ABSTRACT
On a more conceptual and political level, the phones disturb the categories that have been historically used to frame images of immigrants in the United States (US). In line with other US war zones established after Operation Desert Shield (1990-1991), otherwise known as the Gulf War, the plans mounted a theater of operations both visible and invisible. Place, stage, and landscape are here envisioned in theatrical and historical terms, through a constant play on the meaning of the notions of stage and staging. In the Transborder Immigrant Tool (TBT), Amy Sara Carroll's poems are printed using a carefully thought-out layout that reverberates the TBT's contrasting structures of meaning: division and union, territory and crossing, landscape and history, beauty and function, and so forth. Mapping, a tool for territory and state formation, imposes an imagined, abstract order over lived space, revealing something about the spatial categories inherent to the social order.
