This
country's network of national parks and national prisons are coextensive
formations in the production of "nation-space", with its constituent myths
of national origin, national identity, national continuity. |
As new political technologies
are expanding the coercive apparatus of carceral society, institutional
leisure space offers relief and diversion, promising rewards through privileged
access to liberatory natural knowledge. In park space and time, presumably,
disciplinary surveillance will be evaded. The public body, free to mirror
the naturalist's gaze, is appeased through consumption of emancipatory
cultures: the festivals and sciences of rediscovered "nature".
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Y+2Pstudio will explore
rifts and disjunctures that emerge from superimposed matrices of national
parks and national prison systems, a topology agitated by disputes over
the jurisdictions of nature and technology. How are boundaries and horizons
produced to situate this 'geographic imaginary'? What topography is inscribed
within collisions and interpenetrations of ideas about�order and disorder
-- taxonomic ideas of identity and classification that underwrite representations
of both natural and social bodies?
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Y+2Pstudio
tracks flows of transient pilgrims and penitents -- innocent and guilty
-- whose desire is projected across the landscape of signs, who seek utopia
through transparent natural law, discovering distopia in the opaque space
of the penal code. In mapping theaters of emancipation and suppression,
Y+2Pstudio is absorbed into the audience of our national spectacle of reward
and punishment. |