Amerika (2019)

Jorge Méndez Blake is a Mexican mixed-media conceptual artist. Trained as an architect, the artist builds walls and connects their history to literature. He lives and works in Guadalajara, Mexico.

Given the political discourse surrounding walls, immigration, and border security in contemporary American culture, it’s nearly impossible for viewers not to draw parallels between Blake’s installation and Trump’s desire to build his so-called “big, beautiful wall” meant to partition the United States from Mexico. This exploration of barriers as both a cause and emblem of otherness and exclusion appears to address our aspiring autocrat’s longing to shape an American ideology predicated upon nationalism, isolationism, and xenophobia. To this extent, then, Amerika functions not only as a material barrier that blocks patrons’ view and impedes their movement, but it also acts as a metaphor for the border politics and debates that currently occupy our national and global conversations.

Kafka’s Amerika operates as a physical and visual disruption that undercuts the formal symmetry of the installation. It alters the wall’s structural regularity and interrupts its red-hued color scheme. A literal foreign body inserted into more or less homogenous barrier. On a material level, then, the book artefact demonstrates the precarious nature of constructions that posit continuity and stability.By extension, the book’s placement also challenges conservative claims that a wall can facilitate the establishment of a singular American populace or identity. Kafka’s Amerika, to this extent, ruptures the veneer of purity and orderliness which Blake’s Amerika would otherwise foster.