Borders are markers of division as much as spaces of exchange, where cultures are allowed to merge and identities resist fixed categories – though they remain at risk of exclusion and erasure, whether through colonisation or migratory restrictions. For the painter Esteban Cabeza de Baca, born in 1985 in San Ysidro, California, painting is a way to reconnect with erased roots and to reclaim histories ‘before we lose them to time’. In this short film, the US filmmaker César Martínez Barba follows Cabeza de Baca from the galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and his studio in Queens, New York, to the open desert outside Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Using landscape painting as a starting point, Cabeza de Baca challenges colonial representations of space marked by the impulse to tame nature and sever it from those who inhabit it. His work resists the urge to impose order, entwining graffiti with pre-Columbian pictographs to reflect a liminal space where past, present and future converge, revealing a world in constant transformation. The land in his paintings is not static scenery but a living record, bearing witness to those who came before and those who dream of what is yet to come.
