European migration geographies, Poland

An Architektur: Elke Beyer, Oliver Clemens, Jesko Fezer, Kim Förster, Anke Hagemann, Sabine Horlitz, Anita Kaspar, Andreas Müller, Julia Schilling.

Hefte der Forschungsgesellschaft Flucht und Migration (FFM): Helmut Dietric

Origin: Static Issue 04
Content: Text/Images

In Kuznica, on the European Union’s new external border between Poland and Belarus, guards trained by the German border police watch over an extensive security zone. Nearly everything that moves here can be spotted and tracked using new technologies, but apart from a few private business travelers there appears to be hardly any traffic at all. Over the past two years, fewer than ten illegal attempts to cross the border have been counted here. Nevertheless, there is a plan to build an electromagnetic security field around the border fence. Traders and commuters are treated charitably, the commanding officer says, because they are needed in the region.

The contradiction between the use of high technology to secure the new external border and the insignificance of transit, on the one hand, and the arbitrary procedures for crossing the border, on the other, is by no means coincidental or the result of incompetence. In these places, the border is made up of a maneuvering space that has been fought for or deliberately granted, as a reactive filter for migration and goods. Deliberate vagueness and inconsistencies produce gray zones, options for action, and leeway for free play within the border regime.

European Migration Geographies, Poland is a cooperative piece between the Forschungsgesellschaft Flucht und Migration and An Architektur for the project TRANSIT MIGRATION.

TRANSIT MIGRATION is part of Projekt Migration, a project initiative of the German Federal Cultural Foundation (Kulturstiftung des Bundes) in cooperation with DOMiT e.V. (Documentation Centre and Museum on Migration from Turkey) and the Kölnischer Kunstverein, the Institute for Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology, University Frankfurt/Main and the Institute for Theory of Design and Art, ICS/HGK Zürich.

- The text and images are excerpted from An Architektur: Production and Use of the Built Environment/ FFM Heft, 15/ 11, October 2005.

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Contributors:

An Architektur is a magazine collective founded in 2002 and publishes thematic issues semiannually. An Architektur sees itself as a discursive praxis of architecture and views the critical questioning of spatial relationships and the revealing of social ideas inherent in them as an opportunity for political action.

Hefte der Forschungsgesellschaft Flucht und Migration (FFM, Research Center for Refuge and Migration) was established in 1994.
It researches and publishes on the changing situation for refugees and migrants in a variety of central and eastern European countries and on the shaping of the policies for sealing off the European Union’s external borders. The point of reference for the FFM’s work is the interests and rights of refugees and migrants and hence the critical debate about state policies for migration and refuge. The reasons for taking refugee and migrating are fundamentally respected. The efforts of refugees and migrants to organize themselves, even across borders, are supported by this work. International connections have resulted from this research work, and the FFM sees itself as part of this.

Associated Links:

http://www.anarchitektur.com/
http://www.ffm-berlin.de
http://www.transitmigration.org
http://www.projektmigration.de/