Interior Borders
Interior Borders presents the locations of ICE detention centers across the United States before and after they were constructed. At first glance, these images may appear to present earlier, before photos as “free,” and current ICE facilities as newly emerging forms of subjugation. Upon closer examination, however, far from portraying a state of nature, the before images are also portraits of institutional violence, and the after images are portraits of historical continuities as well as ruptures.
These landscapes have been recently enclosed or occupied for incarceration and displacement in multiple ways: by stealing land and flouting treaties, displacing Indigenous nations and peoples, and normalizing the extraction of land, and by detaining unauthorized immigrants and displacing them from their homes and families, when no human being is illegal. Together, these historical images show how systemic incarceration is not an aberration but a central feature of regional and national “development.”
https://interior-borders.justin.work/
Year: 2020