Situation
Since 2019 there is a new Asylum-Regime in Place in Switzerland, that concentrates asylum seekers in federal centres, isolates them from the rest of the people living in Switzerland. The new regime aims for shorter asylum processes - which is an ambivalent goal but resulted in a practical situation of people in the process having much less access to support and to the legal instruments they would be entitled to. (like recourse). Since 2019 there is one of these federal Centres directly next to the Zurich Art School ZHdK. The two buildings even mimic each other, both showing a semitransparent Facade of Broken Metal Plates. But there the similarities already end...
Setting of the installation
“Monument for a future in which the Lager will be History” was an Installation that took place at Zurich Art School in December 2015. It consisted of:
makeshift archive of materials on the Federal Asylum Center Duttweilerstrasse and on encampment politics in general.
a double bunk bed in the style of swiss army bunkers made of metal.
metal letter stamps and hammers.
a social space with a carpet, coffee-tables, tea, snacks.
Visitors could engage with and add to the make-shift archive, sit and talk, engrave the bunk bed with the letter stamps. The latter was a very noisy process, thought of also as a sound event and intended to reverberate along the hallways of the building.
The installation was part of an event for contemporary music (Lange Nacht der neuen Musik).
Some people living in the federal asylum centre got a tour of the ZHDK building beforehand and were personally invited to the installation. The tour focussed on infrastructure accessible to the public.
Intentions
The Installation thematized the public status of the art school building that in theory is open to any interested person and the prison like state of the building next door, challenging the separation of the two spaces on a symbolic, knowledge-, interactional, relational and accustic level.
Basic strategies were awareness-raising on the side of the art school population and facilitation of access to art school infrastructures for the asylum camp population. On top of that, there should be a space for encounters and a soundscape that would record as an event and create an embodied anchor for the ongoing topic.
Furthermore, the installation summoned and displayed an “instant archive” on the topic of the Lager, that would serve as a mediator and a resource for interpreting the situation of neighbourhood between the art school and the BAZ-Lager. Everybody was invited to contribute to the instant archive.
Starting points
As an approach in the context of about::power the installation departs from the following starting points:
Understanding encampment politics as politics of separation of populations that is used for governing nations.
An understanding of encampment politics as having a long historical tradition including a role in the construction of race and a racialised::other.
Understanding specifically the system of the federal asylum centers as an effort to keep the asylum seeking migrant body out of public spaces in order to prevent it from
Being present and visible in and interacting with the space.
Forming relationships with the rest of the population.
Thus preventing it from becoming a subject in relation to soceity.
This understanding is both deducible from procedures installed in the federal centres and can in part be read in plaintext in official statements (see: offizielle statements