5. Border Crossers

“Border Crossers” takes up Jane Bennett’s notions of enchantment and her broader “vital materialism”—as well as the ethical roles such enchanted objects may play. This chapter examines the connections between new materialism and postcolonial theory using the eco-art project Watershed Cairns (2013–ongoing) by St. Louis-based artists Libby Reuter and Joshua Rowan and the interactive web-based documentary Bear 71 (2012), by Leanne Allison and Jeremy Mendes. The former series bridges photographs, sculpture, site-specific installation, and a virtual mapping project to engage the viewer to think critically about his or her relationship to the Mississippi watershed. I argue that the glass cairns and their digital representations allow us to examine the new materialist ideas of object-oriented ontology and enchantment in relation to Walter Mignolo’s concept of “border thinking,” which privileges the object of study. Although borders stand for “otherness” in Mignolo’s formulation, I contend that the Mississippi watershed presents a metaphorical border and a physical boundary zone that radically de-centers human priorities of mapping the ecosystem. In doing so, I situate Watershed Cairns as an ecocritical work specific to St Louis and its racialized history. Bear 71 places online viewers within a schematic digital landscape in which they are free to move around and explore while the narrative of an individual female bear plays intermittently. Through the use of narration and initially jarring anthropomorphism, the film encourages viewers to understand how the figure of the bear is itself discursively constituted and giving multiple answers to the question of who is the true border crosser depicted in the piece.