Margret Grebowicz
17/05/2023
18:00h, Project Space 17
This talk focuses on Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in Arizona, on the US/Mexico border, where Margret have been doing research for the past three winters. No other national park unit in the U.S. has a comparable level of border security. The national park visitor is a subject primed for spectacle, and the border wall is nothing if not spectacular. It runs the entire length of Organ Pipe’s southern boundary, and one of its most spectacular aspects is its permeability—in both the physical and ideological sense. There are endless “holes in the wall,” as it were, breakdowns of security that in turn requires greater security and keeps the manufacture of exigency in a vicious cycle. In national parks, the perspectives of different groups of local stakeholders is overlooked not only by border policy, but also by federal environmental policy, which also comes from the top down. This talk is a series of vignettes that center on movements through the region by human and nonhuman actors, and it is designed to show that the actual exigencies at work in Organ Pipe are many, various, and dynamic. What counts as exigent is not the exclusive domain of the carceral logics and culture of surveillance that govern this part of the world, which has taken on the nickname “Optics Valley.”