‘Undocumented: The Architecture of Migrant Detention Centres’ is a graphic account of the conditions in Canada’s horrific migrant detention system by author and activist Tings Chak. Here’s Tings in her own words:
“On September 17, 2013, just two weeks into my final semester of architecture graduate school, something historic happened: 191 migrant men in immigration detention centre in Central East Correctional Centre—a maximum security prison in Lindsay, Ontario—went on hunger strike. These men—among the thousands of women, men, and children across the country detained every year indefinitely without charge or trial—refused meals, refused enter their cells, and did so in the face of already great repression and isolation. They were resisting the fact that their freedom was being stolen simply because they were born in the “wrong” place.
As a student who felt too politicized, too radical, and too involved in migrant justice movements, I struggled to talk about detention centres in architecture settings. To me, it was clear how architecture gets used to uphold state violence against migrants, particularly working class Black and Brown migrants. To me, immigration detention was an architecture problem if only for the fact that architects design, build, and profit off of the detention of migrants!
Even the most well-meaning of liberal architects and architecture students alike would end up asking me, What about a better (more humane/green/socially responsible) detention centre?
But my answer would be: No prisons. No detention. No families separated by cages. The answer is: Freedom to move, return, and stay.
During those months following the hunger strike, while intensely organizing with grassroots groups like No One is Illegal – Toronto and End Immigration Detention Network that took leadership from immigration detainees, I explored more this question of the architecture of migrant detention. But the more I searched, the more I realized how hidden this world was—intentionally so. The buildings, like the people locked inside them, were undocumented.
So began this unusual project of using the architectural tools of representation I learned in school as a political tool of documenting and reconstructing these sites of detention. Unbeknownst to me, what emerged was a graphic “novel,” or visual essay, or architectural documentary called Undocumented: The Architecture of Migrant Detention.
This is a project about implicating the many hands who participate in and profit from the design and construction of detention centres. This is a project about bringing in these out-of-sight-out-of-mind realities into our conversations about the built environment.
But most importantly, this is a project about provocation, inviting YOU, the reader, to join us in the political project of dreaming (and building) a world without prisons and without borders.
tings chak”
Whether we are situated in the United States, Canada, Australia, or anywhere in the European Union, the nature of migrant detention centers remains much the same. This book will help readers and activists around the world better understand the consequences of a world that militarizes its borders, and criminalizes those who cross them in the name of “national security”.
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