This series of images and texts (in the slideshow above) explores borderlands as xenotopic terrains—that is, uncanny places that sustain ambivalence, keep alive tensions between alienation and belonging, and that, as images, invite multiple readings. The borderlands depicted here are not only those at and around national borders but also in the middle of cities, on hillsides, riverbanks and rocky landscapes, where national, ecological, interspecies and planetary boundaries and politics become entangled.   

             Imaging itself is an active technique of hostility. Satellite and Google imagery, video surveillance cameras and infrared thermal imaging, iris scans and other biometrics, and social media data mining obscure the authorial eye behind the image but they firmly reinforce systems of power, ownership and authority. But what else can happen in the uneasy environment of an image? The series looks specifically at what is revealed in border landscapes.  For whom is an environment hostile? How are hostile environments created—in relation to whom or what? 

             Through images, we look at the strange set of possibilities opened by hostile environments even as they produce violence and confinement. Beyond representation, images also work as fields of possibility and imagination. They double, they reverse, they juxtapose. They illuminate a set of relationships in their composition that reveal them as environments in themselves—environments that constrain and capture while also offering possibilities for alternative interpretations. These xenotopic images are unsettled and contradictory, inviting oppositional readings. These foster alternatives that break didactic certitude and instead open multiple apertures in complex visual regimes of hostility.

             Hostility to migrant life is created not only by pitting human lives against each other—citizens versus others—but also, by pitting human lives against non-human ones. That is, hostility is created not only by way of the now familiar formula of dehumanization which requires likening migrants to non-humans (cockroaches, rats, or anything that scuttles) but by actually appreciating non-humans at the expense of humans. There are further tensions—the “cat holes” inserted into the U.S.-Mexico border wall infrastructure manifest those between the environmental waivers that allowed the wall to be built and the need to knit the fragmented habitats of endangered animals.

             Hidden in the logics of hostile environments are openings and ambiguities. If one has the capacity to recognize the beauty of birds in a wildlife sanctuary, might one also have the capacity to appreciate the vitality in all forms of life? Indeed, this attunement to different forms of life could be harnessed to imagine other ways of being in the world, other ways of inhabiting and moving together, rendering nation-state borders inadequate and ultimately obsolete when considered next to other models of mobility like flyways and watersheds. Yet, such imaginings are too often circumscribed—the New York garbage cans that proclaim a rat-free city reveal the limits of conceptions of coexistence or sanctuary.

             These images also demonstrate the disjunctions of scale in the borderlands, from an individual body to the national to the planetary. A surveillance post between Hong Kong and Shenzhen suggests the military eye that scopes out the landscape for border crossers. Yet alongside is an infrastructure of crossing that is personal, scaled to bodily carriage. The human-powered, human-sized, human-scaled is evident in the foot pedal, hand truck, handles on baggage. In a paradox of scale, the barge transport of cars at the Los Ebanos crossing reverses the modern logic of technology and mobility. Here, the manual, the literally digital, moves the motorized, not the other way around. Steel cars on a steel barge are pulled by fleshy palms on nylon ropes. Much is made of the uncoincidental hostility of terrain and temperature that brutalize border crossings. Yet bodies of all scales still traverse as in the migration corridors of the ocelot and the flight patterns of bees and birds. 

             The charred landscape near Los Alamos, the result of a controlled burn gone wild, is against the backdrop of the centre of atomic destruction. Is the burned landscape a hostile environment because it is devoid of life, or are we humans the hostile agents in an environment that may otherwise adjust itself without prejudice to meet the human-inflected planetary condition? Should we be hostile to a way of life that produces fire that is no longer accidental wildfire in a distant place nor controlled fire in human hands, but simply ecological pyrotechnics, producing charred land, across habitats of all kinds? Fire has an ecological being too, one that has always been simultaneously restorative and destructive, and with the power to escape human control when ecological conditions change, not just to amplify climate change, but act as the very agent of its enactment.

             The image of the black claw-like roots of the aspen in the aftermath of this fire is strangely monstrous and alive. How do we understand the compulsive attraction of images of devastation—of the intermingling of aesthetics and violence? Allure and repulsion ricochet off each other. At times, there is more than an intermingling—an asymmetry can persist in which aesthetic considerations override the content of the image thereby minimizing the hostility and violence of bordering. Color fields in the image series offered here provide one such instance of the aesthetic coming to the fore:  black and white aspen, the triangles of uninterrupted golden rock, the dark green swathe that grounds the fence fragment, the smooth cement grey against bright green wetlands. The semi-abstract quality of the color blocks is crucial; we are hailed—inadvertent though it might be—through shape, color, and positionings.  Aesthetics carry the politics by animating identifications beyond the image content. The indelible imprint of border violence in the photographs does not erase their allure.

             But this is not a claim for the aesthetic of or within the political; rather, it is about trying to find a ruse within visual regimes of hostility. Reading images of hostile environments as xenotopias—ambivalent, othered—and vice versa elevates the uncanny in the visual field—thereby inviting multiple and partial readings to co-exist beyond the simply oppositional or even the “counter”-imaginary, toward an alter-imaginary space that opens greater political possibility.

This series of images and texts (in the slideshow above) explores borderlands as xenotopic terrains—that is, uncanny places that sustain ambivalence, keep alive tensions between alienation and belonging, and that, as images, invite multiple readings. The borderlands depicted here are not only those at and around national borders but also in the middle of cities, on hillsides, riverbanks and rocky landscapes, where national, ecological, interspecies and planetary boundaries and politics become entangled.   

             Imaging itself is an active technique of hostility. Satellite and Google imagery, video surveillance cameras and infrared thermal imaging, iris scans and other biometrics, and social media data mining obscure the authorial eye behind the image but they firmly reinforce systems of power, ownership and authority. But what else can happen in the uneasy environment of an image? The series looks specifically at what is revealed in border landscapes.  For whom is an environment hostile? How are hostile environments created—in relation to whom or what? 

             Through images, we look at the strange set of possibilities opened by hostile environments even as they produce violence and confinement. Beyond representation, images also work as fields of possibility and imagination. They double, they reverse, they juxtapose. They illuminate a set of relationships in their composition that reveal them as environments in themselves—environments that constrain and capture while also offering possibilities for alternative interpretations. These xenotopic images are unsettled and contradictory, inviting oppositional readings. These foster alternatives that break didactic certitude and instead open multiple apertures in complex visual regimes of hostility.

             Hostility to migrant life is created not only by pitting human lives against each other—citizens versus others—but also, by pitting human lives against non-human ones. That is, hostility is created not only by way of the now familiar formula of dehumanization which requires likening migrants to non-humans (cockroaches, rats, or anything that scuttles) but by actually appreciating non-humans at the expense of humans. There are further tensions—the “cat holes” inserted into the U.S.-Mexico border wall infrastructure manifest those between the environmental waivers that allowed the wall to be built and the need to knit the fragmented habitats of endangered animals.

             Hidden in the logics of hostile environments are openings and ambiguities. If one has the capacity to recognize the beauty of birds in a wildlife sanctuary, might one also have the capacity to appreciate the vitality in all forms of life? Indeed, this attunement to different forms of life could be harnessed to imagine other ways of being in the world, other ways of inhabiting and moving together, rendering nation-state borders inadequate and ultimately obsolete when considered next to other models of mobility like flyways and watersheds. Yet, such imaginings are too often circumscribed—the New York garbage cans that proclaim a rat-free city reveal the limits of conceptions of coexistence or sanctuary.

             These images also demonstrate the disjunctions of scale in the borderlands, from an individual body to the national to the planetary. A surveillance post between Hong Kong and Shenzhen suggests the military eye that scopes out the landscape for border crossers. Yet alongside is an infrastructure of crossing that is personal, scaled to bodily carriage. The human-powered, human-sized, human-scaled is evident in the foot pedal, hand truck, handles on baggage. In a paradox of scale, the barge transport of cars at the Los Ebanos crossing reverses the modern logic of technology and mobility. Here, the manual, the literally digital, moves the motorized, not the other way around. Steel cars on a steel barge are pulled by fleshy palms on nylon ropes. Much is made of the uncoincidental hostility of terrain and temperature that brutalize border crossings. Yet bodies of all scales still traverse as in the migration corridors of the ocelot and the flight patterns of bees and birds. 

             The charred landscape near Los Alamos, the result of a controlled burn gone wild, is against the backdrop of the centre of atomic destruction. Is the burned landscape a hostile environment because it is devoid of life, or are we humans the hostile agents in an environment that may otherwise adjust itself without prejudice to meet the human-inflected planetary condition? Should we be hostile to a way of life that produces fire that is no longer accidental wildfire in a distant place nor controlled fire in human hands, but simply ecological pyrotechnics, producing charred land, across habitats of all kinds? Fire has an ecological being too, one that has always been simultaneously restorative and destructive, and with the power to escape human control when ecological conditions change, not just to amplify climate change, but act as the very agent of its enactment.

             The image of the black claw-like roots of the aspen in the aftermath of this fire is strangely monstrous and alive. How do we understand the compulsive attraction of images of devastation—of the intermingling of aesthetics and violence? Allure and repulsion ricochet off each other. At times, there is more than an intermingling—an asymmetry can persist in which aesthetic considerations override the content of the image thereby minimizing the hostility and violence of bordering. Color fields in the image series offered here provide one such instance of the aesthetic coming to the fore:  black and white aspen, the triangles of uninterrupted golden rock, the dark green swathe that grounds the fence fragment, the smooth cement grey against bright green wetlands. The semi-abstract quality of the color blocks is crucial; we are hailed—inadvertent though it might be—through shape, color, and positionings.  Aesthetics carry the politics by animating identifications beyond the image content. The indelible imprint of border violence in the photographs does not erase their allure.

             But this is not a claim for the aesthetic of or within the political; rather, it is about trying to find a ruse within visual regimes of hostility. Reading images of hostile environments as xenotopias—ambivalent, othered—and vice versa elevates the uncanny in the visual field—thereby inviting multiple and partial readings to co-exist beyond the simply oppositional or even the “counter”-imaginary, toward an alter-imaginary space that opens greater political possibility.