Sunday, August 6th 2006  4PM
San Francisco, CA

Ticket Info: $10 general admission, FREE for Headlands Members

Join us for a discussion on the ways the war, the “War on Terror,” and the global economy shape landscapes we’re all familiar with—petroleum landscapes in Richmond, CA, Wal-Mart parking lots, inner-city poverty—and how the war agenda shapes the places where it is fought, thereby impacting other places half a world away. The panel will talk about temporary and permanent changes in the terrain made by state violence and the reaction to it. This is a particularly apt subject for the Headlands, which is located in a decommissioned military landscape of bunkers, gunner pivots and Nike missile equipment. Wars are usually seen as actions rather than as transformations of the very terrain in which we act. With the current war, however, not only has Iraq become a bizarre landscape of terror, security, and ruin, but the “War on Terror,” Homeland Security and the war budget have transformed the landscape of the United States in many ways. How does fear shape how people move through the world or limit their circulation?

How does secrecy hide government acts and sites from citizens? What acts of defiance reclaim public space and public life?

Kenneth Helphand, Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Oregon, is the author of Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime. These gardens are created in extreme social, political, economic or cultural conditions., This remarkable book examines gardens of war in the 20th century, including gardens built behind the trenches in World War I, in the Warsaw and other ghettos during World War II, and in Japanese-American internment camps, as well as gardens created by soldiers at their bases and encampments during wars in the Persian Gulf, Vietnam, and Korea.

Antonia Juhasz is the author of The Bush Agenda: Invading the World One Economy at a Time. Her blurb says: “THE BUSH AGENDA exposes the Bush Administration’s use of corporate globalization policy as a weapon of war in Iraq, the Middle East – through the U.S.-Middle East Free Trade Area, and across the world as it builds a Pax Americana. Tracing twenty-five years of corporate globalization policy, it reveals the history and key role of U.S. corporations in the creation of the Bush Agenda, focusing on Bechtel, Lockheed Martin, Chevron, and Halliburton. It concludes with specific achievable alternatives for a more peaceful and sustainable course.”.

Trevor Paglen is a visual artist and Ph.D. candidate in Geography at U.C. Berkeley, whose dissertation focuses on secret military sites in Nevada. He is also writing a book (forthcoming from Melville Books in October) with Peabody-award-winning journalist A. C. Thompson on the CIA’s torture flights and the planespotters who deciphered them.

Rebecca Solnit, moderator, is a writer and activist based in San Francisco. Her most recent books are Hope in the Dark and River of Shadows.

Location:
Headlands Center for the Arts East Wing, Building 944
San Francisco, CA