Death and Life of a Portal
During 2017 – 2018 Miguel began an extensive research project that explores Tijuana’s urban past. Finding traces of forgotten public spaces and physical layers of memory beneath the building facades. The result of the research came into a performative walk titled “Invisible Mapping” a science-fiction approach to Tijuana’s urban history, explaining the geopolitical forces that produce shifts and changes in the urban landscape.
Death and Life of a portal is a portrait of a parking lot building built on what used to be a public space during Tijuana’s early stages.
Filming the building throughout a phenomenological lens, the city becomes a science-fiction scenario, making evident the portals and parallel dimensions produced by the border’s geopolitical nebulas.
Miguel is a Video Artist, Documentarian and Researcher, Founder of Reactivando Espacios group. Works between the U.S. Mexico border and Los Angeles California. His work often shows multiple perspectives between architectural space, coloniality, and memory. Exploring with cinema and other performative narratives. His work has been presented in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver Colorado (2014), Cannes Film Festival (2015) Biennale di Architettura (2016) Armory Center for the Arts (2017) Museo Numismático Nacional (2018) The New Bauhaus Museum (2019). His bottom-up research and mapping method “Exploration, Aesthetic, Memoir, Narrative” was developed during the documentation and transformation of Tijuana’s violent real estate development boom. His lecture “Destruction of Memory” has been held at SCI-Arc University in Los Angeles California and San Diego State University. Miguel is co-creator of the “Nuevo Norte” infrastructure for migrants. Rethinking the cultural relationship between the city and migration. His current performative work “Disfuncionalista” architecture of repression was part of the exhibition series of the 100 years of Bauhaus in Weimar Germany.