Hostile Territory: Between Inside and Out
Hostile Territory looks at windows.
In a series of photography, postcards and video from multiple continents, including North and South America, Pacific Islands, Western and Northern Europe, and it includes an exhibition and a free newspaper of the same title.
The project traces the thin, slit-shaped windows of modern prisons to their architectural antecedents. Considering the modern prison’s relationship to pre-modern structures of defense, battle and worship, it studies the thresholds they draw between people, shaping their regulation, subjectivity, collectivity and vision.
Complicating the notion that the “birth of the prison” was during Modernity, as an enlightenment institution, Hostile Territory looks instead to their emergence from spaces of warfare — its architecture and its ideological production of “enemies” and “outsiders.”
Installation in 2023 Burren Annual, Burren College of Art
Hostile Territory’s images picture fortresses used to perpetrate and resist colonial aggression, castles that were inverted into jails, city walls that excluded and jailed, bunkers, armories and lookouts, and prisons converted into museums. Accompanied by writing on architecture, ruins, technology, the politics of looking, bodies and imaginaries, and of revolutionary struggle, Hostile Territory reorients a gaze across layers of time, where architecture is a site of struggle and a repository of social and political memory.
While “hostility” refers to hostilities staged at these thresholds, their policing and their resistance alike, it also refers to a hostility of meanings — meanings that are hostile to interpretation, which contradict and undo, which bend and collapse the carceral logics that mass incarceration feeds upon. Located beyond the edges of what carceral regimes know how to see and control, these meanings might make a way for a different repository of meaning to come forward — stories, identities, memories and narratives of survival and subversion that are hostile to the prison’s narratives, its order, vision and schemas of legibility.
Developing out of Hunt’s ongoing visual research into the history and effects of the prison, Hostile Territory originally took shape through the essay, “Politics of Vision in the Carceral State: Legibility and Looking in Hostile Territory,” edited by Michelle Brown for the Oxford Encyclopedia of Criminology. Exhibition images here show its installation for the 2023 Burren Annual, at Burren College of Art in Ballyvaughan, Ireland, where the original essay was revised into this free newspaper, included as a takeaway in the exhibition.