Nuevas promesas (New Promises)

Nuevas promesas (New Promises) is a project in which Ernesto Bautista carries out interventions on the cargo trucks that travel across Central America and Mexico towards the US border. These interventions comprise large-scale poetic texts printed in adhesive vinyl on the side of the containers: “THE NIGHT LIGHT STOPS WITH ME”, “THE SAME AS THE SUN BUT DEATH”, and “EVEN THOUGH IT’S A BORDER I PROMISE NOT TO STOP”, metaphors for the hopes of millions of migrants who make the perilous journey north. Bautista defines these interventions as “literary projects with visual applications”, “expanded literature” and “relational literature”.

Appropriating the popular practices of signing vehicles that identify a male urban culture, the artist adds text to reveal the frail existence of people who risk their lives as they embark upon migration routes — a journey often with no return. The violence of globalised modernity represented through these bulks on wheels that traverse the roads contrasts with the clandestine departure through hidden roads of migrant and displaced bodies. While borders open to make way for goods from the south, walls rise up to stop the arrival of people fleeing violence and crises.



Suset Sánchez Sánchez