Echoes from the Borderlands: Study Two. Collaborative Sonic Exploration of the U.S.–Mexico Border by Valeria Luiselli, Ricardo Giraldo, and Leo Heiblum. december 11, 2024 – march 1, 2025. DIA, Dia Art Foundation, New York – United States

Echoes from the Borderlands: Study Two, is an immersive sound piece by Valeria Luiselli, Ricardo Giraldo, and Leo Heiblum. This multilayered project delves into the histories of violence along the U.S.–Mexico border, taking visitors on a sonic journey that begins at the Pacific Ocean along the San Diego–Tijuana coastline and travels east to the Gulf of Mexico.

Visitors are invited to experience this evocative narrative in four six-hour segments that play consecutively during Dia Chelsea’s open days. With each segment devoted to a borderland state—California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas—audiences can immerse themselves in this broad swath of terrain that for centuries has been contested socially, politically, and economically. Now, in the wake of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Echoes from the Borderlands: Study Two highlights one of the most urgent issues of our time.

A “sonic documentary-fiction,” to use the artists’ words, Echoes from the Borderlands: Study Two gathers the voices of those who inhabit these lands and invites visitors to reflect on the complex histories and ongoing struggles that shape this legal boundary. For the Dia presentation, the artists have created brand-new soundscapes. Each day, visitors can immerse themselves in a compilation of raw audio recorded along the border and interviews with locals from the artists’ extensive sonic archive.

In addition to the exhibition at Dia Chelsea, a chapbook by Luiselli, Giraldo, and Heiblum and published by Dia offers audiences another way to engage the project.

Valeria Luiselli is the author of the nonfiction books Sidewalks (2012) and Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions (2017), as well as the novels Faces in the Crowd (2011), The Story of My Teeth (2013), and the internationally acclaimed Lost Children Archive (2019). She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship (2019) and winner of a Los Angeles Times Book Prize (2014), an American Book Award (2018), Carnegie Medal (2020), Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature (2020), and a Dublin Literary Award (2021). She has been an Emerson Collective fellow, a John Simon Memorial Guggenheim fellow, and an Art for Justice Fund Bearing Witness grantee. Her work has been translated into 30 languages. Luiselli teaches at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, and Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. She lives in New York.

Ricardo Giraldo works in sound, contemporary classical music, and exhibition design. Having studied music in Mexico City and the Netherlands, he worked as the composer-in-residence for the Residentie Orkest of the Hague. He co-designed the permanent exhibition at the Museo Memoria y Tolerancia in Mexico City. He directed the documentary film festival Ambulante (2009–10), as well as Cinema23 and the Fénix Film Awards (2012–19). Together with Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna, he founded the podcast division of the production company La Corriente del Golfo. He co-created the podcasts La advertencia (The Warning, 2020), Mujeres de fuego (Women of Fire, 2021), and Las guardianas (The Guardians, 2023), and the audiobook Desierto Sonoro (Lost Children Archive, 2020) by Valeria Luiselli, among other projects. He lives in Mexico City.

Leo Heiblum is a composer, producer, and sound artist. He studied piano and composition in Mexico City, tabla in India, son jarocho in Veracruz, and Latin American music in Argentina. He has collaborated with Philip Glass on albums such as Concert of the Sixth Sun (2013), Introducing the Suso/Glass Quartet (2018), and The Spirit of the Earth (2018). Most recently, he collaborated with Patti Smith and Soundwalk Collective on The Perfect Vision album trilogy (2019–22) and the exhibition Evidence at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2022–23). He has scored over 40 feature films, many of which received awards at major international film festivals. He has won four Ariel (2009, 2013, 2014, and 2024) and two Fénix awards (2016 and 2018). His album Encyclopedia Sonica Vol.1 was released in 2024. He lives in Tepoztlán, Mexico.