Spaces Stretch Inward: Intersections between Architecture and Minor Literature

Feigis, Irit Katz

doi:10.1215/08992363-2010-003

Cited by 7 publications

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“…171 The camp is often a tool of the majority, used by it to expand or exclude, to gain or maintain political power. However, camps may also be the platform or the instrument for a minor micropolitics of becoming which changes and manipulates the architecture of the majority, whether they are camps created for refugees, indigenous minorities or immigrants and changed by them as in Rachme or the Palestinian refugee camps, 172 or they are the makeshift migrant/refugee camps being erected today in the heart of cities. 173 Thus, it is clear that rather than being only 'a political technology [….where] desubjectivation is made operational', 174 the camp increasingly appears, in this research as well as in other studies, as a complex space of major and minor political action and resistance, in which not only 'bare life' but also 'everyday life' is produced.…”

Section: From 'Bare Life' To 'Everyday Life'mentioning

confidence: 99%

‘The Common Camp’: temporary settlements as a spatio-political instrument in Israel-Palestine

Katz

2017

The Journal of Architecture

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Irit KatzCamps, whether created by or for refugees, undocumented migrants or 'war on terror'suspects, form a central mechanism by which modern societies and territories are managed. While most of us live in permanent built environments which create the stable and predictable settings for our mundane activities, other people are ruptured from such a prosaic reality, living in a situation which is transient and ephemeral.Camps are an inseparable part of this reality of displacement and movement, detention, asylum and refuge. These spaces are often created ad hoc due to an urgent need and later are frequently suspended in time with no clear future, separated from their social, cultural and spatial surroundings.While detention, transit and refugee camps differ substantially in terms of their functions, conditions and modes of creation and organisation, they are all recognised as various forms of the same ever-present mechanism of modernity that is still an important aspect of how we live today. Over the last decade, much has been written about the 'return of the camp', 1 mainly in relation to the camps of the US 'war on terror' 2 and the global proliferation of the camps which form part of the current 'migration age'. 3 Yet the camp has never disappeared since its first emergence in the colonies as early as the 19th century 4 and its extensive use during the 20th century, which will be remembered, as stated famously by Zygmunt Bauman, as the 'Century of Camps'. 5 In Israel-Palestine, the camp was and still is prevalently used to facilitate the significant geopolitical changes of the last century related to the Israeli nationbuilding process and the mass displacement it caused. 6 Camps are extensively employed by both authoritarian regimes and contemporary democracies as instruments of control, custody, care and abandonment. As such, they are mainly analysed as 'devices of power', created by, and mostly for, stripped populations which are managed outside society and the normal state apparatuses in order to maintain the 'national order of things'. 7 However, the camp is not only a space for powerless people: while many camps are indeed inhabited by weak populations excluded by strong powers, others are used by the strong to gain and

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Section: From 'Bare Life' To 'Everyday Life'mentioning

confidence: 99%

‘The Common Camp’: temporary settlements as a spatio-political instrument in Israel-Palestine

Katz

2017

The Journal of Architecture

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“…Writing with Agamben as referent, though, only goes so far even when a commentator who is an architect thinks of space in architectural ways. Feigis (2010), an architect, references Agamben and actual structures as architects might conceive them if they had the specialized language to do so. This occurs as Feigis pairs the built environment of refugee camps and a reading of Kafka digested through the highly theoretical lens of Deleuze and Guattari.…”

Section: Theorizing Exceptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Refugee Housing Without Exception

Mah

Rivers

2016

Space and Culture

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South Africa experienced a recent wave of xenophobic violence in April 2015. Those fomenting violence were mostly Black Africans with South African citizenship targeting Africans from other parts of the continent. Between these attacks, and highly publicized attacks in 2008, South Africa’s government secretly devised plans to construct “model” camps to house migrants with refugee status and those seeking refugee status. The article seeks to understand the space of exception created by government’s proposal considering South Africa’s colonial and apartheid past. This is done by firstly contextualizing the South African case, secondly, placing this South African case within existing scholarship, and thirdly, problematizing the government’s “model.” Beyond this, though, the article presents a conceptual camp design as counterproposal which highlights the power of design to negate spatial exception.

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“…However, phenomenology, even though it is a discipline that emphasises the implications of being in the world, tends to operate within a rather limited and often privileged scope of experience (namely European, middle-class, male and white), and therefore it rarely considers in any particular depth what it actually means to be in and to inhabit spaces beyond what is dominantly seen as convention. While I advocate for the need for a more detailed theoretical reflection on making home from a phenomenological perspective, the relationships between space, building and dwelling would yield greater insight only if complemented by a more practical and so already spatialised approach to refugee camps as found in, say, human geography and architectural studies (Katz, 2010;. This is what I intend here by an intervention -or, more precisely, intermezzo -which looks in more detail at the concrete example of the Palestinian refugee camp, Nahr Al-Barid.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Making home(s) in displacement: critical reflections on a spatial practice Making home(s) in displacement: critical reflections on a spatial practice , by Luce Beeckmans, Alessandra Gola, Ashika Singh, and Hilde Heynen (Eds), 2022, Leuven, Leuven University Press, 425 pp., $69.50 (paperback), ISBN 978 94 6270 293 6 (paperback)

Şahin

2023

Gender, Place & Culture

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This edited collection of papers was born out of a doctoral workshop and conference held in Brussels, Belgium, in March 2019 and entitled, Displacement & Domesticity since 1945: Refugees, Migrants and Expats Making Homes. This was a themed conference sponsored by the European Architectural History Network (EAHN), The Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium (KVAB) and KU Leuven's Faculty of Architecture. Many people, including the editors of this book and many of its contributors, were involved in the organisation of both the workshop and conference. Special thanks go to the organising committee -Alessandra Gola, Anamica Singh, Ashika Singh and Hilde Heynen -for overseeing the conference from beginning to end.At the time, the goal of the organising committee was ambitious but simple: to bring together scholars, activists and architects involved in the (re-)thinking of what it means to imagine, design and create 'homes' in contexts of human displacement. The notion of home itself was placed in relation to domesticity, not with the intention to interiorise or to privatise the concept, but in order to draw attention to spatio-material effects and processes of home-making, which differ from more traditional and idealised associations of comfort and security. Although the origins of this project are rooted in architectural circles, the intellectual agenda was from the start set up as interdisciplinary. Therefore, the conference opened its call to and welcomed papers from the fields of architectural history, theory and practice, ethnography and sociology of space, human and cultural geography, migration studies, as well as post-colonial studies and decolonial criticism, and philosophy. Hence, the conference's goal was to bring together scholars who shared a spatialised and interdisciplinary approach to the intersection of displacement and making of home(s). This objective remains very much the focus of this edited volume.The origins of this edited volume are more than circumstantial. The theme resonates not only with a number of conferences and workshops that emerged around the same time, but also with fraught and ongoing political situations both now and in the past. Among the former, those with a focus on migration, architecture and space include: 'Urban Arrival Infrastructures' (Cosmopolis Centre for Urban Research, VUB, 2015); 'Inside Out -Outside In: Shifting Architectures of Refugee (In) Habitation' (Max Planck Institute, 2019); 'Infrastructures of Care: Spaces of Refuge and Displacement' (The Bartlett, UCL, 2019); and 'Moving, Living, Investing, and Surviving: Housing and Migrations in Uncertain Times' (IMISCOE, 2020).Many of these intellectual activities arose in response to the so-called European refugee 'crisis' of 2015 and, indeed, there is much to be said and is being said ever greater strain in order to survive and, within this, to maintain a sense of human dignity. And yet, what we believe and hope is that this global experience, however variously it has manifested itself, will open the chapters of this edited vo...

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Spaces Stretch Inward: Intersections between Architecture and Minor Literature

Abstract: This essay offers an analysis of the architectural environment of the Palestinian refugee camps in Gaza, examined through a comparison of Deleuze and Guattari's “minor literature” interpreting Kafka's work.

Cited by 7 publications

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‘The Common Camp’: temporary settlements as a spatio-political instrument in Israel-Palestine

‘The Common Camp’: temporary settlements as a spatio-political instrument in Israel-Palestine

Refugee Housing Without Exception

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