(In)visible hybridity

Abstract

This report explains my multifaceted research on two different forms of hybrid geographies that expose the essence of liberal politics. In the first part, I deconstruct the taxonomy of the Texas-Tamaulipas border town area to frame it as a crucial zone for the praxis of North American neoliberalism. In the second part, I investigate the now recur- rent emergence of virtual economic and political zones underlaid by planetary-scale com- putational systems, bringing to the front the takeover of political geometries by self-regu- lated private corporations. In this scenario, hybrid geographies represent a fertile ground for nurturing an art-making process by way of implementation of peripheral perspectives that allow for grasping the complexity of centralized modes of governance reliant on new technologies. Thus, these are systems usually built upon opaque architectures or encrypt- ed languages in which art is capable of metabolizing the ambivalence of the development narratives pervasive in late capitalism.