Hostile Terrain 94 (HT94), a global participatory political art project that memorializes and bears witness to the thousands of migrants who have died on the United States's southern border as a result of its immigration policy, is calling for volunteers to help create a pop-up art installation on the University of Pennsylvania campus. Volunteers will meet at various locations on September 23 and 24 to handwrite on toe tags the identifying details of the nearly 3200 people whose bodies have been recovered along the Southern Arizona border since 2000. The tags will then be placed on a 20-foot wall map of the Arizona/Mexico border in the exact location where the corresponding human remains were found. The installation will be on display at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia from September 25-27.
The project is sponsored and organized by the Undocumented Migration Project, a non-profit research-art-education-media collective directed by Jason De León, Professor of Anthropology and Chicana/o Studies at UCLA.
In collaboration with the 2019–2020 Forum on Kinship at the Wolf Humanities Center, Penn Museum is to host one of HT94's eight prototype exhibitions in 2019. Those exhibitions will then culminate in the 2020 launch of Hostile Terrain 94 in approximately 150 locations around the world. As an active community event at Penn, HT94 will be created by hundreds of volunteers across Penn and throughout the Philadelphia region.
For more information, visit the Wolf Humanities Center website here.
To volunteer and sign up for a time and place on September 23-24, visit here.
