Questioning the exceptionality of the exception: Annabel Castro’s ‘Outside in: exile at home’ (2018) in Cuernavaca

Amid sedimented and ongoing histories of violence

In reaction to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the US government incarcerated 120,000 Japanese immigrants and their descendants, two-thirds of whom were US citizens. ¹ Less well known is the fact that indefinite detention of Japanese-descended people occurred across the Western hemisphere. ² Under pressure from the United States, authorities in Mexico, Peru and Brazil also concentrated and monitored people with Japanese heritage. ³ In each case, officials declared a ‘state of exception’ to facilitate emergency response to the security threat that people with Japanese heritage were presumed to embody. ⁴ This technique of governance was depicted as a ‘crisis’ arrangement to protect liberal democracies, but it demonstrably tended toward authoritarianism. ⁵

Annabel Castro’s Outside in: exile at home (hereafter Outside in) is an art installation that problematizes this process as it took place in Mexico. ⁶ Outside in refers to the Hacienda de Temixco in Morelos (hereafter the Hacienda), which operated as a concentration camp between 1942 and 1945. Visitors to the artwork enter a dark room that hosts an algorithmic discrimination system of Castro’s design. ‘Algorithmic discrimination’ today refers to computational processes of pattern recognition and data sorting found in multiple contexts (e.g. ‘smart surveillance’, targeted online marketing, etc.). ⁷ These processes share a genealogy with intelligence-gathering systems that governments have long employed for decision-making in the face of uncertain threats. ⁸ Castro’s artwork juxtaposes algorithmic discrimination with the case of the Hacienda. As we discuss below, this juxtaposition provoked visitors at the installation’s premiere to reflect on the afterlives of the Hacienda in contemporary computational processes that categorize and construct threats to national security.

Castro’s algorithmic discrimination system continuously dismantles and recombines elements from four classic films, described in more detail later in this essay. It forces the four films into a room that would usually be assigned to only one (see Figure 1). Thus confined, the films are sorted into aural, textual and visual elements and – mediated by the discrimination system – are displaced to three walls. Castro channels sound from the films through headphones on one wall, projects subtitles on a second wall and projects the silhouettes of the images themselves on a third wall, with the center of the images discarded. Machine learning classifies the source material from the films and generates variations in its presentation: facial recognition identifies the presence of a face; natural language processing reads subtitles and decides if a statement carries negative sentiment; and timbre analysis signals moments when voice or music is present.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

‘Outside in’ installation diagram by Annabel Castro.

Outside in premiered in Cuernavaca at the Jardín Borda Cultural Center in September 2018, at a time when activists in the United States and Mexico were mobilizing against an intensification of policies (including immigrant detention) designed to discourage migration from Central America through Mexico to the United States. ⁹ By juxtaposing contemporary algorithmic discrimination with the case of the Hacienda, Castro suggested that the construction and categorization of particular groups of people as threats to national security is not a thing of the past but is ongoing. In 2018, this argument echoed activist refrains about historical repetition. ¹⁰ Outside in, however, could also be interpreted in the context of recent insights from scholarship on data-sorting technologies in the exercise of sovereign power, which suggests that sovereign decisionism is contingent on how lives are made intelligible for security action. ¹¹ Outside in immersed visitors in computational distinction-making processes like those used by governments to identify and secure against perceived threats. ¹² This immersion, at a time when the US and Mexican governments were producing spaces of social exclusion in the name of security, invited visitors to experience technologies of exceptional power as unexceptional and ubiquitous. ¹³

The remainder of this essay follows from a panel discussion in October 2018 during which we reflected on Outside in as a creative-geographical way to question the exceptionality of the exception. ¹⁴ To interpret the artwork as a creative practice of geography, we (1) briefly describe the artwork’s historical context and (2) analyze its composition and exhibition in Cuernavaca. At the premiere, Castro practiced a form of what Philip Crang has characterized as creative public geography. ¹⁵ With inspiration from work in creative geography, we intend this essay to promote ‘dialogues’ beyond this particular space and time ¹⁶ on themes around which Outside in observably elicited reflection: that is, on relationships between past and contemporary processes and technologies by which lives are sorted as a condition for the operation of camps like the Hacienda.

The respatialization of Japanese lives in Mexico

A label at the entrance to the dark room of Outside in informs visitors of the history within which their experience of the artwork can be interpreted. Visitors accordingly learn that concentration camps across the Americas in the 1940s were a spatial form that embodied long-running discrimination against people with Japanese heritage. ¹⁷ The places from which we write – Morelos in Mexico and Wyoming in the United States – share this history. In the United States, young Japanese-Americans suffered racist attacks in the first decade of the 20th century, ¹⁸ after previous generations negotiated exclusionary laws designed to protect the ‘demographic status quo’ by restricting immigration from Asia. ¹⁹ The targeting of Japanese-Americans was officially sanctioned in the United States between the late-19th and mid-20th centuries; for example, the US State and War Departments issued orders in 1910 that authorities should observe Japanese immigrants as threats to national security. ²⁰ In Mexico too, officials regarded Japanese immigrants and their descendants as a danger to national security in the context of a dispute over the Pacific between Japan and the United States. ²¹

In the early 1940s, the Mexican government enacted a series of measures to justify the transfer and concentration of people with Japanese heritage to central Mexico, beginning by freezing their bank accounts after the Pearl Harbor attack. ²² At the time, most Mexicans with Japanese heritage lived in northwestern Mexico. ²³ These families were the first to receive transfer orders, and in 1942 and 1943, 6,000 people were transferred to Guadalajara and Mexico City, losing social connections through that displacement. ²⁴ Community members who lacked economic means or failed to attain employment in these cities were subsequently concentrated in the Hacienda, in Morelos. ²⁵ Concentration in the Hacienda was curiously facilitated by acquisition of the property by the Japanese-descended community. People with Japanese heritage who were already living in central Mexico formed the Committee of Mutual Help (CMH) in order to house displaced people. ²⁶ In June 1942, while Mexico’s government was confiscating the possessions of displaced Japanese-heritage families, the CMH acquired authorization to buy the Hacienda, in order to comply with the government’s directives but also protect their community from more arbitrary treatment. ²⁷ The approximately 800 people living at the Hacienda built their housing and cultivated rice and vegetables for their own consumption. ²⁸ Almost half would stay at the Hacienda for 3 years, until August 1945, when Japan surrendered and the order of concentration in Mexico ceased. ²⁹

This transfer and concentration of Mexicans with Japanese heritage corresponded to a wider consolidation of authoritarian mechanisms in the formation of a liberal-democratic Mexican state. ³⁰ As elsewhere, the authoritarianism immanent to liberal-democratic politicking in Mexico depended upon identification of ‘apparent’ threats. ³¹ In Mexico too, the indefinite suspension of legal status for people with Japanese heritage was contingent upon an official discourse according to which they appeared as a threat to national security. ³² In Mexico and elsewhere, computational processes of data sorting and pattern recognition now do this work of making some lives appear as threats requiring emergency response. ³³ In this context, Outside in juxtaposes past and contemporary processes of national securitization through social exclusion by introducing the case of the Hacienda to visitors for whom it may be unfamiliar and immersing visitors in a form of pattern recognition and data sorting upon which much security action relies. As we detail below, the premiere in Cuernavaca in late 2018 also provided opportunity for Outside in to be experienced in relation to renewed exclusionary nationalism in Mexico and the United States.

Sovereign power as contingent on aesthetic order

Outside in dismembers four classic films, rearranges their elements and presents them in the same constrained space. Three of the films are Japanese, while the other is a Mexican film starring Mifune Toshirō, a Japanese actor who played an Indigenous Mexican man striving to be the patron of a religious festivity. In that latter case (Ánimas Trujano), the actor embodies a Mexican archetype so that Mexicanness itself is put under pressure, as performed by a Japanese national. The other films also underscore themes of belonging, identity and social exclusion. In The Quiet Duel, Mifune stars as a doctor who contracted syphilis in WWII from a patient’s blood during a surgical procedure. In The Face of Another, a man finds a doctor who fashions a lifelike mask that the man can use, incognito, to seduce his own wife. Finally, the main character of Black Rose Mansion is a femme fatale at a private men’s club, played by famous drag queen and singer Miwa Akihiro. Through the performance of a Mexican archetype by a non-national in one case and an explicit focus on embodied difference in the others (i.e. another person’s blood, a lifelike mask and a performance of gendered difference), each film challenges social and spatial certainties. ³⁴ This effect is amplified in Outside in by the algorithmic discrimination system, which continuously classifies and recombines elements from each film.

As described earlier, Outside in presents elements from the films through three different channels, each of which corresponds to a distinct machine learning process (facial recognition, natural language processing and timbre analysis). The images, subtitles and sound from each film accordingly lack synchronicity and lead separate lives on the walls to which they are displaced. Real-time algorithmic discrimination sorts the source material so it is resituated with whatever is perceived to be of the same type. Formally, then, visitors are immersed in an ongoing discrimination process through which distinctions are made between, and types constructed from, the faces, sentiments and sounds that were present in the original films. Upon being informed – through the label at the entrance to the dark room – about the Hacienda’s history, visitors at the premiere in Cuernavaca entered the installation ready to understand the Hacienda not simply as a past episode of authoritarian excess but instead as a spatial form that materialized from distinction-making processes that endure in the name of securing national bodies from apparent threats. At the time of the premiere, Outside in could also be understood to accompany activists in the United States and Mexico who were articulating a sense of transnational solidarity that challenged both countries’ renewal of anti-migrant nationalism. That the Hacienda was created, in part, to satisfy the US government in the 1940s allowed one to understand the camp as part of an ongoing history of transnational border enforcement, which is now evident in the Mexican government’s policing of migrants at the Mexico–Guatemala border, again partly to satisfy US government demands. ³⁵

These reflections began in the context of a 27 October 2018 roundtable in Cuernavaca, with Castro as moderator and Crane (a geographer) and Hernández Galindo (a historian) presenting. Particularly during the question-and-answer session, it was clear that audience members, like students in Castro’s classrooms at the Centro Morelense de las Artes, had mostly never heard of the Hacienda as a concentration camp for Mexicans with Japanese heritage. If they did know the Hacienda as a contemporary resort (http://www.temixcoacuatico.com/), they tended to be unfamiliar with its role in detaining people of Japanese heritage in the Americas. The audience also largely struggled to recognize the Mexicanness of people with Japanese heritage who were transferred to the Hacienda. Audience members made statements to this effect during the question-and-answer session, most strikingly in claims to belonging in the national body that they would not extend to Mexicans with Japanese heritage. For example, one audience member said, ‘No sabía que eso les había pasado a los japoneses aquí’ (‘I didn’t know that this happened to the Japanese here’), which implied the speaker’s failure to recognize as Mexican the people – ‘los japoneses’ – who were detained at the Hacienda. Another audience member contextualized their question by saying, ‘Yo sí soy de acá, mi familia sí es de aquí, de acá somos todos’ (‘I really am from here, my family is from here, we are all from here’), which implied a sense of belonging that the speaker did not extend to people with Japanese heritage. These audience members asserted a sense of irresolvable difference from the detainees even after our presentations clarified that many people detained at the Hacienda were in fact Mexicans who had arbitrarily lost the right to be Mexican. Their ignorance of this history and its implication in exclusionary constructions of Mexicanness today indicates for us that racist disavowals of difference endure in a society shot through with post-racial ideology. ³⁶

Some audience members’ investment in being essentially different from detainees was, however, punctured at the roundtable by a discussion of how the Hacienda’s creation was contingent upon relations across space and over time. We emphasized Castro’s intention to refer, in Outside in, to the camp in Morelos as a spatial form that emerged from distinction-making processes that endure today. This resituation of the Hacienda in a longer history of exclusionary nationalism across the Americas appeared to resonate with some audience members. At the time, President Trump had recently described people migrating through Central America as ‘invaders’, and US and Mexican government agencies had publicly recommitted to securing their nations against an apparent ‘crisis’. ³⁷ That the Morelos case was an effect of processes that also constituted other places was underscored by Crane’s use of Skype to participate from Wyoming, where Japanese-Americans were detained in the Heart Mountain War Relocation Center between 1942 and 1945.

Practitioners of creative geography have recently sought to situate their ‘doing’ in past and contemporary political contexts to generate attunement to possibilities that inhere in the everyday. ³⁸ As a practice of creative public geography, ³⁹ Outside in’s premiere deliberately engaged visitors around forgotten histories of authoritarianism in Morelos and ongoing processes of discrimination that enable the creation of concentration camps like the Hacienda. Castro’s installation accordingly complemented recent geographical work that, in a more conventional form, also reveals the practiced spatiality of camps as a political technology. ⁴⁰ Castro invited visitors to immerse themselves in the operation of a technology by which lives are sorted and readied visitors to experience Outside in as an evocation of the spatial form made possible by constructing and categorizing particular groups of people as the embodiment of a ‘crisis’. By presenting the Hacienda’s emergence as contingent upon ubiquitous and still-ongoing processes, Castro’s installation also promoted reflection on one’s implication in reproducing or refusing imposed separations that, as in the past, still materialize in the construction of concentration camps.