Ad Astra Comix is pleased to announce the second edition of ‘Undocumented: The Architecture of Migrant Detention“. First published by an academic architecture publisher in 2014 in a limited run, we are excited to bring ‘Undocumented’ to a wider audience.
Title: UNDOCUMENTED: The Architecture of Migrant Detention Creator: Tings Chak Published: Sections (The Architecture Observer), 2014 Dimensions: 23.4 x 17.3 x 1.5 cm Shipping weight: 340 g Pages: 120 1st Edition Print Run: 750 copies Buy a 1st Edition: In the Ad Astra Online Store
Unlike previous Ad Astra titles, ‘Undocumented’ is not only a comic. It features sketches, architectural drawings, and written commentary on jails and detention centres. This unusual format encourages the reader to visualize the spatial experience of detention, and evokes its own kind of empathy.
The thesis of ‘Undocumented’ is this: unlike standard architecture, which is designed to maximize comfort for its inhabitants, carceral spaces like jails and migrant detention facilities are designed based on a logic of the bare minimum.
‘Undocumented’ is written and illustrated by Tings Chak, a student of social justice and architecture. Based in Toronto, Tings has been actively involved in grassroots migrant justice and anti-detentions organizations such as No One is Illegal-Toronto and the End Immigration Detention Network, from which ‘Undocumented’ draws much of its inspiration.
As with previous Ad Astra projects, a pre-order campaign will be held to raise awareness and cover the costs of printing. Stay tuned for details!
Title: UNDOCUMENTED: The Architecture of Migrant Detention Author: Tings Chak Illustrator: Tings Chak Published: Self-published as a 3-part zine in August 2014; published by in September 2014 Purchase: In the Ad Astra Comix Online Store For more info: www.tingschak.com
Architecture has been described as a synthesis of life’s components in materialized form. Its proponents describe it as the mother art, or the soul of a civilization, and one in which we have historically defined our understandings of home, safety, comfort. It is an art form that can seem invisible and yet cannot possibly go unnoticed. But what happens when buildings are not, as architect Stephen Gardiner describes it, ‘good people making good buildings by good design’? What if the desired architecture is one of discomfort, isolation, and transience?
Prisons, detention centres, and other “holding facilities” are the subject explored artfully in this premiere work by Tings Chak, an artist, activist, and former architecture student. “Undocumented” is a jarring 3-part exploration the intimate relationship we have with the spaces around us. By examining their physical, emotional and psychological toll when occupied, “Undocumented” posits that their architecture is ill-designed and of ill-intent, meaning it mirrors the economic and political architecture of global neo-liberal policy.
Part One: Landscape
What first strikes the reader in the comic’s first pages is the invisibility of migrant detention in countries like Canada. From the outside, prisons and holding facilities are often nested inconspicuously in suburbs and bedroom communities. Locals think little of their impact but as a source of jobs in increasingly desperate economic times. Despite their underwhelming appearance, their intent, by design, is diametrically opposed to all the buildings around them.
The construction of prisons and other involuntary holding facilities turns architecture on its head, and we experiences a sense of conceptual vertigo. Space and inhabitants alike are compartmentalized. The comic illustrates what inmates describe as a sense of isolation so intense that they feel they are becoming one with the walls in their cell. Aesthetically, this feeling is aided by the compartmental nature of comics as a “sequential” art form.
Part Two: Building
“Undocumented” steps beside the realm of a comic with a linear narrative and into a category of ‘statistics illustrated’. The cold delivery of information brings home the point that these detention centres are, in so many ways, an impediment to the human narrative of their captives. Each individual, in their life journey through spaces and other individual lives, is suspended and infringed upon. Here, life is devoid of free will. Schedules are fixed and micro-managed. Interpersonal interaction is withheld and restricted. In order to understand the stories that escape from these hellish conditions, one must acknowledge the adversities they have overcome.
Looking over the grounds and conditions of a series of holding facilities in Ontario, they seem underwhelming, banal where we might expect that they be ominous. In other words, they are deceptive, and intentionally so. By design and locale, they seem to embody the 19th century French “oubliette”: a dungeon where people are placed with the intention of being forgotten. Modern prison architecture shows that little has changed: rehabilitation, correction or even punishment are beyond the essential purpose of these facilities.
Confinement, historically: Pictured here from the larger french atlas, Civitatis Orbis Terrarum, Bedlam, circled in blue, was a holding facility for those deemed mentally ill or otherwise unfit for 16th century civilization. Despite it being officially identified as a place of support and assistance, according to a writing in 1591, “Bedlam was an oubliette in all but name–a place for forgetting, where the insane were locked up with those interred by their own families on some trumped-up charge simply to be rid of them.”
Part Three: Resistance
Here, the work takes a decidedly more human tone. We go from the vital statistics of carceral facilities to the descriptions of the lives of migrant detainees: precarious, vulnerable, and fearful. Quotes from men, women and children held in detention reveal a profound isolation – from spouse, sun and seasons – an example of the emotional trauma inflicted by confinement. Shine the light a bit further down this rabbit hole, and we consider the subject of solitary confinement, euphemistically termed “administrative segregation” by Corrections Canada. Here, a detainee could spend up to 23 hours completely alone, in what has been regarded by human rights activists for years as a criminal act that jumps the fenced definition of torture by any decent definition.
Ultimately, “Undocumented” is a look at architecture not as a thing of author-less objectivity, but as the physical legacy of accomplices to an agenda of discipline and exploitation. It helps us connect the economic policies of neo-liberalism that impoverish and displace populations to the detention centres they are confined in when they try to escape. With a cold, empirical lens, it demonstrates that the blueprints of migrant detention centres are drawn with the intent to isolate, agitate, and demoralize their human occupants.
Frank Lloyd Wright described architecture as a component in the construction of a civilization’s soul. What, then, can be said of the civilization responsible for these gaps in our urban landscapes that neither light nor hope can penetrate?
“Undocumented: The Architecture of Migrant Detention Centres” is launching as a published book this week, and if you’re in Toronto, you are invited! RSVP for the event here, on Facebook.
