23 min
2017
Drifting Blue is a poetic documentary of the fluidity of space and time, and the way we try to abstract it through our own territoriality. Through a blending of the personal and historical, we observe how unaccounted natural systems can disrupt our lives.
In the Chihuahuan desert, water sculpts the landscape slowly over millennia, and it also dances in short and violent fits. Water leaves its subtle mark on the shape of the rocks, and also expresses itself wildly in floods and rain storms, transforming environments from silent rocky arrangements to natural water parks in a matter of minutes.
As we see in this work about the Chamizal tract— a tract of land that saw the rio grande literally change course over night and give the US almost 600 acres of land—national boundaries can be whipped to and fro by the indiscriminate fluidity that water gives to both time and space against the colonial standardization of them.
In Drifting Blue we observe the Chamizal as it is today, a tract of land divided by a border, defined by a river that has been artificially rerouted and reconstructed so that it will not move. We see the saddling of nature in both the concretized river and the national parks on either side of it, as well as the restrictions of time and space that the land’s inhabitants face as they cross over these structures.
watch Drifting Blue here