Portable Public Space: Embodied Responses to the Mediterranean Refugee Crisis

Abstract

Portable Public Space: Embodied Responses to the Mediterranean Refugee Crisis is ELISAVA’s proposal integrated within Navire Avenir, an international project to design and build a rescue ship for the Mediterranean, promoted by Sébastien Thiéry (Pôle d’Exploration des Ressources Urbaines, PEROU). One of the main objectives of this action-based research project is to propose new approaches to the European refugee crisis through intimate design practices of care. The project explores how to suspend European policies of distanced empathy by positing the human body as a direct practice instead of a passive subject. We wanted to avoid an all-too common superficial, distanced empathy with refugees by putting our own bodies on the line. We thus proposed an honest acceptance of our privileged position, which, while making it impossible for us to put ourselves in the shoes of migrants, allows us to experiment with our own bodies to explore new forms of the politics of care through design, implemented in immediate contexts of everyday life. In this sense, the project entails a series of affective transactions with the socio-political crisis activated by a first-person perspective and dynamic experimentation with the body. Affectivity and vulnerability articulate a design approach that explores the notion of a portable public space. The concept appears as we ask how to negotiate the harsh conditions on board a rescue ship, a space-time in which people live together without a shared cultural, social or spatial code. If urban public space acts as a potential catalyst for encounters with otherness, what kind of public space can we imagine for the heterotopic conditions of a rescue ship? Because we cannot intervene directly on the space of the ship or with the bodies of refugees at this stage, we engage our own bodies in our urban context to address this question. Consequently, portable public space becomes an operative concept to refer to body-centered practices aimed at generating a nomadic space-time, devoid of a stable spatial framework, that will ensure a sense of intimate protection, trigger a sense of belonging and encourage collective sharing. The project is developed in three phases. In the first phase, we explore the humanitarian emergency through field research of the refugee’s post-rescue journey and performative mapping actions to visualize the Mediterranean refugee crisis, identifying wearables and actions, respectively, as two crucial design formats. In the second phase, dynamic experimentation with the body is used to proliferate fast, visceral reactions to basic notions of protection, affect and mourning. In the final phase, we revisit wearables and actions as two possible formats of care-based design that explore the notion of a portable public space. Fundamentally, Portable Public Space: Embodied Responses to the Mediterranean Refugee Crisis explores new formats of public space related to the body-in-transit, in order to propose radical design approaches to the humanitarian crisis which posit the human body as the locus and the means for a revised practice of care.