But this is a playground unlike any other. These custom-built seesaws have been placed on both sides of a slatted steel border fence that separates the United States and Mexico.
The idea for a “Teeter-Totter Wall” came from Ronald Rael, an architecture professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Virginia San Fratello, an associate professor of design at San Jose State University — and it was a long time coming.
In 2009, the two designed a concept for a binational seesaw at the border for a book, “Borderwall as Architecture,” which uses “humor and inventiveness to address the futility of building barriers,”UC-Berkeley said.
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Ten years later, their conceptual drawings became reality. Rael and his crew transported the seesaws to Sunland Park, New Mexico, separated by a steel fence from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.
The New Mexico town is also where a militia detained migrants this year and where a private group built its own border wall using millions of dollars raised in a GoFundMe campaign.
But along another stretch of the border in Sunland Park on Monday, the scene was dramatically different.
People from both sides came together to play in a “unifying act,” the University of California said in a statement. Participants on the Mexico side had no planning, it said.
In an Instagram post, Rael said the event was “filled with joy, excitement, and togetherness at the borderwall.”
Source: Artists installed seesaws at border so kids in US and Mexico could play together
