Britt Mazurek
In 2019 a few years after relocating to Marfa from Chicago the now 55-year-old trumpeter, composer, and visual artist Rob Mazurek found himself performing in one of the most surreal venues of his life: at the bottom of the Santa Elena Canyon in Big Bend National Park. Barefoot in the mud at low tide, he started to play, imagining “a scenario of projecting sonic energy on the border line … improvising on this feeling,” he recounts over Zoom from his music studio in Marfa, where he’s bundled in a black Garza Marfa hoodie. The experience spurred him to consider how the U.S.-Mexico border the site of so much human suffering and political turmoil is ultimately a construct.