Transductive Documentation in Richard Misrach and Guillermo Galindo’s Border Cantos

In this article, I examine how Richard Misrach and Guillermo Galindo’s collaborative photobook and multimedia art installation, Border Cantos (2016), makes the United States-Mexico border’s infrastructure legible. Misrach’s quiet photographs frame the border’s technopolitics, whereas Galindo’s instruments, refashioned from materials recovered from the borderlands, make it audible. The sounds produced in this collaborative work do not remain in a single place but move across, within, and through materials to call into question the configurations of labor and technology that are central to the maintenance of the US-Mexico border. As I argue, Border Cantos reframes how the border can be seen, heard, and felt and engages in what I call “transductive documentation,” an object-centered approach to sound and documentary studies.