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The art and science of secrecy logistics continues to transform not only the geographies of production and distribution, of security and war, but also our political relations to our world and ourselves, notions of sovereignty and citizenship. The stretching of logistics systems across borders into “pipelines of trade” means that supply chain security recasts not only the object of security but its logics and spatial forms as well. “Securing the flow of goods” thus provokes questions about a series of profound shifts in relationships between security, space and economy that animate the following investigation. While “a map is not the territory”, maps are nevertheless crucially important in the production of such a space. In the study of something as widely distributed as a distribution system, maps are a critical infrastructure for the arguments presented in this project and essential architecture for its unfolding. The project is declined through a global trading and Mining Corporation that I argue is a producer of secrecy, a secrecy that is a gigantic and not abstract phenomena.
These different images and imaginaries all work together to map out a series of violent and contested geographies: spaces of movement and flow, and spaces of bordering and containment. These spaces are tackled through an environmental approach done through architecture. They are not just an environment but also a complex system, an architectural project that is spatially interesting and allows for the possibility to engage various shareholders and stakeholders.
“Fixitude” is not the normal state of things anymore and new architectures of secrecy have many possible facets. This is not a normal coherent folio: it is articulated as a dirty atlas – an atlas of the missing elements, things you do not usually see. The interplay of beauty and menace depicted by the satellite imagery exposes the ferocity, fragility and secrecy of both Qatar and Glencore; producer and middleman – the complex nuances of both cases, are still being discovered. This is an attempt to deconstruct a state|corporation duality in both projects to mobilise their inherent dualities into a platform for negotiation, tested at the COP21 Make it Work simulation in Paris and further afield. Certain transformations are already happening and we have tried to negotiate their terms.
