Portable Public Space
Performative mapping actions to denounce the Mediterranean refugee crisis, positing the human body as the locus and the means for a revised practice of care.
Portable Public Space: Embodied Responses to the Mediterranean Refugee Crisis is ELISAVA’s proposal integrated within Navire Avenir, an international project to design and build a rescue ship for the Mediterranean, promoted by Sébastien Thiéry (Pôle d’Exploration des Ressources Urbaines, PEROU). One of the main objectives of this action-based research project is to propose new approaches to the European refugee crisis through intimate design practices of care.
The project explores how to suspend European policies of distanced empathy by positing the human body as a direct practice instead of a passive subject. We wanted to avoid an all-too common superficial, distanced empathy with refugees by putting our own bodies on the line. We thus proposed an honest acceptance of our privileged position, which, while making it impossible for us to put ourselves in the shoes of migrants, allows us to experiment with our own bodies to explore new forms of the politics of care through design, implemented in immediate contexts of everyday life.
