The subject of the work De l’autre côté is the attempts of Mexicans to illegally enter the United States. Akerman made recordings in the no-man’s-land near Agua Prieta where people set up improvised camps, waiting for an opportunity to cross the border. She also filmed in Douglas, Arizona, where ranchers take the liberty of opening fire on the fugitives, and she recorded nighttime footage of the Border Patrol and its officers hunting down the Mexicans with infrared sensing devices. The footage ranges from interviews with the parties involved to tracking sequences and static shots of the landscape and the urban environment on either side of the border. The images are in part accompanied by a text read out by Akerman. It is the account, written by a young Mexican about the difficult journey that his mother made from town to town in California, until she disappeared into anonymity. At Witte de With she is presenting another version of the installation shown at Documenta 11.
Chantal Akerman is a filmmaker. A minimalist esthetic predominated in her early films, which usually adopted a feminist viewpoint or set out to explore the urban space. In her installations she shows sections or sequences from a film simultaneously on different monitors, in order to rearticulate elements of her cinematic work and question the conditions of spectatorship.
