Transect:
31˚52′11″ N, 111˚07′29″ W to 37˚04′42″ N, 116˚01′49″ W

Year   2025
       rvtr
Team   Geoffrey Thun
       Kathy Velikov
       Vanessa Lekaj   

This work assembles a layered transect through sites distributed across Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada, spanning the Sonoran, Chihuahuan, and Great Basin deserts of the southwest US. It reveals the occupations of desert lands, underlands, and skies by scientific, techno-industrial, and military agents, by sites of extraction, surveillance, experimentation, and planetary control.

From the deep extraction of copper resources necessary to advance the electric systems undergirding this complex, we pass through a series of composite hybrid section / elevations: Intercontinental Ballistic Missile silos, surficial displays of airfortress disassembly, the Very Large Array scanning the heavens for life, the Starfire Optical Range defending against aerial attack, landscapes manipulated via detonation to shape proving grounds for off-world exploration, observatories built to discover new planets and sites for terraforming, and the test sites where atoms were split and from which radioactive ash was distributed across the territory.

As the full moon rises, aerial choreographies unfold: mechanical raptors traversing training routes and operations areas, the hovering and tethered Aerostat system scanning for low level movements and crossings, and the now ubiquitous Starlink network controlling digital airspace. Above, the ancient constellations trace mythic rivalries, militaristic symbols, and encoded surveillance.

The Settler Campus

Year   2024
Team   Andrew Herscher
       Megan Kortenhof
       Vanessa Lekaj    

The Settler Campus is a research project undertaken in the seminar, “Under the Campus, the Land.” This seminar was taught in Fall 2024 at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College and Urban Planning by Andrew Herscher, with four guest lectures by Eric Hemenway, Director of the Department of Repatriation, Archives and Records for the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians. The Settler Campus explores the relationship of the University of Michigan to the colonial settlement of Anishinaabe homelands in what became the state of Michigan. The project focuses on the decision to locate the university in the newly-founded Ann Arbor in 1837. How was this decision shaped by the logics of settler colonialism? Engaging this question, The Settler Campus attempts to open larger discussions on the university of Michigan’s Native and colonial pasts and presents.

Occupied Grounds:
Indian and Military Grounds

Year   2024
Prof   
       Megan Kortenhof
       Vanessa Lekaj    

This mapping examines the territorial overlap between military operations and federally designated Indian lands in Arizona. The term Indian is used as it appears in U.S. government documentation, where it continues to define Indigenous territories through colonial classification. By tracing airspace corridors, missile ranges, and training zones that intersect with reservation boundaries, the work reveals the persistence of military occupation layered atop sites of prior dispossession. The map operates as both record and indictment, an image of sovereignty under surveillance, where federal control is drawn not only across the ground but through the air above it.

Images shown below are drawn from a mapping sequence documenting the shared geographies of military and “Indian” lands.