On November 2, 2024, Día de Los Muertos, a gathering in Nogales, AZ, a stone’s throw from the international border wall, was enacted as both a way of honoring those who’ve lost their lives in the Sonoran desert and of celebrating the power of memory and storytelling to foster connection and care across borders.
A constellation of cell phones and blue tooth speakers were set up in the shadow of surveillance and telecommunication towers, each broadcasting individual recordings from the digital archive, Detained—a collaboration between the University of Arizona, Arizona State University, Salvavision, the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, and former detainees of Arizona migrant detention centers.
The result was a “constellation” of recorded voices that participants, moving between points, heard either singly or multiply. Live readings then began to intersect with the recorded voices—“offerings” more than performances. Participants (including students, poets, scholars, activists, and community members) shared excerpts from literature, scholarship, journalism, and their own creative work, that engaged themes of incarceration, surveillance, and the relationship between hard borders and “wireless” or “global” networks of communication.
In Deleuze and Guattari’s, A Thousand Plateaus, the writers observe: “Multiplicities are defined by the outside: by the abstract line, the line of flight or deterritorialization according to which they change in nature and connect with other multiplicities” (A Thousand Plateaus 9-10). With this particular iteration of The Ephemeralization Project, our articulation and movement between and among different voices, vanishing points and lines of flight, we activate Buckminster Fuller’s project: “the doing of ever more with ever less, per given resource units of pounds, time, and living in ever-increasing numbers” in a poetic mode that underscores the value and sustainability of the following resources: collective memory, storytelling, inquiry, community, care, and the human imagination.
Together, through our action and words, but more profoundly through our listening and attention, we considered how we might begin to confront, respond to, and render visible, the relationship between what we may think of or experience as borderless or abstract (global telecommunications companies, “wireless” cloud computing, our concept and relationship to citizenship and nationhood) and the material resources, labour, bodies, hard borders, and spaces of internment, that invisibly support those literally utopian (the word coming to us from the Greek: “ou” [non] “topos” [place]) concepts and systems.