What is a container port? What is it connected to? What sort of ecology does it emerge from? What kind of world does it prefigure? Brian Holmes and Rozalinda Borcila invite you to explore global trade in Miami: including places such as Dodge Island, the Miami River, the financial district, the Norfolk Southern intermodal yard, and the industrial installations of nearby Ft. Lauderdale. Using field trips, analytical texts, history books, oral testimony, and various artistic techniques, this course engages a set of sites sharing one paradoxical condition: they are so large, you practically can’t see them. How can we perceive, investigate, analyze, document, and speak back to such massively invisible objects?
Holmes and Borcila draw on the experience of their ongoing research project in Chicago, Southwest Corridor Northwest Passage. Holmes will launch the theoretical investigation of the logistics industry and organize visits to the sites, while presenting material from his forthcoming book, The River and the Steersman. Borcila will lead the class in developing public, participatory forms at the intersection of amateur forensics, art, and pedagogy. Participants will contribute to a dedicated project website and develop a series of interpretive materials, drawing upon their own interests, backgrounds, artistic practices, and expert knowledge. The course aims to build a conceptual and expressive toolkit that can be used for further inquiry. With luck this will become a continuing project – perhaps your own.
course website: http://massivelyinvisibleobjects.org/
Brian Holmes and I developed the project together and divided the residency into 2 parts, each facilitated by one of us. I facilitated the latter part. Below is the calendar for the last two weeks of the seminar. We began in and around the Port of Miami and worked our way outward, attending to the structures and planning processes underlying the port as an expanding territorial form. As a performative and pedagogical tactic, I proposed we trace the boundaries or edges of the Foreign Trade Zone by walking, boating, swimming, driving. Each attempt to trace this boundary was accompanied by a thematic series of readings, performance workshops and field trips.
Tuesday, April 28 – FTZ –Introduction/review of FTZ 281; logistics
reading Riding the Zone by Rozalinda Borcila
Wednesday, April 29 – listening walk: Port of Miami to financial district;
we trace the boundary of the zone on foot and swimming; we observe the dredging of the port to make room for larger Panamex ships; the problem of dredging stays with us for the duration of the seminar.
Thursday, April 30 – Mapping crime and criminality onto Black bodies; urban governance and the Prison Industrial Complex
reading: Globalisation and US prison growth: from military Keynesianism to post-Keynesian militarism by Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Class workshop : PIC mind map
Friday, May 1 – The detention archipelago
reading: Transnational productions of remoteness: building onshore and offshore carceral regimes across borders by Jenna Lloyd
Saturday, May 2 all day – Field Trip (optional) – In a small boat, we chart a route down the main shipping channel of the Port of Miami , the designated border of newly reorganized and expanding FTZ 281. To accomodate bigger ships, the port is being deepened reorganized as an expanding FTZ project. As in the construction of the first canal system, Florida is connected to the Great Lakes not only through the claims-making processes that produce the will to dredge, but also through the equipment and technologies used. What lives in the sand, muck and soil that is being extracted from the bottom of the bay? We lingered close to three sites of extraction — one a digger, another a scooper and a third seemed aspirational… vacuuming, transporting through massive tubes and then dumping out from a dual shoot extension.
Monday, May 4
Field trip : our walk will link the canal system, intermodal rail yard, a residential development, a warehouse/logistics district, a prison, concrete mine and the Miami International Airport
Tuesday, May 5 – The making of the swamp and the will to dredge – imperial nightmares, Indigenous endurance, settler homelands
readings : The Seminoles from All our Relations by Winona LaDuke ; The Will to Improve by Tanya Li
Field trip: listening walk on the boundary between Krome Ave Detention center and the Everglades; this is followed by an airboat ride in the Everglades with Buffalo Tiger Airboat Tours
Wednesday, May 6 – wrap-up