These photographs are part of a planned installation-based artwork that will use reshaped clothing collected from the Rio Grande Valley, where it was abandoned by refugees crossing the border into the U.S. The re-embodiment of this clothing suggests the human beings who once occupied them, as though they are ghosts haunting the personal objects they were forced to leave behind. Each piece will be paired with an audio recording of testimonials and interviews collected from Annunciation House, a migrant sanctuary in El Paso. The experience is intended to help migrants cross from their current state of voiceless dehumanization in the collective American imagination to active subjects of their own stories, told in their voices.

Amid the many recent issues and events worthy of our attention, the public discussion regarding immigration, especially at the border, has faded from the public consciousness. The artwork’s title comes from Alice Oswald’s poem “Severed Head Floating Downriver,” about the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus traveled all the way to the underworld to retrieve Eurydice, which Hades allowed under the condition that he not look back until he had completely crossed back into the world of the living. Orpheus almost made it all the way out, when he turned around. Eurydice was gone—but was she ever there, or was it all a trick? These clothes were left behind by migrants after completing their own crossing, a last act before entering into their new lives.

Too often, their stories are forgotten, their existences ignored or, worse, despised. Further in Oswald’s come these lines: “I always wake like this being watched/ I always speak to myself/no more myself but a colander/ draining the sound from this never-to-be mentioned wound.” I want to encourage continued attention to this issue and the human beings affected by it, protecting it from becoming a “never-to-be mentioned wound” in a cycle of “singing and forgetting.”