Peter Bo Rappmund

Interviewer: Hey, welcome, Peter Bo Rappmund, very pleased to talk to you. I was very happy having seen your film, "Tectonics", which is about the border between the United States and Mexico. I'd like to start off with the title if you don't mind, "Tectonics", because frontiers or borders are sometimes very arbitrary, made somewhere by people, and sometimes given by nature. Did these two propositions kind of influence you by choosing the title or approaching the work at all?

Peter: Yeah, yeah, when I have first visited the area, it was much different than I had anticipated it was going to be, so already from the beginning I was thinking about why we have a certain pre-concieved notion of what the border is like and then why there is a disconnect between that and the actual reality of being down on the border. Anyway, through travelling most of the length of the two thousand miles of the border I began to think of the structure of the border, not only as the sort of architecture (which is one reason I called it "Tectonics", because it refers back to the Latin root for "building"), but also thinking about the geological idea of plate tectonics and the idea of these two larger unseen forces converging and pushing against each other and creating something that's actually visible upon the landscape; and the thing that I thought was visible was the wall, and the two opposing forces would be the Mexican and the American cultures, pushing up against each other.

I: This kind of border you were working on is kind of triple-hard one, I guess. One one hand it's the wall, where one side is locked out, and the second hard thing is with narco-trafficants, it doesn't make it easier again, and I think that kind of the third hard thing is the desert or the vastness. Did this also come to your mind when doing a project about the whole border, like, from one end to the other?

P: Yeah, I live about an hour away from where the actual border is, from where it starts or stops on one end in San Diego-Tijuana. I went down there and soon as I had started travelling inland, it was horrible. You know, it's no wonder that you hear about people dying from cold at night, or they die from the heat during the summer. So, I tried shooting a little bit when it was more in the summer, and it was impossible as my camera would constantly overheat, and I think I could've probably handled it okay, but the technology was not working with me, so I would go during the winter and even during the winter, it was sometimes very hot, in Texas sometimes it would be closer to a hundred degrees [?] which I didn't think was actually possible during the colder months. As for the people on both sides, on the United States' side the board patrol was very vigilant, and I was constantly being pestered by them, as I was trying to shoot, and it became sort of... almost a game to try to avoid them or, when they did come up to talk to me, to try to get through it as quickly as possible so I can get on doing what I'm doing. On the Mexican side it's interesting because the actual population of the people go right up to the border, so the problem with that when you're shooting is, you know, naturally more people who are curious what's going on, but also the narco-trafficers that have control of some of those areas, they also don't want you looking around because they think you might unveil something that they're trying to do themselves. On the United States' side by the same token they usually thought that I was working for the trafficers and that I was taking pictures to find out where there was, you know, where they could possibly breach the security.

I: There's not so many people in your pictures, sometimes there are, was that sometimes a lonesome job?

P: Yes, it's very, very, um, it's, sometimes it's so...

I: Excuse me, could you kind of reconsider the time you spent on the actual border more or less?

P: Yeah, it was more or less three years, I believe, and then thinking about it even further back, you know, maybe five years -- I've been thinking about trying to do this for a while. Yeah, I would go out for a few weeks at a time and I would just shoot non-stop and then I come back and then I go out again. As far as the loneliness, you know, it's a little disconcerting when you've been there for a long time, like a whole day and you haven't seen a single person at all, y'know, and then you know at night that there's going to be people that are going to be coming out and trying to cross... so yeah, that can be a little irritating, a little disconcerting. When I shoot it's typically just me and no one else. With a project like this it was usually too difficult to have anyone else. I tried to have someone help me, but that didn't work out. I'd usually set up and I would take notes and I would start my camera and I would start my little field recorder and doing sound and, y'know, I'd do that just over and over again across the entire [area?] of the border. It's fine that the loneliness that you encounter some people would like to seek out, because it is quite nice to be alone. But yeah, at the same time, if something happens [?], then who is going to... There was, y'know... a lot of places didn't have cellphone service, of course, and the terrain is pretty rough in certain areas.

I: Having been to the area so often, spending there months and months and taking over, I don't know, half a million pictures, as you mention in the screening, -- did this change your attitude towards the border, to the problematic of the border, to the respect of the border, to the wish to overcome it or whatever?

P: Yeah, the border area just as a landscape is surprisingly beautiful, it's even, I would consider parts of it a most sublime experience, being down there, just being on this sort of edge of fear and unknown and just this very... sort of harsh beauty of the landscape. I think from the very beginning that all my pre-conceived notions of the area were sort of blown up. Every time I go down there something would be different from what I was expecting, and then that was so important for me that I convey that in the film, y'know, that it isn't black and white, and, y'know, I like to mention that the people that are around the area, as you get closer and closer to the actual border, the people tend to be much... they tend to handle this situation with much more subtlety and with much more grace towards each other. There's a greater understanding of what's going on, I guess, in the area... Um... I had something else I wanted to say about that...

I: Maybe this helps, I was very much thinking about the situation of [Vienna?], which used to have been surrounded by borders and still is, it's kind of a subtle border now, not for those who are trying to come in... with having the, um, during the Cold war having the iron curtain around this, and many people from the border villages told me that after the fence had been torn down, after '89, it took years and years and years until villages very, very close to each other would actually overcome these borders. Did you have... did you make any kind of experiences like that?

P: I think one of the things I... I imagined that if the border came down, it wouldn't... I don't know if it would be large transitional period necessarily. I think the longer it stays up, the more, y'know, bifurcated it becomes, but the region has been constantly in flux and constantly taken over by new people over and over again so it's almost like that's what is to be expected in the area. Certain areas, I think, have been affected by the violence, that is occurring, while I don't think the violence is ever as bad as what you hear in the news, because that seems to be what only people want to focus on, I mean, it is a real thing. Still, at the same time, when I was in [Juarez?] there was a feeling of the city kind of being more locked down, and, as you know, there's been many women that have been murdered out there and that's an ongoing problem with violence in the area, and you can feel it -- when you're in the city that is a little bit more wary of what's going on. At the same time, I was out there by myself and my car broke down and I was sort of in the middle of nowhere outside [Juarez?] and I saw a truck coming with some guys who looked a little bit rough and I knew that something bad was going to happen, I was just really, really worried and they were coming towards me, and then they got there and they just helped me get unstuck. It's all that happened and again, there was this thing that the feeling I had was something I've been told I was supposed to be feeling, and the reality of the situation was actually very different. That happens all the time on the border.

I: It's a huge vast area you've been travelling to everytime and it starts off with the pictures of the sea and ends with pictures of the sea. For me as a central European this was kind of spooky to see at the beginning, because, as you might know, the sea is the biggest border between Africa and central European Union, mainly, and many people die trying to cross that border. Did you have anything in mind, or was it just to start from coast to coast?

P: The actual structure of it, yeah, was to follow it coast to coast, but it's also a statement. I mean, at the beginning of the film I have a shot, it almost looks like surveillance, shooting this ocean, and sort of, like, what's going to emerge from it. I most was thinking about the ocean to the land sort of being the ultimate threshold that was crossed for people to actually evolve and sort of using that as a message to convey, y'know, how we've evolved and where we're headed and that there's always constantly these lines, these barriers to making progress. [?] with the ocean, I think I saw more people trying to cross that way than anywhere else, especially on the gulf coast area, people pretending to fish and then you'll see them sometimes transport people back and forth across, y'know.

I: When crossing the border, which you did, you were filming or taking pictures, actually, taking photos from both sides, I found that the sound design of the movie was very subtle in using kind of music or elements of language, because in this very special case also language means does create the border, even if you're able to cross it, how did you work on that sound?

P: It was important to me... first of all, with the language [?], I don't have any titles or credits with the film, I wanted it to be something that you could experience as anyone who would be down there. The sounds that I use in the film are all the sounds I just naturally collected from the area and, y'know, a lot of times I would have the camera faced one way and I'd be recording sounds a little bit farther off and noticing something else and then I 'd still put those two together. Sometimes I would take the sound that had recorded and I would double it. Like I mentioned earlier before, I always take the notes before I start shooting and it's always important to me to make a note of what I hear, I find that the recorder usuallu doesn't capture what I'm actually hearing, it might capture something completely different. So if I don't hear that when I'm playing it back later, then I'll try to find it with the recording that I made in the same area and I'll put it over on top of it or something like that. As far as the structure of the film goes, I feel sound in general is much more subjective experience and I feel that it serves a purpose as a sort of narrative that can befall from the beginning to the end, not necessarily a reliable narrative, but it's a story that's sort of being told about going from the beginning to the end of the border.

I: I was also thinking of the frontier was, kind of, as we are all told, no matter where in the world, the US story go west, searching for the frontiers, overcoming it, exploring it, conquest it, which is kind of the area that people were looking for, where you have been filming and which is now moved to protection. Does this have an impact on how you made the film?

P: It's interesting because for me, I think about it the same way, as migration and this conquest and claiming territory as this westerly movement constantly moving west and I think it's, y'know, where I'm from, and maybe you see that in a lot of places that the movement is moving in, sort of, one lateral direction, usually. I feel that was the strongest force for making me want to start with the gulf coast and moving to the Pacific ocean. For some people, I think, that's confusing, especially the Western audiences, because they tend to think of the world with North America being on top and they think about maps and reading left to right, and so I think for them looking at the border, natural progression would be moving from Pacific ocean to the gulf coast, but that never makes any sense to me: first of all, the positioning of how the globe is is completely arbitrary, much like many of the boundaries, so for me it was more important to, sort of, show the progress of moving forward and hen that final push in the very end when we have the fence just going off into the ocean, sort of into nothingness, and, y'know, sort of making a statement about what, y'know, is there anything left to conquer. One of the reasons I didn't want to focus on just the violence and the sensational things in the area was because I don't think we'll be able to have any discussion, really, about it if that's all we do. If we do that, it just becomes something to read about and then to say, y'know, 'Whoa, I'm never going down there!'. As long as we have that fear there can't be any progress made, and so I think it's really important that people think about some of the other things that are going on down there.

I: But do you think that your movie and how you made it and how it's been set up would add to the question of the border, or the picture of the border?

P: I feel the piece is political piece and that it doesn't choose the side from the very beginning, so like I was saying earlier, as you get closer to the border and you talk to the people, you notice that there's usually more subtlety about how they think about the area, and it's only when you move outside of that, like in Arizona, when you're outside of that and you're more northerly, you really see people take a stand, like it's either black or white. Because of what I experienced being in the area over the years I was traveling down there, I felt that it was necessary to show that it isn't just one way or the other, there's so many different angles to it, even though that's very strong division that occurs, there's different ways of looking at it, you don't have to look at it from just one side or the other, you can look at it from the top or the bottom or the sides... So I wanted to make a piece that prompted people to think about that and that would activate their imagination to think about those things instead of just simply sitting back and saying 'Okay, that's a horrible thing' and not think about it anymore, or, y'know, 'That's a scary place', 'I'm glad I don't live there'. I didn't want it to be like that.

I: Because you said it's a political movie, I would totally agree, because I like this kind of subtle political things and not this showing... like, these intentions of showing some kind of truth or anything. But there was one real actual statement, in the beginning of the film on the fence it says 'No border wall'.

P: Yeah, that's interesting area. I put that up almost as a sort of... I had this at the very beginning of the film because I wanted to show the sort of futility and trying to rally against this very large thing by yourself, and having this sort of fence... that sign on this person's front fence just kind of sitting there to me just seemed like it was helpless in a way. At the same time, I admire the person to be doing that because they are taking a stand against, basically, the US government. It's basically like having a sign that's saying, y'know, 'Stay off my lawn'. It's funny because in the beginning part of the film I show Texas, where there's a border that is dictated by the natural... the natural river, that's Rio Grande river. What the United States government started to do is they started to build a fence inland from the river on the United States' side, but sometimes the fence is right next to the river and sometimes it's actually a mile inland; and what's happened is that this fence actually sometimes fenced people in between the river and the fence, and so that way you see these people that are sort of trying to speak out against it. But yeah, I do have that at the beginning. You see that quite a bit, in the latter part of the film I have the person who made that sort of patriotic thing with all the flags, and it's right next to the fence in Arizona, and the guy who owns that property, he calls it the border patrol ranch or something like that, but it's basically like a militia that's run down there of people who sort of act like they're police down there. And when I was around the area, the very first time I went down there, the guy thought I was trafficing drugs and I told him, no, I was here to take photos of this interesting thing that was in the middle of nowhere, but he was very suspicious of me. Yeah, I knew I wanted to take a stand, but my stand is firmly and, y'know, making people think about it. It's too easy to take one side or the other, and the people, who I feel like are going to make progress and they're going to actually figure out what the next stage is going to be of this area, are the people that are first not approaching it with any fear, but also thinking about it in broader terms and not just 'your side and my side'.