Border Ghosts: Artistic Practices and Spectral Memories in Border Necropolitics

This paper examines the artistic project Border Ghosts (2018–2025) as a practice of material translation through which migrant presences—excluded from institutional records along the Mexico–United States border—become perceptible in artistic form. Situated within necropolitical regimes that produce structural vulnerability, the study draws on the work of Achille Mbembe, Ariadna Estévez, and Avery Gordon to consider how spectrality operates not as metaphor, but as a mediated mode of presence. Through brief interviews and three-dimensional recordings of bodies, objects, and temporary dwellings using 3D scanning and printing, the project transforms fragmentary traces into sculptural configurations that make precarious lives perceptible within exhibition space. The case studies show that even minimal testimonies, often absent from formal archives, can persist as material traces within aesthetic circulation. Rather than proposing a solution to structural violence, Border Ghosts approaches artistic practice as a way of engaging absence, mediation, and incompletion. In doing so, the project reflects on the limits of institutional recognition and on the conditions under which marginal lives may be encountered.