POLITICAL EQUATOR
The Political Equator was conceptualized by Teddy Cruz in 2005. Considering the Tijuana-San Diego border as a point of departure, The Political Equator traces an imaginary line along the US–Mexico border and extends it directly across a world atlas, forming a corridor of global conflict between the 30 and 36 degrees North Parallel. Along this imaginary border encircling the globe lie some of the world's most contested thresholds: the US–Mexico border at Tijuana/San Diego, the most intensified portal for immigration from Latin America to the United States; the Strait of Gibraltar, where waves of migration flow from North African flow into Europe; the Israeli-Palestinian border that divides the Middle East, along with the embattled frontiers of Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, and Jordan; the Line of Control between the Indian state of Kashmir and Azad or free Kashmir on the Pakistani side; the Taiwan Strait where relations between China and Taiwan are increasingly strained as the Pearl River Delta has rapidly ascended to the role of China's economic gateway for the flow of foreign capital, supported by the traditional centers of Hong Kong and Shanghai and the paradigmatic transformations of the Chinese metropolis also characterized by urbanities of labor and surveillance.
The political equator also resonates with the revised geography of the post-9/11 world according to Thomas P. M. Barnett's scheme for The Pentagon's New Map, in which he effectively divides the globe into "Functioning Core," or parts of the world where "globalization is thick with network connectivity, financial transactions, liberal media flows, and collective security," and "Non-Integrating Gap," "regions plagued by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder, and chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of global terrorists."
But while this renewed global border is a working diagram, emblematic of hemispheric divisions between wealth and poverty, intersecting a necklace of some of the most contested checkpoints in the world, it is ultimately not a ‘flat line’ but an operative critical threshold that bends, fragments and stretches in order to reveal other sites of conflict worldwide where invisible trans-hemispheric sociopolitical, economic and environmental dynamics are manifested at regional and local scales. The Political Equator is the point of entry into many of these radical localities, distributed across the continents, arguing that some of the most relevant projects forwarding socio-economic inclusion and artistic experimentation will not emerge from sites of abundance but from sites of scarcity, in the midst of the conflict between geopolitical borders, natural resources and marginal communities.
PE MEETINGS
Trans-Border Itinerant Dialogues
Co-founded by Steve Fagin and Teddy Cruz, in conjunction with the Center of Urban Ecologies at the Visual Arts Department at University of California, San Diego and the neighborhood-based NGO Casa Familiar in San Ysidro, as well as other regional agencies and institutions, The Political Equator Meetings emerged in 2006 as a way of connecting this border region with other geographies of conflict in the world. By engaging the political specificity of these critical junctures, the meetings have focused on producing new local-global correspondences, arguing that only through the radicalization of the ‘particular’ a less neutral and abstract understanding of conflict can emerge.
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The Political Equator Meetings have taken the form of nomadic urban actions and dialogues involving the public and communities, oscillating across diverse sites and stations between Tijuana and San Diego. These conversations on the move have proposed that the inter-disciplinary debate takes place outside the institutions and inside the actual sites of conflict, enabling the audience to be both witness and participant. The meetings unfold around a series of public works, performances and walks traversing these conflicting territories and serve as evidenciary platforms to re-contextualize debates and conversations among diverse publics.
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PE meetings have sought to re-define conventional conference protocols, generally conceived as exclusive, highly specialized and rooted inside the institutions. Instead, PE seeks links beween the specialized knowledge of institutions and the creative socio-economic and political intelligence embedded whithin communities. This implies the opening of the conference format as an experimental platform, researching new forms of knowledge, pedagogy and public participation.
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An essential objective of the PE meetings has been to use the Tijuana-San Diego border region and the marginal communities around it as sites of research and intervention to forward a new level of public dialogue and awareness towards the production of more inclusive policies and economics of urban development.
PE CONSORTIUM
After the PE3 event, the Political Equator will transform into a Platform for Operative Urban Knowledge seeking to distribute itself, through exemplary practices working within specific zones of conflict worldwide. The PE Consortium will be co-curated by Teddy Cruz, William Morrish and Cohabitation Strategies —Emiliano Gandolfi, Lucia Babina, Gabriela Rendón and Miguel Robles-Durán. The PE Consoritum will be a mediating platform for pedagogical, design and grassroots organizations to amplyfy exemplary urban process producing new expertise, the collective imagination of marginal groups and communities, and their generative socio-economic and political knowledge. The formation of this platform seeks the scaling-up of locally-based practices in order to expose, reframe and disseminate hidden relational patters and alternative methods and processes of social, cultural, economic and urban production, enabling new urban pedagodies towards citizen action and its impact on urban policy.
For the PE Consortium, researching expanded modes of urban practice implies the re-conceptualization of new models of ownership and cohabitation. The aim is to spatialize existing non-conforming urban models and processes in order to analyze and illustrate instances, whose tactical translation can propose and implement public knowledge and new ways of inhabitation providing accessibility to collective and affordable housing.
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