Circulations: An Emerging Architecture of Unsettlement 

Wednesday 5 September, 17.15 – 18.30

Contemporary migration operates as a system of circulation where deportation regimes, precarious lives, and militarized borders keep people moving, ensuring that they remain unsettled. Within such a system, borders can be considered speculative entities that are produced through the conjunction of legal regimes, ecologies, practices of management, apprehension, and securitization. In this presentation, I consider how borders are produced through different kinds of spatial practices, and mobilising techniques from architecture and art practice, I ask how we might map, represent, and work with unsettlement and circulation as defining conditions of lives caught within the border regime. In doing so, I am concerned with an idea of location beyond geolocation, emphasising instead the entanglements that produce place as fleeting, found in moments of respite, in waiting, and in the relationships that people enter into along the way. Reconceiving migration as perpetual—and perpetually enforced—circulation, rather than as linear movement toward and arrival at a destination also has an effect on how we might address the production of borders. It requires new ways of thinking about its spatial practices and logics (i.e., how borders work as forms of securitized/militarized infrastructure) and its temporality (as mundane and ongoing rather than a spectacular event or crisis). It also invites new ways of representing and mapping migration and borders that apprehend these spatial and temporal dimensions. 

Bio

Professor of Architecture and Visual Culture, UCL Urban Laboratory 

Situated between art and architectural practice, Nishat Awan’s research and writing focus on the intersection of geopolitics and space, including questions related to diasporas, migration and border regimes. She is interested in modes of spatial representation, particularly in relation to the digital and the limits of witnessing as a form of ethical engagement with distant places. She has led the ERC-funded project, Topological Atlas, which aims to produce visual counter-geographies of the fragile movements of migrants as they encounter the security apparatus of the border. Currently, she is Professor of Architecture and Visual Culture at UCL Urban Laboratory. 

 

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