What story would the pictures of your youth narrate? What would these printed images say about your loved ones, or the place where you grew up, or the frustrations born from your consciousness?

The writer Omar Pimienta brings Album of Fences to Phoenix, a book of poetry translated to English by Cardboard House Press. “It’s an exercise of the memory, an attempt to recreate the borderland,” says Omar, an interdisciplinary artist whose work is born out of the condition of living in a place of constant flux: the city of Tijuana, Mexico.

Border fence in Tijuana, Mexico. Photo courtesy of Cardboard house Press.

Album of Fences addresses the border’s social and political realities, using photography to provoke the memory of its author, who recounts stories from Colonia Libertad, a community that stops at the border wall with the United States. “I never crossed illegally,” says Omar’s father Marcos in one of the poems. At least he never crossed through the desert, never using his own name.

Every poem begins with an image, of children looking at the camera lens, of Don Marcos showing an incomplete hand, of crossings, of the constant suspicion from border agents, of the frustration of participating in a ritual created by those in power.

“Pimienta is an alchemist of memory, turning single snapshots into legends.” Photo courtesy of Cardboard House Press.

Omar’s poetry is powerful and ethereal, and the reader doesn’t gets lost in obfuscated language; instead, one gets called into the nostalgia produced by the images: moments in which we relive the reality of the author and his loved ones, who invite us to learn the city of transit where they live.

“One of the greatest virtues of the border is its creative capacity,” explains the author, “it gives us a more complex vision of the world.” The border offers endless challenges and opportunities to creative people in Tijuana. In the last decade, the city’s cultural production has been recognized around the globe, and tijuanenses have integrated in their art their geographic uniqueness, their access to technology, a hybrid language, and a social conscience born out of a constant space of negotiation. Tijuanenses live crossing lines imposed by others, in the unevenness of power between two countries, in the never-ending arrival of people looking to the future, or trying to forget the past.

U.S. Customs agents at the border. Photo courtesy of Cardboard House Press.

Besides poetry, Omar Pimienta uses installation, performance and the intervention of spaces to question the bureaucracy that controls migration between countries. In his project Ciudadanía Libre, the artist collaborates with Colonia Libertad residents to create their own Ministry of Foreign Affairs, granting citizenship, passports, visas, and even consular services that guarantee “the free movement along the entire earth’s surface, marine or aerospace.”

Lady Libertad hat Colonia Libertad in TJ. Photo courtesy of Cardboard House Press.

Omar is a border artist, a critic of the space he inhabits. He’s someone who uses his own story to share the human condition of those living in the line, in the crossing. Album of Fences is a small portion of the complexity of the border, a reflection from the eyes of one of its residents, a child who grows up in a welder’s workshop, who becomes a man crossing to the other side, and who lives in the privilege of coming and going.

Omar Pimienta comes to Phoenix to promote the publication of his book, as part of Cardboard House Press Bilingual Poetry Series. You can meet the author, get his book, and hear more about his work on Wednesday, April 4, at 6:30pm at the Phoenix Art Museum.

This piece was written by Luís Ávila.

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