There is a growing swath of the earth’s inhabitants for whom “the future” and “the normal” is not accessible, whose plans are not transactable, and voices are not heard. These unrecognized beings have been put through processes of undocumentation in accord with the normal functioning of the law, and all the discourses subsumed to its practice. The precarity this undocumentation produces, renders the process of legal embodiment and representation as a failure within national and international schemes of habitation, social participation, and governance. One of the symptoms is an instrumentalization, within legal, informal and institutional representations, of an undocumented body politic as Rückenfigur, the halted traveller motif popularized through Caspar David Friedrich’s “Wanderer above the Sea Fog”. This motif represents a person seen from behind in the foreground of the image, contemplating the view before them. This is a graphic device of internalizing an-other’s view. In contrast, Higuera’s work presents the boundaries between figure-and-ground and self-and-other, among other distinctions, as inhabiting thresholds of unrecognizability — of personal and social opacity permeated by transparency and vice-versa. 

This investigation of the unseen, the undocumented, and the affective through black-and-white, figure-and-ground reversals and generative compositions are alliterative means of understanding the experience of migration, relation, and the soul’s journey through complicated histories and national boundaries. These drawings are approaches to permeate the subjects and objects of the pluriverse — the scales, territories, intentions and dislocations orchestrating the relations of the material and the immaterial.