Organized in conjunction with Whitechapel Gallery in London, Artists’ Film International (AFI) is a program that showcases international artists working in film, video and animation. Every year all participating institutions nominate a moving-image work from an artist living and working in their country.

For AFI 2020, Ballroom Marfa selects Miguel Fernández de Castro’s film Grammar of Gates/Gramática de las puertas. This dynamic visual and aural collage traces the overlapping territories, languages, and conflicts that mark the U.S.-Mexico border within the sovereign Tohono O’odham Nation. The artist weaves together excerpts from the 1970 movie Geronimo Jones, drone and surveillance-like imagery of the landscape, and an affectless recitation of phrases drawn from A Practical Spanish Grammar for Border Patrol Officers.

The rote repetition from the textbook sets a backdrop for the banal and brutal architectures of power situated at the border. Via this military mantra the video registers who navigates the territory, legally and illegally, and the various physical and invisible barriers they might face. The artist uses an observatory set on a sacred mountain and a blocked gate, meant to connect ancestral O’odham lands, as indices of the degradation of stewardship and access. Carefully grafting disparate source material, de Castro illustrates the language of power that defines the edges of a violent dynamic that in turn defines the border.