Do refugee camps have authors? Who designs them? And what is the relationship between anonymity and these places of existence? This piece will approach such questions by suggesting anonymity as a potential central feature of and within refugee camps, addressing their ambivalent nature of lacking or missing a clearly identifiable ‘author’ or ‘designer’, while also acknowledging its power-creative capacity. A space lacking a clear author, yet created by an authority. To paraphrase Tony Fry, the central reflection is that ‘camp design, designs’ but as in Gilles Deleuze’s version of an act of creation being ‘an act of resistance’, camps are at the same time spaces of exception and unfinished projects in their fragmented, episodic, plural and uncertain nature; a temporally unstable grammar, always in motion despite its apparent fixity, drifting between past and present, visibility and invisibility. Camps are authored either by autoconstruction and inventiveness, generated by the violence of the impossibility of inhabitation, or by the regulatory and exclusionary design of planning. Camps are in themselves unfinished, transitory and caught in a perpetual present where they offer protection, recognition and anonymity, defined by their ambiguous nature. They represent the apparent paradox of a place that simultaneously makes individuals invisible and projects its residents as a collective into the public imagination. While such a story can be true in some cases, in many others anonymity as in genericity is simply a sign of non-existence, disappearance, and oblivion. Through a multimedia and interdisciplinary approach, this knowledge co-creation piece will explore such tensions, considering the camp as a form of inhabiting our planet, tenaciously resisting the paradigms and paradoxes of contemporary geopolitics.
part 1
part 2
As a part of this multimedia publication, we welcomed two guests, Silvia Aru and Samar Maqusi, for a conversation around the notion of anonymity in camps.
Silvia Aru is a political geographer who has been investigating the European migration regime regulating migrant movements in bordering regions, with a focus on Ventimiglia, in Italy. Her research has been mostly empirical and developed in various international contexts, such as Canada, Brazil and Europe.
Samar Marqusi is a research associate at the Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering, University College London (UCL), working with the RELIEF centre (UCL) on a project in Lebanon, where she is researching modes of vitality in the camp and in the city.
2:50 (kicking off)
encountering the space of the camp: how, where and why?
11:00
camps’ political life: what are they made of?
between appearance and disappearance, construction and destruction.
18:34
the form of the camp: at the intersection of temporality and permanence.
building subjectivities within political regimes.
28:08
camps and anonymity: who is the author of the camp?
part 3
https://refugeerepublic.submarinechannel.com/
https://futuress.org/magazine/refugees-welcome/
https://palarchive.org/
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/8/3/125?fbclid=IwAR2jqpZiLiifFKVHPW1pi-NREGKgfQwV9l6yTvw_-42TW7XNes3LW6MyrYY
https://thefunambulist.net/podcast/a-moment-of-true-decolonization/daily-podcast-16-saba-innab-reconstructing-nahr-el-bared-palestinian-refugee-camp
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/can-europe-make-it/how-should-we-study-europes-harmful-migration-policies/?fbclid=IwAR35UbxzBUfpaE8ay0Ma-QkuosC7BfFBxbNeRFui_cRFKzX3lpLA-htNepU
https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/inhabiting-a-hostile-environment-the-sanitary-politics-of-life-at-the-post-camp-calais-border
https://thepublicsource.org/palestinian-camps-marginalization
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/6/3/60
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249871851_The_Return_of_the_Camp
authors
This is a contribution by a couple of projektado members, supported by open collective discussions and feedback from the rest of the projektado collective. The decision to not individually name the authors is to take clear distance from the overwhelming presence of individualistic and self serving practices in design today, and instead focus on the role of collective action and shared values.
Whilst we maintain at times contrasting individual and personal opinions, styles and approaches, we all understand that our production is part of a discussion we share and that is motivated by a collective goal, and that therefore, we all feel represented by.
Camillo Boano is Professor of Urban Design and Critical Theory at The Bartlett Development Planning Unit (DPU) and professor of Architecture and Urban Desing at the Dipartimento Interateneo di Scienze, Progetto e Politiche, Territorio del Politecnico di Torino, Italy. He is Co-Director of the UCL Urban Laboratory. Camillo’s research has centred on the complex encounters between critical theory, radical philosophy and urban design processes, specifically engaging with informal urbanisations, urban collective actions, as well as crisis-generated urbanisms. He is working on a series of interconnected research projects in Latin America, South East Asia and the Middle East on urban infrastructures, habitability and the urban project. he is the author of The Ethics of Potential Urbanism. Critical Encounters between Giorgio Agamben and Architecture (2017) and Progetto Minore. Alla ricerca della Minorità nel Progetto Archiettonico ed Urbanistico (2020)
first published for projektado magazine issue 1: anonymity in design / may 2021
