Guillermo Galindo

Sonic Border

In 2011, Mexican artist and composer Guillermo Galindo began travelling the Mexican-American border, collecting abandoned objects that bear evidence of migration. For the installation Sonic Border, Galindo composed an original score using these artifacts, crafting eight different instruments from discarded items that include clothing, bottles, a pocket-sized New Testament, and United States Border Patrol ammunition boxes.

Galindo’s media reveals the struggle for survival and the violence of conflict, providing insight into the complexity of current circumstances of immigration and border disputes. These timely concerns are merged with pre-Columbian beliefs.

“Mesoamerican cultures,” Galindo explains, “believed that our personal objects and the sounds they produce are, in many ways, attached to our journey through this planet.”

These tenets, like the sounds of Galindo’s instruments, resonate powerfully today, and Sonic Borders illuminates hardships that may seem remote for many viewers.

“When designing instruments,” Galindo says, “my goal is not to obtain ... the most beautiful sound, but to allow the materials to sing in their own voices.”