‘Walls to Live Behind’ Insights into Spatial Realities of Forced Displacement and Activist Potential of Contemporary Scenography
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Abstract
This essay investigates the liminal stages of inhabitation that emerge in the immediate aftermath of forced displacement — unplanned and improvised domestic sites positioned between ‘home-loss’ and ‘home-making’. It responds to the grievous statistics of displaced individuals around the globe and addresses the ongoing neglect of these critical sites in human experience in contemporary discourses.
Drawing on spatial, cultural, and political theory, the essay unpacks ruptured domestic experiences and defines them as forms of spatial and temporal shock. Violence in war is commonly enacted through speed; thus, survival unfolds in conditions of radical disorientation. In the immediate aftermath of displacement, one’s ability to enact home-making practices is completely constrained. This ‘living in the interim’ is defined as a performative condition in which spatial agency is expressed through gestures of survival. From this perspective, the zones of refuge people inhabit are investigated and presented as scenographic sites in which material improvisation, embodied adaptation, and human agency are actively performed.
The essay employs a scenographic inquiry, which allows for a unique hybridisation of spatial, temporal, and performative insights. Scenography here emerges as an activist lens and a tool, and develops a hybrid methodology that combines testimonial analysis and speculative experimentation. Two interrelated projects, ‘Spatial Triage’ (2021) and ‘In the middle of NOWhere’ (2023), offer an embodied form of witnessing and re-imaging of how refugees navigate temporary sites that are materially and symbolically suspended between past and future. Positioned within the expanded spatial discourse, scenography is capable of exposing the politics of domestic precarity and new spatial taxonomies of care, continuity, and resilience in the face of systemic violence and uprooting.
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