Undrawn Spatialities. The Architectural Archives in the Light of the History of the Sahrawi Refugee Camps

Abstract

What happens if architectural knowledge is not mediated through drawing or does not produce any type of record? How can an architectural archive exist and make sense in a context where the circulation of knowledge and the emergence of spatialities leave no physical traces? This essay offers insights into the traces left by undrawn spatialities and how they could be recorded and interpreted in architectural archives based on observations on the history of the Sahrawi refugee camps in archiving oral memories in collaboration with the Sahrawi Ministry of Culture. A project was launched to archive and maintain nomadic knowledge circulation that has been short-circuited by protracted immobilization. This essay proposes that gestures, words and bodies- as producers of undrawn architecture -allow other regimes and traces of spatialities to emerge.

Keywords:

• architectural archives
• Sahrawi refugee camps
• non-visual architecture
• minor histories
• oral memories
• nonrepresentational techniques
• spatialities

Notes

1. For a critique of the Imperialist Western gaze on the archive, see Elizabeth A. Povinelli, “The Woman on the Other Side of the Wall: Archiving the Otherwise in Postcolonial Digital Archives,” Differences 22, no. 1 (2011): 146–171.

2. https://bangkok.unesco.org/content/cultural-mapping (accessed June 1, 2020).

3. Ektoras Arkomanis, “Passage Variations: An Elliptical History of Migration in Eleonas,” Architecture and Culture 7, no. 1 (July 2019): 95–111. On Palestinian camps see, Dorota Woroniecka-Krzyzanowska, “The Right to the Camp: Spatial Politics of Protracted Encampment in the West Bank,” Political Geography 61 (November 2017): 160–169.

4. Robin Evans, “Translations from Drawing to Building,” AA Files 12 (1986): 156, 160.

5. Ibid., 160.

6. Kent Kleinman, “Archiving/Architecture,” Archival Science 1 (2001): 321–332. An example of a building preserved in a museum includes the Chinese merchant house of Yin Yu Tang at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Masschussets.

7. Daniel Libeskind, “Chamber Works: Architectural Meditations on Themes from Heraclitus,” MOMA, https://www.moma.org/collection/works/164668 (accessed June 1, 2020).

8. Robin Evans, “In Front of Lines that Leave Nothing Behind. Chamber Works,” AA Files, 6 (1984): 487.

9. Ibid., 488–489.

10. Ibid.

11. Mark Wigley, “Unleashing the Archive,” Future Anterior: Journal of Historic Preservation, History, Theory, and Criticism 2, no. 2 (2005): 10–15.

12. As quoted by Stuart Hall from Walter Benjamin “To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was.’ It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.” He argues that archives are not inert historical collections. They stand in an active, dialogic relation to the changing questions which the present puts to the past from one generation to another. Stuart Hall, “Constituting an Archive”, Third Text 15, no. 54 (March 2001): 89 and 92. Ariella Azoulay proposed that the archive is “a graveyard of political life that insists that time is a linear temporality: again, an imperial tautology.” Ariella Azoulay, Potential History. Unlearning Imperialism (London: Verso Books, 2019), 186.

13. Jill Stoner, Toward a Minor Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012). Lucía García Jalón Oyarzun, “Excepción y cuerpo rebelde: lo político como generador de una arquitectónica menor/Exception and the Rebel Body: The Political as Generator of a Minor Architecture” (Thesis, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid, 2017).

14. André Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993).

15. Gilbert Simondon, L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information (Grenoble: Millon, 2005).

16. One can find insight on the historicity of the migration of gestures in Carrie Noland and Sally Ann Ness, ed., Migrations of Gesture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

17. Nicky Gregson and Gillian Rose, “Taking Butler Elsewhere: Performativities, Spatialities and Subjectivities,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18, no. 4 (August 2000): 441.

18. Robert Kaiser and Elena Nikiforova, “The Performativity of Scale: The Social Construction of Scale Effects in Narva, Estonia,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26, no. 3 (2008): 123.

19. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 2011).

20. Keller Easterling, Medium Design (Moscow: Strelka Press, 2018).

21. David Turnbull, “Maps Narratives and Trails: Performativity, Hodology and Distributed Knowledges in Complex Adaptive Systems? An Approach to Emergent Mapping,” Geographical Research 45, no. 2 (June 2007): 140–149.

22. In his research on Imagination and Invention, Simondon proposes four textures of the image; the driving force, the hosting system of information, an affective resonance of experience, and a cognitive signal as symbol. The invention emerges out of a reorganization of the system of symbols (which is deeply embodied and individuates its milieu in the same motion), which results in a new image as driving force. Images are always a gesture and a movement. In Gilbert Simondon, Imagination et Invention: 1965–1966, ed. Nathalie Simondon (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2014).

23. Noland and Ness, Migrations of Gesture, XII.

24. Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1-14.

25. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Nelson Cary, and Grossberg Lawrence, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture 271 (1988): 271–313.

26. Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).

27. Ibid., 48.

28. Ibid., 32.

29. Povinelli, “The Woman on the Other Side of the Wall,” 146–171.

30. Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide (London / New York: Routledge, 2016).

31. Janina Gosseye, Naomi Stead, and Deborah Van der Plaat, eds, Speaking of Buildings: Oral History in Architectural Research (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2019), 10.

32. Kleinman, “Archiving/Architecture,” 321–332.

33. André Lepecki, “The Body as Archive: Will to Reenact and the Afterlives of Dances,” Dance Research Journal 42, no. 2 (2010): 28–48.

34. Ibid., 31.

35. Farocki developed it in Workers leaving the Factory or The expression of hands. Thomas Elsaesser, Harun Farocki: Working on the Sightlines (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004).

36. Arkomanis, “Passage Variations,” 95–111.

37. Ariella Azoulay and Louise Bethlehem, Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography (London: New York: Verso, 2012).

38. Lynette Russell, “Indigenous Knowledge and Archives: Accessing Hidden History and Understandings,” Australian Academic & Research Libraries 36, no. 2 (January 2005): 161–171.

39. Terry Cook, “Evidence, Memory, Identity, and Community: Four Shifting Archival Paradigms,” Archival Science 13, no. 2–3 (June 2013): 34.

40. Nancy MacKay, Curating Oral Histories: From Interview to Archive (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2007).

41. Jacob A. Mundy, “Performing the Nation, Pre-Figuring the State: The Western Saharan Refugees, Thirty Years Later,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 45, no. 02 (June 2007): 275.

42. Tomás Bárbulo, La historia prohibida del Sáhara español, Imago mundi 21 (Barcelona: Ediciones Destino, 2002). Juan Carlos Gimeno Martìn, and Juan Ignacio Robles Picón, “Vers une contre-histoire du Sahara occidental,” Les Cahiers d’EMAM. Études sur le Monde Arabe et la Méditerranée, 24–25 (January 1, 2015).

43. Sophie Caratini, La république des sables: anthropologie d’une révolution (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003). Konstantina Isidoros, Nomads and Nation-Building in the Western Sahara: Gender, Politics and the Sahrawi (London: I.B. Tauris, 2018).

44. Manuel Herz, From Camp to City: Refugee Camps of the Western Sahara (Zürich: Lars Müller, 2013).

45. Women constitute around 90 percent of the adult and capable population.

46. Tamarix aphylla, a species of Acacia.

47. Isidoros, Nomads and Nation-Building in the Western Sahara, 2018.

48. Julio Caro Baroja, Estudios saharianos (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Africanos, 1955).

49. On non-visual image and affects, read the introduction of Stoner, Toward a Minor Architecture, 2012. Lucía García de Jalón Oyarzun, “Nightfaring & Invisible Maps: Of Maps Perceived, but Not Drawn,” The Funambulist, 18 (2018): 40–43.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung [P1ELP1_188043].

Notes on contributors

Julien Lafontaine Carboni

Julien Lafontaine Carboni is an architect. He graduated from ENSA Paris-Malaquais and currently pursues a PhD at the ALICE Laboratory, EPFL. He has published in architectural, philosophical, and anthropological journals such as Tabula Rasa. He investigates non-visual epistemologies and architectures, implying other forms of historicity that allow for minor histories to emerge.