Join the Graham Foundation Bookshop for the launch of Ecologies of Power: Countermapping the Logistical Landscapes & Military Geographies of the U.S. Department of Defense (MIT Press, 2016), a Graham funded publication by Pierre Bélanger and Alexander Arroyo. Taking place as part of a new Saturday series of Graham Foundation grantee book launches in the Madlener House foyer, an informal space between the Graham Foundation’s Grantee Library and Bookshop, this event will feature a discussion between Bélanger and Arroyo as they introduce their anti-disciplinary process of research, development, and collaboration on the book during the past six years. The presentation will provide insight into the often neglected discourse about the role of media in spatial policy, logistical operations, military deployment, and infrastructural development at the intersection of matters of land, landscape, terrain, territory, and power. The talk will be followed by a reception in the bookshop where copies of the title will be available.

Weaving together an extraordinary range of visual media and original geographic work, this critical cartographic volume counter-maps the geospatial footprint of the U.S. Department of Defense beyond the battlefield, revealing a vast and shifting military-logistical landscape reshaping infrastructures and environments at every scale. Moving beyond conventional military geographies of combat zones and covert operations, Pierre Bélanger and Alexander Arroyo explore the forces and forms of this landscape from the molecular and metabolic to the political and the planetary, giving new dimension to familiar military milieux of land, air, sea, and space. In so doing, they trace out a growing assemblage of logistically linked “operational environments,” where militarized, demilitarized, and non-militarized landscapes are ever more entangled. It is in this assemblage that they find emergent ecologies of power at work in the making, unmaking, and remaking of operational environments across existing, emerging, and future horizons.

Pierre Bélanger is a landscape urbanist, founder of OPSYS (Landscape Infrastructure Lab), and Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture and Co-Director of the postgraduate Master’s Degree in Design Studies Program at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. Bélanger has received two Graham Foundation grants to individuals and is the national curator of the Canada Pavilion for the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale.

Alexander Arroyo is an environmental designer and critical geographer with a background in philosophy from Columbia University and landscape architecture from Harvard University, currently pursuing his PhD in Geography at the University of California, Berkeley.

Related Graham supported projects:

2013 Individual Grant to Pierre Bélanger for “Ecologies of Power: Countermapping the Logistical Landscapes and Military Geographies of the U.S. Department of Defense"

2016 Individual Grant to Pierre Bélanger and Nina-Marie Lister for "Extraction Empire: Sourcing the Scales, Systems, and States of a Global Resource Empire"

Image: Helmand Valley Region (Afghanistan) © Behrouz Mehri AFP Getty.