Description:

“Orina, orina” a man says as he brings his dog to the plants in the pothole. I pay someone $5.00 to not steal the plant. I contribute to a man’s “cross the border fund” and he sweeps the dirt around the pothole. A grandmother loans me her watering pot. An electrician shows me his cactus plants. I buy a skirt that “would look great” from a man staying at Casa Migrantes in exchange for the plant that was in the pothole.

“Could this be our Tijuana?”

This was my Tijuana...or at least this is how I came to know the city. Between 2005 and 2006 I planted gardens in potholes throughout the City of Tijuana as a mechanism for acquaintance. This gesture created a peculiar occurrence that charged the ordinary proximity between people and place into a state of frenzied ethnography.

Tijuana | A Fantasy of Absolute Place explores the possibilities and limitations embodied in the friction between people and place as a shared experience of the everyday.