February 19, 2010, Innsbruck
Manuel Herz: refugee camps
Curator: Matthias Böttger
[stabilize] – holding on to something temporary and passing, making a measure, that was thought short termed, permanent. Consolidating new circumstances, unifying new developments, stabilizing uncertain and soft structures.
Escapees pitch up new roots, if they cannot return after a long time. They adapt to the local circumstances and at the same time contribute parts of their own culture. If they meet with fertile ground and with open society they develop themselves further and shape the next basis for the next expansion. However often refugees are confronted with dismissive or even hostile conditions. In the case where a new community is built up on dry soil, stabilizing means to preserve inhumanity. Those places of exclusion: ghettos, camps, deprived areas, and left behind regions have to be fluidized instead of being consolidated in hopelessness. (Raumtaktik)
Manuel Herz: refugee camp – ideal cities in filth and dust
Architect Manuel Herz sees refugee camps as the most direct translation from politics into space. Based on tangible situations in western central Africa he disputes with the impacts of an apprehensive planning strategy. Herz questions the role of the architect and planner in the context of humanitarian help in reaction with acts of war. For example most of the worldwide existing refugee camps at this time are built following the same model of UNHCR. The tent is the central element of the regulation structure and classification. The camps are organised in a hierarchy of clusters, blocks and sectors separated with paths and reached by roads. Based on only technical layers, this planning attempt ignores social and political consequences. Local conditions and social effects get negated. As when camps in the south of Chad are built up on forested areas in a nature reserve or gigantic “Suburbias” arise without any structure of a town. Which impacts do planning strategies have, if originally planned refugee camps, after 35 years, develop into the biggest urban settlement of the entire Sahara? How well are special technical planning models qualified for a political instrumentalization? In the exhibition at aut, by use of his research and his selected documents, Manuel Herz demonstrates the architecture of refugee camps as an example of a colonial, continued, stabilized praxis based on European norms.“The aim of using one model to operate in all conflicted areas almost reflects the mechanisms and models of the processes of colonialisation in the 19 th century, which were supposed to bring values of enlightenment to the “wild Africa” or the Orient. Still the pleasant organization, which is based on western European moral values, in the powdered heat of the desert and the tropical forest and frequently close to warlike battles, appeals to be planned by fools. (Manuel Herz)
manuel herz
b. 1969; studied architecture at RWTH Aachen and at the Architectural Association London; 1995 – 97 assistance with Daniel Libeskind; since1999 his own office in Cologne; teaching at Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan, Stockholm; Bartlett School of Architecture, London (2000 – 02); Berlage Institute, Rotterdam; Harvard Graduate School of Design; ETH Studio Basel; lives and works in Basel and Cologne
selected buildings and projects
projects in architecture in Israel and Germany a. o. 2001 – 03 expansion and renovation of the des municipal museums in Ashdod, Israel (together with Eyal Weizman and Rafi Segal); 2003 living and business-house „Legal/Illegal“, Cologne (German price of architecture); under construction: jewish community centre, Mainz (competition 1999); numerous publication theoretical texts on architecture a. o. about the relationship of the jewish and space, about the architecture of acting, about the planning strategies of refugee camps, resp.
Veranstaltungsreihe
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