Society. Spaces. Screens

Abstract

How are urban communities at the southern margins of the US impacted by their geopolitical locality and proximity to sites of national security? While economic boom propelled metropolitan growth, it simultaneously produced an intensification of uneven developments, including the decline of formerly vibrant communities along the US/Mexico border. Entrapped in the ‘dark spaces’ of the US militarized border zone, these edge communities must navigate economic scarcity, muted political advocacy, and expansive (often deadly) security tactics. Border walling and national closure (since Trump’s presidency) deployed anti-immigrant violence as an affirmation of state power. The fortification of the southern border wall intensified, mediated by violent machinations, images of migrant children in cages, and the demonized figure of the Latin/Haitian border-crosser, dehumanized, conjured as contagion, a deadly threat. While the southern border wall has been equipped with “eyes” (Molnar 2024), such scopic regimes and surveillance technologies are also trained on the Mexican side in defense against the approaching ‘multitude’ from the South (Agamben 1998). We tend to avert our gaze from the border region in the southern US, this urban frontier-zone of life and death. Media industries release a limited repertoire of images, mostly of a barren, inhospitable terrain, a wasteland, a lawless dead zone, absent of people. When so excised from public discourse, visual fields, and memory, how can these border localities be reimagined? My inquiry probes instances of artistic experimentation and visual radicalism (performances, installations, public works) at the southern border as platforms for digital knowledge production, witnessing, and political agency.