The Border Dusklands are the desolated tracts of landscape where light always seems to fall in the exact angle that turns everything (the road, the trees, the earth, the occasional traveler, the light itself) into an illusion. Although these areas are areas of the mind, there is nothing imaginary about them. They undoubtedly exist (and have existed since anyone cares to remember) as real, physical spaces which translate the vaporous map or the mind into the eternally volatile phenomena of text and image. Border Duskland is the nuclearized New Mexico desert as is the floating rarity in Roberto Bolaño’s prose. The sandblasted hellhole that is Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, the grim limbo of the Western Sahara, the endless bricks that make up Auster’s City of Glass, each and every punctuation mark (or lack thereof) that makes up a (any) relation. These are all, together and in their own right, Border Dusklands: spaces in which what is, what isn’t and what could (never) be interact and interbreed to build a sometimes desolate, sometimes lush, always interesting panorama.

Please have your passport ready, you are about to cross la frontera.

blb.