Undercurrents
AGENCY principals Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller presented recent work that reveals emerging–and often invisible-forces which erode public space and degrade democracy. AGENCY is a design and research practice which leverages spatial design and spatial information to counteract nascent forms of global and urban insecurity. From the practice’s position on the US/Mexico border, which provides a base of operations and context for discrete interventions, AGENCY’s work reveals and enacts emerging publics. Working in protracted, conflictual contexts, the practice consistently shifts the narrative, developing targeted methods to identify, appropriate, and subvert subperceptual urban and atmospheric phenomena.
Kripa and Mueller are the authors of FRONTS: Security and the Developing World (Applied Research and Design, forthcoming), which uncovers a growing geography of codependence between the global security complex and the urban morphologies of the developing world which it increasingly incriminates. Kripa and Mueller will elaborate on their work to: expose hidden geographies; countermap targeted communities; uncover the infrastructure of secretive detention networks; reveal the shifting space of sovereignty at the border; forge postnational assemblies from shared urban metrics; and exploit airborne vectors of cultural and biological exchange.
Undercurrents, Perkins+Will, Chicago, 2018. © Iker Gil.
Undercurrents, Perkins+Will, Chicago, 2018. © Iker Gil.
Undercurrents, Perkins+Will, Chicago, 2018. © Iker Gil.
Undercurrents, Perkins+Will, Chicago, 2018. © Iker Gil.
Undercurrents, Perkins+Will, Chicago, 2018. © Iker Gil.
Undercurrents, Perkins+Will, Chicago, 2018. © Iker Gil.
Undercurrents, Perkins+Will, Chicago, 2018. © Iker Gil.
Video shot and edited by Axel Olson.
Thanks to the Perkins+Will for hosting the event.
