Tuscon, Arizona, USA
It is a surreal scene in the Sonoran Desert: rows and rows of old military aircraft, baking in heat and dust. Welcome to the “Boneyard”, one of the largest collections of old aircraft left over from decades of U.S. airpower and warfare around the world. This large site is located inside the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, an active base on the outskirts of Tucson, Arizona (USA), and is where old aircraft go when their time patrolling the skies of the world comes to an end. Over 4,000 aircraft are housed there, making it one of the largest facilities of its kind.
The fieldwork film is part of a project that looks at violence of the military meets everyday civilian life directly, making them intriguing laboratories for understanding everyday militarism. It builds on military geographies and borrows Rachel Woodward’s (2005) definition of a “critical military geography… which seeks to understand how life in the civilian sphere is shaped by military structures and imperatives” (as summarised by Bernazzoli and Flint 2009, p. 393).
"It may seem a stretch to be suggesting that these military museums cause slow violence, which is typically associated with the real embodied suffering of those impacted by environmental racism and other infrastructural conditions. Because of the specific nature of this military infrastructure, one that straddles military and civilian geographies, given the auto-ethnographic work and observations at large, we are compelled to make a linkage between slow violence and epistemic violence, as the later has been elaborated on in the context of museum politics (Tolia-Kelly 2019)This particular form of epistemic violence resembles slow violence, then, we suggest as real harms are distributed as a result. In an infrastructural scenario like the military museum, we must consider these as gaining force from each other."