Hostile Environment(s)
– DESIGNING HOSTILITY, BUILDING REFUGIA

Hostile Environment(s) – Designing Hostility, Building Refugia is an expanded symposium and online platform that investigates the political ecology of migration and borderland violence. In a series of online and in-person events it will unravel the ways in which surveillance technologies, the strategic mobilization of legal geographies, bureaucratic protocols and extractive practices have conjured up a generalized atmosphere of hostility against those classified as outsiders, weaponizing “natural” borderlands as well as urban geographies across and beyond Europe.

Over the next six months the symposium will feature various formats, asking what forms of radical hospitality and sanctuary might still exist when spaces of refuge are being destroyed.

Conceived as a continuation of architect and researcher Lorenzo Pezzani’s One Year-Long Research Project (2018-2021), it is a collaboration with the unibz – Faculty of Design and Art and Z33 – House of Contemporary Art, Design and Architecture, Hasselt.

Hostile Environment(s) – Designing Hostility, Building Refugia is edited by Silvia Franceschini (curator, Z33 House for Contemporary Art, Design and Architecture), Roberto Gigliotti (professor, unibz – Faculty of Design and Art), Emanuele Guidi (artistic director, ar/ge kunst) and Lorenzo Pezzani (co-founder of Forensic Oceanography and lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London).

It was commissioned and co-produced by ar/ge kunst, Bolzano, and the unibz – Faculty of Design and Art in collaboration with Z33 – House of Contemporary Art, Design and Architecture, Hasselt.

The online platform was designed by Stefania Rigoni and Martina Soffritti.