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Case study to deploy in Arizona, 2008

The Casa Segura structure was included in the exhibition Interference at Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology in New York City from September 27th – November 15th, 2007.

Due to limited funding, Casa Segura is not currently installed along the border. If you would like to help us raise funds for sustaining the structure, please contact us.

Inside the structure

Visitors to Casa Segura will find plenty of water, basic medical suppies such as band aids and antibiotic cream, nutrition bars, some clean clothes and a custom interface for creating a pictogram and sharing a part of their story with the larger public via this website.

In addition, there is a map of the border region created by Alberto Morackis and Guadalupe Serrano of Yonke Arte Público, Nogales, Mexico. Their description follows:

The written language of the ancient mexicans were the ideograms, this is the way they described their epic voyage from Aztlan to the region where they built their sophisticated civilization. Yonke finds a similarity in the voyage of the mexican migrants through the desert where again the dream its repeated–a heroic travel of thousands of human beings who defy everything.

The ancient ones found Amate paper, the media to conserve their memory, made from the bark of the tree of the same name. Amate continues to be produced in some regions of Mexico, with the same handcraft process, where strips of Amate bark are dampened to unite them later with blows of a stone.

We decided to use this same material, to induce a contrast between the high tech interface in the structure and the ancient paper. The migration process has long been a part of the way human culture is constructed.

Our description in the map is not a real route, but the one of time, space, and the dangers of traveling in the desert. The images that we use are necessary for the visual description, some we appropriate from the old icons used by the the Aztecs and others from our imagination.

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