AGENCY has launched our Border Dispatches, a series of investigative reports on the US/Mexico borderland. The first installment is featured this month in The Architect’s Newspaper.
Each month, we will identify and explore a “sleeper agent,” a critical site or actor reshaping the diffuse, overlapping binational territory we know as the borderlands. Throughout the series we will provide you an ‘on-the-ground’ perspective from the frontiers of an expanding securocratic territory, taking you inside the detention centers, military training facilities, simulated landscapes and logistical networks that seek to manage the region.
We start by unpacking the space of security training at the Border Patrol Academy in Artesia, NM, where a series of replicas of the international border fence provide a staging ground for training law enforcement agencies. These strange simulacra serve as instructive indexes, signaling significant shifts in the fabrication of national security. Reality and simulation freely intermingle on the site.
