Control The Bor(D)ers is an installation and series of durational performances, by Emilio Rojas and Michael Asbill, which extends their shared interest in trees and nature as tools to embody themes of displacement, migration, roots, and belonging. Seeing trees as archives and witnesses in space and time symbiotic to human existence and their relationship between extinction and carbon within the framework of the dying North American ash forest.
The piece utilizes ash trees that have died in the surrounding landscape due to the Emerald Ash Borer, a pest that has decimated ashes across the United States and Canada by the millions since it was introduced in 2002. There is approximately 8 billion ash trees in North America on a pathway to functional extinction due to this half an inch iridescent beetle.
Rojas and other dancers engage in a process of reconfiguring and transforming the carbonized remains of a single tree to explore the consequences of the decimation of a entire species of trees in the forest ecosystem, but also as a larger metaphor for border protectionism, the environmental costs of globalization, and the way immigrants have been often been equated to pests. The dancers move with palettes made from the same ash tree and create movements based on the marks left by the larva of the beetle. These pieces of carbonized wood could last up to 10,000 years, creating fossils of the anthropocene, artifacts that mark the extinction of the ash tree, but also perhaps foreshadow the precarity of human existence in our burning planet.
First performed at the Judson Memorial Church for the festival Movement Without Borders, curated by Richard Colton, with dancers: Arthur Aviles, Jonathan Gonzalez, Ishikawa Mio, Maxi Canion and performer: Carol Montealegre.
Image credits: Whitney Browne, and Michael Asbill. Judson Memorial Church, NYC. curated by Richard Colton.