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HOTEL, CONTAINERS, TENTS
– SPACES AND OBJECTS OF MIGRATION Background Today it is more obvious than ever that migration plays a central, but also highly ambivalent role in the process of globalization. On the one hand, migration appears to be the expression of a freedom that is both highly desired and taken for granted – the travels of business people and tourists all over the world, for example. On the other hand, however, mobility is a thing to be regulated, if not completely prevented, which is why migration must be construed as a problem of population-related policies and politics. These different types of mobility are related to, and intertwined, with each other. The context, which originated historically in this manner and is being continually reshaped, is not abstract, for the ambivalent, contradictory practices of migration are increasingly organizing themselves at the same locations and operating with the same objects – both to their own and specific conditions, respectively. As part of our project, we will analyze three such object-like locations and objects that are also involved in the production of social spaces: the hotel, the shipping container and the tent. Focus Normally, the hotel is associated only with business trips and tourism. However, in the last several decades, the hotel has also assumed completely different functions. In the crisis areas of the world, the hotel serves as a relay station from which news about crises is communicated to a global audience. A concrete example is the Hotel Continental in Skopje, in which most journalists and camera teams stayed during the crises in Kosovo and Macedonia. Moreover, during the war in former Yugoslavia, hotels were turned into accommodations for refugees. The Hotel Libertas in Dubrovnik, which today is still empty, is only one example of this. The borders between places of asylum, prisons and hotels are become increasingly porous, whether we are speaking of the "reception" camps at the Schengen frontiers, or deportation centres in Germany (euphemistically called Ausreisezentren in German), in which refugees are interned until being expelled from the country. In his reflections on the postmodernity of the hotel "Bonaventura" in Los Angeles, Fredric Jameson characterizes this as "a total space". At the same time that the rich withdraw from the public realm into safe, miniature ersatz cities like the "Bonaventura", refugees are banished from public spaces into deportation centres, places that already serve as substitutes for the "outside" into which they eventually are to be expelled. A similar continuum of functions and meanings can be seen when we examine the phenomenon of the shipping container. At first glance, the shipping container – a normed, practical way to transport cargo – is a perfect example of the mobility of goods. However, it is increasingly the case that people themselves are being transported in containers. Refugees hide in them or are carried in them. At the same time, the container represents not only mobility, but also temporary immobility. Its kinetics are always "on-call", and even when not it motion, it can be used in a wide variety of ways. At large construction sites, for example, migrant workers are housed in them. At cultural events, the container can be used as the box office or an improvised stage. The most flagrant example of such immobility is perhaps the moored cargo ship that has been converted into an accommodation for refugees. Finally, the tent combines tradition nomadic ways of life, and their metamorphoses, with current forms of mobility. Today, places where tents are to be found tend to be areas where there has been a – catastrophic – break with everyday life resulting in a state of emergency. Sometimes tents and tent camps are the harbingers of crisis. The functions and meanings of tents and tent camps can be located at the abovementioned intersections of meaning: they can serve both as an accommodation for tourists (i.e. for campers) and as an accommodation for refugees or soldiers. Methods and goals This investigation aims to study the hotel, shipping container and tent as places and objects where both desired and undesired migration occur in close proximity to each other – as porous or sealed rooms and entities that mobilize people, but also paralyze them in the process of transit – and also as psychogeographical topoi that stimulate and regulate subjectivizations and structure the images of migrant subjectivity. In this context, the project is interested in the entire praxis of these spaces, these "containers". The analysis of the abovementioned concrete functions and meanings (with the help of selected examples) will thus be augmented by a reconstruction of the political and also visual economy of these places and objects. The regions in Europe and the Near East to be examined are on the
Mediterranean and the Atlantic – places where especially the
intertwining of tourist and migrant movements produces specific
space-times, subjectivities and constellations of politics and economics.
We want to discover which processes have led to the reassessment
and revaluation of hotels, containers and tents. What is the influence
of the ambivalent multifunctionality of hotels, containers and tents
on concepts of geography with regard to politics, economics and
culture? What make possible the evolving range of materials and
imaginative uses, and what is forced by it? Added meaning is to
be gained by examining the conditions under which the containers
are produced, for at the beginnings of the physical production of
their architectures and textures can often be found the work of
migrants themselves.
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DOMiT, Dokumentationszentrum und Museum über die Migration in Deutschland e.V. Frankfurt Institute of Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology University in Frankfurt / Main Institut für Theorie der Gestaltung und Kunst (ics, HGK Zürich)
research project „hotel, containers, tents”
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