La Lotería

Authors: Nylsa Martinez, Adam Boggs, Tiffany Orozco, Zach Zeilman 

The documentary/performance short La Lotería, a reference to the popular game of chance, structures a tragi-comic narrative that argues for the concept of the post-border city as an alternative to borderization. The linguistic and didactic ontology of the card game is transformed into a narrative device that reveals multiple and open futures. If the traditional game transmitted a colonial image of geography and identity, our lottery remixes the form to re-engineer its function. Serendipitous encounters become openings for communal relationships, rather than tension escalating confrontations.

Here, our collective has undertaken a scholarly intervention in the traditional lottery icons by re-imagining them as emblematic of new geographies and new identities that the post-border city generates; a zone where converging traditions transforms the culture of the inhabitants. In order to represent this, we created a lottery game board consisting of nine new images that demonstrate the potential of an equitable, spatially just geographic and cultural environment. The post-border city we imagine produces culture rather than enforced social and national hierarchies.