Insecurities: Tracing displacement and shelter

For over 60 million persons in the world today, shelter is defined through constant movement or escape. Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter explores the ways in which contemporary architecture and design have addressed notions of shelter in light of global refugee emergencies. From the strengthening of international borders to the logistics of mobile housing systems, how we understand shelter is ultimately defined through an engagement with security. Refugee camps, once considered temporary settlements, have become sites through which to examine how human rights intersect with the making of cities. Bringing together projects by architects, designers, and artists, working in a range of mediums and scales, that respond to the complex circumstances brought about by forced displacement, the exhibition focuses on conditions that disrupt conventional images of the built environment.

Liquid Traces: The Left-to-Die Boat, 2011, an eighteen-minute video by Forensic Oceanography — a research project by filmmaker Charles Heller and sometime architect Lorenzo Pezzani—focuses on the case of sixty-three migrants who died while drifting for fourteen days within the NATO maritime-surveillance area off the coast of Libya in spring 2011. Turning the information generated through surveillance (satellite photography, various sensing technologies) into evidence of responsibility, Forensic Oceanography worked with NGOs to file legal petitions for the crime of nonassistance. A map the duo created circulated in the international press, acquiring additional meaning as it proliferated.

–Artforum, January 2017