The Wall as an Ontological Artefact
Arquitecture Brutalism, Eclusion and the Aestheticization of Violence on the Tijuana-San Diego Border (1989-2025)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.62120/mch.10.101Keywords:
border, brutalist architecture, ontology, otherness, subjectivity, border walAbstract
This article examines the border wall between Tijuana (Mexico) and San Diego (United States) as an ontopolitical artifact that articulates materialities, discourses, and spatial practices in the production of differential regimes of existence. Drawing on a qualitative hermeneutic-critical approach and field observations conducted in 2024, the study interprets the wall not only as securitarian infrastructure but also as a form of brutalist architecture that shapes urban space, subjectivities, and border imaginaries. Through an interdisciplinary framework integrating urban anthropology, political theory, and critical architecture, the analysis explores the material, spatial, biopolitical, and symbolic dimensions of the border device. It argues that the wall operates simultaneously as a technology of power, an archive of migrant violence, and a site of symbolic contestation that organizes hierarchies of life, memory, and mobility within contemporary neoliberalism.
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