SUTURA is a binational art encounter in Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, born from the need to offer a different understanding of the border through arts and culture. By bringing artists, cultural workers, and communities together, we seek to share the knowledge produced here and strengthen the relationships that sustain our cultural life.

For centuries, colonial narratives have portrayed this territory as barren and lawless, obscuring the lives that exist here or treating them as unworthy of protection. These ways of seeing continue to shape the modern U.S.–Mexico border and the forms of violence imposed on its communities. SUTURA understands the border as a place of knowledge and resistance, where people continually create ways to live, organize, and care for one another.

Our work grows from decades of cultural activity in the region. Through sustained engagement with their communities, artists and cultural workers have developed practices that examine the conditions affecting our lives and contribute to changing them. The relationships built around this work are an essential part of the border’s cultural infrastructure.

The name SUTURA, Spanish for “suture,” expresses how we understand these practices: as ongoing efforts to mend wounds that run through our territory and communities. Many of these wounds are made visible by the political boundary between the United States and Mexico; others emerge from forces within and beyond the region. The work of mending is difficult and unfinished. Sutures can tear, and wounds are repeatedly reopened. Arts and culture alone cannot resolve the conditions that produce them, but they can help us confront those conditions together and sustain the work of making a better place to live.

SUTURA also asks who gets to represent the border and whose experience informs those representations. Images, artworks, academic research, and journalism about the region often circulate without the perspectives of those who live here. By placing artists and cultural workers with lived experience and sustained relationships to the border at the center of the encounter, we seek to broaden these accounts and share the community building that makes their work possible.

From November 18–22, 2026, SUTURA brings together more than 150 artists and over 25 spaces and organizations across Ciudad Juárez and El Paso for five days of exhibitions, performances, conversations, site visits, and community activities. Presented in independent spaces, museums, artist studios, and public gathering places, the program centers Latinx, Chicano, Border, Mexican, and Latin American practices in dialogue with artists and thinkers from other regions.

We approach SUTURA as a relational process: a way to meet through art, listen to different experiences, exchange ideas, and deepen our understanding of one another. These five days make visible an ongoing cultural life and create opportunities for relationships that continue beyond the encounter.