borders

last saturday i was invited to speak at a sort of cultural event thing here in porto, as one of three projects loosely linked under the event title: borders (fronteiras). 

the first presentation was given by an architect named marta, from cirurgias urbanas, which is a portuguese architect collective who are working with architects without borders. their project involved organising a competition to ask people to propose projects to provide cheap, sustainable housing to develop areas of their city for habitation by primarily immigrants and asylum seekers, and to evolve the concept of a hosting centre (the places where immigrants are housed while waiting for deportation/citizenship) into a more open, constructive way of finding an active place in the host city for them. the project was called cidade de abrigo, or hosting city. 

                            

for me, this raised a lot of issues about immigration (not least the fear that this was all a bit lefty, with no practical dissection of the actual ethics of immigration, just a simple idealistic "we should let them all in and help them!" attitude, which i was able to discuss with marta in the debate afterwards and find was not really the case, although i think i was the only person there who doesn't think we should have boundless immigration and if i hadn't been presenting a project about israel/palestne i would have been branded a raging tory). 

i was next, talking about the process and purpose of an exhibition nuno coelho and i made a couple of years ago based on some experiences we had in palestine. technically it's an exhibition by nuno coelho (not one to share glory), but i was asked to talk about it as i was involved in some small way, and nuno was off holidaying in the açores. so, i gave a little presentation, explaining why the posters were made the way they were, and about the problems with widespread information about political situations like this and about the potential problems of education in conflict zones and unilateral borders and all that type of stuff. 

   

anyway, after me was this lovely group of austrians, who are part of a vary varied and multi-talented collective called goldextra. they were presenting a project they were working on, which was basically a computer game made in the half life 2 model (that's a reference for computer game types by the way) so multiple players in different locations can play at the same time. when playing the game, you can choose to be either a border guard or an illegal immigrant trying to cross the borders. you can follow one of two routes, one from western africa, and one from eastern europe, and get try and get into europe. it was actually really interesting. i'm not into computer games really (at all), but the process or research they went through and the reasons that they decided to make a computer game to illustrate a point were really fascinating for me (for each project the group do, they try to choose a different medium that they feel fits the purpose).

anyway, they were lovely, so go and have a look at their websites and that. we had a very pleasant conversation over delicious greek food too, which was courtesy of 555, so thank you to 555!