What happens if architectural knowledge is not mediated through drawing or does not produce any type of record? How can an architectural archive exist and make sense in a context where the circulation of knowledge and the emergence of spatialities leave no physical traces? This essay offers insights into the traces left by undrawn spatialities and how they could be recorded and interpreted in architectural archives based on observations on the history of the Sahrawi refugee camps in archiving oral memories in collaboration with the Sahrawi Ministry of Culture. A project was launched to archive and maintain nomadic knowledge circulation that has been short-circuited by protracted immobilization. This essay proposes that gestures, words and bodies-as producers of undrawn architecture -allow other regimes and traces of spatialities to emerge.
La dicotomía nómada/sedentario es cuestionada aquí como una construcción occidental. Su deconstrucción es necesaria cuando las poblaciones nómadas se convierten en refugiadas por razones climáticas, políticas o económicas. Es el caso del exilio saharaui en Argelia tras la invasión de Marruecos de su territorio en 1975, y la ocupación del Sahara occidental hasta hoy. Los campamentos de refugiados saharauis cerca de Tinduf, Argelia, son considerados aquí en relación con la forma de vida nómada pastoril anterior al conflicto. Analizando la vida cotidiana en los movimientos más excepcionales de los saharauis durante el siglo XX y sus formas de asentamiento, queremos contribuir a este debate, en relación con los campamentos de Tinduf, formulando una hipótesis sobre la existencia de un nomadismo inmóvil saharaui. Defendemos la necesidad de considerar una diversidad de escalas de tiempo en el análisis del nomadismo, desde la consideración del momento, hasta la larga duración de los movimientos de la población, entendiendo el proceso de sedentarización de los campamentos saharauis como una estrategia temporal de supervivencia.
Archival power, silences, and absences profoundly shape and structure postcolonial landscapes, spaces, and urban environments by controlling bodies, histories, and interactions. This book explores pathways to dismantle these imperial entanglements by developing methodologies and plural epistemologies through an interdisciplinary dialog between history, memory politics, critical theory, and archival practice together with the fields of the built environment, landscape, urban studies, architecture, and the arts. Unearthing traces catalyzes critical discussions that not only challenge the objectivity and dismantle the neutrality surrounding current archival practices and archival institutions, but also question what constitutes the archive itself. The book unearths potential histories and minor narratives buried by the imperial production of pasts and silences. The diverse range of contributions in the book offers original research, discussions, positions, and tools and provides a critical resource for scholars, architects, artists, activists, and archivists who want to engage with landscapes and built environments in a critical and postcolonial perspective in relation to archival materials and practices.
FilosóficoEspañol. A previous version of this text was published (in Spanish) in 2021 in the journal Tabula Rasa with the title 'Inmóviles, pero no quietos. La sedentarización de los saharauis como estrategia de adaptación y respuesta a la supervivencia. Sobre la posibilidad de un nomadismo inmóvil' . [Juan
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