In a gallery at the back of UCSB’s Art, Design & Architecture Museum, four folding worktables face a large map dotted with location markers and hung with clusters of yellow and orange tags. More tags sit in stacks on each of the tables, along with manila envelopes and pages of printouts from a database.

Opposite the map, on the two walls that flank the entrance to the room, dozens of stained and tattered T-shirts form a haphazard collage. On one side of the space, there’s a shelf displaying similarly distressed items, things like torn canvas shoes and a waterlogged diary; on the other, there’s a video monitor displaying drone footage of the Sonoran Desert in Arizona. The exhibition is called Hostile Terrain 94, and it is one of more than 150 such stations set up around the world this year by a team led by UCLA professor of anthropology and 2017 MacArthur Award recipient Jason De León. 

In order to fully appreciate Hostile Terrain 94, you need to follow the exhibit’s instructions. I’ve spent some part of the last two Saturdays participating in the show. Seated at one of the worktables in front of the map, I used black pen to fill out the slips of cardboard and string known as “toe tags,” which morgues use to identify dead bodies. From the printed spreadsheets, I dutifully copied the 14 data fields onto each tag I made by hand, writing down case numbers and location information. Some of the categories ​— ​state, county, and latitude and longitude ​— ​were familiar. Others, such as “surface management” and “corridor” were new to me. The work was at once relatively easy and impossibly difficult.