Borderline Series
with Fernanda D’Agostino
2018-2019
Portland, OR & San Francisco, CA
multi-site video installation / performance series
Borderline / Peace Movements — Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco
Audience gestures were integrated with In/Body’s pre-recorded material, exploring movement as a language of peace and resistance.
Borderline / Mapping — Open Signal, Portland
In/Body’s filmed performances mixed with imagery of climate disruption and surveillance, shifting between hope and foreboding.
Borderline / Decameron — Oregon Contemporary Art Center
Live In/Body performance invoked historical parallels between the Black Plague and contemporary polarization.
Borderline / InBody — Open Signal, Portland.
This chapter foregrounded the collective’s cyclical approach to embodied trauma, healing, and memory through unpredictable image-movement interplay.
Borderline / the map is not the territory — Portland Art Museum.
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Lead artist, concept, creative coding: Fernanda D’Agostino
Featured performers: In/Body (Sophia Wright Emigh & Jaleesa Johnston)
Additional performers (various iterations): Yunuen Rhi, Justin Hoover, Lisa & Juju Kusanagi, Tahni Holt, Eliza Larsen, Lu Yim, Sarah Turner, Sarah Brahim, Featherpistol, Linda K Johnson, among others
Sound: Guillermo Galindo, Karim Lakhdar, Kevin McDonald
Partners/funders: Justin Charles Hoover & Collective Action Studio, Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco, Chinatown Community Development Center, San Francisco Arts Commission IAC program
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Tags: Installation, Film, Sound / Composition, Experimental performance, Somatic ecology, Art & science initiative, Collaboration, Interdisciplinary research
Borderline was a five-part series of installations and performances by my longtime collaborator, Fernanda D’Agostino, created between 2017 and 2019 in Portland and San Francisco. The project addressed the entanglement of climate crisis, migration, surveillance, and embodied trauma, combining scientific imagery, surveillance feeds, and live video capture through D’Agostino’s innovative creative coding. Each iteration offered a different vantage point, immersing audiences in responsive environments that reflected ecological, political, and psychological tipping points.
The series prominently featured the In/Body collective (Sophia Wright Emigh & Jaleesa Johnston), both as featured collaborators and as primary performers in live and filmed work. In/Body’s practice — marrying technology and movement — investigated how societal crises leave subliminal imprints in the body, and how performance can simultaneously invoke and begin to heal ancestral trauma. Our movement responded to unpredictable mixes of image and sound, mirroring the instability of traumatic memory while opening space for ritual transformation. This thread ran through every Borderline installation where we appeared, grounding the series in embodied ritual and ecological attunement.
