Political Equator 3 is a 2-day cross-border mobile conference held on the 3rd and 4th of June 2011. This event is co-organized by the Center for Urban Ecologies in the Visual Arts Department at UCSD, and two community-based, non-profit organizations on both sides of the border, Casa Familiar in San Ysidro, California and Alter Terra in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico.
The third program in a series of bi-national conferences, PE3 continues to engage pressing regional socio-economic, urban and environmental conditions across the San Diego–Tijuana border. These meetings have been focusing on a critical analysis of local conflicts in order to re-evaluate the meaning of shifting global dynamics, across geo-political boundaries, natural resources and marginal communities.
Following the format of previous Political Equator meetings, PE3 is a nomadic event, an itinerant conversation traversing the border landscape itself bringing participants to the actual sites of conflict. This time, the audience will oscillate between two marginal neighborhoods on both sides of the border known as creative urban laboratories for re-imagining this border region. PE3 will unfold through a series of performances and public walks that will traverse these conflicting territories enabling debates and conversations at different stations, including an unprecedented border-crossing-performance through a large pipe under Home Land security that will allow the participants to cross the border from a protected Estuary on the US side into a Tijuana Slum that collides with the border wall on the Mexican side.
Attracting an international, regional and local roster of artists, architects, environmentalists, scholars, community activists and politicians, PE III will focus on The Border Neighborhood as a Site of Production, investigating practices in the arts, architecture, science and the humanities that work with peripheral neighborhoods worldwide where conditions of social and economic emergency are inspiring new ways of thinking and doing across institutions of urban development and public culture.
This event is receiving major support from the FORD Foundation in addition, this project has been supported in part by The Visual Arts Department and Calit2 at University of California, San Diego.
for more information go to:
www.PoliticalEquator.org
