Uploaded May 2024 | Updated September 2026, 1 hour ago
What if art and poetry could dissolve borders to save lives? Kate Huber from Tilburg University introduces a hybrid lecture by Ricardo Dominguez on Art, Activism and Environmental Justice. Ricardo Dominguez's talk pushes the boundaries of how art can change our understanding of migration and environmental justice. Although Dominguez’s art and activism focuses on environments and border infrastructures between Mexico and the USA, his talk gives us new ways of thinking about art, activism, migration, technology, and the environment here in the Netherlands. As budget cuts chip away at cultural subsidies, political debates persist about immigration and where EU borders should be enforced as well as what to do about the nitrogen excesses threatening the future of Dutch agriculture and its biospheres. To resolve such complex issues, we often turn to technology. Yet technological changes are also not always necessarily advancements, as we know from polarizing network infrastructures, racial biases encoded into algorithms, and the impacts of e-waste. Such challenging and interconnected issues raise questions about technology, migration, and environment that art and activism can help to answer. Dominguez’s work in the 20th and 21st centuries has much to teach us about the barriers and borders that connect and divide humans, more-than-humans, and environments, as well as the artistic possibilities to provoke new ways of approaching the most pressing issues of our time.
Dominguez is chair of the Department of Visual Arts at the University of California San Diego. Dominguez is a founding member of Critical Art Ensemble and a cofounder of Electronic Disturbance Theater 1.0 (EDT), a group that developed virtual sit-in technologies in solidarity with the Zapatistas communities in Chiapas, Mexico. With the EDT 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab project, Dominguez collaborated on the Transborder Immigrant Tool, a GPS cell phone safety-net tool for crossing the Mexico/US border. Described as having potentially “dissolved” the US border with its poetry, the Transborder Immigrant Tool won the Transnational Communities Award in 2008. It has been exhibited at several venues worldwide, including the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. Dominguez continues his work with the EDT 3.0, which recently used drones to perform a play critically assessing agricultural technologies. The play was visible on both sides of the border fence at the MexiCali Biennial.
What if art and poetry could dissolve borders to save lives? Kate Huber from Tilburg University introduces a hybrid lecture by Ricardo Dominguez on Art, Activism and Environmental Justice. Ricardo Dominguez's talk pushes the boundaries of how art can change our understanding of migration and environmental justice. Although Dominguez’s art and activism focuses on environments and border infrastructures between Mexico and the USA, his talk gives us new ways of thinking about art, activism, migration, technology, and the environment here in the Netherlands. As budget cuts chip away at cultural subsidies, political debates persist about immigration and where EU borders should be enforced as well as what to do about the nitrogen excesses threatening the future of Dutch agriculture and its biospheres. To resolve such complex issues, we often turn to technology. Yet technological changes are also not always necessarily advancements, as we know from polarizing network infrastructures, racial biases encoded into algorithms, and the impacts of e-waste. Such challenging and interconnected issues raise questions about technology, migration, and environment that art and activism can help to answer. Dominguez’s work in the 20th and 21st centuries has much to teach us about the barriers and borders that connect and divide humans, more-than-humans, and environments, as well as the artistic possibilities to provoke new ways of approaching the most pressing issues of our time.
Dominguez is chair of the Department of Visual Arts at the University of California San Diego. Dominguez is a founding member of Critical Art Ensemble and a cofounder of Electronic Disturbance Theater 1.0 (EDT), a group that developed virtual sit-in technologies in solidarity with the Zapatistas communities in Chiapas, Mexico. With the EDT 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab project, Dominguez collaborated on the Transborder Immigrant Tool, a GPS cell phone safety-net tool for crossing the Mexico/US border. Described as having potentially “dissolved” the US border with its poetry, the Transborder Immigrant Tool won the Transnational Communities Award in 2008. It has been exhibited at several venues worldwide, including the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. Dominguez continues his work with the EDT 3.0, which recently used drones to perform a play critically assessing agricultural technologies. The play was visible on both sides of the border fence at the MexiCali Biennial.
