New York, New York, December 6, 2024 – Dia Art Foundation is pleased to present Echoes from the Borderlands: Study Two, an immersive sound piece by Valeria Luiselli, Ricardo Giraldo, and Leo Heiblum. This multilayered project delves into the histories of violence along the U.S.–Mexico border, taking visitors on a sonic journey that begins at the Pacific Ocean along the San Diego–Tijuana coastline and travels east to the Gulf of Mexico. The work will be on view at Dia Chelsea from December 11, 2024, through March 1, 2025.

Visitors are invited to experience this evocative narrative in four six-hour segments that play consecutively during Dia Chelsea’s open days. With each segment devoted to a borderland state—California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas—audiences can immerse themselves in this broad swath of terrain that for centuries has been contested socially, politically, and economically. Now, in the wake of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Echoes from the Borderlands: Study Two highlights one of the most urgent issues of our time.

“At Dia, our mission is to provide artists with the freedom and space to create ambitious works that challenge the boundaries of artistic expression, and Echoes from the Borderlands: Study Two truly embodies this mission. Valeria Luiselli, Ricardo Giraldo, and Leo Heiblum have created a deeply resonant project that not only pushes the limits of sound art but also addresses critical social and historical issues. It’s an important contribution in keeping with our ongoing commitment to support work that fosters contemplation, understanding, and dialogue,” said Jessica Morgan, Dia’s Nathalie de Gunzburg Director.

A “sonic documentary-fiction,” to use the artists’ words, Echoes from the Borderlands: Study Two gathers the voices of those who inhabit these lands and invites visitors to reflect on the complex histories and ongoing struggles that shape this legal boundary. For the Dia presentation, the artists have created brand-new soundscapes. Each day, visitors can immerse themselves in a compilation of raw audio recorded along the border and interviews with locals from the artists’ extensive sonic archive.

“Echoes from the Borderlands: Study Two brings the histories and lived experiences of the borderlands into sharp focus, inviting us to consider the violence and resilience that shape these spaces. This project’s impact lies in its ability to transcend the political through art. It challenges us to listen, not only to the land and its current residents, but to the echoes of the past that continue to resonate today. The project also meaningfully extends Dia’s thinking about land—a conceptual thread in Dia’s program overall—and Land art fostering a greater understanding of our relationship to the people who inhabit and move through it,” said Humberto Moro, Dia’s deputy director of program.

Kamilah Foreman, Dia’s director of publications, added, “The voices in Echoes from the Borderlands: Study Two offer a profound narrative that speaks to both historical and contemporary struggles along the border and, by implication, other colonized lands. Intertwining archival materials with original recordings, the project creates a layered experience that encourages deeper reflection on the intersections of identity, displacement, and resilience. It’s a testament to the power of art as a means to transform collective memory.”

In addition to the exhibition at Dia Chelsea, a chapbook by Luiselli, Giraldo, and Heiblum and published by Dia offers audiences another way to engage the project. The book, subtitled Study One: Call You When I Get Home, is a libretto adding narrative threads to the sound work, which blends archival materials, field recordings, and interviews to highlight issues including the genocide of Native peoples, migration, reproductive rights, and environmental destruction. Imaginative responses, written and composed by the artists, add “one more layer, something like soot, to all the things already sedimented in a collective understanding of the world,” in Luiselli’s words. A QR code in the chapbook allows the audience to read and listen to a compressed, 72-minute version simultaneously.

Dia’s presentation of Echoes from the Borderlands: Study Two is curated by Kamilah N. Foreman, director of publications, and Humberto Moro, deputy director of program.

All exhibitions at Dia are made possible by the Economou Exhibition Fund. 

Echoes from the Borderlands is organized in partnership with the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA). 

Echoes from the Borderlands was developed at Dia Art Foundation; the ArtLab at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; BeluRecords, Mexico City; and La Corriente del Golfo Podcast, Mexico City; with the generous support of Laurie Gunst and Karen Yamashita.

About the artists

Valeria Luiselli is the author of the nonfiction books Sidewalks (2012) and Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions (2017), as well as the novels Faces in the Crowd (2011), The Story of My Teeth (2013), and the internationally acclaimed Lost Children Archive (2019). She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship (2019) and winner of a Los Angeles Times Book Prize (2014), an American Book Award (2018), Carnegie Medal (2020), Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature (2020), and a Dublin Literary Award (2021). She has been an Emerson Collective fellow, a John Simon Memorial Guggenheim fellow, and an Art for Justice Fund Bearing Witness grantee. Her work has been translated into 30 languages. Luiselli teaches at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, and Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. She lives in New York.

Ricardo Giraldo works in sound, contemporary classical music, and exhibition design. Having studied music in Mexico City and the Netherlands, he worked as the composer-in-residence for the

Residentie Orkest of the Hague. He co-designed the permanent exhibition at the Museo Memoria y Tolerancia in Mexico City. He directed the documentary film festival Ambulante (2009–10), as well as Cinema23 and the Fénix Film Awards (2012–19). Together with Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna, he founded the podcast division of the production company La Corriente del Golfo. He co-created the podcasts La advertencia (The Warning, 2020), Mujeres de fuego (Women of Fire, 2021), and Las guardianas (The Guardians, 2023), and the audiobook Desierto Sonoro (Lost Children Archive, 2020) by Valeria Luiselli, among other projects. He lives in Mexico City.

Leo Heiblum is a composer, producer, and sound artist. He studied piano and composition in Mexico City, tabla in India, son jarocho in Veracruz, and Latin American music in Argentina. He has collaborated with Philip Glass on albums such as Concert of the Sixth Sun (2013), Introducing the Suso/Glass Quartet (2018), and The Spirit of the Earth (2018). Most recently, he collaborated with Patti Smith and Soundwalk Collective on The Perfect Vision album trilogy (2019–22) and the exhibition Evidence at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2022–23). He has scored over 40 feature films, many of which received awards at major international film festivals. He has won four Ariel (2009, 2013, 2014, and 2024) and two Fénix awards (2016 and 2018). His album Encyclopedia Sonica Vol.1 was released in 2024. He lives in Tepoztlán, Mexico.

About Dia Art Foundation

Taking its name from the Greek word meaning “through,” Dia was established in 1974 with the mission to serve as a conduit for artists to realize ambitious new projects, unmediated by overt interpretation and uncurbed by the limitations of more traditional museums and galleries. Dia’s programming fosters contemplative and sustained consideration of a single artist’s body of work and its collection is distinguished by the deep and longstanding relationships that the nonprofit has cultivated with artists whose work came to prominence particularly in the 1960s and ’70s. 

In addition to Dia Beacon, Dia Bridgehampton, and Dia Chelsea, Dia maintains and operates a constellation of commissions, long-term installations, and site-specific projects, notably focused on Land art, nationally and internationally. These include: 

• Walter De Maria’s The New York Earth Room (1977) and The Broken Kilometer (1979), Max Neuhaus’s Times Square (1977), and Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks, inaugurated in 1982 and ongoing), all located in New York
• De Maria’s The Lightning Field (1977), in western New Mexico
• Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), in the Great Salt Lake, Utah
• Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1973–76), in the Great Basin Desert, Utah
• De Maria’s The Vertical Earth Kilometer (1977), in Kassel, Germany 
• Cameron Rowland’s Depreciation (2018)

For additional information or materials, contact: 

(U.S. press inquiries)
Hannah Gompertz, Dia Art Foundation, hgompertz@diaart.org, +1 212 293 5598
Melissa Parsoff, Parsoff Communications, mparsoff@parsoff-communications.com, +1 516 445 5899

(International press inquiries)
Sam Talbot, sam@sam-talbot.com, +44 (0) 772 5184 630