This conversation addresses an important aspect of Merve Bedir’s work (along with Jason Hilgefort at Land+Civilization Compositions) regarding the architectural and linguistic dimension of Turkish politics regarding the 2.5 million refugees the country currently “hosts”—the very notions of “host” and “guest” are the first things discussed here. Through the description of several sites of either appropriation or dispossession/detention by and of refugee bodies in Istanbul and in other regions of Turkey, we try to think of the architect’s political role and responsibility, remembering however that we must always doubt of our own actions when they have such drastic consequences. Merve Bedir ...

The five p’s: proper planning prevents poor performance I’ve been building a car at Elwood Bodyworks for a couple of years. Bill Cherry’s my mentor. He lets me use his tools and constantly reminds me of the 5 P’s: Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance. These are Bill’s tools.

Lauren Wetmore interviews Swiss American curator and writer Alexandra Stock about her scathing critique of Christophe Büchel’s 2019 Venice Biennale project Barca Nostra. Published that same year by the independent Egyptian online newspaper Mada Masr, Stock’s “The Privileged, Violent Stunt That is the Venice Biennale Boat Project” decries an “artworld that repels all criticism of it,” and describes the repercussion of being one of the first voices to publicly denouncing this high-profile artwork. Stock is an occasional writer, artist, and consultant based mainly in Cairo since 2007. She graduated from the Zurich University of the Arts with a BFA in Art Theory, participated in De Appel’s ...

In this conversation, we talk about Harsha Walia’s new fantastic book, Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism (Haymarket, 2021), which draws an international map of the border imperialist regime in its geographic, historic, and legal complexities. We then proceed in trying to envision the various forms of internationalist solidarities that emerge in the struggle against this global regime, following in particular Indigenous and/or Black resistance. Harsha Walia is the award-winning author of Undoing Border Imperialism (2013). Trained in the law, she is a community organizer and campaigner in migrant justice, anti-capitalist, feminist, and anti-imperialist movements, ...

How can you navigate towards something when there are no fixed points when you cannot determine your position? How do you know where to go, or even know when you have got there? This fourth volume in the Archifutures series investigates how architecture, traditionally considered to be a future?oriented activity, can best respond as we find ourselves on the threshold of a “post-futurist” condition where the future is not necessarily ahead of us, but everywhere and – perhaps most especially – “now”. Contributors include: Nora Akawi, Florian Bengert, Filipe Estrela, Mariabruna Fabrizi, Nikita Gyawali, Ana Jeini, Holly Lewis, Fosco Lucarelli, Brett ...

Each architecture that was thought as a physical implementation of private property contains already in itself the potential for containment in a legal situation like the one of quarantine. David Garcia talks about the origins of such a situation, its territorialization (lazaretto, Ellis Island etc.) as well as its application on bodies, but also on entire landscapes like in Chernobyl and Fukushima. We discuss about Michel Foucault’s definition of biopolitics through the historical example of the quarantined city that suffers from the plague, as well as David’s own architectural projects in response to the various problems tackle by quarantine. David Garcia ...

Displaced outside of the cinema, the films invite us to form a new assembly. The series a cinema situation concentrates not only on the films but also on the potentiality of this assembly and, more widely, on the social practices that have contributed to the creation of new film cultures – film societies, cineclubs, film-makers clubs within decolonial movements, video salons, film workshops, etc. – by establishing other modes of production and distribution, by setting up spaces of freedom, sites for emergent subjectivities. The series would have us question our relation to the films, to their images, complicating it by ...

This twelfth SDUK broadsheet examines the diverse means by which individuals and communities build lasting or fleeting bonds. Coinciding with the conclusion of Crossings: Itineraries of Encounter, the Blackwood’s 2021–22 lightbox series, this issue, BONDING, echoes themes seen throughout Crossings: migration, diaspora, borders, and archives. Where the lightbox exhibitions examine image-making practices, this SDUK issue engages print culture in new and recurring formats including visual storytelling, poetry, a letter exchange, and a recipe. Food is the source of many enduring cultural bonds, and thus one might be tempted to start from the gut: See Diasporic Dumplings (p. 27) for a site-responsive ...

Border Thinking: Disassembling Histories of Racialized Violence aims to question and provide answers to current border issues in Europe. Central to this investigation is a refugee crisis that is primarily a crisis of global Western capitalism and its components: modernization, nationalism, structural racism, dispossession, and social, political, and economic violence. In this volume, these notions and conditions are connected with the concept of borders, which seems to have disappeared as a function of the global neoliberal economy but is palpably reappearing again and again through deportations, segregations, and war. How can we think about these relations in an open way, ...

Lucie Bacon and I had this conversation only a few days after she finished her second field trip in Bosnia-and-Herzegovina where her research took her to study the European Union politics of “externalization,” i.e. the ‘subcontracting’ of its (anti-)migration policies outside of the Shenghen Space. Lucie has visited some asylum centers, where numerous migrants wait to be granted their legal status, and detention centers, where migrant bodies are imprisoned prior to their expulsion. She collected numerous testimonies from migrants themselves, but also organizers, activists, administrative officials, etc. and tell us about them in this discussion. We also talk about her ...

The ninth episode of the Corona Under the Ocean series, with ship captain and sea rescue activist Carola Rackete, begins with her early research in the Arctic and Antarctic, and how she experienced the melting of the poles, without the need for scientific data. That was also when she decided to engage in political action in order to have a real impact on the multiple forms of violence the capitalist system perpetrates, both human and environmental, both individual and structural. This podcast is the result of a conversation between Carola Rackete and Sonia Fernández Pan, in which the Covid-19 pandemic ...

Deal or No Deal is an exhibition sourcebook detailing a field of transactions and negotiations, employing elements of geometric formalism to delineate various positions of inclusion and exclusion, participation and observation, and the particular and universal. The circle, line, and square in its proliferation are brought into relation with the built environment. Intersecting circles, shaded areas, and parallel stripes form abstract Venn diagrams illustrating uncontainable combinations of relationships and differences (insiders and outsiders).