Border Prayer

Border Prayer, by Billion Tekleab, seeks to answer to the conditions of escape, the status of African reality, American dreaming, Black shapeshifting and Black migrant liveness.

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This project interrogates systems of surveillance on Black migrants in south west Houston, contrasted with surveillance in Eritrea to inform close looking practices. An anti-documentarian, Tekleab captures temporal states at various boundaries in Eritrea, off the coasts of the Red Sea, in nearby countries and far off lands like the U.S.

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In moving image and sound, she traces the ephemera of African circumnstance, which is to live a life always renegotiating the status of citizen and anti-citizen, migrant and immigrant, Africanness and blackness, nation and no nation, longing and belonging.

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Tekleab begins this descent into untethering the mediating of African liveness with third and sacred spaces, where not all is visible to the outsider, that serve as a site of place-making and collective re-memory for Eritrean migrants in South Houston, to find moments of refrain and release.

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