Title 42, or, The Flight of the Pallindrone

The talk tonight at EMPAC is canceled due to weather delays from tropical storm Nicole. Please join Ricardo and Amy for their workshop at the Sanctuary for Independent Media Thursday at 7PM. Check the Sanctuary website for the most up-to-date information on Thursday.

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In this talk, Ricardo Dominguez and Amy Sara Carroll of the collective Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0 discuss a brief history of the collective’s previous work in relation to borders; the relationship between NAFTA, US Prevention through Deterrence philosophy, the binational War on Drugs, and the emergence of border art as genre. 

Each decade of the twentieth century triggered draconian refinements of the “border horror” of U.S. immigration policy. Resulting borderization in the twenty-first century continues as such, now with blurred divides between the flow of goods and the blockage of human beings. Supply chain disruptions and queued shipping containers and the US invocation of Title 42 and “Stay in Mexico” policies, while never comparable, are in equal measure “products” of COVID-19.

Among others, the artists will reflect on the influences, production and distribution challenges, and discordant reception of the collective’s Transborder Immigrant Tool, a project that debuted fifteen years ago. This project consists of an app designed to provide sustenance in grueling desert conditions like those that abut the US-Mexico Border. The app consists of poetry and a navigational system that points users toward water sources provided by humanitarian aid organizations like Water Station Inc.

The talk concludes with a discussion of Carroll and Dominguez’s new work-in-progress theater production, “The Flight of the Palindrone.” This project instrumentalizes drone activity to provide a sonic theatrical intervention that plays on surveillance technologies in the Mexican-U.S. borderlands, the participation of the University of California, San Diego (the artists’ own institution) in the research and development of unmanned aerial vehicles, and regional eco-catastrophe—all within the context of Carroll and Dominguez’s continued commitment to translanguaging and the artivist gesture. 

In addition to this talk, Amy Sara Carroll and Ricardo Dominguez will host a workshop from 7-9PM on Thursday November 10, 2022 at The Sanctuary for Independent Media in North Troy, NY.