Laiken Jordahl is a former National Park Service naturalist who works at the Center for Biological Diversity to protect wildlife, ecosystems, and communities throughout the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.
This video essay focuses on the landscapes of the Sonoran Desert—and the project of a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico—as a way of investigating the manner in which something as seemingly generic as a wall can take on particular political and affective forms. This short provocation explores the ways that violent and distasteful objects create, and subsequently come to characterize, malevolent spectacles.