Introductory note: In July-August 2014, the war launched by the Israeli army on Gaza killed 2,251 Palestinians, among which at least 1,463 were civilians. When confronted to these figures, the Israeli army legal corps justified this drastic proportion by invoking legal fictions supposed to legitimize them. Many of these fictions have already been exposed here (see here, here and here), but one in particular stroke us for its extreme demagogy: Palestinian civilians were killed by the Israeli bombs because they are used by Hamas as so-called “human shields” (see past article). In a forthcoming article for The Funambulist Magazine’s fifth issue (May-June 2016), Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon deconstruct the racist dimension of this legal narrative manufactured in order to legitimize the killing of thousands of Palestinians.

I was in Brussels all day yesterday, which allowed me to experience the heavy deployment of military and para-military (masked police officers with assault or sniper riffles, etc.) forces in some (strategic) parts of the city. “My thoughts and prayer [do not] go to the family of the victims” as the formatted sentence normally says. I suppose that, in their immense pain, they could not care less about this; instead, I hope that my anger represents them well. If we follow the dubious logic of the Israeli army’s spokespersons, their loved ones, and us all, ‘normal’ citizens using the public transportation systems of our metropoles are nothing else than the so-called “human shields” of our governments. In the wake of the November 13, 2015 attacks, the powerful slogan “Your Wars, Our Deads” (Vos guerres, nos morts) quickly emerged, although it did not reach the circulation of a consensual “Pray for Paris” — the French extremists of secularism still managed to find it problematic! — or the significantly more cleaving “Je suis Charlie” created after the assassinations of journalists in January 2015. Although the absolute conceptual separation of citizens and their governments is problematic in the deresponsabilization that it would imply, there is indeed a clear separation between them when it comes to the experiencing the consequences of the last 200 years of violence deployed by Western governments both internally and externally — a similar argument could be applied to the Turkish state-violence in Kurdistan or the islamophobic policies of the Indian local and national governments for instance.

The European quarter, targeted by the bombing of the Maelbeek subway station yesterday, carries in its very name — a name that I share, sadly — this violence. The European Parliament is indeed situated in the “Espace Léopold,” adjacent to the Parc Léopold, both named after Belgium King Léopold II (1835-1909), whose colonial policies are responsible for the death of no less than 10 million Congolese. The map above shows this urban situation and satirically calls out “civilian areas” the parts of the city surrounding the various institutional buildings. Of course, this text is not an invitation for terrorist organizations to target governmental representatives instead of arbitrary citizens. Rather, it intends to use the legitimate emotions of fear and trauma that anyone experiences when affected one way or another to extreme violence, in order to draw a parallel with the much more frequent (direct/ indirect, past/present) deployment of Western violence in the Global South and with the way this violence is implicitly or explicitly legitimized through the essentialization of entire parts of the city — even in the case of terrorist attacks in Global South cities (see the critique of the notion of “Hezbollah bastion” in the context of the November attack in Beirut for instance). It also intends to denounce what Georges Orwell called the “doublespeak” of our governments that simultaneously (sometimes in the same sentence) call for “more peace” and announce the deployment of more violence through military interventions (i.e. war) in symbolic sites that are dubiously associated to the authors of the attacks, despite the fact that many of them are citizens of the country where the attacks occurred. Martial violence is a self-fed entity, i.e. violence necessarily calls for more violence and the fact that such a platitude is not made evident is highly revealing of the demagoguery of our societies.

Security as well (another form of violence), is a doomed-to-fail solution since, by definition, it is implemented as a reaction to the violence it is supposed to prevent. Its function is more a spectacular one, intended to manifest the presence of the State within society both in terms of protection in the city centers and economic sites, and suppression in the marginalized parts of the city, where suspects are searched, to the detrimental assimilation of the local population (in Molenbeek in Brussels for instance, or in the banlieues in French cities). We should therefore not hold our governments responsible for failing to secure us; instead, we should hold them accountable (and through them, the part of us that legitimize their existence) for their own national and international violence. This is for the sake of the (almost always racialized) bodies it targets, as well as for our sake, us citizens of the cities of Brussels, Ankara, Bamako, Paris, Abidjan, Bombay, Madrid, Istanbul, London, Beirut, etc. indiscriminately targeted by the tragic echoes of our own violence.

In the spirit of this text, I have to recognize that writing it after yesterday’s Brussels bombings rather than after the recent attacks of Ankara, Istanbul or Abidjan or any recent American drone strikes in Somalia or Afghanistan is symptomatic what I denounce, since it implies that this kind of text is only necessary when European cities are affected, i.e. when our emotions are indexed on the proximity of violence. I therefore apologize to my readers for these marks of a not-entirely decolonized discourse.

Carceral dome for the Zaandam migrant detention center by Customr Willem van der Sluis / Photo by Luuk Kramer

As the latest issue of The Funambulist Magazine is dedicated to Carceral Environments, Daniela Ortiz brought to my attention the (past) existence of these carceral domes designed in 2007 by Dutch designer Customr Willem van der Sluis for a migrant detention center in Zaandam, a town situated a few kilometers north of Amsterdam. This is far from being the first collaboration between designers/architects and the industrial carceral complex in all its forms, and we should never refuse a debate of ideas with non-abolitionist designers providing that the extreme violence of incarceration is acknowledged as an axiom of the conversation. Furthermore, if we trust the successive dated imagery available on Google Earth, we can see that the domes were dismantled in 2013, and as such, they might not be so relevant to address here. However, the way the designer describes his project in two videos (see below), helped by a complaisant media coverage, provides a discourse banalizing the violence of architecture (which is far from exclusive to this particular project) and, as such, it seems important to analyse here.

The Zaandam migrant detention center is one of the three of the kinds in the Netherlands. It is situated on an industrial dock and the cells themselves are located in carceral barges anchored to it. In June 2008, Amnesty International published a report (the cover page is a photo of the Zaandam prison) about the criminalization and incarceration of persons in irregular visa situation in the country. The first paragraph of the report states the following: “Each year some 20,000 irregular migrants and asylum-seekers are detained in the Netherlands, where the use and duration of detention and other restrictive administrative measures is increasing. This report examines how far these measures have led to a deterioration in the human rights situation of irregular migrants and asylum-seekers. It also underlines Amnesty International’s growing concern over the control and security oriented approach by governments worldwide, in an effort to “combat” irregular migration, at the cost of migrants’ human rights” (Amnesty International, “The Netherlands: The Detention of Irregular Migrants and Asylum-Seekers,” 2008.). It is crucial to associate these concerns with the design of the domes examined here, since they fully contribute to the exercise of violence denounced by the report — the counter argument presented by the designer that the domes act as “an inverted panopticon” combines the odd architect obsession for Bentham’s carceral scheme and the eloquence of illusive ideas. Although the domes have been dismantled (perhaps moved to another location), they fully take their place in the inventory of the various inventive efforts provided by designers and architects in the enforcement of the walls of Fortress Schengen (see past articles about Calais and the Slovenian/Croatian border for instance) whether these walls are built on the borders themselves, or internally in the forms of heavily monitored refugee camps and detention centers.

In the videos presented here, as well as in articles written about this project, both the designer and journalists use the term of “illegal immigrants” without ever questioning the outrageous idea that a person could possibly be defined as “illegal,” and to be imprisoned for their administrative situation. The idea of improving the conditions of life of imprisoned bodies, usually argued by reformists of carceral environments (often in a non-substantiated manner), is barely mentioned here, which might indicate the actual indifference of the designer regarding the political program of his project and the vision of society it embodies. What might easily appear shocking in a situation where architecture deploys its full carceral violence, should also appear to us as such in other programs however: condominium buildings in gentrifying areas, police stations in neighborhoods antagonized by the police, gated communities, etc.

Moreover, the designer’s discourse in both videos adopts the exact same tone and share many arguments with design and architectural projects traditionally presented in various specialized media. “Modular,” “light,” “patterns,” “a signal at night,” etc. described here are recurrent notions an audience might recurrently hear in the 3 minute speeches that popular architects have became masters to deliver. The description of the influence for perforation patterns often take orientalist accents, but in this case, the designer go even as far as comparing his patterns to “tricks used in numerous religions” to trigger “a kind of ecstasy.”

Using someone’s speech against himself is however easy and it is not the point to judge this designer as an individual here. Beyond the complicity that designers accept regarding the political program that their projects serve (sometimes to the point of reaching the “concerns’ of an organization like Amnesty International), there needs to be an understanding of what is appealing (even unconsciously) to architects for them to work on such a program. Architecture is fundamentally a discipline that consists in anticipating the spatial organization of bodies in a given context. It is important for them that this anticipation proves right since their projects are conceived to optimally fulfill their intended function if it does. The degree with which it make sure that this anticipation proves right varies, but no other environments than the carceral ones are reaching the quasi-certitude of this prediction — the corridor is another one as written in another essay. There is therefore a certain bliss for designers to know that their creation will be experienced the exact same way than they intended it to be, whatever the intention may have been — malevolent, benevolent, it is irrelevant here. The domes examined in this article enclosed a small football field (whose lines are visibly disturbed by the ‘ecstatic’ light pattern on the floor described above); the carceral characteristics of this small building thus insure that its function is not subverted into something else than what it was intended to be. “The Designer and The Prison” is thus a love story, since no program than the prison fulfills better the inherent quality of architecture. A resistance to such a passionate relation is to be envisioned. In my opinion it can only consist in either a complete refusal to use the design instrument to embody certain programs, or the counter-intuitive (and therefore requiring intense reflection) use of design against its own intrinsic logic.

For a deeper analysis of the architecture of migrant detention centers, see the 2014 Archipelago conversation with Tings Chak, as well as the graphic essay in the latest issue of The Funambulist Magazine by Tings and Sarah Turnbul

One of the most recurrent questions asked by French main media in their current campaign against — the animosity they manifest allows this term to be used here — any form of manifestation of Islamic public signs consists in asking “How many Molenbeeks is there in France?” to which the usual televisual “experts” answer without blinking that France has been doing a better work than Belgium when it comes to constraining “Salafists” — a word that they evidently just learned — to the Republic’s order. Beyond the traditional French condescension towards the northern neighbors (jokes about Belgium people is an entire genre of humor in France), there is this dubious labelization of one of Brussels’ 19 municipalities (Sint Jans Molenbeek) into a synonym of crawling “jihadism” neighborhood; a labelization never questioned by any of these “experts.” This article will attempt to shortly introduce the process that such a stigmatization of a neighborhood inevitably triggers. Whether this process is understood and deliberated engaged by its concerned actors is irrelevant here. My arguments won’t be that news anchor, politicians, police officers and developers are meeting every Tuesday night to discuss about how they will engage the strategy described here, but that these four actors all play a crucial role in this process according to a specific chronology.

Molenbeek is a West-Brussels neighborhood where 94,000 people live, many of which are persons and families of Moroccan Rif descent. Among these residents, 10 were part of a group of 20 people responsible for the coordinated attacks that killed 130 people in Paris on November 13, 2015 and 32 people in Brussels on March 22, 2016. What allows the media and politicians to demagogically ignore the proportion that 10 people out of 94,000 represents, is the fact that Molenbeek is a piece of urbanity that Arab residents, a certain amount of whom carries signs of their faith, have appropriated, in the same way than any population residing in towns where the notion of public space actually means something. Even reasonable journalists seem to believe that they would not be writing a credible article if they were not acknowledging the visible manifestation of political forms of Islam in Molenbeek, as well as a supposed high rate of delinquency and criminality in the neighborhood (usually described through hearsay). However, when one looks at the actual statistic of reported illegal acts, one can only notice that the ones accounted for Molenbeek are significantly lower (often twice less) than the ones for the municipality of Brussels or other municipalities of the capital. We could expect serious journalists to find a way to generate the following graphs but that is apparently too much to ask for:

Police statistics of criminality between 2000 and 2014: blue is for Brussels municipality, yellow is for Sint Jans Molenbeek. (1) Weapons and explosives, (2) Drugs, (3) Physical assaults, (4) Burglary, theft, carjacking, homejacking, etc. Source: Cadastre.be (comparison with other municipalities can be made in case those are not revealing enough)

Once again, I won’t differentiate the journalists and politicians who actually know these figures and nonetheless decide to participate to what I called in a past article “fearful discursive contamination” and those who have simply not done their job by not knowing these numbers. The consequences of such discourse stigmatizing a specific neighborhood consists in an increased societal antagonism against its population and a subsequent simulacrum of legitimacy for police and/or military forces to repress it. In November 2015, I had already written an article for Warscapes entitled “Deadly Rhetoric of Strongholds and Bastions,” in which I was comparing this antagonizing discoursing process at work in Burj Al-Barajneh (South Beirut, described as a “Hezbollah stronghold” by Western media after a ISIS-led suicide attack killed 43 people on November 12, 2015), Gaza (the process to “decivilianize” Palestinians by the Israeli army is not to be presented here anymore), the French banlieues, and Molenbeek. Although it might appear innapropriate to compare a territory like Gaza with a relatively central neighborhood of the European capital city — the call by French right wing intellectual Eric Zemmour to bomb Molenbeek rather than Raqqa after the November attacks notwithstanding — one has to realize that the logic through which racist discourses and police/military interventions work together are comparable, despite the significant difference of degree of violence that they respectively trigger in these two examples.

Police interventions are however not the end of this process. Once the various forms of resistance to the dominant order (i.e. what participates to an imaginary of dangerosity to the average white person) are no longer visible in this neighborhood, a radical transformation of its urbanity can be implemented. A small walk along on the canal or in the adjacent districts North and East of Molenbeek already provides a vision of the municipality’s future. Its location in the city — on the contrary of French banlieues — associated to the low price of its real estate (encouraged by the rhetoric examined here) makes it a significant asset to developers whose projects are currently being built in its vicinity (see photos below). Molenbeek residents and people standing in solidarity with them should therefore be cautious of corporations buying land in their municipality, if not currently, in the months to come. Real estate projects take a few years to be built and developers are very likely to know that the few years of heavy policing and public work that will necessarily follow the current situation will drastically increase the value of property in the neighborhood.

 New real estate residential projects in the “Canal District” (left, photo in 2014 / right, screenshot from http://canaldistrict.be/)

In her contribution to the first Ila Souria colloquium at the Institut du Monde Arabe (Paris) in October 2013, architect Irène Labeyrie affirmed that parts of the bombing of rebellious neighborhoods of Damascus by the Assad regime has been done with future urban projects in mind, in order to accelerate the demolition of these areas (see text and video of her presentation). The visualization of a satellite photograph in the neighborhood of Yalda, in the precise and systematic destruction it introduces certainly renders credible such affirmation. Here again the comparison between Damascus and Molenbeek can only make sense if we think in terms of logic at work, rather than in similitude of violence. The logic of this process is however precisely what this text attempts to demonstrate. The process to which Molenbeek is currently subjected is a known one and its violence can only be delegitimized if the imaginary in which this piece of urbanity is depicted changes radically. The generalized racism that allows the conscious or (even more perverse) the unconscious equation of Muslim bodies with criminality, if not terrorism and of a predominantly Arab neighborhood with a sense of insecurity from the white part of the population (overwhelmingly represented in the media, politicians, the police and developers/architects) is the problem that we should be addressing here. As always, architects have a strong responsibility in the violence of the process described in this article since their authorship brings value to and enables the real estate projects that will end the chronology of displacement of the antagonized population. Along with journalists, they should therefore be at the forefront of the construction of an anti-racist imaginary linked to the city and its various neighborhoods.

It has been a little while since I knew that two new books I wrote would be published around the same time. While the second one will exist in bilingual French/English version (more about it in the coming days), this first one, La politique du bulldozer: La ruine palestinienne comme projet israélien (Bulldozer Politics: The Palestinian Ruin as an Israeli Architectural Project) was just published in French by B2 Editions. Here is a translation of the index:

• Introduction
• July 22, 2014 in GAZA: The Ruins of the Continuous Siege
• July 1, 2014 in IDHNA: Punitive Demolition of Homes
• Interlude: Caterpillar D9 Bulldozer
• April 10, 2002 in JENIN: The Bulldozer Used as a Weapon of War
• July 1971 in RAFAH: The So-called “Pacification” of Gaza by Ariel Sharon
• July 18, 1948 in LUBYA: The Palestinian Ruin and its Absence
• Conclusion

Since there is no English version planned out, and that I used the arguments and some of the case studies in a paper presented at SOAS for the symposium “The Gaza Strip: History, Future and New Directions for Research” (October 2015) I propose to publish this shorter text here for non-francophone readers. In addition of the research specifically made for the redaction of the book, it draws on a few articles and maps written and drawn here for the last two years.

The book can be found in French bookstores that have an architectural theory section, as well as on B2’s website.

The Palestinian Ruin as an Israeli Architectural Project ///

In his book The Drone Easts with Me: Diaries from a City under Fire, Palestinian author Atef Abu Saif recounts the punctuation of his daily life by the systematic bombings of the Gaza Strip by the Israeli army during the dreadful siege of the 2014 summer that killed 2,220 Palestinians and displaced more than 500,000.[1] Abu Saif describes how he and his relatives could not bring themselves to tell his 19-months old daughter, Jaffa, that the loud noises she was keeping hearing were, in fact, deadly bombs. Instead, they told her that the loud noises she could hear was her big brother Naem slamming the door, hence her scream each time an explosion occurs nearby: “the doooooooor!” In a city under siege, sound becomes the predominant relation to the outside reality. Abu Saif recounts how everyone in Gaza can now make the difference between the noise of a missile launched from a tank, a ship, a drone, an aircraft, or a helicopter. To the noise of the bombs, we need to add the voluntarily terrorizing noise of F16 aircrafts reaching the wall of sound, as well as the continuous droning of the Zannate (drones) and, of course, there is the sound of buildings collapsing, dreadfully crushing the totality of its objects and bodies that they contain.

The 51 days of war undertaken by the Israeli army against Gaza and its inhabitants in July and August 2014 constitute one of the most recent occurrences of a process of ruination of the Palestinian conditions of life that started in the late 1940s. This text is a fragment of a broader research about this historical process of ruination of Palestinian homes understood in a paradoxical constructivist architectural manner. By constructivist, I mean that we should distinguish a precise order behind the chaos of the ruins’ rubbles, an architectural process in which the ruin is understood as the final product of a cautiously design strategy.

Let us consider for instance the Etzel Museum situated in Manshieh between Jaffa and Tel Aviv. This building, designed as an homage to the infamous Sionist paramilitary group of the same name (Etzel is the Hebrew acronym to designate the Irgoun) consists in a clumsy modernist glass and steel architecture based on the foundation of a former Palestinian house, destroyed, with the rest of Manshieh in April 1948 – one month before the beginning of what the Israelis call “the Independence War” it ought to be noted. The architectural message of this building is clear: the modernist Israeli city of Tel Aviv dominates and replaces the archaic Arab city of Jaffa in a historical act described by the museum architects, Niv, Schwartz and Schwartz, as a territorial “liberation.[2]”

Although the Etzel Museum recounts the Sionist conquest over the Palestinian presence, it does not deny the latter. One other aspects of this research however insists on the double ruination process undertaken by the State of Israel against the numerous Palestinian villages that were evicted from their inhabitants in 1948. Many of these villages’ homes were dynamited shortly after their eviction leaving an important amount of ruins on the territory that Israel then claimed as its own. Nevertheless, these ruins constituted an architectural testimony to both the past Palestinian presence on this land, and the conditions in which the State of Israel was founded. The latter therefore undertook the destruction of these ruins starting from 1949 in order to avoid “superfluous questions,” as the official terminology of the Minister of Foreign Affairs accounted in a 1965 ordinance.[3] In several cases, forests founded by the Jewish National Found were seeded and grown over the remaining stones of these villages. Before 1948, the JNF used to collect money in the Jewish diaspora to buy land to Palestinian owners; the foundation of the State of Israel made this Zionist project obsolete and the JNF then continued to collect founds in order to grow forests in an effort of “Europeanization” of the Israeli territory.[4] The ruins of Palestinian villages like Lubya near the Sea of Galilee were thus covered by a multitude of trees within forests sometimes named after the country of its donors – South Africa in the case of Lubya, as Mark J. Kaplan and Heidi Grunebaum’s film, The Village under the Forest (2013) depicts.

 Still from  The Village under the Forest by Heidi Grunebaum and Mark J. Kaplan (2013)

The majority of the Gaza population being composed of refugees from 1948, we can get a sense of the serial destruction that these families have no choice but to experience through time. Their homes in historical Palestine were first dynamited, the remaining ruins were later bulldozed, sometimes hidden in engineered forest, and the last sixty-seven years in Gaza have provided many occasions of destruction of their new home, during the three last dreadful sieges in particular.

2014: THE WAR AGAINST PALESTINIAN HOMES AND ITS LEGAL NARRATIVES ///

As Eyal Weizman describes in his original lecture, Forensic Architecture (2010) now turned into a research council at Goldsmiths, bombings themselves are less the cause of death of Palestinians in Gaza, than the collapse of architecture they trigger.[5] This distinction might appear fastidious, particularly regarding such a poignant question; however, it is an important distinction to understand the modus operandi of the Israeli army and, in doing so, to present an accurate and precise description of its accountability for its attacks.

The bombing of housing buildings in particular illustrates well the strategy behind these dreadful attacks. While for many people in the world, the notion of home can be associated to a certain degree of safety, Gaza inhabitants cannot benefit from such a luxury. On July 13, 2015, local journalist Mohammed Omer reports the daily terror of the siege through a poignant tweet: “Most difficult moment for a father: split his children in all corners of the house or all in one corner and die together?[6]” Here again, the architectural component of this tragic thought is far from being innocent. The Israeli army has acquired an unprecedented expertise in the destruction of buildings – Weizman’s lecture describes the cautious design of so-called targeted assassinations, the explosive use, the part of the building targeted, etc. – and its bombardments and the legal accountability in which they result should be understood through their damning degree of precision[7].

In its rhetorical fight to legitimate its action, the Israeli army explicitly contests the notion of home for Palestinians of Gaza: “When Is a House, a Home?” (July 2014) pretends to ask a poster created by the propaganda service of the Israeli army to be spread on social network. The poster shows a form of architectural section of a building divided into six rooms, three of which use the common codes to represent a home (a bedroom, a living room, an office), while three others represent what is described as a weapon storage, an operation room and a command center through drawings that we would characterize as ridiculous, if they were not implying the dreadful reality of the bombings.

The strategy behind this kind of posters is to contribute to a manufactured legal narrative in which the Palestinian armed resistance is using the civilian population of Gaza as “human shields,” in order to somehow legitimize what the military sense of euphemism calls “collateral damage.” This rhetorical tactic is not new, since it was already used during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and it has provided useful talking points for Western governments to back the Israeli action since then. The fact that the presence of civilians in building designated as military targets does not stopped the army to bomb them should however show the absurdity of such a claim or, if anything, its obsolescence. Similarly, the validity given to this pseudo-legal narrative does not seem to take into account the impossibility for Gaza inhabitants to flee from the Strip – an inventory of the totality of bombings during the summer 2014 by OCHA shows that no areas in the entire Strip has been spared.

The dubious usage of the legal concept of “human shields” is however not the only weapon in the rhetorical arsenal of the Israeli army’s legal corps. Another component of this legitimizing narrative involves the idea according to which a civilian warned of the imminent bombing of the building where (s)he lives can no longer be considered as such if (s)he refuses to flee from the area. This is how the Israeli air force developed the so-called “knock-on-roof” tactic, which consists in the preliminary use of a low-explosive bomb on a building that will be destroyed minutes (sometimes seconds) later. The amount of time allocated to a family to flee its home – the actual bombing usually intervenes a minute or two after the warning shot – sometimes in the middle of the night, is barely relevant here, since the legal status of civilian could not possibly be stripped from anyone simply by a warning shot, or sometimes by a phone call.

Evolution of the “No-Go Zone” during the 2014 siege on Gaza / Map by Léopold Lambert (2014)

A third pseudo-legal maneuver consists in the designation of “no-go zone” within Gaza, where anyone is considered to be legitimately killable. The “normal” condition of Gaza – the very notion of normalcy constitutes a rhetorical violence in itself – involves a 100-meter wide kill zone along the Israeli border of the Strip punctuated with remote-controlled machine gun towers. On July 22, 2014 this zone was temporarily thickened to reach a 3-kilometer width, and thus including a considerable amount of houses within it. 25% of the Gaza population (450,000 people) was consequently displaced not to be situated in an area that was going to be abundantly bombed – let us insist on the fact that no area of the Gaza Strip was spared from the bombings. As of today (October 2015), an important part of this displaced population is still homeless, since the Israeli blockade, backed by the Sisi administration in Egypt, has prevented any cement bag to be imported into Gaza.

1971: THE SO-CALLED “PACIFICATION” OF GAZA BY ARIEL SHARON ///

In 1969, Ariel Sharon who is recognized as instrumental in the invasion of the Sinai Peninsula two years earlier is named at the head of the Israeli army’s Southern Command, and thus in charge of the Gaza Strip that was also invaded in 1967. The resistance of the PLO is particularly active in the following years and, on January 2, 1971, Sharon is asked by Moshe Dayan, then Minister of Defense, to implement a counter-insurrection against it. Sharon’s memoirs, although necessarily dubious, are particularly useful to understand his strategy in the matter.[8] His descriptions of his analysis of Gaza have a lot in commons with 19^th-century Western orientalist writers:

I was waking up at dawn and leaving with only a snack and a bottle of water, accompanied by my chief of intelligence and my chief of operations, I was exploring a given sector. Day after day, systematically, I thus inspected each square meter of each refugee camp and each orangery. Since my childhood, I knew that the Arab farmers’ methods were different from ours. I was now observing their work with a new interest.[9]

The idea of Sharon walking by himself in Gaza and reflecting in the contemplation of Palestinian farmers is somewhat amusing in its orientalist self-romanticization. Throughout his description of these months of counter-insurrection, he is cautious to depict the latter as a simple policing operation barely affecting the daily lives of Palestinian civilians. This operation is however massive in its scale and the way Sharon interprets Gaza in an architectural and geographical manner is particularly interesting for our argument here. One of his first strategic gestures is purely diagrammatic, but like the work of architects, its consequences are drastic: he in fact traces a grid on the map of Gaza and establishes 1,500×1,500 meter squares, whose control he then attributes to his officers. He enjoins the latter to know as absolutely as possible the physical dimension of their attributed square, spotting every single element (a dead tree, a lemon tree in an orange field, a chopped off palm tree, etc.) as a potential meeting point for fugitive PLO member. He, as well, describes a certain form of forensics, in the cautious production of knowledge of a colonized territory following a given attack by the Palestinian resistance: he evokes the search for underground shelter’s ventilation pipes, the naught ropes used by Israeli soldiers to measure Palestinian homes from the inside and outside to spot potential “fake walls” hiding an extra room, as well as the little ladders regularly used to suddenly look inside Palestinian yards.

However, these methods described in his memoirs clearly operate in an effort to minimize the description of the destructive part of this military operation. The massive demolition by bulldozers in Rafah’s refugee camp, which destroyed more than 2,500 houses and displaced more than 16,000 people, are depicted by him as a simple enlarging of the narrow streets of the camp’s dense urban fabric. The bulldozer, although far from exclusive in the Israeli army arsenal, has been instrumental in the history of ruination of Palestinian homes. The bulldozer Caterpillar D9 in particular, has been customized by the Israeli army since its creation in 1954 and systematically used in the numerous wars in which Israel has been engaged since then. Its use to increase the width of refugee camps in Gaza in order to provide enough space for tanks to circulate is particularly interesting to include in a broader history (past and future of 1971) of urban transformative means of counter-insurrection.

While acknowledging the specificity of the historical context we can, for instance, associate the figure of Sharon with the one of Thomas Robert Bugeaud, Marshall of the French army between 1843 and 1849 (date of his death). Bugeaud was instrumental to a new military doctrine on both sides of the Mediterranean, since he was first involved in the end of the colonization of Algeria, then in charge of the country’s “pacification,” and that he took part in the counter-insurrection in Paris in 1834 and 1848. After the 1848 revolution, he wrote a small manual of counter-insurrection in a urban context for his fellow officers. Entitled La guerre des rues et des maisons (The War of Streets and Houses), this pamphlet interprets the architectural component of the city as an instrumental dimension of the insurrection and counter-insurrection and, as such, can be manipulated to gain a military advantage.[10] The French demolitions of half of the Casbah of Algiers between 1830 and 1860 certainly attest of this understanding – the urban battle for decolonization in the 1950s will later confirm its importance – as does the Hausmannian transformations of Paris and their digging of numerous new boulevards in dense proletarian areas during the Second Empire, between 1852 and 1870. Insurrections being more likely to be advantaged by a dense and complex urban fabric, these cities were architecturally modified to make them more controllable for the imperial power and its army. In this regard, it is not innocent that the new streets created in the Rafah refugee camp in 1971 were nicknamed “the Sharon Boulevards.”

In the more specific history of the Israeli army tactics, the 1971 “urban” operation in Rafah can recall the one in the Jenin refugee camp in 2002 during the Second Intifada. In only a few days, the customized bulldozer Caterpillar D9 of the army demolished 140 houses and damaged more than 200 others, in an effort of increasing the width of the camp’s street to allow the army tanks and other vehicles to penetrate inside its dense urban fabric where the Palestinian resistance was partially operating. Here again, one of the richest testimonies of such an operation comes from one of its protagonists, in the person of Moshe Nissim, simple bulldozer conductor who spent 75 straight hours behind the wheel of his D9, half naked and drinking whiskey, demolishing systematically and indiscriminately Palestinian homes.[11] In this example as well, the reconstruction is as interesting as the destruction, since the UNRWA specifically rebuilt streets wide enough to accommodate the potential return of Israeli tanks as Eyal Weizman describes in Hollow Land.[12] Also described in the latter volume is the 2002 Israeli operation in the Nablus refugee camp in which the soldiers’ tactic that consisted in going from house to house through their walls, recalls without doubt the ones described by Bugeaud in his manual.

Political Cartography of Rafah / Map by Léopold Lambert (2015)

This destructive 1971 counter-insurrection led by Sharon should not be seen as a punctual short-sighted operation. Another aspects of the latter advocated by Sharon to the Minister of Defense, Moshe Dayan, and the Prime Minister, Golda Meir, consists in cutting the Palestinian cities of the Gaza Strip by implementing Israeli settlements between them. The first settlement was built in 1970 and six others will be built in the following eight years. The double destructive-constructive function of Sharon as a military architect is here expressed at its best. Demolitions will later continue: in 1982, after the withdrawal of the Israeli troops from the Sinai, Sharon who was then Minister of Defense, orders the destruction of 300 Palestinian homes along the border to ensure a thick militarized line between Gaza and Egypt. Between 2001 and 2004, the Israeli armed bulldozers destroy more than 2,500 Palestinian homes in another counter-insurrection efforts; the Prime Minister’s name of the time is Ariel Sharon.

CONCLUSION ///

In August 2005, the Israeli army’s bulldozers undertake the demolition of three thousand buildings in the Gaza Strip. This time, those are not Palestinian buildings but, rather, they constitute the totality of the twenty-one Israeli settlements that had been constructed on Palestinian territory. This demolition was conducted following the unilateral decision of the Sharon government to “disengage” the Israeli civil and military presence in Gaza.  Sharon’s role of Prime Minister was the last one of a rich political career following his military one, and we can recall his role as Minister of Defense in 1982 when he also forcefully evicted the Israeli settlers and demolished the settlement of Yamit situated a few kilometers inside the Sinai Peninsula when the occupation of the latter was terminated.

Although the dismantling of the Israeli settlements in Gaza could, at first glance, appear as beneficial to the Palestinian population, the reality is more complex for various reasons. We can find the first one in the absolute isolation that Gaza has to endure, which thus becomes the potential target of massive bombardments like the ones we witnessed in 2008-2009, 2012, and 2014. Another reason has to do with the demolition itself. For a while, the Israeli government had claimed to be interested to sell the settlements to the Palestinian Authority but had set a prohibitive price preventing any possible transaction to occur. Only the settlements’ numerous agricultural green houses that had been bought by donations raised by James Wolfensohn (then President of the World Bank) were planned to be transferred to Palestinians. Aware of this agreement, the settlers however destroyed them so that the Palestinian population would not benefit from it.[13]

When the Israeli army finishes withdrawing on September 12, 2005, it leaves behind itself a multitude of debris, many of which are toxic.[14] Only the synagogues of the twenty-one settlements were left intact, thus engineering the televisual spectacle of some Palestinian youngster vandalizing them. We find here an additional tactic of ruination: the manufacturing of an ideological spectacle based on the symbolical demolition of a cultural building.

Ten years later, it is still easy to recognize the marks of the Israeli settlements on the ground of Gaza. Similarly to the argument presented by Eyal Weizman to describe the photographs of Fazal Sheikh in the Negev, we can talk of the earth as “photographic surface,” that is a surface that bears the trace of its successive occupations.[15] We can conclude this text with another photograph that bears the trace of the Israeli cautious process of ruination of the Palestinian infrastructure. In 2015, when one would look at the aerial photographs of Gaza provided by Google Earth, one could not ignore the gigantic cloud of smoke escaping from the unique power plant of Gaza bombed by Israeli aircrafts on July 29, 2014. Whether the choice for this photograph was intentional or not is irrelevant here; what matters when it comes to Gaza and the daily process of ruination to which it is subjected, is the continuous coincidence of the crime and its photographic evidence.

[1] Atef Abu Saif, The Drone Eats With Me. Diaries from a City Under Fire, Manchester, Comma Press, 2015.

[2] See Sharon Rotbard, White City / Black City: Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa, Cambridge, MIT Press, 2015, p.130.

[3] Aron Shai, “The Fate of Abandoned Arab Villages in Israel, 1965-1969,” in History and Memory, vol. 18, n°2, “Home and Beyond. Sites of Palestinian Memory,” fall-winter 2006, pp.86-106.

[4] See Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, London: Oneworld Publications, 2007.

[5] http://www.forensic-architecture.org/

[6] MohammedOmer (@Mogaza), Twitter, July 13, 2014.

[7] See Eyal Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza, London: Verso, 2012.

[8] Ariel Sharon and David Chanoff, Warrior: An Autobiography, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001.

[9] Ibid., 298.

[10] Maréchal Bugeaud, La guerre des rues et des maisons, Paris, Jean-Paul Roger, 1997.

[11] See Tsadok Yeheskeli, Yediot Aharonot, “I made them a stadium in the middle of the camp” on gush-shalom.org, 2002.

[12] Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, London: Verso, 2007.

[13] See Jean-Pierre Filiu, Gaza: A History, London: Hurst, 2014.

[14] Weizman, Hollow Land, 2007.

[15] Eyal Weizman & Fazal Sheikh, The Conflict Shoreline, Berlin, Steidl, 2015.

Important Note: As usual when it comes to such topics, I decided to reserve all rights when it comes to the photographs presented in this article (other pictures that I publish on this blog are licensed under creative commons), as I’m wary that their use could be instrumentalized for political ideologies with which I fundamentally disagree. If you would like to use them, feel free to send me an email to ask for authorization (info.funambulistATgmailDOTcom).

I drove back to Grande Synthe and Calais yesterday, in company of friend Merve Bedir (listen to our conversation for Archipelago) in order to document the new refugee camp of Grande Synthe (see below), as well as the massive demolitions that reduced Calais’ so-called “Jungle” of half its size a few weeks ago. Merve and I have agreed to both establish a report for The Funambulist insisting on our subjective vision of this visit during which we saw the same things but, necessarily, from two different points of view — the photographs we took bring an additional layer of subjectivity to the texts. This article is therefore specifically dedicated to the comparison of the two official camps that have been built in Calais and Grande Synthe. The reason for this is that both materialize into architecture a governmental (whether national or local) political program in which migrant and refugee bodies and lives are the object. Although this article will be constructed in a comparative, and therefore negotiative, mode between both camps, one should not forget the fundamental common point of both sites: the fact that they are and remain camps and, as such, an extremely problematic architecture/urbanistic typology, as we will see in the conclusion.

SITUATION MAP ///

Distance between the camp in Grande Synthe and Dunkirk’s port: 11Km. Distance between Calais’ “Jungle” and Calais’ port: 4Km. Distance between Calais’ “Jungle” and the entrance of the Channel Tunnel: 15Km. Distance between both camps: 34Km.

CALAIS’ “JUNGLE” CONTAINER CAMP ///

 Photograph of the camp’s construction in December on Logistics Solutions’ website / Please note that only half of the “Jungle” (the one that was not demolished in March) is visible here.

I have already written twice (see first and second articles) about the container camp built in the middle of Calais’ “Jungle” that, as such, had necessitated the demolition of a mosque and other makeshift dwellings in order to be built. The forthcoming fifth issue of The Funambulist (May-June 2016) also counts an article on the question of racism in relation to this camp, written by Miriam Ticktin. The way the camp came to existence is through a quite limited amount of money from the State that then delegated the design, fabrication and implementation of the camp and its infrastructure to Logistics Solutions, a French company whose website proudly accounts of its deal with the Egyptian army for one of its bases’ kitchens, and call the container camp a “container hotel for Calais’ migrants.” The organization of control, maintenance and administration of the camp was then delegated to another private actor, the association La Vie Active whose past humanitarian experience was uniquely related to work with elderly persons, as well as persons with disabilities. The camp is surrounded by a fence, counts only three access gates. In this regard, the evacuation map (see photo below) in case of an emergency, by showing the little amount of exit points, also reveals the somehow carceral characteristics of this camp. The only regular access can be made through a small pavilion guarded both by police officers and private security contractors (the photos below that do not show the fence are taken from right outside of it). Once a registered person has been identified through a palm-recognition device (with all the problematic aspects that it represents when it comes to the Dublin Regulation), s/he can access the camp through uninviting turnstiles (see photo below).

As written in the pasts article, the camp is built on a grid, easily monitored by the numerous (although discreet) surveillance cameras that populate it. Any form of sociality is discouraged through space, as well as through rules forbidding cooking (food is provided by the association on another site, a few hundreds meters away) or practically practicing any other activity inside the camp. The infrastructure is minimal as the plans below attest: the camp is designed to temporarily (its official name, CAP means Temporary Hosting Center) provides a roof and restrooms to 1,500 bodies by parking them in containers traditionally use to park goods. We should however not say that the camp provides the very minimum of the function we could expect from such a program but, instead, that the container camp deliberately scuttles its function in order to provide an ideological spectacle of the way the French State approaches what it keeps calling “the migrants problem.” The container object itself provides a “loud and clear” message equating the non-white migrant and refugee bodies to accountable objects to which we can add the symbol of the container that the State dreams to ship to other territories.

 All photographs by Léopold Lambert (April 2016) / All rights reserved (for the reasons explained above). The makeshift dwellings of the Calais’ “Jungle” are only shown in their relation to the container camp here because I have not figuring out a non-voyeurist manner to show the rest of the piece of urbanity that the Jungle is.

GRANDE SYNTHE’S MSF CAMP ///

Although it also intends to host 1,500 persons, the camp opened in March in Grande Synthe near Dunkirk is significantly different from the container camp in Calais. The Municipality (whose head is Green Party member, Mayor Damien Carême) worked with the NGO Médecins sans frontières (MSF), as well as the association Utopia 56, in order to organize a hospitable camp, independently from any participation/decision from the French State. Although a few police officers are guarding both entrances of the camp and that volunteers make sure to control who is entering (and subsequently, probably leaving too) the camp, Merve and I were welcomed and authorized to walk in the camp without any supervision. The dwellings, designed for two or three persons each, are made out of chipboards with floors separated from the grounds. Various additions have been made on some of them depending on the needs of the residents. A person of Utopia 56 responsible of the camp’s organization insisted on the goal that consists in providing ideal conditions for a form of autonomy from the residents (communal kitchens for instance). Many have appropriated their dwelling by adding flags or graffiti, an important amount of which show the predominance of Kurdish people residing in the camp. In addition to the restrooms, showers are also available, as well as an infirmary, clothing supply and laundry. To many extents, the Grande Synthe refugee camp is therefore significantly different from its Calais counterpart: the political program materialized into an architecture here, involves a more local scale of governance and, as such, not only proposes a more benevolent intervention towards migrant and refugee bodies, but also allows the latter to organize themselves some of the conditions of their life in the camp.

 Former encampment of Grande Synthe near the town center (left: February 2016, right: April 2016).

However, such a significant difference should not blind us in blatant problematic conditions in this camp that intervene at a larger scale of design. The site is not surrounded by fences, but it is tightly framed by both a loud highway and train tracks, preventing anyone to leave the camp from any other side than the two gates at its extremity. Similarly, the location of the camp fundamentally separates it from the rest of the town, on the contrary of the former site of encampment closer to the town center. Two pathways have been implemented for residents to gain an easy access to the neighboring shopping mall, as well as two bus stops. Although the conditions of life on the former camp were deplorable between the mud and the occasional assaults that some persons suffered from French nationalists, a young Bedouin refugee residing in the camp told us that he strongly regretted such a proximity. Although we can understand that it might not be easy for a mayor to find a parcel of land sufficiently large to host 1,500 persons, we can only observe how, once again, one of the necessary conditions of hospitality seem to be remoteness.

 All photographs by Léopold Lambert (April 2016) / All rights reserved (for the reasons explained above).

CONCLUSION ///

Even more important than the specific aspects of the Grande Synthe camp that render it also problematic, we have to insist on its very typology: the camp. This is the fundamental common point to these two sites of (in)hospitality: they belong to the domain of architecture of control and to the genealogy of their typology that also includes its most deadly forms: concentration camps and gulags. Of course, such a comparison should not be made lightly and we need to strongly insist that there is a drastic difference between camps that embrace their carceral and deadly characteristics and camps that function to materialize a humanitarian program. However, it is also important to state that camps are fundamentally organized to control the bodies that live in it, regardless of the intention that motivate such a control. In the case of carceral camps, the intention is to ensure that bodies do not escape from them and are occupied to the role that has been forcefully attributed to them, while in the case of humanitarian camps, the intention is to count and organize the lives of bodies according to a humanitarian program. For instance, controlling how many persons are present in the camp allows the anticipation for supply in food, water, clothing, fuel, etc. In order to implement such a control, whatever the intent that justifies it, architecture (understood in the broadest sense as possible) materializes the organizational scheme through its physicality. What is literal in the case of the container camp in Calais may be a little less so in the case of Grande Synthe, but is experienced by its residents’ bodies nonetheless. The typology of the camp, in opposition to the village, the neighborhood, or other veritable pieces of urbanity is doomed to reproduce such control on bodies that have no interest in being controlled. If there was one argument that would emerge from the totality of this blog’s numerous articles, it is that designing a fragment of urbanity that can be called a village or a neighborhood guarantees us in no way that its residents will not be subjected to a political controlling order. Yet, these typologies are not fundamentally dedicated to control in their very essence, they can simply become as such if they are designed and instrumentalized by political programs gaining from such a control. Just like for any other carceral program, we are left with two options: what we may call the Grande Synthe option that consists in genuinely (and sometimes successfully to a certain extent) attempting to soften the corners of a necessarily violent typology, or inventing/embracing alternatives to it.

3 of the 13 drawings for Topie Impitoyable by Loredana Micu

Topie Impitoyable: The Corporeal Politics of the Cloth, the Wall, and the Street published by punctum books, 2016.

As announced a few days ago, I have a second book being published almost simultaneously with the first one, La politique du bulldozer (B2, 2016). Written (exceptionally) in French in 2014, this volume attempts to articulate a certain amount of ideas gathered under Michel Foucault’s phrase, “Mon corps, topie impitoyable” (“My body, merciless landscape” — topie impitoyable was kept as such for its alliterative qualities, pronounce it out loud to hear it!). It was then illustrated by friend Loredana Micu and translated into English by Anna Klosowska, and it is now published in its bilingual version by punctum books with which The Funambulist has been repeatedly collaborating these three last years.

Topie Impitoyable: The Corporeal Politics of the Cloth, the Wall, and the Street is more invested in raising the question of what a body is than in offering a definitive answer. Instead, it questions some stereotypes concerning structures located at various degrees of proximity to the body’s material assemblage, allowing a better integration of the surrounding objects, atmosphere and other bodies and proposing a political reading of their relationship to the body, whether deliberate or accidental. From the hoodie that Trayvon Martin wore when he was killed, to the streets of New York City during Occupy Wall Street and the apartheid wall in Palestine, this book moves through a series of episodes that illustrate how bodies and objects of all sizes are enmeshed in deeply entangled political relationships.

Topie Impitoyable was also published in Italian in 2015 by Emmanuele Jonathan Pilia and Deleyva Editore. In addition to thanking Loredana, Anna, and Eileen Joy along with the rest of the punctum books team, I would like to acknowledge the great influence that four friends had on my writings for this book, through their groundbreaking works:  Madeline Gins (whose poem “All Men Are Sisters” concludes the book),  Mimi Thi Nguyen, Minh-Ha T. Pham, and Eyal Weizman.

INDEX ///

07| PRELUDE: Architecture as a Weapon
21| INTRODUCTION: What Is a Body?
47| DESIGN AND BODIES: An Intrinsic Violence
65| THE CLOTH: An Epidermic Fabric
99| THE WALL: The Line and its Thickness
127| THE STREET:  Occupation of Bodies
159| CONCLUSION: “All Men Are Sisters”
169| ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Excerpt from the book:

PRELUDE: ARCHITECTURE AS A POLITICAL WEAPON ///

It always seems useful to situate a discourse in the wider context of one’s ongoing research. This new book begins where the previous one, Weaponized Architecture: The Impossibility of Innocence, ended. I wrote it in 2010 and my friends Baraona Pohl and César Reyes had the kindness to publish it in 2012. That book started with the hypothesis that architecture is inherently violent because of the way it dissects space and because of the resulting spatial organization of bodies. Architecture is a social discipline, and therefore this violence always ends up as an instrument of politics, whether it’s done consciously or not.

The volume touched upon a host of historical and contemporary examples: Haussmann’s transformation of Paris in the nineteenth century, prison architecture, American suburbs during the Cold War, gentrification of New York, barricades, tunnels, etc. A number of examples are mentioned again in the present volume. However, Weaponized Architecture was preoccupied with one particular situation: material realization of Israeli occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. In the first place, my research was analytical, in the footsteps of the canonical work of Israeli architect Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land. I attempted to compile an inventory of the different means that organize the military and civilian Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territory by different means: architecture, infrastructure, territorial and legal. Second, my research had an “embodied” aspect thanks to an architectural project intended as part of a political manifesto on Palestinian resistance to the occupation. Built in “zone C” (63% of the West Bank since the Oslo accords of 1993), where Israeli army prohibits any Palestinian construction, it consists of a small agricultural platform connected to a shelter, to be used by the Bedouin population. That design uses architectural means to disobey the rules of the occupation. The project also anticipates the discovery of the building by the Israeli army, and the resulting attempted demolition. Spatial properties of the building prevent complete destruction, resulting in the creation of a ruin in the landscape of Salfit: a ruin whose political value for the Palestinian people is not negligible. Palestinian villages on Israeli territory after 1948, destroyed down to the last stone, were not able to tell the story of their past existence. Palestinian ruin, however, can do so through its architecture.

One important conclusion of Weaponized Architecture was the refusal to see architecture as a “solution.” The book insisted on the danger inherent in this notion that tends to take every means necessary for its accomplishment. For me, it is more interesting to define problems rather than to occupy a technocratic position that would attempt to solve them. Similarly, the present book is more interested in defining our ignorance, especially concerning the body, than establishing certitudes.

This book is entitled Topie Impitoyable (Merciless Landscape) in a homage to the opening sentence of Michel Foucault’s short radio conference, The Utopian Body (Le corps utopique), broadcast by France Culture station in 1966. Its alliterative symmetry is supposed to translate Foucault’s original phrase: “mon corps, TO-PI-e imPI-TOyable” (“my body, merciLeSs LandScape”). The body is, thus, necessarily spatial, which also means that it is necessarily material. As we shall see, this book often adopts axioms similar to this one, which reiterate the notion of occupation. I had a chance to reflect on occupation during Occupy Wall Street movement in which I participated in 2011 and 2012 in New York. The phrase “merciless landscape” means that the necessary spatiality of a given body implies that there is only one space for each body at a given time and that only that body can occupy that space. At the time you are reading this book, your body — that is, you — is situated in the place you’ve chosen, or that was chosen for you, excluding all the other places in the world; and only your body can be situated in this particular place. Conflicts that may emerge from that exclusivity will be one of the subjects of this book.

In order to truly begin this book, though, we must define some terms we use throughout. The first of them is matter. One of the postulates of this book is that there is nothing that is not matter. I am less interested in defining the term matter than in inviting the reader to think everything in terms of matter, including phenomena that we often consider immaterial: thought, life, time, etc. Each of them can be interpreted in terms of continuous movement of matter. For instance, the notion of time is nothing but a retrospective construct of the movement of matter.

Matter is indeed in movement, which entails encounters between material assemblages we call bodies. This allows us to define the term of violence that I will use frequently, and whose reception is often problematic. I understand violence in a strictly material dimension as well. This approach considers all encounters between two bodies whose result has an effect on their structural coherence — that is, on their ability to form a body. Violence is thus an episodic or continued relation of two bodies, that is, of two material assemblages. As we shall see, there is reciprocity in that violence, although that may not be evident, due to the degree of violence affecting each body. In other words, when I bump into the table corner — a frequent experience for the clumsy body that I am — my body is affected, but to some extent the table as well.

The last term I want to define is power. This book doesn’t only borrow the title from Foucault, but also the way Foucault elaborates an interpretation of power. For him, power is not something that bodies have, or something that exists in and of itself, but rather something that is excercised between bodies. There are, therefore, no bodies that are essentially colonizers and others, essentially colonized. Rather, in each instance, there are effects of relations between bodies. The conditions of these relations are nonetheless influenced by social structures and their normative production, as we shall see in the introduction.

Let us now draw a map of this book. I see it as a slow zooming out movement from the body and the successive intensive and material layers that compose bodies, to the objects that constitute the field of exploration and fascination of the present book. Each chapter can be read independently, allowing specific readings from specific vantage points. The audience is varied, and some arguments will be self-evident to many, but perhaps not the same ones for everyone. It seemed important to present them all here.

The introduction will bring closer to us the material assemblage we call the “body.” First, we will consider each body as an isolated and neuter whole and observe its physical properties. Second, we will imbue the body with movement in order to understand its potentialities. The notion of movement implies material encounter between bodies. This will allow us to imbue the body with political values, in particular in the way encounters between bodies produce normative processes. We will study in detail the ways bodies are systematically “trapped” in the mechanism of the norm that categorizes them in order to function. Bodies are assigned race, gender, definite sexual orientation, potential handicaps: categories that produce power relations determining the way bodies interact with each other.

This book wants to make a statement on design as discipline. If we consider the body in a certain way, we will better be able to analyze the way that objects, buildings and cities imagined by that discipline interact with the body. That will be the point of four chapters of the book. Each analyzes a bodily relation to design on a certain scale: clothing, wall and street. These three scales associated with the scale of the body itself should not be considered independent from one another. Rather, they are intensive layers whose limits cannot be clearly established. The categorization of the stages selected in the backwards travelling of this book is solely intended to help my argument. I begin with a question that, no matter how we answer it, is always inscribed in a normative hierarchy: what is a body?

It is my great pleasure to announce the release of the fifth issue of The Funambulist Magazine (May-June 2016) as well as its formal launch event in New York on May 4th. It is dedicated to a tremendously important topic that had been an underlying theme of many articles in the four first issues, but embraces here its entire primacy: the relationship between design and racism. Design tends to crystallize and reinforce the normative relationships between bodies in a given society, often to the point of materializing racist political programs. The issue is composed of articles, interview and projects describing the active contribution of design to structural racism in Palestine, the United States, France, South Africa, and Europe. The contributors are Eze Imade Eribo, Rasheedah Phillips, Nick Estes, Miriam Ticktin, Lwandile Fikeni, Nicola Perugini, Neve Gordon, Nacira Guénif-Souilamas, Alicia Olushola Ajayi, Whitney Hansley, Claire Lubell, and Melisa Betts, as well as Sinthujan Varatharajah and Yaşar Adnan Adanalı who both wrote guest columns that precede the main dossier.

The formal launch event will occur in New York on May 4th, 7PM at 61 Local (61 Bergen street, Brooklyn, NY). It will first consist in a presentation of the issue by editor-in-chief Léopold Lambert accompanied by contributor Alicia Olushola Ajayi, followed by a roundtable about the topic with Christina Heatherton, Hadeel Khalil Assali, and Minh-Ha T. Pham. The issue will be available for purchase.

As usual, the issue is available for purchase in four different offers:
– Printed Version
– Digital Version
– Printed + Digital Combo
– Issues 04 Carceral Environments and 05 Design & Racism Combo (printed)

You can also subscribe to the magazine and thus support The Funambulist in a longer span of time while benefiting of better prices:
– Printed Subscription per month
– Digital Subscription per month
– Printed + Digital Annual Subscription

The Funambulist relies on these sales to exist financially, and your support is therefore both appreciated and necessary. However, I apologize to the readers for whom the prices of these offers remain too high. I will soon be starting a program to access the magazine for a much lower price in many countries (bookstores in Zagreb and Porto already propose it for instance), and, please keep in mind that I never refuse to send the digital version to a reduced price or for free should it be your case and ask for it by email (info.funambulistATgmail.com).

INDEX ///

• 0 | COVER: CALAIS’ CONTAINERS
  Léopold Lambert
• 2 | THE KEYS TO RETURN: INHERITING LOSSES AND NARRATIVES
  Sinthujan Varatharajah
• 4 | FROM URBAN TRANSFORMATION TO URBAN WARFARE
  Yaşar Adnan Adanalı
• 6 | FROM THE BLOG: MOLENBEEK
  Léopold Lambert
• — MAIN /// DESIGN & RACISM
• 10 | INTRODUCTION
  Léopold Lambert
• 16 | SLAVE SHIPS: HUMAN COMMODITIES, FLOATING DUNGEONS AND CHIMERAL MANIFESTATIONS
  Eze Imade Eribo
  Rasheedah Phillips
• 22 | OFF THE RESERVATION: LAKOTA LIFE AND DEATH IN RAPID CITY, SOUTH DAKOTA
  Nick Estes
• 28 | CALAIS: CONTAINMENT POLITICS IN THE “JUNGLE”
  Miriam Ticktin
• 34 | APARTHEID: THE DESIGN OF RACISM IN SOUTH AFRICA
  Lwandile Fikeni
• 38 | STUDENTS: MINING COMPOUNDS
  Claire Lubell
• 40 | GAZA: HUMAN SHIELDS, RACE, AND THE LEGAL ARCHITECTURE OF CONTEMPORARY LIBERAL WARS
  Nicola Perugini & Neve Gordon
• 46 | ARCHIPELAGO: THE DESIGN OF FRENCH STRUCTURAL RACISM
  Nacira Guénif-Souilamas
• 50 | CASE STUDY: APARTHEID TERRITORY IN PALESTINE
• 54 | STUDENTS: FREEDOM VILLAGE RESEARCH INSTITUTE
  Alicia Olushola Ajayi
• 56 | STUDENTS: BLACK MOLD IN U.S. PUBLIC HOUSING
  Whitney Hansley
• 58 | STUDENTS: MIRRORING DISPARITY
  Melisa Betts

Yesterday evening, we formally launched the fifth issue of The Funambulist Magazine (May-June 2016): Design & Racism in Brooklyn, NY. After a presentation of the magazine itself (that I conveniently forgot to record), contributor Alicia Olushola Ajayi presented her work featured in the student section of the issue, followed by three successive interventions by Minh-Ha T. Pham, Hadeel Khalil Assali, and Christina Heatherton about their respective interpretation of the relationship between design (in a broad understanding of the term) and structural racism. If you could not be with us last night, you can listen to each of these fantastic presentation through the recording below. I would like to warmly thank my four wonderful guests, as well as the numerous friendly members of the audience, among whom were present three contributors to the first issue of The Funambulist Magazine: Sadia Shirazi, Nora Akawi, and Javier Arbona.

01. Alicia Olushola Ajayi / The Freedom Villages of Brooklyn, IL

Alicia Olushola Ajayi’s  work engages political, economic, and social contexts and the nuances that correlate between the built environment, historical narratives and present day social issues. Alicia graduated with honors from Washington University in St. Louis with a dual masters in architecture and social work. Alicia is currently an Associate Designer at MASS Design Group in Boston.

02. Minh-Ha T. Pham / The Invisible Racist Design of Fashion Copyrights

Minh-Ha T. Pham is Assistant Professor in the Graduate Media Studies Program at the Pratt Institute. She is a contributor to the third issue of The Funambulist Magazine (Clothing Politics), co-editor (along with Mimi Thi Nguyen) of Threadbared, and author of the book Asian Wear Clothes on the Internet (Duke University Press, 2015).

03. Hadeel Khalil Assali / Between Predatory Banks and Oil Companies: The Colonias of South Texas

Hadeel Assali is a PhD candidate in anthropology at Columbia University, and she completed an MA in anthropology at The New School in New York City. She is also a fellow at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia. Her research interests include the transfer of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to Paraguay in the late 1960s and early 1970, and the world they found themselves in, where Arabs of mostly Syrian and Lebanese descent were (and still are) deeply integrated into the socio-economic and political worlds of Paraguay.

04. Christina Heatherton / Policing as Urban Planning: From Broken Windows to Counter-Insurrection 

Christina Heatherton is an Associate Professor at Trinity College. She is the co-editor (along with Jordan T. Camp) of  Policing the Planet (Verso, 2016) and Freedom Now! Struggles for the Human Right to Housing in LA and Beyond (Freedom Now Books, 2012), the editor of Downtown Blues: A Skid Row Reader (Freedom Now Books, 2011), and the author of The Color Line and the Class Struggle: The Mexican Revolution, Internationalism, and the American Century (University of California Press, forthcoming).

05. Questions and Rountable with Alicia Olushola Ajayi, Minh-Ha T. Pham, Hadeel Khalil Assali, and Christina Heatherton

Additional Photographs

All photographs by Martin Byrne (thank you!):

 All photos by Merve Bedir (April 2016) / All rights reserved

Report from Calais and Grande Synthe (part 2): (Spatial) Transformation of Migration Control by Merve Bedir

See part 1: “Two Political Architectures of (in)Hospitality” by Léopold Lambert

I’m in the train to Paris, to meet Léopold for a research visit together to Calais and Dunkirk. During the trip of two hours, my passport and residence permit is checked three times, and my bag is controlled twice. The state of emergency in Belgium and France has been extended for the second time now, which ironically and expectedly increases people’s feeling of insecurity. Move fast in/around the train stations, don’t hang out for too long at the same place.

Based on Léopold’s advice, I go straight to Stalingrad, the ‘arrival neighborhood’ of Paris, right next to Gare du Nord and Gare de l’Est, to see the non-formal camp site under the train tracks. Stalingrad Market sells hardly anything local, but has the world in it. Shop windows are in Russian, Arabic, English, etc. street-stalls-on-cloth offer cell phone chargers, combs, socks, and belts for a quarter worth of the shopping center. The non-formal area for refugees runs all along the tracks from Stalingrad till Jaurès stop, has beds and tents laid out tight together. The basketball court is not in use anymore, and graffiti on every pillar: No one is illegal. Once in while an announcement from above: “Dear passengers, there are pick-pockets at this station, please secure your belongings.”

That same evening we go to Place de la République, where we see two big posters hanging on the three pillars (‘liberty’, ‘equality’ and ‘fraternity’) of the Monument to the French Republic: “Democracy, where are you?” and “Borders kill: Solidarity with the migrants.”

The next morning, we leave early for Calais and Dunkirk. First we go to Dunkirk to check the site of the former encampment. While waiting to become an “eco-village,” the land between the small stadium and the residential neighborhood was used as a temporary refugee camp, managed by the municipality and MSF. Finding out that the new location of the temporary camp is not nearby, we start driving, ending up in another neighborhood, asking around and finding our way to where the camp is re-located (Grande Synthe), right between the highway and the railroad, completely invisible, except for the two police cars at the entrance to the site. Used as a former linen factory, this place is around 20 km away from the first encampment location.

We walk in, start asking people, someone from the volunteer booth takes us to the camp manager. He tells us about the kind of facility Utopia 56 is erecting here together with the refugees; talks further about autonomy and self-organization in the camp, how there will be so much public space for the refugees, etc. We continue to walk, the space feels like a huge left over land between the highway and the train tracks, several things look like they are recycled from something else. There is a functioning carpenter’s workshop, and a common kitchen, a big eating area under construction, a couple of wood baskets for growing plants, two football posts.

We keep walking… I look back to see Léopold talking to a person. Fares (that’s his name) invites us to his dwelling, tells us about how he got here, his back-and-forth trips between Turkey and Greece, Germany and France, the fact that nobody registered him till now, but finally he ended up at the threshold of UK. He says “I came this far, my mom, my brother, my sister are all in U.K. But we spent all our money, now I have to wait here, before I can make it near them as well.” Fares is from Kuwait. He doesn’t know when he was born. He never had an identity card. He worked in Syria and Dubai, before he had enough money to leave. He and his family had a lot of trouble until now, he says “But I know it will all be different when I have the British passport.” I ask him how it compares between the camp before and here, and he responds that he feels neglected here. There were people visiting them from the neighborhood, from the city, bringing soup, sitting down for a conversation. Here, nobody comes, nobody would come, it’s not easy to reach for them, also “people think we are fine, we are taken care of, now, but that’s not the case.” I have to think, because he wasn’t registered until now, will he also be sent back to Turkey, or stay here, or can he ask to be sent next to his family? He doesn’t know if/when he is leaving, or how long he will stay in this camp. Might that feeling of neglect also be resulting from that?

  Common area next to the train tracks in Grande Synthe

  Recycled furniture,  plywood dwellings, football posts and the highway in perspective, in Grande Synthe

 Adjacent neighborhood to the former encampment in Grande Synthe

Calais is another 30-minute drive from Dunkirk, the border construction with three levels of fences and police officers every kilometer prepare us to the ‘security’ regime in effect. We approach the camp site, we find our way to pass the two police officers, who try to dissuade the visitors from entering the Jungle. Only part of the Jungle exists now, the other side expanding towards South is cleared, except for the Ethiopian church. We go through the left overs of the Jungle to reach to the formal camp, where the digital humanitarian shelter, in the form of a container camp in a gridiron layout, is implemented. The containers for the people are exactly the same as the water tanks used for the camp. A white iron fence runs all around the camp, separating it from the Jungle, with security cameras at different spots. The formal camp seems empty, it seems like nobody lives there. On our way out, through the Jungle, we bump into the Embassy for Rojava, a prayer space for the Alawites, the corridor of non-formal economy is still partially there with the hairdresser, the restaurant, the bakery, etc., as well as several flags possibly representing where people are coming from.

  Alewite prayer space in “the Jungle”

 Consulate of Rojava in “the Jungle”

 Restaurant in “the Jungle”

Summing up

It seems, as the migration regime is changing for the EU, the spaces of migration are also transforming. Control and security are becoming more paramount elements of refugee camps, while communicating the message that people are being taken care of.

We cannot think of what is happening in Calais or Dunkirk independent from what is happening in Place de la République. The ‘crisis’ is not about security, because of which I have to be checked 3 times in 2 hours from Rotterdam to Paris; or migration, because of which people end up in ‘waste land’s like Grande Synthe. The ‘crisis’ is about the corruption, the decay of the nation state and our common values, our culture. I remember the piece I read in Volkskrant last week, talking about Lesvos after the EU-Turkey deal, how is Grande Synthe different than Lesvos? Not much, it seems. People are disposable either in Lesvos or in Dunkirk.

Another aspect of what we have seen, is the very existence of the camp. We compare camps to each other, as forms of temporary settlement, discuss budget, security, daily life, economy, formality/informality, etc. But, why don’t we ask what is public in a camp? Is there public in the formal container camp in Calais? Is there public in Grande Synthe? Can we talk about public space without the existence of a public? Can we talk about public, if ‘the future’ is missing from the camp? Can we talk about public, if there is no prospect for people about where they will go, what they will do tomorrow, the next day, in a month, in a year? What is the logic of constructing camps, and new economy around it, if we don’t really know what the purpose of camps for the prospects of people?

Note: The photos attached to this text are complementary to the ones in Part 1 of this blog post.

See also the Archipelago conversation “2.5 Million Refugees in Turkey: A Few Architectural and Linguistic Considerations” with Merve Bedir recorded on February 20, 2016

Photograph by Meriem Chabani (May 15, 2016)

I had not yet written anything about Nuit Debout, the current movement that has been occupying the square of the République in Paris since March 31, 2016. The reason for this is that my thoughts are still not articulated about whether or not this movement gives itself the means to fundamentally challenges the way systemic violence operates in France. Originating from a demonstration against a new labor legislation drafted by the French government, the movement quickly expanded its political struggle to other issues: regularization of undocumented workers, rights to housing, police reform, change in foreign policy, anti-speciesism, etc. The variety of these struggles as well as their organizers makes it difficult to emit a definitive opinion on the movement. One thing that is proper to it however and can be, as such, the object of our critique is its territorialization. Situated at the core of young-middle-class Paris — the same Paris that had been the target of the November attacks — Nuit Debout can call as much as it wants for the banlieue youth to join it, its territoriality renders such call uninviting. This is the key problem of the movement: it has forgotten to deconstruct the relationships of domination that are at normatively at work in society. It was particularly flagrant when a few male participants were outraged by the non-mixity of some meetings of the Nuit Debout feminist commission, calling it a denial of democracy, assuming here again the Republic’s universalist claim that “all men [sic] are equal” in a society however operating through the continuous experience of inequality. Similarly, one of the foundations of French structural racism (listen to the Archipelago conversation with Nacira Guénif-Souilamas for more about it) is its territoriality through the segregative characteristics of the banlieues (consult the category dedicated to them on this blog). Here again, the work of deconstruction (decolonization) that would have been necessary for an actual “convergence of struggles” as claimed by Nuit Debout has not been done.

Engaging now at the scale of the movement itself, there has been another work of deconstruction that has been forgotten by one of its commissions: the group of architects that eagerly decided to invest their skills in favor of the movement, Archi Debout. While there is a priori no profession that should be excluded from a social movement, it is reasonable to say that all sets of expertise necessitate an introspection proportional to the role this expertise plays within the mechanisms of violence of a given society. Architects would probably agree that if a group of police officers who currently surround the square of the République would express the desire to be part of the movement, they would not only need to lighten themselves from their offensive gears and weapons, but would also need to deconstruct their responsibility in what the movement struggles against. The same is true for architects and the fact that this reflective work has evidently not been done is symptomatic of the way architects consider their profession: they think of architecture as a neutral tool that can be either used for “good” or “evil.”

Architecture is however not that different from the police baton or, better even, the teargas canister (because of the atmosphere that its produces around bodies) that has been used against Nuit Debout these recent weeks. Neither of them can be separated from their intrinsic violence but both can be used for different forms of struggles, although they are both almost always used to condition and reinforce the normative sets of domination at work in a given society. The photograph above showing a meeting occurring in one of the domes constructed by Archi Debout is highly representative of architecture’s inherent capacity to splits a milieu, organize bodies according to this split, and categorize them socially between included and excluded bodies. On a square recently renovated into a somehow smooth and open plateau that all recognized to have been the condition for such a movement to be organized, architects have felt the compulsive need to recreate separating walls. Of course, the sheltering function will be the one invoked to justify the construction of such walls, yet, the shelter in its sole clear function is the paradigmatic example of “architecture’s intrinsic exclusionary violence” since it determines (through a protocol of selection determined by the local politics) which bodies get to be protected, and which ones should be excluded — even if this protocol materialized through the rather simple “first here, first served” rule as it is the case here.

Photos by Arnaud Contreras (April 6, 2016)

Does this text signify that architects can only be part of social movements as citizens, stripped from their expertise? I am convinced of the contrary. As members of a society dedicated to a spatial reading of the latter, their role can precisely contribute to a deconstruction of the various spatial apparatuses that structure its operative sets of domination between bodies. And if architecture is the weapon this texts claims for it to be, it certainly can finds the same use that it has served historically in Paris through the construction of structures that can simultaneously constitute means of defense and challenge the fluxes of a city otherwise indifferent. Because these two attitudes requires to think of architecture against itself, they have been undertaken by non-architects so far, mostly before architects themselves got involved (as such) as during one of the first nights of Nuit Debout (April 6, 2016), when a crowd marched against the police station of the 5th arrondissement, where were detained some of its members. The fortified architectural characteristics (in a similar way than the ones in the banlieues) emerge historically from the student confrontations with the police in May 1968 — whether the crowd knew it or not, I have no idea. Later on, the marching crowd created barricades on the nearby Boulevard Saint Germain (see photos above) to protect itself against the action of the police. If architects really feel the urge to intervene as such in a political movement, this is, I think, how they should engage with their own expertise.

Image above – Street art by Dip Social Klub at Nuit Debout: “The police violence you are currently experiencing, it exists in the banlieues for more than thirty years.” “Homage to all the victims of police crimes.” “The dance of suffering.”

In an interview with Christina Heatherton and Jordan T. Camp featured in their book, Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter (Verso, 2016, soon on Archipelago), Naomi Murakawa states the following:

The terminology we use betrays the notion that policing at its core is acceptable, that it only becomes a problem when things go awry. But let’s be clear: there is no such thing as racial profiling. To say the police are profiling suggests the possibility that there could be colorblind policing. There never has been, and the social order in which we live means there never could be. “Police brutality” is also a hollow term, in the sense that all police interactions, by definition, occur under the threat of brutality.

This last passage, as well as the rest of the interview and the rest of the book, is extremely helpful to think of the current spectacular violence we are witnessing in France in the interaction between the police and strikers/demonstrators against the project of a legislation project that would regulate labor to the detriment of workers. An important part of the media and politicians have insisted that police officers were the victims of many actions of “casseurs” (literally, “breakers”) organized against them. This discursive stigmatization allowed the French government to order the legal exclusion of nine people from the area where a police demonstration was being held on May 18 to protest against “anti-cop hatred” — the police here lost an opportunity to protest instead against the long extra hours they have been asked to provide since the January 2015 attacks. Although this order was broken in courts — the suspicion against these nine persons to organize actions against the police was fund to be funded on nothing — we can see how the imaginary provided by most press outlets associated to the executive power of the ongoing state of emergency can deploy its arbitrary violence on targeted bodies.

Videos of “police brutality” collected on Mediapart

Despite this dubious reading of the situation, these recent weeks have certainly provided numerous images of what we commonly call “police brutality” (“muscled intervention” as most press outlets like to call them): teargas shot in a crowd or straight at targeted people, sadistic use of the baton, strangling arrests, people pushed onto the floor, etc. Even Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan whose police crushed Occupy Gezi and currently siege Kurdish cities, saw an opportunity in the situation to publicly condemn the ongoing police violence in France.

However, we can bring two additional layers of critical reading of this situation. The first one is about the bodies targeted by this “police brutality,” and their territoriality. Because of the deep historical anchor of unions in France, and the imaginary they carry (and probably their internal politics), the organized worker struggles are often dominated by white bodies and tend to occur in city centers. As the Dip Social Klub’s recent graffiti at Nuit Debout above reads, “The police violence you are currently experiencing, it exists in the banlieues for more than thirty years.” As written in several past articles (see the “Paris Banlieues” section), the police action in the banlieues is systematically an antagonizing one, finding its historical origin in the colonial policing of indigenous bodies. The creation of the BAC (Brigade Anti-Criminalité) in particular can be traced back to such genealogy. In Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing, Didier Fassin recounts and analyzes his field work among the BAC and attests of the conscious or unconscious racism — its officers are overwhelmingly white — at work in their arbitrary daily interventions in the banlieues. 

 Recent photographs of police interventions in Paris / Photos by Léopold Lambert (2016)

Nevertheless, reading Murakawa’s comment and, beyond it, her work in general, helps us to think further about something that, all things considered, is a surprise to no one. Even the French government, found recently guilty of having its police leading identity control discriminating non-white bodies, argued in its legal appeal that this discrimination was based on the idea that such controls must applied on “a population that appears as potentially foreign.” As Murakawa states, “there is no such thing as racial profiling,” in other words, there is nothing that the police can be blamed for independently from the structural ideology that it enforces, in the case of France, that is the continuity of colonialism. Murakawa continues by stating “‘Police Brutality’ is also a hollow notion.” Indeed, when we see police officers beating up a demonstrator with a baton, we tend to look at the spectacular violence of the assault itself, and not as much as the very fact that the baton itself is (materially and legally) manufactured to be at the police officer’s disposal for its usage. Even the non-actual-usage of it is itself a form of violence, says Murakawa, since it materializes the “threat of brutality.” The very function of the police as an agent of violence — the ethical and social legitimacy of this violence is not mobilized in this definition of its function — is therefore the one that should be challenged, rather than its spectacular occurrences. Spectacular violence creates inequality in the outrage it triggers, since it involves an observer, which itself involves a territoriality of visibility (here, the French city centers, inhabited by the middle and upper classes). ‘Normal’ violence, on the other hand, occur in a territoriality of invisibility where no one can afford the role of the observer — except, perhaps, anthropologists doing their field work. Such territoriality needs to be understood both literally (the banlieues for instance) and figuratively. The fact that so many of us do not see the inherent violence in the presence of armed (often male, often white) bodies patrolling our cities is indeed itself a process of invisibilization that simultaneously reveals and reinforces inequalities.

It is therefore the entire police state apparatus that needs to be challenged. In this regard, Murakawa, as well as We Charge Genocide organizers, also interviewed by Heatherton and Camp for Policing the Planet, advocate for police abolition. Just like we had talked about it in the conversation about prison abolition with Nasrin Himada (see issue 4 of The Funambulist Magazine and/or Archipelago), an abolitionist process should first and foremost be conceived for what it is: a process. This simultaneously means that such a political program finds no interest in replacing a state apparatus by another one — on the contrary of the immediate questions of alternatives often raised when the word abolition is mentioned — and that, as such, it does not require to be fully implemented in order to be practiced on a daily basis at the scale of individuals. We should therefore take very seriously such a political program and take part in the reflection that is engaged around this topic.

“The Rule of Walls: An Architectural Reading of the State’s ‘Legitimate’ Use of Violence”
Lecture given on May 18, 2016 at the Warwick Political Geography Conference

The notion of “legitimate use of violence” by the state, although far from new, still allows an understanding of the way our societies operate, according to a particular societal order. The punctual action of the police is often used to illustrate this notion, but the structures that condition it rarely incorporate architecture as a key actor. This lecture therefore proposes to examine this state violence through the scope of architecture using several examples: the state of emergency and the neo-colonial police stations of the Paris banlieues (suburbs), the foreseeable policed gentrification of Molenbeek in Brussels, the dehumanizing walls and container camp of Calais. Although emerging from significantly different political contexts, these case studies have in common that they implement themselves through architecture, using the latter’s intrinsic violence in order to force a political order on bodies.

A big “thank you” to Aya Nassar, Mara Duer, Antonio Ferraz de Oliveira, and the other organizers for their kind invitation, as well as to Stuart Elden for his introduction.

A few slides from the lecture ///

Mobile police fence, allowing only a controlled pedestrian access to the Rue de Rennes on June 14, 2016 / Photo by Léopold Lambert

To the risk of spending too much time on political matters specific to France for a certain amount of the blog’s readers, I would like to come back to a very recent event that occurred a few hundreds meters away from my office, and that I was therefore able to document and investigate in a way that is not dissimilar to the (much more rigorous) methods of Forensic Architecture. On Tuesday June 14, a massive demonstration took place in Paris and gathered several hundreds of thousand people protesting against the new labor legislation that intends to (de)regulate labor conditions in the workers’ disfavor. Exceptionally the demonstration was organized as a march from Place d’Italie (South-East of Paris) to Invalides (Center-West of Paris). A certain amount of clashes occurred along the way between the massively deployed police — we’re still under the state of emergency — and several dozens of masked participants who undertook to break down advertising windows, banks and insurance companies’ storefronts, as well as throw stones at the police — whether one thinks that such action is legitimate or not, one is obliged to observe the asymmetry of means, as well as the fact that these individuals represented less than one percent of the participants to the demonstration. As it is customary (cf. this widely shared/translated cartoon), the press and politicians strictly framed their coverage and discourses on the spectacle offered by cocktail molotov, fire bombs and other firecrackers (conveniently forgetting the ubiquity of teargas and deafening grenades), rather than on the human tide of dissent that flowed the Paris boulevards.

 Map for a reconstitution. Numbers near the white arrows refer to the photographs presented below.

One particular event however became the focus of this narrative constructed to compromize the social movement protesting the labor law. At some point of the day, during a moment of generalized confusion, one to three people deliberately damaged a few glass panels of the exterior facades of a relatively recent building of the Necker Hospital, a large hospital complex dedicated to the care of children. The description made by some press outlets, as well as by political representatives, depicted scenes of terror for the children and the medical staff inside the hospital, as if hordes of hooligans had penetrated the complex of the hospital and undertook to break everything they found. The Ministry of Interior, Bernard Cazeneuve, even conveniently mentioned the presence in the hospital of the young child of a couple of police officers assassinated the night before by a alleged member of ISIS. The words of Prime Minister Manuel Valls in front of the hospital on Wednesday accusing demonstrators to want to “kill police officers” completed the vision associating workers unions and ISIS, offered a few days earlier by Le Point, one of the most followed weekly news journal that stated that “France is subjected to two threats today that, despite being different, are compromizing its integrity: ISIS and the CGT [main worker union].”

 (above/left) Le Figaro newspaper: “Damages at the Necker Hospital: The Story of a Nightmare Day.”
(above/right) Le Parisien newspaper: “Labor Law: The Necker Children Hospital Vandalized by ‘breakers’.”
(bottom) TV screenshot Prime Minister Manuel Valls giving a speech in front of the Necker Hospital.

Although some people (staff and patients’ parents) inside the hospital during the demonstration already offered their version of the story and their aversion of the instrumentalization of this event by the government, and although we can probably all agree that the three individuals who smashed a mallet in the glass walls of the hospital acted in a manner that is difficult to define in another way than moronically — a live video showing one of them at work allows us to hear from another demonstrator “hey! it’s a kid hospital here!” — it seems important to reconstitute the context and actual effects of this particular event. All following photographs are some I took a few instants before these glass walls were damaged on June 14, and further, some other I took today to observe the (small) extents of the damages.

[1] For about 1.5 hour, the demonstration cortege was stopped on the Boulevard du Montparnasse at the level of the Rue du Cherche Midi, while police barrages prevented anyone to access it.

[2] Many people at the police barrage on Rue de Sevres wanting to either join the demonstration, or simply cross the Boulevard. The hospital can be seen in the background of the fourth picture. The third and fourth pictures show a demonstrator being frisk by police officers. The fifth picture show the smoke of teargas — although this is not visible, the air was already toxic the moment earlier — after fire bombs and stones were thrown at the police.

[3] The State of Emergency implies exceptional police arsenal. A few minutes later, the water canon vehicle was brought to the intersection and started to disperse demonstrators.

[4] View of the Boulevard du Montparnasse on June 16. The photograph is taken from where the demonstration cortege was stopped and show where the clashes occur.

[5] Graffiti on the bourgeois residential buildings of the Boulevard. The one on the left “Urgence Notre Police Assassine! 93” (Emergency, Our Police Assassinate) attests of the presence of familiar banlieue organizations in the demonstration.

[6] [7] [8] [9] These photographs show the extents of the damages on the external skin of the hospital building. Although relatively small and non-consequential to the function of the interior spaces — PM Valls described “surgery rooms behind this walls!” — one is forced to recognize the absurdity of such damages that exclusively serve the construction of the government’s narrative, which clearly was expecting if not hoping something like this to happen. A few weeks ago, a police union revealed that officers currently receive orders no to act immediately against individuals breaking storefronts and bank dispensers, suspecting the Ministry of Interior to thus force an imaginary associating the current social movement to violence. Although this text is in no way trying to legitimize a police intervention — police-less demonstrations would necessarily be safer for everyone — this lack of intervention (although witnessed, to a certain extent on Tuesday) is highly revealing about the government’s strategy.

In conclusion, despite the specificity of this case in terms of geographical and historical context, we can see how it relates to many other situations, in which the inherent subjectivity of the medium (etymologically, the “intermediary”) that recounts an event is fully embraced and thus instrumentalized politically. In this case, the compromission, however small, of the architecture of the hospital becomes an act deliberately confusing the external membrane of a building with the totality of the bodies situated inside of it. Moreover, this attack on architecture is placed in a current imaginary of spectacular destruction that goes from Palmyra to the attacked cafés of the French capital (but unsurprisingly, not in Gaza). Although the act itself cannot be suspected to be engineered by the police itself (a few conspiracy theories already flourished since Tuesday), the conditions of this act, as well as the way it is recounted are the respective responsibilities of the government, and the press. I started this text by mentioning the work of Forensic Architecture as an example of investigations involving architects’ expertise through other means than the one traditionally associated to this profession. Although such expertise is not fundamentally mobilized in this present example, I am hoping that such an investigation, however small it might be, can be considered as a methodological precedent on which others could base themselves, some of which mobilizing more the architectural dimension of the given examined event.

Humor Bonus: Cartesian logic on the Boulevard du Montparnasse: “I think therefore I am not a (anti-riot) cop”

Text originally written in French for a journal that should remain nameless as the text was published along 14 others, all written by male contributors. I nevertheless want to thank Nicolas Hannequin for his help.

On August 12, 2015, 2,500 refugees, mostly Syrians and Afghanis, are kept prisoners for 24 hours in a stadium of Kos, a Greek island situated only a few kilometers from the Turkish coasts. They were promised that they could undertake their asylum claim in the European Union once they’ll be gathered in the stadium. It is not clear whether it was only a rumor or a trick from the Greek police. In any case, the 2,500 refugees, families and individuals who feel the civil war in Syria or the greatly precarious situation in Afghanistan we thus enclosed in the little stadium of Kos, forming a dense crowd under the sun of August for long hours. People fainting and panic movements are frequent, water and food are lacking, bathrooms are not accessible, and the tears of the children are a testimony of the cynic situation: populations fleeing tragic situations, accomplishing thousands of kilometers from East to West to find only additional turmoil once they set foot on the European land.

The fact that these 2,500 persons were gathered in a stadium could appear innocent at first glance. We could have thought that such a concentration of bodies could have taken place anywhere else. Nevertheless, places that simultaneously enable the gathering a great number of bodies as well as their control by a given authority are significantly limited, in particular in an urban context. This text will thus think the stadium as an architectural environment which sport and entertainment functions can, without any modifications be dissolved to be replaced by other uses related to a political concentration of bodies in such a space.

The recent example of Kos recalls — European authorities should also remember it — another historical example of such a concentration of persons against their will: the Paris “Vel d’Hiv” (Winter Velodrome) in July 16 and 17, 1942 that gathered over 13,000 Jews arrested by the Nazis and the French police before they were deported then assassinated in the Holocaust camps. This comparison is not a comparison of the politics that led to these two massive arrests — we may and should be heavily critical of the European Union policies in terms of immigration but cannot compare them to the Nazi industrial genocide — but rather, an observation of the similarities in the concentration of bodies in a premise which functions have been modified by these respective politics.

We can add to these two examples a third one: the New Orleans Superdome  during and right after the passage of Hurricane Katrina in late August 2005. The stadium, home of the Saints, has been indeed used as a “shelter of last resort” for about 20,000 persons during one week. The human damages that the hurricane caused (more than 1,800 people died), as well as its material damages (more than 100 billions of dollars) were followed by the State of Emergency and the deployment of 45,000 soldiers of the National Guard to intervene, weapons in hands, against potential looting. Although the Superdome was a shelter and, as such, an environment in which its temporary inhabitants were not forced to stay, we have to interpret what this concentration of bodies in a stadium meant in the context of the State of Emergency policed by armed soldiers effectively forcing the city inhabitants to comply with a curfew at night. Moreover, the daily organization of several thousand of people’s lives in an environment that allows no intimacy constitutes significant difficulty and the New Orleans police intervened within the building a few times. The notion of control of the stadium is here again fundamental in the way we interpret this radical shift of functions.

Similarly, the photographs of hundreds of beds organized where, usually, the synthetic sport field is situated are particularly illustrative of the oddity of such a disruption of the traditional functions of the stadium. The concentration of bodies in the center of the building contrast with their absence in the bleachers in an inverse scheme of the one normally organizing the stadium: dozens of thousands of bodies densely present in the bleachers watching a small amount of others in their practice of a sport. Such an inversion allows us to ask the question of its meaning at a philosophical level: what does such an absence of spectators signify when the stadium leaves its sportive functions to become a carceral environment? Perhaps, it relates to the impossibility of a neutrality, of an innocence that such events imply: no one can be spectator of them, only the action at the center of the stadium constitute the reality to which every body contributes deliberately or not.

This dichotomy between the bleachers and the field enables us to think of the space that the stadium materializes. As evoked at the beginning of this text, the field of a stadium represents often a rare somehow empty space in the middle of a more-or-less-dense urban fabric. We can even think of the stadium, not as an assemblage bleachers+field, but, rather, as the architectural assemblage that surrounds the field, as if one had seek to protect this grass or earth surface from the rest of the city. Of course, this vision is quite ridiculously bucolic and involves an obsolete image of a schism between the city and an arguably opposed nature. Nevertheless, if we do not think of it through this anthropocentric opposition, but, rather, as the construction of a void — the void is not an anterior condition, it needs to be constructed — we may be able to think about this quite particular architectural typology.

When this void is well balanced with a significant urban density, it can become the scene of the democratic practice materialized in the gathering and community of bodies. This is the “between-the-lines” reading that we can make of Eyal Weizman’s book, The Roundabout Revolutions, which, from Cairo’s Tahrir to Bahrain’s Manama analyses the 2011 insurrections through the spaces that enabled these gatherings. We can also think about the construction of the Champ de Mars in Paris, as the democratic space of the French Revolution, when it was designed to host the 100,000 participants to the Fête de la Fédération on July 14, 1790. We can thus be surprised that the stadium does not belong to our imaginary of democratic spaces. After all, the etymology of the bleacher (i.e. tribune in French), refers to the tribuns, administrators of the Antic Rome and, as such, to the political practice of the city. The difference between Tahrir Square, scene of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, and Port Saïd’s stadium where seventy-four persons were killed following a football game on February 1, 2012, is the capacity of gathered bodies in a space to escape from it.

More often than not, a square results in an urban configuration of diverse architectural assemblages built in different eras by different architects and political representatives. What emerges from this difference is the difficulty to control this space in its totality since it responds to various logics that, eventually, creates several lines of flight. On the contrary, a stadium constitutes a cohesive architectural assemblage designed by agreeing deciders (architects, engineers, politicians, etc.). Architecture, in its capacity to structure space constitutes a particularly effective discipline to organize bodies in space, even when it does not correspond to an explicit politics of control — we should not forget nevertheless that stadiums are usually only accessible through the presentation of paid tickets and that the control of this economy has strong architectural repercussions. It is for this reason that a space designed for sport or cultural entertainment does not need any architectural transformation in order to become a carceral environment as we saw it through the historical examples of Kos, Paris and New Orleans. The control of bodies is already inscribed in its very materiality: only the motivation for such a control as well as its degree of acceptation of bodies themselves are modified in this political transformative process.

Let’s finish this demonstration by its logical conclusion: since architecture necessarily deploys a certain degree of control on bodies that it hosts, a veritably democratic space cannot be designed. Of course, this does not mean that architectural apparatuses cannot be created in order to diminish their own capacity of control, and we can imagine a stadium reducing as much as possible its carceral potentiality, however, such a practice involves thinking architecture against itself, that is, against its intrinsic characteristics. For these reasons, the stadium in its propensity to gather bodies and, therefore, to influence the social relationships between them, remains a particularly useful example to examine these characteristics, as well as the resistance that can be opposed to them.

I am happy to announce that the sixth issue of The Funambulist Magazine (July-August 2016), dedicated to Object Politics is now officially published. This new issue concludes the first year of existence of the magazine; I hope that you enjoyed it and that you will continue to do so during the second year. Similarly to the third issue (January-February 2016), dedicated to “Clothing Politics,” this new issue is dedicated to a scale of design that, sometimes, goes unnoticed in the examination of its political dimension: the scale of objects. Our bodies are surrounded by them, wear them, use them, and eat them. They are all precisely designed, and are involved in complex manufacturing systems, yet we often fail to address the political intensity of our interaction with them.

The issue includes guest columns about Native resistance in New Mexico by Jennifer Marley, and about the most recent Palestinian Festival of Literature by Bhakti Shringarpure. The articles of the main dossier are written by Charmaine Chua about the shipping container, Françoise Vergès about the banana, Manar Moursi & David Puig about Cairo’s street chairs, and Pascale Lapalud & Chris Blache (Genre & Ville) about gender and urban furniture in French cities. It also includes a short graphic essay about Ramallah’s Mukataa by Samir Harb and a text about the New Palestinian Museum “without objects” by Karim Kattan. The transcript of a 2014 Archipelago conversation with Miami artists/writers Gean Moreno & Ernesto Oroza examines the systems in which generic objects take place, while the photographic section is a partial report of the most recent Unknown Fields‘ expedition in Rajasthan’s garment factories. The three student projects invent a passport and a backpack for the refugees in Lesvos (Embassy for the Displaced), a kit of facial prosthetics to “trick biometrics” (Alix Gallet) and a bridge countering the segregating effects of the concrete walls of Baghdad (Sarah Almaki).

The issue will be formally presented and launched at the Autonoma Conference in Athens on July 2 at 3:15PM.

As usual, the issue is available for purchase in four different offers:
– Printed Version
– Digital Version
– Printed + Digital Combo
– Issues 05 Design & Racism and 06 Object Politics Combo (printed)

You can also subscribe to the magazine and thus support The Funambulist in a longer span of time while benefiting of better prices:
– Printed Subscription per month
– Digital Subscription per month
– Printed + Digital Annual Subscription

You can also catch yourself up with the 5 first issues by using this “make-your-own-3-issue-combo” option!

The Funambulist relies on these sales to exist financially, and your support is therefore both appreciated and necessary. However, I apologize to the readers for whom the prices of these offers remain too high. I will soon be starting a program to access the magazine for a much lower price in many countries (it is still in the making), and, please keep in mind that I never refuse to send the digital version to a reduced price or for free should it be your case and ask for it by email (info.funambulistATgmail.com).

As we learn everyday about new arbitrary murders of Native and Black bodies in the United States by primarily white police officers, it seems crucial to bring as much information and reflection on the table in order to act in solidarity of the various political movements organized against this immune machine of death. One key element of the conversation consists in the recognition that these murders are not punctual accidents caused by racist police officers but, rather, the most extreme form of a violence legitimized and designed by the State (see past article “Police Brutality Is a Hollow Term”). The historical relationship of Native and Black bodies with the U.S. State (both at federal and state level) are therefore important to consider in order to understand how the police institution has been designed against them from the beginning of the United States’ formation and continues today its murderous function. The following text gives us such an important account of Native life and death in a “border town” of South Dakota. Written by Nick Estes for the fifth issue of The Funambulist Magazine: Design & Racism, we both felt that it was important to share it with as many people as possible here. You can also download the article as it is laid out in the magazine itself by clicking here.

Off the Reservation: Lakota Life and Death in Rapid City, South Dakota by Nick Estes

On December 19, 2014, thirty-year old Lakota man Allen Locke along with hundreds of Lakota people gathered for a Native Lives Matter rally at the Rushmore Plaza Civic Center in Rapid City, South Dakota to demand justice and answers for rampant police violence against Natives in the city. The next day, Rapid City police knocked at the door of an address in the low-income housing development, Lakota Homes. As the name suggests, this neighborhood in the city’s north side is home to a majority of urban Lakota residents. That night, police responded to a call to remove Locke after a domestic dispute. Dispatched officer Anthony Meirose entered the residence and, later, an intoxicated Locke allegedly said to him, “It’s a good day to die” before charging the officer with a steak knife. Meirose believed he had no other choice but to shoot Locke five times, killing him in the kitchen within earshot of his family. The South Dakota Attorney General’s office ruled the shooting “justified,” stressing what Locke allegedly said before Meirose killed him implying suicide by cop. The consensus by law enforcement and the local media was: on the one hand, if Locke wanted to die that day, police were not at fault; on the other hand, if he did not want to die, then he surely was “dying” like so many Natives — a belief that naturalizes the myth of the disappearing Indian. There is no more stereotypical colonial encounter than one between police and the “drunk Indian.” In this scenario, a violent death was expected if not inevitable.

There was nothing innocent about this encounter. Settlers claim Rapid City as a white space. Persistent urban Native presence gives rise to the meticulous management and design of the city along racial boundaries administered by the police, the arrangement of low-income neighborhoods, and the fabrication of a criminal element found most commonly in the “drunk Indian.” The Native poor are cordoned off to mark racially and politically distinct settler and Native spaces. The arrangement of these colonial geographies reflects the same historic and ongoing patterns of violence that displace and contain Indigenous peoples to reservations and remove them from the ancestral territories. Enforcing these spatial arrangements requires the continual policing of space and the continual performance of settler ownership over lands and people that they claim as their own. Law enforcement plays an integral role in upholding these violent spatial practices. Encounters between police and the racialized poor in the U.S. have a murderous and well-known history. How vigilante white slave patrols in southern states evolved into modern police departments is well-documented. Lesser known is policing’s colonial origins: settler colonialism — the physical and spatial process of eliminating, disappearing, and forcefully displacing a native population from their lands to be replaced by a foreign, occupying settler population — is the longest, most enduring, yet least acknowledged structure in the U.S. Indian reservations are commonly considered the forgotten, rural pockets of poverty where violence is abundant and hope in short supply. According to U.S. Census figures, however, almost four of five Natives live off-reservation in places like Rapid City. Rapid City is the epitome of a colonial city. In local vernacular, it is called a border town, the white dominated settlements that ring Indian reservations where persistent patterns of violence and criminalization define everyday Native life.

Lakota Homes, a low-income housing development, is home to the majority of the urban Lakota in Rapid City where Allen Locke was killed by police / Photograph by Nick Estes (2014)

Established as an illegal settlement in 1876 in direct violation of the 1868 Ft. Laramie Treaty that guaranteed the Lakota as the sole owners of the Black Hills, Rapid City served as an eastern gateway to the mountains’ highly-prized goldfields. That same year, a Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho confederacy crushed the U.S. military, famously wiping out the Seventh Cavalry and killing General George Armstrong at the Battle of Greasy Grass. Months later Congress passed the Black Hills Act, nullifying the 1868 Treaty. Although never militarily defeated or surrendering, the Lakota found their treaty lands significantly diminished and overrun with settlers. Reservation life was not a choice, but a means for survival. In 1889, South Dakota was granted statehood, solidifying settler claims to Lakota treaty territory. In his book To Have This Land (1991), Philip Hall shows how Rapid City businessmen and newspapers played a crucial role in drumming up anti-Indian sentiment and calling for the violent conclusion to South Dakota’s “Indian Problem” to secure white ownership of remaining Lakota lands. Meanwhile, white vigilantes in Rapid City formed “cowboy militias” and led sporadic sorties against “hostiles,” or Indians going “off the reservation” and those who ventured too to close white-dominated settlements such as Rapid City. This kind of frontier homicide came to a head when the U.S. deployed Custer’s former regiment, the Seventh Cavalry, to stamp out what was believed to be an imminent insurrection among Lakota people leaving their assigned reservations. Spotted Elk’s band (also known as “Chief Big Foot”) left the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation for the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation without permission only to be greeted by a vengeful U.S. military. On December 29, 1890, the Seventh Cavalry detained and opened fire on these fleeing Lakota people, killing some 300 at what became known as the Wounded Knee Massacre.

To “go off the reservation” is a U.S. expression current in military, law enforcement, and political circles. It means to defy orders or to deviate from what is expected. Soldiers who “go off the reservation” are rogues or mavericks in military lingo — those who “cross the wire” of military bases called “reservations” and enter hostile territory called “Indian Country.” For Native people to “go off the reservation” refers to those who historically refused reservation life or refused to respect its borders, where Native life was contained and managed. In those days, those willfully crossing frontier borders were renegades, outlaws, or hostiles, who were usually hunted down and summarily shot, hanged, or imprisoned. It is not coincidence this phrase arose from of the nineteenth century Indian wars, the confinement of Natives to reservations, and the murderous consequences inflicted upon those refusing to live by imposed rules and boundaries. Native bodies “off the reservation” in places like Rapid City are loaded with meaning. They are the nightmarish reminder of settler precarity, the living proof of a counter and prior claim to the land. In 1980, the Supreme Court confirmed this fear when it ruled that the U.S. had illegally taken the Black Hills from the Lakota. The court ordered a monetary compensation to which the Lakota refused by saying resolutely, “the Black Hills are not for sale.” In spite of this, the occupation of the Lakota lands continued unabated, and so too did colonial violence. Asserting ownership over the Black Hills, however, does not simply boil down to living on stolen land: settlement requires a continual inflicting of discipline, pain, violence, and death against the bodies whose mere presence elicit so much anxiety about the legitimacy of the colonial project — that indeed this is stolen land. They are bodies that refuse to go away, refuse to disappear, and refuse to sell their lands.

 Despite ongoing occupation, Lakota presence in Rapid City is a continual reminder of refusal  to disappear, to go away, and sell their lands / Photograph by Nick Estes (2013)

As a result, Lakota people are subject to enforced poverty and mass incarceration, most of this taking place off-reservation. According to a 2013 American Community Survey, Natives in Rapid City live in poverty at rates higher than many reservations. More than half of the city’s Natives, mostly Lakota, live below the poverty line. Most of the city’s Native poor are concentrated in neighborhoods like Lakota Homes. This rate of urban poverty is the highest of any urban demographic in the United States. Barely twelve percent of the city population, Natives make up half the city’s jail population and more than three-fourths of the city’s homeless. Natives in Rapid City are also five times more likely to get arrested and nearly twice as likely to receive a traffic citation. A recent “independent” review of Native and police relations, however, found fault not in “racially biased” policing, but blamed a political “radical minority” of Lakota people who, according to the report, “can be racist in their own right” towards the predominantly white Rapid City police. This sentiment displaces blame not just onto the Native community, but allows for the police to continue to create and enforce the frontiers or boundaries of the city. The police hold down the fort in Rapid City’s racialized poor neighborhoods. The phrase “hold down the fort” captures the kind of violence that is imagined and projected to take place in these “frontier” neighborhoods between Native and white settler spaces. On this frontier, the law sanctions its own nonexistence and calls for the continual violation and subduing of Native bodies with impunity, especially those who appear to possess the ability of calling attention to tenuous settler claims — such as political dissidents and the criminalized Native poor. Scenes of violence and poverty — of “savagery” — contrast against those of white civilization. Police often see themselves as “the thin blue line” between a “civil (White) society” and a “savage (Indian) society.” Holding down the fort is a euphemism for ongoing colonial occupation and the civilizing mission — civilizing savage spaces, people, and a Native political sovereignty that rightfully claims the land. According to this view, settler society is always the victim, and police keep at bay a savage sovereignty from reclaiming the city.

Flags from top to bottom: Oglala Lakota Oyate, the American Indian Movement, the United States, and the United Nations. Many Lakota view their relationship with the United States as international, evidenced in treaty-making, and contest the United States’ claim as sole owners of the land / Photograph by Nick Estes (2013)

In police dialogues, history never takes precedent. The criminalization of political “radicals” dates back to the reservation era when Lakota political dissidents, such as Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, were targeted and assassinated by reservation police. Between 1903 and 1934, hundreds of Lakota spiritual leaders, homosexuals, women, and other “subversives” were also imprisoned at the Canton Indian Insane Asylum for Indians in South Dakota. One of three unceremoniously died there. Thousands of children, too, were taken from families and forced to attend boarding schools, such as the Rapid City Indian School or were sent farther away to places like the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. In the 1960s and 1970s, a new revitalization of national liberation came in the form of the American Indian Movement (AIM). AIM formed in 1968 in Minneapolis, Minnesota to address rampant police brutality and border town violence against urban Natives. Soon after AIM’s famous 71-day siege at Wounded Knee in 1973, federal and state law enforcement led a violent revanchist campaign against Native “radicals” and against the political threat of an overt anti-colonialism that intended to reclaim stolen lands, such as the Black Hills. Following the political repression of AIM, a study found from 1977 to 2012 South Dakota’s prison population increased more than 500 percent. About one-third of that population is Native, while Natives making up less than nine percent of the state’s population. Colonial cities such as Rapid City simply re-enact these spatial politics of colonization on a daily basis by removing and eliminating “subversive” Native bodies from what are perceived to be “settled” urban geographies, or cityscapes believed to belong solely to white settler society.

Police violence and incarceration is colonial violence because it has always been premised on the spatial and physical elimination and displacement of Natives. It is also a political art that attempts to erase and conceal its role in colonialism to the point that we assume the historical relationship between colonizer and colonized has ended. It actively constructs “threats” that must be eliminated and contained by criminalizing “drunk Indians” and political “radicals” — when neither activity is illegal by definition. It is used to reject an unfavorable history and legitimate Native claims to territory. The police shooting of Lakota man Allen Locke (and many others in recent years) epitomizes this process. The killing of Natives forces us to consider the immense amount of material resources and ideological labor necessary in order to claim control and ownership over Native spaces and bodies. Locke’s death, like so many others, demonstrates the underlying precarity and anxiety surrounding questions of settler ownership. In this sense, Rapid City is as much a material manifestation as it is a geopolitical buffer that forcefully disavows Lakota life off reservation and claims to the Black Hills.

Lakota protesters hold a banner contesting settler ownership over Rapid City / Photograph by Nick Estes (2012)

Nick Estes is Kul Wicasa (Lower Brule Sioux Tribe) and a doctoral candidate in American Studies at the University of New Mexico. He studies Indigenous political theory, Indigenous internationalism, American Indian history, and border town justice. Estes also co-founded the Native activist group The Red Nation.

(image above) The 127 guests (friends) of Archipelago, The Funambulist’s podcast since January 2014.

On July 2nd, I was lucky enough to be able to be part of the Athens conference Autonoma, presenting my half of a talk elaborated with friends of dpr-barcelona, Ethel Baraona Pohl and César Reyes Nájera, entitled “Political Friendships.” Through it, we intended to address the politics of form rather than contents, as we usually do in our talks. By addressing the “form,” we meant to discuss about the “behind the scenes” part of our editorial work in order to put on the table as many political elements that usually remain undiscussed because they do not explicitly materialize in the final aspect of this work. Every day, we have to take or confirm a certain amount of decisions that have important political consequences but that rarely get addressed as part of a larger debate. This text is a synthesis of the talk I gave in this context, hoping that the conversation engaged in Athens could continue here, online. With the sixth issue of the magazine now published, thus concluding the first year of existence of the publication, this also allows me to pin point a few problems that need to be addressed in the coming months, as well as to give a more personal (i.e. more fallible) account of this work.

01. Logistics

Let’s start with my office in Paris. This is where I work 7 days a week when I’m not travelling. I ought to make it more equipped to host meetings with the occasional visitors and collaborators!

Of course, an editorial project requires a lot of work on the computer: exchanging emails with contributors, editing the drafts received, finding authorized illustrations, designing the layout of the magazine, and formatting texts within it, etc. The tone of the articles is important in relation to the audience with which the project wants to engage. In this case, a strong emphasis is put on the idea that a non-academic, not necessarily English-native reader audience — such a profile includes myself to a certain extent — should be able to understand every text: jargon and footnotes are prohibited. This is not to say that every idea can be explained through a simple language but, rather, that the arguments curated in the publication cannot claim to be politically engaging if they require an academic background to understand them.

Publishing a printed magazine means that there is a also an object logistic behind it. Every other month, I send a file to be printed near Lyon and hope for the best when receiving several hundreds copies a few days later (offset printing does not allow any testing). A first element of self-critique concerns the politics of printing which, beyond the patronizing of a small local business, remains non-engaged when it comes to the paper and ink manufacturing for instance. Once received, a few hundreds copies are to be immediately placed into envelopes, carried to the affiliated post office (usually in two large suitcases) and shipped to the subscribers and bookstores that, hopefully, will receive them a few days later. In this regard, it is interesting to see which national postal service are the most efficient and what it reveals about the concerned country’s value of public service. USPS in the United States, for instance, seems to have given up their profession to private services.

02. Money

Money. The taboo of too many anti-capitalist conversations (including this conference). It seems however very important to tackle it in order to act on its consequential politics. Every month, I have to spend about a full day of accounting, and subsequent budgeting for the coming month. The tracking of bills to pay (healthcare, internet, rent, etc.) and to receive is also an important part of this day. Although this might appear facetious, this exercise is crucial to the survival of the project and, as such, the time and energy spent on it feels engaging and the end of these days always leave me with a sense of accomplishment. Through this overview of the economic dimension of the publication, I also get a synthesis of the various elements involving money that have strong political incidences.

Price is, of course, a very important element and this is where a second strong point of self-critique intervenes. Having until then systematically placed everything I produced under a creative commons license (to the exception of the book Weaponized Architecture published by dpr-barcelona in 2012) and despite the continuation of The Funambulist’s open access blog and podcast, I started this new project with a deep sense of discomfort when I had to begin monetizing the production of my contributors’ and my labor. Instead of using this discomfort to find ethically viable of doing so, I went on without considering enough options. As a result, the prices of the magazine (12 euros for the printed version, 6 euros for the digital one) are prohibitive to a very large audience even if subscriptions allow a somewhat cheaper access to it. Despite the fact that the subjects tackled by the publication operate at a worldwide scale (see map below), the large majority of people who purchase the magazine live in Western Europe and North America. The map above shows the bookstores and libraries in which the magazine can be found, betraying such a geographical reprehensible tendency — not to mention the social differences within countries themselves. One important aspect of my work for the second year of the publication will therefore consists in challenging this problem. Bookstores in Portugal, Croatia and Greece already proposes the magazine for a much cheaper price, but these punctual initiatives will need to be systematized everywhere in Southern Europe and in the Global South (i.e. the largest part of the world!). This aspect of the project can only function if readers who have the means to purchase the magazine through its full price also understand their responsibility to support a project so that others can also benefit with it. This economic and ethical balance is a complex one and I welcome inputs on how it can be achieved.

I am the only person working continuously on The Funambulist. Like many small companies, my budget does not allow me to have any employees. Many architecture offices in this position decide to rely on the numerous people who send them internship applications and who will receive either a very low salary or no salary at all. Receiving quite a few myself, I know that the sole “valuable experience” of the check above (!) is something that sometimes come from potential interns themselves and, it becomes therefore tempting for anyone to capitalize on this self-alienation. Having been an unpaid intern myself less than a decade ago, I know that some unpaid internships are indeed sometimes more valuable than uninteresting paid ones. However, the luxury of being able not to be paid reinforces the social split to the disfavor of those who simply cannot. Furthermore, it reinforces a culture in which unpaid labor becomes a norm. For these reasons, I declined and will continue to decline all internship application until I will be able to properly pay interns with “valuable experience” and money.

The same thing goes for contributors who produce a significant labor in order to come out with the wonderful articles of the publication. Although, a certain amount of them has a somehow stable salary in the context of academia, publishing specifically curated articles in a magazine that attemptively pays my own salary is nothing short of exploitation. Although I do apply this logic and pay my contributor, I also have to say that there is nothing satisfactory in the way I currently do so ($100 for main articles, $50 for guest columns and use of photographs) as their honorarium should be three to four times more (there will be a 50% increase starting the 8th issue) given the labor they mobilize for it — the same goes for copy/proof editors or other occasional collaborators. As such, I don’t want to appear in any way as “giving lessons,” but rather as trying to account for the negotiation between an important ethical position and economic contingencies.

03. Editorial Form

Finally, there is the form of the editorial line itself. This consists in considering the publication as a speakerphone and addressing what is being said in it by whom. Although I do not think that every magazine’s editorial line should necessarily mobilize a scale as large as the entire world to be considered as valuing minor narratives, it becomes an important thing to monitor if the publication’s articles are describing various geographical situations. In the case of The Funambulist Magazine, the map above shows the world locations that have been mobilized one or a few times in the six first issues. To me, this map is equally satisfactory in the large range of locations, and insufficient in the way it does not yet involve enough accounts from places that get usually excluded from the global narrative.

 Wonderful friends (Olivia Ahn, Sadia Shirazi, Minh-Ha T. Pham, Reina Lewis, Alicia Olushola Ajayi, Christina Heatherton, and Hadeel Khalil Assali) speaking at three Funambulist event in New York and London (2015-206)

The notion of political friendships intervenes particularly when it comes to the question of who is speaking in the speakerphone that constitutes this project. Concentrating myself as the editor of the publication, the quasi-totality of the globalized normative body (white, cisgender-looking male, able, owner of a passport from a country that acquired an important part of its wealth from the participation, elaboration and enforcement of slavery and colonialism), it is my role to curate issues that silences the perspective of this position in order to provide a humble platform to anti-racist, feminist, queer, exiled voices without ever essentializing them as such. In a world where simply accepting to shut up would still be a position in compliance with the normative order, this is the only tenable position if we want to contribute destroying the latter. It requires a continuous questioning of our personal social position in relation to others. The decolonization of our own discourses is never fully achieved and automatic behaviors learned and performed through privileges often re-emerge, but this is where friendship becomes a revolutionary thing (much more than the notion of alliance, I believe), as it involves simultaneously mutual trust and kindness, two notions that do not immediately appear as political but should urgently replace those of “tolerance” and “inclusiveness” in the dominant liberal discourse.

As readers might be able to tell that things are getting more and more personal, I would like to conclude this text with a last aspect addressed in the talk: emotional labor. Once again, such a labor is always proportional to one’s position in relation to the structural norm: the amount of sexist and/or racist micro-aggression (or much more explicit ones, of course) that one may experience for instance on a daily basis necessarily adds a drastic weight on any other emotional labor engaged in their work. This is nonetheless a part of work with which every one engaged in the construction of minor narratives have to deal, and it remains usually undiscussed, perhaps in a perpetuated patriarchal suspicion towards emotions. Manifestations of friendship through encouragement or any other forms of support (through emails, social media, or incarnated encounters) are what allow to counter the (unequal) toll that emotional labor takes on our persons. It is less a need for validation than the feeling to humbly belong to a larger political community.

This labor is also mobilized in the emotional position we choose to adopt personally and in our work.  The one I am personally trying to hold — I am full of doubts about whether this is the right one and if this comes from a dubious position of privilege — is one of emotional optimism. This is not a position that denies the profound legitimate anger that is ours when witnessing the violence of the forces against which we struggle, this is not either a position of hope or progress that would candidly foresee a more agreeable future, but rather, this is a position in which we make ourselves continuously engaged in the productivity/constructivism of our struggles. This means that we may never win, but that we are definitely winning.

Police checkpoint filtering the access to the June 23 demonstration in Paris / All photographs by Léopold Lambert (2016)

This article is written in the continuity of two others that described the relationship of the French State and its police with the numerous demonstrations organized in opposition to the new labor law project since March 2016. While the first one, “Police Brutality Is a Hollow Term” (May 31, 2016) insisted that we should not look at police violence as a punctual (and rare) episode of spectacular force, but rather as the very function of the police experienced in particular by the banlieues residents, the second one, “Architecture Under Attack” (June 16, 2016) was examining the demagogic instrumentalization of the (minor) damages caused on the Necker Children Hospital in Paris during one of the June 14 demonstration. This present article considers the demonstration that followed the latter, as the potential paradigm of the future spaces of protest in our cities, in particular when such measures are deployed during a neocolonial (now newly-renewed) State of Emergency.

The political context described in the article cited above is important to understand this present one. Strengthen by its dubious spectacle produced through the images of broken bank and advertising windows that the June 14 demonstration caused through a faction of so-called “casseurs” (breakers), the government granted as only option for the June 23 demonstration a static gathering on the Place de la Bastille in Paris. Such a proposition by the government and the police prefecture was categorically declined by the seven unions organizing the demonstration — the largest one being the Confédération Generale du Travail (CGT) — which led the police prefecture to ban the demonstration altogether on June 22, triggering an outrage from all citizens attached to the right of protest. A few hours later however, an agreement was found between the unions and the government to organize the march from and towards the Place de la Bastille by looping its trajectory around the Port de l’Arsenal in a total length of 1.5 kilometer, as the two maps below illustrate. In agreeing to this option, the unions may have thought to save their face but committed  instead to a dangerous precedent.

What the map of the police prefecture above does not show is the double layer of police checkpoint set up around the red zone preventing any vehicles to penetrate within the perimeter, as well as around the course of the demonstration (see below) that are the topic of this article.

 Map created for the purpose of this article. Click to see a larger version.

The particularity of such a historically short path for a demonstration consists in the ability for the police to control every point of access to it. As the photographs below illustrate, mobile foldable fences were set up around the Place de la Bastille, while other streets were blocked by ‘walls’ of police vehicles. Such a formation allowed the numerous deployed police officers to set up checkpoints and search every single person wanting to enter the ‘premises’ of the demonstration. While it was apparent that these officers had received specific orders to interact in a civil manner with the demonstrators, any person holding an object that could be associated closely or remotely to a potential conflict with the police was refused the access — I had to leave my bicycle helmet to a local hair dresser for instance.

In the current paranoid context that France currently experiences, in which the masculinized spectacle of security primes over actual security, these searches by the police echo the ones that have become customary when entering public buildings and large stores since the 2015 attacks in Paris. Such an echo maintains a confusion between the arbitrariness of these attacks and the targeted political action undertook by the demonstrators — as explained in the previous article, this confusion has sometimes reached some disturbing moments of explicitness.

More generally, these practices consecrate the logic of control manifested in the management of private spaces receiving the public. What I mean by that is that what is policed is not as much unlawful behaviors as such, as the hints of a potential unlawful behavior, as well as any behavior that would somehow escape this control. In private spaces, this manifests through the implementation of rules (that usually transform into norms), in addition to the law. In public spaces, by definition less controllable, it materializes through the large deployment of armed police forces, in particular at its access points. Such a “privatization” of public space had already found an occurrence in the systematic search of persons wanting to access the Place de la République in the evening when the political movement Nuit Debout was gathering. But, more broadly, we should read the genealogy of this practice through the figure of the colonial suspect.

 Still from Gilo Pontecorvo’s film The Battle of Algiers (1966)

A classic reading of colonial history may bring us to 1957, when the French paratroopers deployed in Algiers enforced such checkpoints all around the Casbah from where the Algiers-branch of the FLN was leading the Algerian Revolution. However we should also insist on the neocolonial dimension of our time: although the police action in the banlieues does not materialize through fixed checkpoints filtering access to a particular space, the systematic searches that the Brigade Anti-Criminalité (BAC) conducts on the racialized youth of these residential neighborhoods also correspond to the same intrusive and violent logic — not to mention the 3,000 house searches that the State of Emergency has allowed since November 2015 (see past article). In this regard, it is not innocent that the BAC was formed in 1970 in the continuity of a genealogy of police brigades all involved in the policing of colonial cities: the Brigades Nord Africaines, the Brigades Agression et Violence (BAV) and the Brigades de Sécurité de Nuit (BSN) that they ultimately replaced (see the work of Mathieu Rigouste). These brigades are the consecration of the police targeting of the suspect. In their anticipation of unlawful behaviors (rather than on their cessation), they are required to form a figure of the suspected body that would be susceptible to adopt such behaviors. Of course, this formation is fully subjected to both the collective and individual imaginary of what this figure looks like and the colonial subject is almost always fully confused with it. The search of the suspect is thus a confirmation of suspicion and any unfounded result (the overwhelming majority of the time) is interpreted as a success from the suspect to hide what would incriminate him/her, rather than as a profound institutional failure. This vision is often reinforced by the “suspect” him/herself as this process usually induces an illegitimate sense of guilt. This systematic practice of police searches is to be distinguished to a certain extent from the ones undertaken at checkpoints, since the latter involve a higher sense of territoriality in the threshold between two milieus they involve, yet they can be associated through this figure of the suspect, since the checkpoints’ specific location targets specific bodies — in this case, demonstrators.

Although the protesters to the labor law cannot be assimilated with the post-colonial population of France — union representatives remain predominantly white and male bodies — the colonial project and its figure of the suspect is thus at the core of the way spaces of political affirmation/opposition are envisioned in our cities. This political affirmation/opposition is allowed — we might want to use the term tolerated — but the conditions in which it is embodied are to be fixed and enforced by the State and its police. In this regard, the ideal instrument to materialize the control of an environment remains irrevocably architecture.

While many architects and students in architecture are interested in questioning in what would consist the design of a democratic space and/or a space for protest, they usually do so in the illusion of a politically neutral architecture (an architecture of consensus). While it is true that architecture does not necessarily serve policing function, it seems primordial to me that we consider how easily it does serve such a function. This easiness comes from architecture’s intrinsic violence and propensity to enforce a schematic organization of bodies in space. A truly “democratic” architecture is therefore impossible to achieve; what is achievable, on the other hand, is the construction of an architecture serving democratic political programs. Such programs, in order to exist need to confront the conditions that prevent them from existence. It is precisely in the context of this opposition (against the police for instance, but not exclusively) that architecture’s political power can be used for “minor narratives,” and be successful in doing so. The June 23 Bastille demonstration, on the other hand, is here to remind us of what the future designated spaces of protest will look like should we not oppose it.

ADDITIONAL PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE JUNE 23 BASTILLE DEMONSTRATION ///

A few days ago, Mayor of Cannes David Lisnard promulgated a formal ban on full-body swimsuits worn by some Muslim women on the city’s beaches — these swimsuits are oddly designated as “burkini” when the apparel seems to be a beach equivalent of the chador, not of the burka. The ban stipulates “Access to beaches and for swimming is banned to any person wearing improper clothes that are not respectful of good morals and secularism.” This sentencing regulates the amount of epidermic surface that should be exposed, while strongly recalling phrasing we usually encounter that fixes the amount of epidermic surface that should not be exposed, proving if need be that these two unjunctions although seemingly opposed are, in fact, the same. As it was already the case for the 2010 French legislation forbidding anyone to have their face dissimulated in public space (see past article), explicitly drafted against Muslim women wearing the burka or the niqab, we could insist on the demagogic dimension of such laws, targeting a significantly small amount of persons to engineer an electoral spectacle. Then again, we should also examine them for their deeper signification and what they reveal about the way the French society is still operating on its colonial bases. It would be indeed a mistake to read this recent municipal ban through the spectrum of a recent European “resurgence” of discriminatory policies, some of which have to do with the over-mediatization of the few dozens of thousands of migrants and refugees whose bodies have been used as a recurrent televisual material for the last recent months, some others with the ongoing State of Emergency in France (one of the reasons invoked by the Mayor). When it comes to French islamophobic and racist politics, in particular the colonial fetish constructed around the colonized woman’s mode of being and mode of dress, the logics behind them are to be found deeper into history.

On May 13, 1958, the French colonial authorities in Algeria organized the spectacle of Algerian Muslim women ceremonially taking off their veil and burning it in the demonstration of liberation from the patriarchy — a liberation that colonization would have supposedly enabled. This event was probably in Frantz Fanon’s mind when he wrote the first chapter of his book L’an V de la revolution algerienne (“The Fifth Year of the Algerian Revolution,” translated into A Dying Colonialism, 1959), entitled “Algeria unveiled”:

Every rejected veil disclosed to the eyes of the colonialists horizons until then forbidden, and revealed to them, piece by piece, the flesh of Algeria laid bare. The occupier’s aggressiveness, and hence his hopes, multiplied ten-fold each time a new face was uncovered. Every new Algerian woman unveiled announced to the occupier an Algerian society whose systems of defense were in the process of dislocation, open and breached. Every veil that fell, every body that became liberated from the traditional embrace of the haik, every face that offered itself to the bold and impatient glance of the occupier, was a negative expression of the fact that Algeria was beginning to deny herself and was accepting the rape of the colonizer. Algerian society with every abandoned veil seemed to express its willingness to attend the master’s school and to decide to change its habits under the occupier’s direction and patronage. (42)

“Aren’t you pretty? Unveil yourself!” Colonial poster enjoining Algerian Muslim women to stop wearing their veil, playing on double meaning of the word “unveil” (1958). Similarly, the phrase “Aren’t you pretty?” is ambiguous in whether it exclaims “you are pretty!” or asks “are you hiding the fact that you’re not?”

The state’s forceful unveiling of the colonized Muslim women is thus fully part of the universalist project envisioned explicitly by the colonial regime — universalism being calibrated on the French vision of society of course — but we should also read it through the spectrum of patriarchy and misogyny; that against which it claims to be mobilized. The 1959 colonial poster above shows that beauty, a seemingly innocent and benevolent value, is a weaponizable concept in the establishment of this universalist project by either colonial or imperial power. In this regard, France is not the only entity that constructed such an ideological narrative around this value. In her text “The Biopower of Beauty: Humanitarian Imperialisms and Global Feminisms in an Age of Terror” (2011), Mimi Thi Nguyen examines how beauty was also mobilized by the US government in the first weeks of the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Her essay focuses more particularly on the Kabul Beauty School, established “by the nongovernmental organization Beauty without Borders, sponsored in large part by the U.S. fashion and beauty industries.” Beyond the capitalist logics that accompany Western armies invasions — the colonized population is always considered as a potential profitable market, as we still see in Palestine for instance — we should insist on the imposition of Western standards of beauty on colonized (or ‘imperialized’) bodies and the dispossession of agency that results from it.

In this regard, it is not innocent that the Cannes ban described at the beginning of this article takes for site a summer beach. As an obstructed piece of land, the beach is a site necessarily exposing bodies. Numerous geographical contexts also attributes to the beach a normativity that expects bodies to expose themselves through lighter apparels that facilitate the bodily experience of the sea. Because patriarchal societies tend to associate the vision of skin with sexuality — and therefore either forbid it or, on the contrary, enjoin it — one of coping strategies (far from being the only one) is a rather literal one and consists in the simple refusal of such an exposure to the dominant gaze. This refusal is understood as a violation of the norm in proportion of how much the judging body contributes and benefits from the latter. When such a refusal is inscribed in a longer history that mixes the imaginary of the past colonial segregative legislation with current racialist normativities, it appears as absolutely unacceptable for the dominant bodies. This is how we end up confronted with pieces of legislation crystallizing the norm determining the rather arbitrary number of how much skin surface should or should not be revealed into enforceable laws. The norm and its policing violence already sanctioned behaviors that differ too much from its standards, but when the law itself is mobilized to implement this sanction, it is the entire state structures and its own policing apparatus that are deployed against essentialized bodies whose personal and collective histories are linked in depth with the history of this violence. Rather than forcing these bodies to comply with the new legislation, it instead organizes their exclusion from the territoriality on which the law applies.

In this regard, we can note that the Cannes ban was made public the same day than a “burkini day” was cancelled at a public swimming pool near Marseille, thus preventing a group of Muslim women to use the pool because of the swimwear they intended to be wearing. If we accept that clothing is part of our identities — whatever degree of intentionality we apply to it — we are obliged to find a concomitance of the ban of mode of dress with the bodies that actually wear them. As written in a past article that examined two quasi-simultaneous eviction of Black and Palestinian bodies in swimming pools of Texas and Palestine, we also need to consider the aquatic milieu that the sea and pools constitute: “Water, in its appreciable materiality (in opposition to air), expresses the fact that the bodies situated within it, share a milieu. It thus invokes an imaginary based on the transfer or not of material elements between bodies, in particular, dirt. In other words, water makes it less tolerable for bodies to share a milieu with objects/bodies considered as dirty or abject. Abjection does not however merely stop at the actual aspect of a body ‘ornamented’ with conventional dirty elements, it is also defined by what anthropologist Mary Douglas calls “matter out of place” (Purity and Danger, 1966). The abjection that characterizes racism is thus ‘hypertrophied’ when placed in the aquatic context of the swimming pool [or the sea], hence the necessity felt by bodies presuming of this abjection to evict bodies considered as abject from this milieu.” The social construction of the abject, manufactured by the norm and crystallized by the law (and continuously reinforced by design/architecture I should add) should be the first structures to dismantle in our political effort.

For more, read the third issue of The Funambulist Magazine (Jan-Feb. 2016) dedicated to Clothing Politics.

At a moment when many eyes are turned towards France and the violent relation of the State, its police and the law with its Muslim citizens, in particular women, it seemed very important to me to place in open-access the transcript of this interview with Nacira Guénif-Souilamas that was originally published in the fifth issue of The Funambulist Magazine, dedicated to Design & Racism (May-June 2016). It is crucial to understand that what is currently unfolding on the French marina beaches, with the explicit agreement of the Prime Minister Manuel Valls (despite the fact that the mayors who took a ban on Muslim’s full-body swimwear belong to the opposition), is only the exacerbated spectacle of processes that are born with coloniality and have been operative since then. This conversation helps placing the current events into the historical and contemporary context of French post-colonial residents’ daily lives in a society structurally designed against them. It was originally recorded on April 11, 2016, in University of Paris VIII (Saint-Denis) for The Funambulist’s podcast, Archipelago. Nacira Guénif-Souilamas is an anthropologist and sociologist, author and editor of four books examining structural racism in France. Such a specific system of legal targeting, administrative discrimination, urbanistic discrimination, stigmatizing imaginaries, etc. is the topic of this conversation. Photo: Marche de la Dignité et contre le Racisme in Paris on October 31, 2015, organized by the MAFED, a group of female racialized activists including Nacira herself (second from the left) / Photograph by Nwak (MWASI).

LÉOPOLD LAMBERT: Let’s speak about structural racism in France. If we begin by introducing the context in which we’re speaking about it, can I ask you to tell us about how much this racism has the particularity of being territorialized in the city with the very particular territories that the banlieues, the suburbs of Paris and of other cities in France, embody?

NACIRA GUÉNIF-SOUILAMAS: Like many scholars or activists, I do speak about structural racism and I’m always facing this astonishment from my interlocutors. They don’t understand why I put racism at the level of the state, rather than at the level of individuals who are not morally entitled to what they do. As if racism was only a moral issue. So, it’s very hard to have some sense of how invasive and pervasive structural racism has become. The denial is probably the best illustration of its reality. The more structural racism is being denied in France, the more it says something about the extent to which it has completely invaded and structured all kinds of territorialized relations. This is also why, sometimes, people have the feeling that racism is not something that is so widespread, because they don’t know anything about the suburbs. They never go to suburban housing projects, “les banlieues” as we call them, or “les cités.” So, of course they never encounter it, unless if it’s on the TV, which means that it is something that is completely out of their world and out of their sight. I think that one way to understand how effective structural racism has become in France is to understand that it has led to some sort of mapping of not only differences, but of asymmetries and otherness… so much so that space has become a tool of othering. You know who you’re talking to just by noticing where people come from: when people come from certain lines of suburban trains, you would guess that they come from spaces that are completely segregated and racialized.

LL: If we go back in time, maybe we can also see that this structural racism is directly inherited from colonialism. What we’re seeing today is in the direct flowing of two centuries of colonial policies by France, and the persons that are stigmatized by those policies, the people who live in those specific neighborhoods, are largely coming from the former colonial empire, and we may add that many from the Caribbean have ancestors who were victims of slavery.

NGS: Some of the different quarters of suburban, working-class neighborhoods could be seen as reservations. They have boundaries. You know when you’re trespassing the boundary. You’re recalled to that and you can sense that from the way people look at you, or from how all kinds of rules of social interactions suddenly change. You can have some of that at the University of Paris VIII because it’s in Saint-Denis, so it’s in the middle of a suburban, working-class area. So, there is something of the pattern or the design of the reservation that you could notice. But you have to come with the proper tools because, otherwise, you could just use the class issue, the low-income lens. That is not enough: what is really at stake now in these suburbs is the fact that people did not choose to live there. They were compelled to go there. They were assigned houses or apartments that were in these neighborhoods. And, these neighborhoods, from one decade to another, became completely racialized. Also, very interestingly, there is differentiation among the racialized. You have buildings where you get only Black people, buildings where you could only get Arab people… buildings where you could get people that come from the DOM TOM [overseas territories], these former colonies that were included in French sovereignty, where French slavery took place and was finally abolished in mid-nineteenth century. But, these territories became only sort of “equal.” These are places where you could still encounter colonization and colonial relations. The people who come from these islands are also people who are really facing something that has to do with the continuation of the perception of them as inferior and not equal citizens. People who come from the Caribbean, for example, or La Réunion have been French citizens for more than half a century. But, they still are not considered as equal citizens. So, on the one hand, the coloniality of the French suburbs has something to do with internal colonization; on the other hand, it has to do with what could be called the “process of othering” in order to build, to construct, to invent the internal enemy. This is mainly how these suburbs are viewed and sometimes ruled, even by local-level elected people.

LL: Islamophobia in particular constitutes not only a form of racism that thinks of itself as legitimate, but that you even call “virtuous racism.” We’re seeing politicians, journalists, or intellectuals — even very far on the left side of the political spectrum — who would say Islamophobia is not a form of racism because it’s a critique of religion. Could you explain this notion of “virtuous racism” to us?

NGS: I think that it takes place precisely in this kind of frame and time when France feels threatened by all kinds of things. Frenchness is at stake, and it has to be saved by any means. For that purpose, all kinds of pundits, or people who consider themselves entitled to express the voice of the majority — who is this majority that they’re talking about? — pointing at the culprit… considering that the culprit should be named, described, and questioned, even as a citizen because, often, this kind of racism is against French citizens. It’s something that has become completely usual. I mean, there are no eyebrows being raised. Nobody would be surprised by that. Everybody would consider that it has its own legitimacy, as you said. It’s all about saving France, French identity, and the so-called values of French society from its internal enemy: saving France from what has been more and more called an “invasion” not only from the Muslims, but also from the Blacks and the Arabs that live in France and come from former colonies. I think that what is really at the bottom of all of this is that, for a lot of French, it is absolutely unbearable to consider that the formerly colonized could become an equal. So, any means to prevent that from happening is considered to be legitimate and virtuous. It’s really a matter of expressing some sort of very deep and old tie to the nation. Racism can be an expression of patriotism and, therefore, can be considered virtuous. Any means — ranging from criminalizing veiled women all the way to questioning people who want to become activists with relation to their racialization, who become called “communitarist,” which means that they develop an anti-white racism — any means is good and considered legitimate. Racism has become a major tool that cannot be questioned. Since it has become structural, here are two reasons why racism shouldn’t be addressed and tackled beyond words and all kinds of communication around it: first, racism is a proper and virtuous means to save France, second, structural racism is not possible because France is an egalitarian republic.

LL: [chuckles] It doesn’t have race.
NGS: [jokes] No, it doesn’t have race.
LL: They solved racism…

NGS: ahead of time. Like, even before it could happen. This public conversation would always go back to the French Revolution, explaining that being French is a political identity. It has nothing to do with any kind of ties, any kind of belonging. Of course, it always erases or obscures the fact that this was meant only for men and, then, for citizens that were on the mainland. The colonial empire was never a part of this definition of the political identity. What happens when, suddenly, people who were subjects of the empire, who were natives, who were “indigènes” — what happens when those people become French because they were born in France, because they are naturalized? They have ended up claiming equal rights since 1983, when there was this first march by children of immigrants claiming equality and fighting racism. This claim has been made time and time again, and it still raises some sort of misunderstanding. French society feels as if these immigrants want to completely destabilize the institutions of the French republic.

LL: This issue is about design and racism. I was particularly eager to interpret design in all its possible meanings, including the design of structures, but also the design of narratives that sustain the structures. You briefly mentioned women who wear hijab earlier. This is something we already examined in the third issue about clothing politics. Right now, we’re observing yet another surge against women wearing hijab through, in the end, a relatively clumsy narrative. We can see when people lose their calm, as current minister of women’s rights, family, and children who declared them as “political opponents.” She said this while using absolutely scandalous racist words. But, beyond those, some of us might have missed the scandalous racist ideas: the fact is that they are, for her, political opponents and they must be “saved against their own will.” Although this idea can find echoes in other Western countries, it seems that it is nothing quite like what we’re seeing in France.

NGS: No, this is really one of the French exceptions. There are many of them, but this is one that completely shapes the state of mind and the state of politics in France. You could say that, in a way, the veil has become some sort of an ultimate boundary in public space in France. The mere appearance of a veil brings with it all kinds of representations, narratives… all kinds of obsessions that do not quite have to do with the freedom of women, actually. It has more to do with the state of order. How do you preserve order in French society? How do you manage the republican conception of what freedom is, what liberty is, what freedom of speech is, what freedom of thought and belief is? The veil has become this token and decoy that, now and again, is supposed to express and epitomize all of that, not just in one word, but in one person. So, you could experience times when women who wear the veil are physically assaulted because they appear or seem to be some sort of an insult to what France means. A denial of what France fancies itself to be as it entertains the idea that it is still a country where a lot of people are very progressive.
I think this is something that has been totally missed in the way the architecture is being conceived in France. I was thinking about that because of your first question. All of the housing projects were built in the spirit of bringing progress to the low income families, to the working class, and even, in the beginning, to immigrants that would have the chance to have a house in this kind of housing project. But, what everybody missed was that the progress was already vanishing, just as the Frenchness, actually. They are not possible anymore in the way that they were conceived before. The space speaks for that. It witnesses this double vanishing. This might have come from the fact that, at some point, new immigrants that were visibly challenging white Frenchness were also the ones that were missing the progress of a universal promise. They were the ones that would not benefit from it because they were out of jobs in the first place. So, now they are considered to be responsible for both — not only the vanishing of white Frenchness, but also for the vanishing of progress. They are often blamed because they are poorly paid, and so they are a challenge for the core labor market. At the same time, they are considered to be the ones that have completely destroyed the environment in which they live. These buildings were not meant at all to last… this was obvious from the beginning that it was not the purpose of these kinds of buildings: it was just to make sure that people would be housed. But, they end up being considered responsible for the decay of all these suburban areas and the fact that they did not survive time. They are the proper decoy in order to not question the state and the way the state was deceptive in so many ways. The state was not able to address many questions that have been raised now for the past half century, so, not only the immigrants, but also the racialized minorities become responsible for that.

LL: A particular aspect of your work that really shows the intricacies of this system of white supremacy in France, in particular when it comes to the design of a particular racist imaginary, consists in distinguishing what I may call “figures of acceptability” or “exemplarity” within marginalized, racialized populations in a sort of claim from the state that it does not conduct racist policies. It’s a bit like the “my best friend is Black” excuse at the scale of the state! In this regard, you have attributed names to these figures like “la beurette,” for Arab women, which might be hard to translate into English actually.

NGS: Yes, it’s a vernacular expression that is not translatable. But, the accurate way to name it in English would be “the young, French Arab woman,” which is supposed to express her eagerness to be integrated into French society and readiness to do whatever it takes to be integrated. So, “la beurette” has become a stereotype of youth, especially female youth, which misses the point about structural racism and intends to save herself on her own from her group, from her family, because she’s strongly requested to do so. It’s a strong demand from the state that they, the youth, make the demonstration, that they prove integration is possible. In other figures constructed by the State in its perception of its racialized citizens, you also have “the Arab boy,” who is this Orientalized character that can be criminalized for his behavior being violent, being a rapist, compelling women to veil themselves because he’s a sexual predator. This figure has become absolutely central. Some time ago, I realized that it was not just speaking to French society, but it was also speaking to other European societies. I realized that the past moral panic in Germany could be analyzed in terms of “the Arab boy” — What is he doing here? How come he could become so present, and invade our society so easily, so much so that he imposes on “our women” his behavior and sexual violence? So, this is really something that has become much more illustrative of situations that take place in many Western countries. Another figure would be “the veiled woman,” who is supposed to be the explanation and the expression of alienation and survival, coming from the past, as if she was completely an anachronism of a past that cannot end, and that imposes itself on today’s world. Whereas, we perfectly know that women who veil, especially when young, are individuals like many others: they are complex, they have multiple belongings and identities, and they may “tinker” in order to make themselves fit in with their own views and expectations. There is a way to completely erase that, to flatten all these experiences in order to have them available for this narrative of a civilization under threat and destruction because of its internal, religious, racial, ethnic minorities.

LL: I think that there was also “the secular Muslim,” that we could also call “the gentle Imam” who is always invited on TV to apologize in the name of Islam, Muslims, etc.?

NGS: Yes, exactly. This is typically the kind of subject who is not sovereign. He or she has no ability whatsoever to express anything personal. They are on duty, and they do the lip-service. Or, to put it in my own words which are a little more critical, I would say they become again those natives that work with the colonial power. They serve this power. And, sometimes, this power outsources to them all kinds of public statements or policies that they don’t want to deal with. For the past ten years, we have had many examples of women who were appointed as ministers, for example, just because they were Arab or Black. The purpose was not to include, in the elite, people who have a very high level of conscience, and are able to change things and bring to the table questions that are not addressed; these women were not expected to do that. For instance, the reform of the labor policy that is currently being debated is being promoted by a woman who is called Myriam El Khomri. She is of Moroccan descent, and was blamed for putting forward this law. But, we all know that it’s the government that decided that she would be the promoter of the law. Maybe they had some sense that it would be very badly received in the wider society, but nobody pays notice to the fact that the law is completely blamed by using the Arab name of this minister. El Khomri, for example, is a word that has never been used as often as the past month. Interestingly, in Arabic, “el khomri” means “brown.” Nobody has mentioned that. There is a colonial resonance of the fact that this woman bears a name that means “brown,” and was put forward and sent to the front in order to sell this law that nobody wants.

LL: I think it says a lot, as well, in these reactions of how much the old-school left movements are still in large majority white and male. The way this minister, in particular, has been singled out and become the object of slogans is extremely problematic as well. To talk precisely of those movements of resistance to finish this conversation and to maybe end up on an encouraging note, could you describe a little bit for us the many things that are being organized right now, that are led by people who are actually stigmatized by this structural racism we’ve been talking about?

NGS: Yes, the impetus for all these movements is the fact that everybody agrees on the issue of structural racism and how it has to be addressed. One major outcome of this is the fact that you have mobilization from racialized people on their own. They don’t want to be part of any kind of state agency. They want to be autonomous. They have this very accurate sense of building coalition in order to push forward their own agenda. I was part of one of these movements myself, the MAFED, that organized the March for Dignity and Against Racism [see The Funambulist 3]. This is a declaration of independence; that is to say, these are sovereign subjects. They don’t want to be bought or sold by any kind of master, because white men in the government consider that they own these women. So, it’s also about saying, “you don’t own anything.” Like many others, this movement fights against state violence, the police violence, the murders of young men who are mostly Arab or Black and have been killed for the past 40 years by the police and, most of the time, the police officers don’t get convicted. So, it’s also about pushing forward issues that are usually considered to be completely unwelcomed and exaggerated, as if the minorities who encounter stop-and-search on a daily basis for instance were indeed exaggerating. So, there is this will and this collective notion that something can be put forward. It’s also about every time that there’s a racist statement, to point at it and to say, this is not something that we will accept anymore. We’ll make statements, write in the newspapers, demonstrate, and file lawsuits against what is happening. I think this will take a long time but there is some hope in the change of not only position, but also the change of lexicon. Today, the fact that it’s about saying that racialization has become a structural process, is something that might end up touching and reaching out to people that experience it on a daily basis, but so far remain silent. So, it’s about reclaiming not only a voice, but also the space from where to express this voice.

Transcript by Amrit Trewn (2016) / Find the rest of this conversation online in “The Design of French Structural Racism.”