Questioning the exceptionality of the exception: Annabel Castro’s ‘Outside in: exile at home’ (2018) in Cuernavaca

Abstract

Annabel Castro’s art installation ‘Outside in: exile at home’ (2018) problematizes indefinite detention at the Hacienda de Temixco, in Morelos, Mexico, a facility which functioned as a concentration camp for Japanese immigrants and their descendants between 1942 and 1945. The Hacienda de Temixco, like other sites for indefinite detention of Japanese-descended people in the Americas, was contingent upon making detainees’ lives intelligible for security action as the embodiment of a ‘crisis’. This essay interprets Castro’s artwork and its premiere in Cuernavaca as a creative-geographical way to engage visitors around relationships between past and contemporary distinction-making processes by which particular groups of people are refigured as threats to national security. To interpret the artwork as a creative practice of geography, we (1) briefly describe the artwork’s historical context and (2) analyze its composition and exhibition in Cuernavaca at a time when activists in Mexico and the United States were articulating a sense of solidarity that exceeds exclusionary constructions of threatened national bodies.