border cannot exist without thoroughfare, and thus constitutes a transitional space between two societies. It functions in an autonomous and marginal fashion, in the absence of notions of public interest or social assistance, without really following the rules of either territory: a kind of inhabited no man's land. It is essentially up to the women who live there to organise the social and economic regulations of the zone. In order to survive this way of life and the exploitation in the maquiladoras, the hope of one day crossing the border and living in the United States provides a source of motivation. It is in this way that some women find the strength to cross the border via hidden openings. They even organise border-crossing support networks for pregnant women, so that they can give birth in an American hospital, and their child is born a citizen of the United States.


These women accept these working and living conditions because their salary often constitutes the only income for their family. Moreover, they are often resigned to the possibilities that are open to them: becoming a factory worker, the servant of a private house or, as a last resort, a prostitute. Ursulla Biemann encounters a large number of women involved in prostitution, sometimes combining factory work and prostitution.
The last part of the video concerns the murders perpetrated in the zone. Since 1995, nearly 350 women were killed in Juarez. Since most of them were recent arrivals in the city, nobody knows them and thus nobody claims their bodies. In order to highlight the cynicism of such a society, the artist insists on the fact that the primary concern is to conceal the identity of the company they were working for.


Priscilia Marques
Translated by Yves Tixier and Anna Knight