The following description comes from the event organizer.

Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller are the directors of AGENCY, a design and research practice leveraging spatial design and information to counteract global and urban inequality. Located on the US/Mexico border, their work engages emerging publics in protracted, conflictual contexts by consistently shifting the narrative, developing targeted methods to identify, appropriate, and subvert subperceptual urban and atmospheric phenomena that violate human rights.

AGENCY has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Rome Prize in Architecture, ALNY Emerging Voices Award, and the Architecture Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among many others. In inclusion to their accolades, they are fellows of MacDowell and the New York Foundation of the Arts and Letters. Their work has been exhibited widely, from the Venice Biennale, to the Berlin and Hong-Kong—Shenzhen Biennales.

Their talk, FRONTS, will discuss the research done in Kripa & Mueller’s book, FRONTS: Military Urbanisms and the Developing World (AR+D, 2020). Kripa and Mueller will expand upon the original urban research and analysis from their book to reveal how a growing geography of codependence between the global security complex and the urban morphologies of the developing world which it increasingly incriminates.