In The (Dissenting) Line / La línea (disidente), Ethan Madarieta traces the recurring figure of the line across Emilio Rojas’s performances, asking what happens when the border is no longer understood as a fixed geopolitical division, but as something carried through bodies, landscapes, gestures, and memory. Drawing on Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s understanding of the borderlands, Madarieta considers works including Topography of the Margins, A Vague and Undetermined Place (a Gloria), and Lo que dejamos atrás to explore how Rojas transforms the borderline into a shifting, embodied archive.

Moving between cartography, migration, scars, cracks, wounds, and acts of drawing and undrawing, Madarieta follows the line as it moves from landscape to body and from body to body. Rather than disappearing, the border leaves an “emotional residue”—a trace that persists through memory, movement, and trauma. Madarieta proposes Rojas’s line as a “dissenting line”: one that refuses the border’s apparent fixity and instead becomes a suture connecting multiple bodies, histories, and territories. In Rojas’s work, the line is not simply a mark of division, but a borderland in constant transformation.