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 ...

Following our recent debate “Politics of Spatial Segregation” that shed light on racist Danish housing policies and the notion of structural discrimination co-hosted with CAMP – Center for Arts on Migration Politics in Copenhagen on 22 March, Margarida Waco from The Funambulist met with the two co-founders of the association Almen Modstand (Common Resistance), Fatma Tounsi and Marie Northroup, for a conversation about current legislation and the founding pillars of the association. The starting point of the conversation was a new strategy to rid Denmark of a parallel society by 2030 presented by the Danish Government in March 2018. To counteract ...

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 ...

The second season of Overmorrow’s Library is dedicated to world-building, world-ending, and travel across worlds. Federico Campagna presents a new selection of books that might help us to appreciate the fragility of ‘worlds,’ and the art of creating new ones through a particular use of our imagination.

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, ...

In this podcast, Renisa Mawani introduces her current work that uses the migrant ship Komagata Maru to address migration within its legal and temporal dimensions. We then continue this conversation by examining the arguments she made in the 2012 article “Law’s Archive,” which examines the available means to archive law within the collective narrative that the archive constitutes. The archive’s means are politically and physically determined in such a way that indigenous contributions—not always textual for instance—to this collective narrative cannot fully take part in it. This conversation therefore has a goal to challenge the way we commonly understand the notion of ...

This episode features some of the most forward-thinking contemporary musicians and visual artists currently based in the Bay Area. There is an unspoken blueprint in the Bay Area arts and music communities allowing artists an organic crossover between practices and languages. A hybridizing of mediums that arises from spaces of deep experimentation. From the Bay Area’s openness and curiosity to the limitations of physical spaces to work and gather in – leading to the creation of multipurpose spaces that host artists across visual art, performance, and music, thus resulting in crossovers. Each in their unique way, the artists featured in this episode ...

In the second episode of Aridity Lines, my guest is Ala Tannir, an architect, researcher, and curator from Beirut, Lebanon. We focus on her work and research concerned with exploring the Mediterranean Sea as a space of resistance and possible interspecies alliances. Where Tannir maps out new currents of movement of jellyfish and humans at risk in the Mediterranean Sea. She connects the undefeated underwater species, which thrive in ailing seas where oxygen levels are low, with the movement (or the denial thereof of vulnerable human beings) above water to help us understand how the crisis of climate change and ...

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, ...

The Distance Plan, Journal Issue 3, 2015 “Climate and Precarity,” The Distance Plan Journal’s third issue, sets out to survey how migration, environmental crisis and climate activism are debated in relation to capitalism and its alternatives. Taking Judith Butler’s notion of precarity—the destruction of the conditions of liveability—as a starting point, the issue brings together texts and artist pages that speak about the relationship between ecological and economic precarity. A recurring question is how climate change is most effectively represented as an issue of social justice, and the role of artists and thinkers in developing a critical vocabulary and imaginary for ...

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 ...