Adrien Missika

In As the Coyote Flies, the artist presents a montage composed of eleven sequences filmed by drones surveying the border between the United States and Mexico. Originally associated with military applications, the drone has now become widely accessible; Adrien Missika employs it to explore and document highly sensitive and heavily surveilled territories, creating a form of counter-surveillance using the same tools as those in power. The artist imagines the drone as a “coyote” freely traversing the desert space – a choice that is not without semantic ambiguity, as the term “coyote” also commonly refers to undocumented migrants or those who facilitate their passage across borders. The footage, recorded in 2014 on both sides of the frontier – between Ciudad Juárez and Tijuana, along the Pacific coast – reveals a fragmented geography marked by political and symbolic tensions. The presence of the border wall is inscribed within this context as an emblematic device. As the American political theorist Wendy Brown argues, such infrastructures represent a response that is at once spectacular, costly, and only apparently reassuring to the progressive weakening of nation-state sovereignty. As physical and symbolic barriers, they reveal the adoption of securitarian policies which, far from addressing the structural causes of migration, ultimately reinforce and render visible the contradictions of the system that produced them.