Video. 30' 32"

Resulting of Muntadas participation in the public art program "InSite 05" on the border between San Diego and Tijuana, On Translation: Fear/Miedo is a televised intervention that is based on the production of a video work that weaves together interviews with people who experience the tensions of the border zone on a daily basis, archival televised footage that refers to the idea of fear on the border between Mexico and the United States, and other documentary and journalistic material. The video aims to reveal how fear is a translated emotion, revealing itself in differing ways on both sides of the border as a cultural/ sociological construction based on politics and economics. On Translation: Fear/Miedo was broadcast between August and November 2005 in four distinct locations that connect the centers of power/decision making with the places where these policies are evident everyday: Tijuana, San Diego, Mexico City, and Washington, DC.

On Translation: Fear/Miedo approached the borderline as a barrier. Muntadas stockpiled pre-existent or archive material—footage from television news programmes and other documents, but also from film fictions—as well as a number of interviews recorded on each side of the border, broken down and sorted into common issues and woven threads. Finally, a third element consisted of the quoted titles and texts that intermittently punctuate what is visually and orally presented, producing caesuras, annotations and new paragraphs. The video began by introducing fear as a generic concept—emotion, sensation and feeling are some of the terms associated from the very start with fear—but it soon steered towards other specific and reciprocal connotations: the fear of others, of strangers; the fear of illegal immigration; the fear of those who think they enjoy a superior privileged lifestyle… among other aspects referred to in passing, such as drug trafficking, the murder of women in Ciudad Juárez, the cynicism surrounding migration policies in the fortunate world, the treaties and pacts that favour the enrichment of a few to the detriment of underprivileged societies floundering in the mud of the end of history.

Eugeni Bonet

Television, Front and Side Views (2008)