Caminata Nocturna - Espacio Fronterizo
- kroys42
- Mar 30
- 1 min read
Karl Ingar Røys’ Caminata Nocturna documents both the flight and pursuit of illegal economic migrants across the Mexico-US border. Or at least that’s what it initially appears to document. In actuality, the video depicts a facsimile of such events, a tourist sideshow put on by the inhabitants of the town of Alberto, 2000 kilometres from the border. This adventure holiday allows mainly Mexican tourists to experience and enjoy –since tourism is always about an attempt at happiness– something like an illegal border crossing into the United States. The simulation of migrant hopes and fears in Alberto began July 2004 as part of the Parque EcoAlberto, a holiday ‘eco-park’ established with financing from the Mexican State. The dual screens of Caminata Nocturna present sharply edited fragments of bodies running or pushing stealthily forward, police trucks screeching down roads and the barked bureaucratic speech of border lockdown amidst a night bisected by the converging torch light tunnels of flight and pursuit. One screen is panic and the other screen is pursuit. And finally, there’s an abrupt bringing together, dual images of a circle of cop cars and running bodies abruptly immobilised, kneeling and lying on the ground as police regulate and question them. Then, the chase in the video begins again with a more elongated but no less frantic temporality, as it must every evening on the U.S-Mexico border in a repetition of desperate economic migration and disciplinary praxis.
