'Hostile Environment'(s)

The exhibition ‘Hostile Environment’(s) emerges out of the investigation undertaken by researcher and architect Lorenzo Pezzani in South Tyrol within the framework of the One Year-Long Research Project’s fourth edition, commissioned by ar/ge kunst and curated by Emanuele Guidi. The notion of ‘hostile environment‘ was first introduced in the migration debate in the UK in 2012 to refer to legislation aiming to deny migrants access to work, housing, services, and education. Ever since, shrinking forms of social protection have turned cities across and beyond the Global North into intolerable spaces of hostility for those classified as outsiders. At the same time, “natural” terrains such as oceans, deserts, and mountain ranges (including the Alps) have been increasingly militarised and migrants funnelled into more and more hazardous terrains, often with fatal consequences. ‘Hostile Environment’(s) is reframed here as an analytical lens to capture these distant but interconnected processes, whereby “natural” and civic spaces alike have been weaponised by surveillance technologies, the strategic mobilisation of legal geographies, bureaucratic protocols, and (settler-)colonial practices of extraction and development. Spanning the domains of forensic investigation, academic research and teaching, as well as activist practices, the exhibition sets out to investigate and unravel this political ecology of migration and border violence. It carefully composes a comparative geography of diverse border-environments, producing a continuous movement from the local to faraway environments and vice versa. The Atlas of Critical Habitats gathers an expanding collection of legal documents, maps, a 3D model, videos, and a media archive that explore practices of border control that do not target specific subjects, but rather seek to intervene on the milieu such subjects cross or inhabit. Organised according to a standard climate classification system, the Atlas produces a framework in which projects by various architects, artists as well as current and former postgraduate researchers from the Centre for Research Architecture are presented. Tempi Morti seeks to capture the ways in which hostile environments have infiltrated everyday life in unprecedented ways, deeply affecting its very rhythms: the time of speed and waiting; of haste and stagnation; of restless idleness; of precarious conviviality and racialised violence. Three time charts–produced through a workshop with asylum seekers and activists living in Bolzano–trace the structures of feeling that emerge at the intersection of standardised and subjective time. These events were organised in collaboration with Antenne Migranti and Langer Foundation