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For three days in early October 2015, the art collective Postcommodity launched a temporary art installation that reached fifty feet above the desert and two miles across the U.S.-Mexico border. I watched that weekend as they anchored twenty-six helium-filled balloons to the desert floor and let them ascend to create a visual and conceptual link between Douglas, Arizona and Agua Prieta, Sonora.(fig.1). Each yellow, ten-foot diameter balloon had been inscribed with four sets of concentric circles—red, blue, black, and gray, with a black center—to form two pair of “scare eyes” (fig. 2).
Postcommodity repurposed a ten-inch consumer bird repellent product known as a “scare-eye” balloon, which is meant to repel birds from fruit trees, gardens, awnings, fences, and everywhere else they are unwanted.1 In fact, Postcommodity’s Kade Twist discovered the product while trying to break-up a “bird party” on his backyard fig tree in Phoenix.2 After the birds figured out that the balloons are harmless within a couple of days, Twist shared the experience with then-Postcommodity member Steve Yazzie, and Yazzie joked that the collective should launch the balloons on the border to ward off Western civilization, at least for a day or two.3 They experimented with the “scare-eye” balloon in a series of small-scale installations and finally realized its potential in the border-crossing installation they called “Repellent Fence” almost ten years later.
Postcommodity, founded by Twist and Yazzie in 2007, is a Southwest-based art collective with a revolving roster and a focus on Indigenous representations.4 Along with Twist, current members are Raven Chacon and Cristóbal Martínez. Chacon, who is Navajo, lives in Albuquerque. Martínez lives in Phoenix, Arizona and identifies as Chicano or “Alcaldeño” (raised in Alcalde, New Mexico). Currently residing in Santa Fe, Twist identifies as Cherokee. 5 As a group, their work applies an Indigenous lens, rather than a focus on Indigenous people. While their large-scale installations certainly involve the positionality and representation of Native peoples, they also tend to critique colonial structures—such as capitalism, globalism, and neoliberalismrather than lament the poor or sad Indian that has appeared in countless renderings.6 Representations of Natives in need of saving or awaiting humanity reinforce the view of them as agentless others, a condition that Walter Mignolo refers...