An Equator of Borderzones

Sadly, more than likely -- and due to poor planning on my part (and I mean POOR.) -- I will not be able to zip down south to check out next weekend's transborder public event in San Diego and Tijuana: THE POLITICAL EQUATOR: URBANITIES OF LABOR AND SURVEILLANCE. What a bummer; it's a downright shame actually. Eyal Weizman and Teddy Cruz talking about an informal equator pieced together by a network of geopolitically tense borderzones, where globalization and labor come to a head in the form of security walls, signposted fencing, widespread slums, maquiladoras and colonias, Border Patrol outposts, detention facilities, military checkpoints and improvised sub_Base landscapes, surveillanced labor flows spanning from the Taiwanese waters to the Strait of Gibraltar, the West Bank to San Ysidro, Kashmir to Tijuana, Bangladesh to the frontiers of Kurdistan. Then, crossing into Mexico for a day to see my friend's documentary that he's spent the last five years producing, MAQUILOPOLIS. Missing this will hurt.

"These are only a few of the critical thresholds of a world in which the politics of density and labor are transforming not only the sites of conflict but also the centers of production and consumption, while unprecedented socio-cultural demographics rearrange flows of information and capital. The dramatic images emerging from the political equator are intensified by the current political climate in which terrorism and its opposite, fear, set the stage for current confrontations over immigration policy and the regulation of borders worldwide. The result is an urbanism born of surveillance and exclusion which casts these geographies of conflict as anticipatory scenarios of the 21st-century global metropolis, where the city will increasingly become the battleground in which control and transgression, formal and informal economies, legal and illegal occupations meet."

This has Subtopia written all over it, and I need to find a way to sneak down there. Needless to say, if anyone is headed down - don't miss this. And if you already planned on attending - report back. I'd love to hear your thoughts. Seriously, podcasts, tape recordings, whatever you end up with... Seriously. Let me know.