Dawn Rose on an Open Gate

The Sonoran Desert hides flowers that await an entire year to bloom during a single night. They do so in the dark, like white dots on the horizon. Their scent travels far, carrying the desire of those who gamble everything on that single night. And that is how insects find them. Are they their trap or their lover? They also guide those crossing the border by foot, trying to remain unseen. The rest of the year, _la reina de la noche (Queen of the Night)_ persists as dry-looking branches, anchored to their underground roots. The botanists of the Boundary Commission who documented it in 1859 barely caught a glimpse of it: they collected it at dawn, just as it was beginning to close. _Cereus greggii_, today _Peniocereus greggii_. For them, naming the flora and tracing the border were one and the same act. Not so long ago, bison inhabited these lands and moved freely on both sides of the line that now divides them. Their disappearance was the result of a calculated violence. Their return is as well. Today, they star in _rewilding_ programs. Binational agreements, land-use and agricultural planning, genetic studies, health certifications, transport crates, corrals and fences, GPS collars, transmitter ear tags, camera traps, aerial monitoring, and predictive models. An entire infrastructure designed to produce a new wild condition, somewhere between semi-captivity and supervised acclimatization, that studies animal behavior and movement. A mechanism that aims to prevent failed releases, like the one where the bison ran off and ended up hundreds of kilometers away from their designated living area. Yes, the bison are returning, transformed into romanticized technonatures. When it is hard to imagine a future, we search the tracks of the past for a way to orient ourselves. Stirring up the earth with their hooves and fertilizing it with their feces, the bison head back, fueling the promise of recovering the native grassland, a territory to which it returns, but which no longer exists. The border erases, but it also leaves scars. The very satellite images used to track the herd's movements reveal the mutilation of an ancient fish, the oldest geoglyph in the Americas, carved by those who knew the path to the water. The machinery that builds the border and destroys the world has severed its back. Its head continues to point toward the sea, to a coastline that now lies on the other side. There is an admirable insistence in that gesture, the one which persists despite everything. The fish, the flower, a bison that does not return. Miguel Fernández de Castro has inhabited this territory made of fragments and persistencies for years. His works attend to what usually remains off-screen. Dust clouds, licks, footprints, outlined absences. They do not fully reveal what produced them, but they remain there even after the conditions that made them possible have changed. They guide us through the desert like someone crossing it by night. They act as guides in systems too vast to be fully understood, too elusive when observed from afar, which we learn to read without knowing for certain what they foretell. Sometimes, it is enough to find the smallest opening where only boundaries grow. The stubborn line of a fish toward the water. Marina Otero Verzier