A Century of Camps: Refugee knowledge and forms of sovereignty beyond the nation-state

As part of The Parliament of Bodies, the public programme at documenta 14, Eyal Weizman and Lorenzo Pezzani will join this forum discussion exploring the geneaologies, epistemologies, heritage, and knowledge produced by refugee camps.

This gathering of the Parliament of Bodies will explore the genealogies, epistemologies, heritage, and knowledge produced within one of the most poignant and morbid legacies of the twentieth century, namely “refugee camps.” The century’s first refugees were survivors of the genocide of the Armenian populations living in the territory that would soon become the Republic of Turkey between 1915 and 1923. The Armenian genocide marked the emergence of international humanitarian relief to survivors, the establishment of camps, triage stations in neighbouring countries, and the international media documenting the horrors of their experience in reports and photographs. The refugee camp invented a political regime without political rights and a visual regime of total exposure and dispossession.

This forum proposes to reverse the paradigms and explore refugee camps and being a refugee in the world as central, rather than epiphenomenal, exceptional, or temporary notions. From Beirut to Calais, from Lesbos to Zaatari, we invite architects, urban planners, theorists, filmmakers, artists, writers, and activists to reflect on the knowledge accumulated and transmitted from life in the camps, the myriad histories of acting, building, resisting, and negotiating power and authority; producing community, space, and temporality. The legacy of a century of refugee camps constitutes fertile terrain to interrogate the normative paradigms of nation state and citizenship and reevaluate different cosmogonies for the organization of society, relations of authority and power, as well as production of economy, space and time.

Read more about Forensic Architecture’s presentation of 77sqm_9:26min at documenta 14.

In collaboration with The Arab Fund for Arts and Culture.

This event is free and open to all and will be live streamed.

Learn more at the documenta 14 website.