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Incendiary Traces

The Southern California landscape has always been in question. It has served the purpose of different narratives and provided the backdrop for numerous conflicts, both real and imagined. Artists, explorers, speculators, even military strategists have used our polyglot landscape to voice and define our relationship to place, history and memory.

Conceived by artist Hillary Mushkin, "Incendiary Traces" is a conceptually driven, community-generated art project that explores the political act of representing the Southern California landscape by creating a series of "draw-in" events in different locations across the region, from the border between U.S. and Mexico to San Clemente Island and beyond.

The project, which is developing an archive of images, uses our real and symbolic affiliations with the subtropics as a starting point to bring home connections between Southern California and political "hot spots" in the Middle East, North Africa, Latin America and beyond. The archive includes drawings, ephemera, public events, sounds, and other forms of expression that reach beyond mainstream representations of these geographies. Through engaged and embodied acts of image and sound-making, "Incendiary Traces" aims to bring us closer to seemingly remote international conflicts. We are seeking collaborators in its development.

Follow along with Incendiary Traces at their website and on Facebook.

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Nikko Mueller sitting on a ladder on top of a park table at the San Clemente Border Station for "Three Border Ecologies" | Lena Martinez Miller
All around the United States is a 100-mile border zone where one can be searched and one's things seized. Policies way beyond what the constitution allows is regularly implemented. Artists drew on select sites. Here's what they realized.
Hillary Mushkin's artwork at the San Clemente Border Station for "Three Border Ecologies" | Courtesy of Hillary Mushkin
Created by policymakers in the 1940s, the border zone extends 100 miles inland from the nation’s land and sea boundaries and houses nearly two-thirds of the U.S. population. It's also where the 4th amendment rights of the people have been subverted.
Sketch of Laguna Peak Tracking Station, 2016. Watercolor and ink on paper | Hillary Mushkin
As part of the "Incendiary Traces" project, Hillary Mushkin took artists to Pt. Mugu to do some surveiling and drawing of their own.
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"Incendiary Traces" examines how military groups employ simulation, role-playing, and performance to deliver training required to operate in the extreme conditions of combat.
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Thirty miles east of Indio, California in a largely uninhabited desert landscape, sits the largest military training ground in U.S. history, though you might not have heard of it.
Incendiary Traces looks at the cartographic representations of WWII in the 1940s, providing historical context for understanding our own conception of global space.
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Incendiary Traces pays a virtual visit to an Afghani village to make the seemingly remote conflict a bit more comprehensible to those in the U.S.
Simulations in computer games and virtual reality are radically altering the way the military prepares soldiers for war.
Incendiary Traces visited the Mexico/U.S. Border to view the border from the perspective of U.S. Border Patrol agents.
In the early 1900s, medical inspection and photographic documentation ushered in a new set of surveillance procedures for state oversight at the U.S.-Mexico border.
The art project Incendiary Traces embarks on a second series, focusing on the methods Southern California professionals use to visualize international conflict.
Incendiary Traces led a recent draw-in at the 29 Palms Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center where participants used drawing as a tool for connecting the SoCal landscape to foreign battle zones.
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