Many people undertaking precarious journeys experience periods of both interminable waiting and continual displacement at or within national borders. Camps figure largely both in these experiences and in the representation of migration for broader publics, often representing the idea that migration constitutes a “crisis.” In Europe, camps are the subject of fraught debate about who should be allowed to live in the European Union (EU). Following increased arrivals in 2014–15, asylum and immigration systems were overwhelmed, and camps grew in number and expanded—both official camps funded and managed by governments to hold asylum seekers as they await initial processing, and unofficial camps built by migrants without access to official aid (Doctors Without Borders 2016).
These camps are spaces of both extreme uncertainty and migrant agency, as the limbo of waiting is also a complex site of action and “wakefulness” (Khosravi 2020: 205). Yet for broader publics, these nuances are often invisibilized. Instead, it is often a moment of violence or the camps’ outright destruction that brings them into a global spotlight: Coverage of “the jungle” in Calais, France, for example, is frequently dedicated to police clearings of the camp, including the October 2016 demolition and subsequent evictions (Taylor 2020). More recently, a number of art exhibitions have featured objects left behind: a charred teddy bear, a backpack, children's clothing (cf. Haiges and Busch 2020; Kiefer 2020). This coverage brings important awareness to conditions that pervade these sites, including the common risks of fire and of violent eviction. Yet it does so by orienting public attention around the camp's recent or imminent violent destruction, rather than daily life while it stood, or the heterogenous experiences of those who resided there. This focus on aftermath risks inscribing these sites into public memory in one of two problematic ways: first, it may reproduce narratives of immigrants as threatening criminals. As the camps enter public consciousness for acts of violence that transpire there, or for their demolition, they participate in what De Genova terms “border spectacle,” or the rendering of processes of illegalization as hyper-visible (De Genova 2002). Second, the focus on aftermath may reify the image of the migrant as a vulnerable subject to be pitied. Work that centers objects removed from the context of the camp, for example, risks forwarding a kind of anonymous victim narrative.
Yet, as we discuss here, traces that remain or are circulated in media also attest to camps as sites of negotiation: between migrants’ visibility and invisibility; between camp residents, authorities, and locals over the use of space; between temporary settlements amid the longer search for protection and security. Take, for instance, a 2018 photograph by photojournalist Stefano Montesi, taken at an abandoned penicillin factory in the periphery of Rome, Italy, where migrants established an unofficial camp (see Figure 1). The image documents a moment following a press conference at which residents spoke out about how their eviction from another camp (run by Baobab Experience closer to the city center, as we address in more detail below) left them homeless. In the photograph, migrants stand before the collapsing structure that marks their successive displacement, and which they in turn have inscribed: a door propped up against a concrete wall is spray painted with the phrase “OUTLAW YARD.”1 Amid the uncertainties of occupation, this trace, which we recognize as a testimonial inscription that marks the camp and may outlast it, reflects an agentive act of ownership: through this inscription, residents claim the physical space and claim the phrase “outlaw,” subverting pervasive stereotypes of migrants as criminal or suspect—a reminder that a camp's inhabitants are also in many ways its authors (Seethaler-Wari et al. 2022: 11–12).2 Circulated through news media, the sign also re-inscribes the space for viewers who learned about it through coverage of residents’ occupation of the site after police evicted them from the Baobab camp. Like other objects visible in the photograph—a clothesline, a suitcase, a chair—the sign may well outlast this occupation. OutLaw Yard marks a convergence of aftermaths: at the time of the photograph, the former factory, its exposed structure and former floors overgrown with weeds, housed up to 200 migrants who should have had access to official forms of legal, medical, and social aid, and yet survived with little to no support from the state. How can we read these layered inscriptions in ways that don't invite ruin fetishization,3 and that don't reproduce border spectacle? How does an ethical reading of these inscriptions help us recognize the realities experienced in these camps, and how such sites are themselves inscribed on spaces in ways that defy their erasure?
“OutLaw Yard”: the abandoned penicillin factory in Rome. Image by Stefano Montesi, 14 November 2018, for Corbis News. Getty Images. https://www.gettyimages.fi/detail/news-photo/migrants-are-pictured-in-an-abandoned-penicillin-factory-news-photo/1061458810.
Citation: Migration and Society 6, 1; 10.3167/arms.2023.060108
In this article, we propose a method of reading traces of displacement that recognizes them as inscriptions that record and convey the logics of the camp, including the negotiations and frictions at the heart of the camp's temporality and its paradoxical nature—both for official camps that should protect, yet which for many become part of a series of displacements, and for informal camps like the former factory, established in response to the gaps and failures of official reception systems. We argue that it is critical to identify ethical ways of reading these traces of displacement. Aftermath is a complex and perhaps unexpected entry point to the camp, yet it is important to engage with, because it is such a crucial mode of representation of camps in broader global north imaginaries. The discursive positioning of the camp and its symbolism as abandonment, displacement, eviction, and migrant precarity enable a broad erasure of people's experiences. When migrants inscribe meanings onto the spaces they (are forced to) enter, they resist “discourses of exclusion” that create a singular record of vulnerability (Nyman 2017). Contra such discourses, traces of displacement, we suggest, resist exclusion and abandonment as all-encompassing frames for engaging with the camp.
In the first half of this article, we outline the rhetorical methodology we propose for reading traces of displacement. In the second half, we illustrate this approach by putting multiple inscriptions into conversation: physical marks, including writing made by people in government-operated and unofficial camps; and the traces left behind when they abandoned these places, often by necessity. We focus on two very different former camps that speak to the recent expansion of these sites in Europe and suggest the range of spaces they represent. The first is the Moria camp, a government-funded and -operated reception site established on the island of Lesbos for processing asylum seekers and refugees entering Greece. Here we read traces of displacement through images that have circulated in global media, as a way of recognizing agency amid the border spectacle and fetishization of destruction that such images could uphold. Second, we consider the unofficial camp operated by migrants and volunteers with the Baobab Experience activist collective in Rome, Italy, offering shelter and assistance to migrants unable to access government aid. We highlight how physical inscriptions transform this setting, recognizing traces as disruptive testimony that “authors” place even as they are displaced.
Reading traces that remained following each camp's destruction as documentation and testimony offers a way of engaging with the frictions and agentive acts that shape sites within necropolitical border regimes. With an understanding of testimony as a form that is controversial in migration, auto/biography, anthropology, and legal studies, we see testimony as always already mediated (Gilmore 2017). Furthermore, we see this discussion as contributing to understandings of the function of testimony, including testimonial inscriptions, as forms toward evidence and redress (Powell 2020: 7–8). Throughout this discussion, we use the term “migrant” to avoid assumptions related to individual legal status.4
Traces as Method
Theoretical Framing: Recognizing the Violent Logics of the Camp and Engaging Aftermath
Our methodology for traces of displacement is informed by theories of power and containment, particularly scholarship that re-engages notions of the camp as a site of exception, recognizing the camp as simultaneously outside “normal” legal frameworks (Agamben 1998) and a site of social and political agency (Ramadan 2012). The increasing number of refugee camps, detention and reception centers, and informal settlements suggests that “warehousing” the refugee, despite its inevitable denial of rights, remains a systemic issue across the globe (Smith 2004). The violence of this containment is necropolitical, governing through suffering and death (Mbembe 2003). As Thom Davies and colleagues discuss in the case of camps in Calais, necropolitical violence manifests through both outright acts (e.g., police brutality) and neglect in the form of “constriction: being deprived of the opportunity or freedom to improve one's hazardous or miserable condition” (Davies, Isakjee, and Dhesi 2017). When the state fails to provide basic health and legal services or leaves infrastructural problems unattended, this “inaction” enacts necropolitical border regimes within the nation.
Necropolitical violence shapes both sites we discuss: the official camp at Moria, funded and operated by the government, reflects authorities’ attempts to manage migration and accommodate increased arrivals; yet it also signals the failures of these attempts, as residents built their own housing throughout and along the periphery of the camp when the original container housing did not suffice. The unofficial camp operated by Baobab Experience speaks to systemic violence in another way, as a site constructed by and with migrants outside the purview of authorities, as an alternative to homelessness. Yet camps are not defined only through violence, nor do they exist in isolation. As Fiddian-Qasmiyeh observes, “camps are always-already ‘more-than-camps’, being connected to and through other spaces (diverse camp and non-camp spaces), and other times (including diverse pasts, presents and futures)” (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2019: 289). Our call for an ethical reading of traces responds to the need for scholars and broader publics to engage with the camp as a complex space. Reading traces that remained following each camp's destruction offers a way of engaging with the frictions and agentive acts that shape sites within a broader system of necropolitical border governance.
Understanding spaces as constructed and contested, we see the camp as “always in the process of being made” (Massey 2005: 9). Discussions of camps as liminal spaces have been productive, yet focusing on liminality can limit the ability for those outside the camp to recognize it as a lived space and site of agency. As Anooradha Siddiqi and Somayeh Chitchian discuss, the camp is an authored space whose spatio-temporal dimensions:
[complicate] the totalising image of the camp as the space of refuge or the figure of the refugee as the subject of displacement. . . This is a contingent process of spatial authorship and (re)production. . . . It is an otherwise, constantly to be written and rewritten, ar-ranged, de- arranged and re-arranged in an entangled web of connections. It is not to be fetishised through “crisis” discourses of “exceptionality.” (Siddiqi and Chitchian 2022: 46–47)
While common narratives frame migrants themselves as the problem, the traces that remain from multiple and successive displacements serve as reminders of the actual issues of concealment, abandonment, and perpetual displacement that the camp represents, whether as a government-constructed detention site or a shelter created in response to homelessness. Camps are a technology, a system and an institution, designed and built to manage bodies (Kandylis 2019)—or, in the case of informal settlements, established in response to the violence of those efforts. Violence within the camp is not a glitch but rather a sign of the systemic, routinized problems that such a technological space creates (Noble 2018).
In reading traces as testimonial inscriptions, we emphasize that this violence unfolds in a space also directly shaped by migrants themselves, who represent diverse groups of people with varied life experiences and desires for the future, and whose inscriptions on the camp record their negotiations of protection and struggle (Ramadan 2012). Racist and colonial logics are embedded into the design of official structures and shape the forms that unofficial camps take, as they are built in response to authorities’ neglect. Even when a camp is abandoned or destroyed, the problems of racism, colonialism, and surveillance that drive the logics of the camp remain (Rothe, Fröhlich, and Lopez 2021). These logics exist in friction with the experiences, needs, and desires of camp residents. While we don't claim to be able to fully know inhabitants’ intentions, we argue that these frictions are identifiable through a study of how the camp is inscribed on a place—including through graffiti, physical structures, abandoned objects, and their representation in visual media. Reading traces of displacement is thus one way of recognizing agency within settings from which it is so often erased.
Our focus on “aftermath” refers both to the literal aftermath following a camp's destruction, and to how the “constant temporal negotiation” that defines life in the camp is reflected in its construction as “an otherwise” (Siddiqi and Chitchian 2022, 48), including as it is shaped in part in relation to the possibility of its dismantling. Comprised of a varied set of traces, a camp's aftermath is a testament to its impermanence and the ongoing displacement of its residents, yet an unclear and incomplete statement on what life in and after the camp is like. Our focus on aftermath is related to work on ruins (Stoler 2008), remains (Hamilakis 2022), and afterlives (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2019); we use the word “aftermath” to emphasize our focus on moments immediately surrounding a camp's destruction and to suggest the spatio-temporal relationship between the camp and those who encounter it from the outside.
Conceptualizing Traces
We propose a rhetorical method of reading traces as intentional inscriptions, agentive acts of testimony, that focuses on objects as witnessing texts, emphasizing a recognition of the marks (literal and nonliteral) made by people whose presence is often readily erased from dominant narratives. We refer to traces in two ways: those that circulate in media accounts, where the risk of fetishization resides, and those that remain following a camp's destruction and (re)inscribe the space of the former camp. Reading traces as inscriptions is a way of recognizing agentive acts within scenes of abandon/destruction, or what Weltman-Aron describes as “writing for the trace.” Discussing the work of Algerian author Assia Djebar, Weltman-Aron suggests that “paying attention to scenes of vanishing inscriptions . . . is, for Djebar, a way of resisting colonial expropriation, as well as of avoiding well-intentioned assurances of authentic recovery that would sidestep enduring political and cultural dispossession” (Weltman-Aron 2008: 495). Bringing the notion of “writing for the trace” to an engagement of former camp spaces and their representation in media enables a recognition of the “poetics of the trace” (Glissant in Weltman-Aron 2008: 495) as a significant way to deconstruct the power relations that shape camps and the experiences of those who reside in them.
As a mediated text, testimony is politicized (Gilmore 2017) and can have material consequences (Awan 2020). Importantly, listeners, readers, or viewers of testimony are implicated as witnesses (Whitlock 2017), making the recognition of injustice a responsibility. Reading traces as testimonial inscriptions offers useful entry points for recognizing the complex dynamics that shape spaces such as the camp, including tensions between displacement and containment, and negotiations between authorities regulating the nation's borders through the camp and camp residents who, in seeking the protection of the nation that refuses to let them fully enter, engage in agentive acts of inscription to make both their own presence and the violence of the camp known. In this way, rhetorical readings of traces as testimonial inscriptions can resist the border spectacle that reproduces problematic assumptions about migrants.
In its attention to testimony and witnessing, this approach aligns with anthropological scholarship on the materiality of mobility. For example, in the context of the Sonoran Desert, Gabriella Soto argues that the history of precarious migration can be tracked through the “traces of the clandestine foot traffic of undocumented people” (Soto 2016). Focusing on the tensions and resonances between human actors and the “things” they leave behind, Soto asks, “What are the implications of migrants’ attempts to memorialize their presence in a landscape where their presence is forbidden?” Soto's question prompts us to consider the critical insights that the everyday materiality of movement provides, including how migrant traces disrupt border security narratives that position migrants as criminal threats or helpless victims.
The focus on materiality has also led scholars to consider the complexity of memory in works such as The Incomplete Thombu, where drawings and architectural renderings that represent memories of displacement become traces within the broader narrative about the civil war in Sri Lanka (Shanaathanan 2011; see also Powell 2022). Through sketches and oral history excerpts, The Incomplete Thombu records the remnants of the war, even if the government refuses to recognize its role in displacing its population. In another instance, Paynter and Miller outline how the movements of migrant boats in the Mediterranean are traced and how the boats themselves contain a kind of memory of their past voyages (Paynter and Miller 2019)—a “barely-there” record, something ephemeral and detectable through surveillance technology, whether the boats sink or reach European shores.
These brief examples illustrate the growing scholarly and public attention to abandoned objects beyond simplistic labelings of trash, refuse, or something discarded. They also point to the need for methods that recognize the complexity of these traces and their connections to processes of erasure and inscription. In our methodology, we extend these approaches by focusing on the ways that traces inscribe disruption. Reading traces for their disruptive qualities can be a way to obtain a fuller picture of the realities of precarious migration and requires that we consider records that fall outside official or traditional archives. Sometimes this is possible via interviews or narratives recorded by those on the move, but migrants are not always ready or able to tell their stories. Undocumented migration “cannot always be expressed in words. It can, however, be evoked in things, in sensorial and affective experiences and gestures, in non- linguistic utterances” (Hamilakis 2016). Grounded in the everyday and routinized moments of the camp, traces provide an important counterpoint to border spectacle and bring the counternarratives they represent into sharper relief.5 In their disruption, traces are testimonies that point to the complicity of the viewer.
Traces read in the way we propose become a record of a site that might be otherwise unseen, misread, or erased from public consciousness (we discuss archiving further in our conclusion). This rhetorical method seeks to make the everyday evident and center a focus on objects. Reflecting an ethical stance, with this focus on the embodiment of objects (Ahmed 2006) rather than on human faces, we center not suffering, but the representation and inscription of that suffering on the physical space of the former camp.6 What are largely assumed to be abandoned objects (or trash) can then be seen as testimonies to processes of displacement—testimonies that, as we discuss in the cases of the official Moria camp and the unofficial settlement run by Baobab Experience, reflect multiple temporalities and may themselves be fleeting.
Reading Traces of Displacement
The Fire
On 14 January 2021, the Greek Ministry of Migration tweeted drone footage spanning a new migrant camp on the island of Lesbos, celebrating the construction: “The works in the Temporary RIC of Mavrovouni in #Lesvos are progressing normally.”7 Mavrovouni, nearing completion at the time, appears pristine: neat rows of white tents are set against the backdrop of the shimmering sea, with no suggestion that the up-close view might reveal a different reality. As migrant advocates pointed out, the video was a public relations move to show Greece's construction of an orderly, clean camp for the thousands of people seeking refuge there. Humanitarian aid worker Eleni Konstantopoulo retweeted the video on 15 January 2021, commenting, “Conditions look great from an aerial view, avoiding the details of the stark reality in the camp.”8 Indeed, the view from above obscures detail and invites an interrogation of the seen and unseen—or unseeable—in an image (Kaplan 2017). This particular video also masks the very recent past, refusing to reference the camp it was built to replace—the Moria Identification and Detention Centre, known as the world's worst refugee camp until it burned down and was evacuated in September 2020.
Established on the Greek Island of Lesbos in 2015 as an increasing number of migrants crossed the Aegean Sea from Turkey, Moria was “a pressure point between Istanbul and Brussels” (Donadio 2019). People fleeing violence in countries including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Somalia hope to obtain protection in the EU by entering via Greece. The EU's Dublin Regulation requires asylum seekers to file claims in the country where they first enter the EU. As is the case across Southern Europe, extant reception systems have proved inadequate to accommodate the increase in arrivals, leading to overcrowded detention and reception centers and an increasing number of informal settlements. Built to house 3,000 refugees, by the time Moria burned, more than 12,000 were living there and the camp had come to symbolize Europe's continued failure to meet migrants’ basic needs. Images across global news media depicted overcrowded conditions, the “jungle” that evolved outside the camp, and the piles of trash accumulated without adequate funding for a number of services.
Even before the fire, Moria circulated for broader publics as a site of aftermath: a place so inhospitable it could not last, even as residents made it their temporary home. In a photo from March 2020, photographer Lydia Emmanouilidou frames mounds of discarded plastic water bottles filling a ditch behind a row of tents (see Figure 2). The caption, “Garbage is strewn between tents in Moria, an overcrowded refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos,” focuses our attention on the garbage produced in the space of the camp. The image is likely meant to highlight inhumane conditions. However, the phrase “garbage is strewn” situates camp residents as likely responsible for the refuse, when in fact camp administrators are responsible for maintenance of the space. The rhetorical effect of photographs like these could position camp residents as filthy, lawless, and lacking the ability to care for their surroundings. When it simultaneously indicts the state and migrants, global reportage of camps can distance viewers from the individuals inside, evoking pity or disgust, rather than critical examination of the national and international institutions that allow for such conditions. In this particular image, the sheer volume of water bottles is overwhelming. Viewers are left with no means to imagine how “management” might care for the thousands of people who are, like the trash, confined in the camp. The photograph situates the bottles as stand-ins for the abject and “submerged” bodies of migrants (Ahmed 2006).
Photo taken at Moria by Lydia Emmanouilidou and included in her article “Life goes on in Greek refugee camp amid diplomatic tensions and pandemic.” The World, 16 March 2020. Reprinted with permission. https://www.pri.org/stories/2020-03-16/life-goes-greek-refugee-camp-amid-diplomatic-tensions-and-pandemic.
Citation: Migration and Society 6, 1; 10.3167/arms.2023.060108
Reading the trash rhetorically as a trace, we can recognize how these bottles and their circulation through global media inscribe a particular narrative on our collective cultural understanding of displacement. When the dominant traces of warehousing people are piles of rubbish, refugee-ness may also become associated with piles of rubbish, reifying the border spectacle in destructive ways. However, if we read traces as inscriptions that convey a disruptive message, we might understand their embodied meaning differently. Considering the water bottles not as trash but for how they inscribe the space of the camp, we can recognize them as evidence of states’ failures toward humans forced from their homes. Rather than presume the bottles are part of a landscape of abjection and abandonment, we can see them as markers of the legal and social marginalization enforced on people as they seek protection and stability, and even, perhaps, as a form of documentation—however temporary—of the camp as a site of accumulation—of time, anticipation, and the workings of everyday life.
In September 2020, the Moria camp burned in fires reportedly set by several camp residents as restrictions on people's movements imposed by authorities during the COVID-19 pandemic stressed already critical conditions.9 Among the objects that survived the fire was a “logbook of horrors,” a ledger containing notes by humanitarian aid workers assisting unaccompanied minors inside Moria (Malichudis and Papangeli 2020). Found among the ashes by reporters Stavros Malichudis and Iliana Papangeli, the logbook documents aid workers’ activities between November 2018 and May 2019, including instances of camp violence, unsafe conditions for unaccompanied minors, and workers’ continued pleas with “management” to address these issues. In 2018, for instance, one of the workers describes “huge inaction in the management and supervision of the structure.” The logbook thus highlights the failed institutional approach to migration, violence within the camp as a result of that failure, and hopelessness that the situation would improve. Described as routinely unsafe, life at Moria involved “constant, never- ending technical insufficiencies, the deep psychological struggles of the unaccompanied minors, and the dangers awaiting them in every corner” (Malichudis and Papangeli 2020).
Entries also document frictions among camp residents and with locals, highlighting the near-impossible management of the camp as local, regional, and international institutions failed to develop ways to address migrants’ human rights. If we understand the fire as a protest to the camp's unlivable conditions, the logbook, surviving the fire and read in relation to it, becomes a trace of those conditions and resistance to them, and serves as a cautionary tale for any such detention space.
In their notes, the aid workers appear clearly concerned for camp residents’ safety. While the logbook bears witness to the complex dynamics of working and living in such spaces, entries also reflect the dehumanization that comes with “detention.” Residents lived in metal shipping containers repurposed as housing. When referring to these spaces, aid workers labeled them by number: “Container No. 5.” This seemingly innocuous language contributes to how migrants are “seen” by the broader public. The containment or detention of human bodies situates the residents as outside normal living conditions, exacerbating their precarity. After their evacuation, residents were forced to sleep on the side of a nearby road. Thus, when those same bodies are seen lying under blankets on the road, they are already positioned as “not contained,” and therefore at fault for their vulnerability. The records in the logbook, though desperate to document unsafe conditions, re-inscribe the body of the migrant as both containable and displaceable. On its own, the logbook's testimony does not disrupt the dominant narrative about refugees. However, abandoned within the aftermath of the camp, the logbook illustrates how “the abandonment of refugees is therefore constructed actively . . . [through] the denial of provisions upon entry to the EU” (Davies, Isakjee, and Dhesi 2017). The fire itself is an act of inscription, an act that responds to what's recorded in the Logbook of Horrors by saying it must be torn down and started over. Read following the destructive fire, the logbook comes to inscribe the site with a record of the tensions of containment and resistance, and the invisibility imposed by constriction versus the visibility the fire created.
In a very different account of inscriptions, journalist Katy Fallon tweeted on 30 September, just days after the fire, “A notebook with English sentences carefully written out on the side of a path in the middle of the burned out remains of Moria camp. A reminder of the lives people were trying to build in here even amongst such chaos” (see Figure 3). The words in the lost or left-behind notebook appear to be someone's practice sentences, recording questions and their answers in English as if in a language class: “What is your favorite sport?” “My favorite sport is football.” The last question is, “How is your health?” “I am all right.” Why was this notebook left behind? Did the author miss it? What do these sentences inscribe that is different than the “Logbook of Horrors”?
Notebook found at Moria, from journalist Katy Fallon's Twitter (reprinted with permission). https://twitter.com/katymfallon/status/1305141514088185856?s=20.
Citation: Migration and Society 6, 1; 10.3167/arms.2023.060108
The everyday-ness of the class notebook contrasts starkly with the “horrors” noted in the logbook. Unlike the logbook, which in many senses affirms narratives of refugee abjection, the notebook disrupts what we think we know about the refugee experience by bringing camp conditions into the everyday—the routinized, systemic abandonment of people left to find a path through the trash to the next moment in their journey. Common (Western) assumptions see the camp as finite, contained, and “out there,” a linear space represented by rows of tents and long lines waiting for the bathroom or fresh water. Its linearity suggests that it will end, all will go back to “normal,” and that these displacements will exist in the past. In contrast, with practice sentences that suggest the relatable everyday-ness of a classroom, the notebook's spatial recursiveness is made visible, disrupting viewers’ assumptions that their own experiences are entirely distinct from those of the camp.
The fire literally rendered Moria unlivable, but rather than reify a dearth of meaning, traces like these two notebooks inscribe the camp's simultaneous unlivability and everyday routine into public/political awareness. While the fire exacerbated the danger Moria residents confronted, it was also an agentive act, rendering the camp newly visible. Like with the phrase “OutLaw Yard” inscribed on the former penicillin factory in Rome, such inscriptions can reclaim a space even as they refute it, disrupting the normal hierarchies that rule these sites of exclusion.
The Barricade
In this section, we draw on the example of informal camps in Rome, Italy, established with the support of activist collective Baobab Experience beginning in 2015, when Roman authorities refused to sufficiently expand reception center capacity as migrant arrivals increased (Paynter 2018).10 Despite Baobab's regular negotiations with police on where to establish a settlement, police still regularly raided sites the group successively occupied near Rome's Tiburtina train station, evicting residents and clearing their belongings more than twenty times between 2015–2018.
Initially, the group occupied Via Cupa, a short street in Rome's San Lorenzo neighborhood. From late 2015 to September 2016, migrants and volunteers administered aid and meals, operating an informal camp for thousands of migrants who stayed in tents along Via Cupa for days or weeks at a time, as the city repeatedly failed to provide much-needed and repeatedly- promised accommodations. Although the Via Cupa occupation has long since been cleared, traces remain, for instance in graffiti on the buildings lining the narrow road. On the former center's metal gate, people painted their names and messages of solidarity (see Figure 4). Building walls are signed with more names and countries. These traces function as both ledger and map, inscribing migrants’ presence onto the city street and, at the same time, visibly linking the Baobab encampments with those in other cities and countries. When we read the gate in Via Cupa, we are reminded of the writing people make on walls at multiple points along their journeys—a sign of camps’ interconnectedness across time and space (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2019: 289). Such inscriptions communicate critical information, as when detainees in Libya copy phone numbers from prison walls for contacts in Italy who might help them. They also record people's presence.11
Graffiti in Via Cupa. Photo by Eleanor Paynter, June 2018.
Citation: Migration and Society 6, 1; 10.3167/arms.2023.060108
They are written, at least in part, for what—or who—comes after. In the Via Cupa graffiti, the message is not entirely clear: names mark migrants’ presence in what was, inevitably, a temporary settlement. We can read these traces as inscribing presence and as accusations, claiming not only “I was here” or “recognize me” but, “you put me here” or “you left me here.” What might seem a mostly aesthetic transformation and an erasable inscription was also (in 2018, when the photograph in Fig. 4 was taken) a record of resistance to erasure: defying locals who wanted migrants gone from their street, and city authorities who refused to expand official accommodations.
Following the group's eviction from Via Cupa, volunteers and migrants eventually established a camp they named Piazzale Maslax12 on an asphalt lot near Tiburtina station, unofficially sanctioned by local authorities for the group to set up tents and serve meals. Residents included asylum seekers, refugees, and undocumented migrants from countries throughout Africa and the Middle East. Over its 16 months, the camp accommodated tens of thousands of people, some staying a few days, others months while awaiting asylum hearings or, simply, because the camp offered security that the streets did not. Piazzale Maslax became a national symbol for migrant rights activists, on the one hand, and anti-immigrant movements, on the other. It was repeatedly cleared and reoccupied until, at the urging of then-Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, police demolished it in late 2018, leaving residents without shelter. Those who lived or volunteered at the camp have told the story of Piazzale Maslax through interviews, conferences, demonstrations, and in their ongoing work to support homeless migrants in Rome. The broader record of the camp, its significance for those who spent time there, and its position within the shifting politics of migration in Italy, is also comprised of a set of physical traces that document the camp despite attempts to erase it, and that reveal how these struggles materialize and affect physical spaces.
What remains of the camp, most visibly, is a wall: a concrete barricade supporting a tall metal fence that encloses the area where the camp once existed (see Figure 5). Pieces of the barricade were put in place during inspections and evictions over the settlement's 16 months, and the final eviction in October 2018 was marked by the dramatic erection of the fence and sealed-off entry. The barrier is both obstruction and canvas, with anti-racist messages about freedom of movement painted or appended that challenge the wall itself, rendering it a site of protest. To engage with this site as a trace requires taking up the frictions of this barricade, inscribed with the phrases “FREEDOM” and “MIGRATION IS NOT A CRIME.” The barricade and the messages appended to it together constitute a record of struggle and negotiation over space, permission, permanence, and, reading the messages themselves, over xenophobia and freedom. The barricade is a reminder that tensions with authorities were of course about rights—the right to occupy a space, the right to aid—but they were, critically, also about negotiating visibility that did not reproduce border spectacle.
Barricade at Piazzale Maslax. Photo by Eleanor Paynter, June 2019.
Citation: Migration and Society 6, 1; 10.3167/arms.2023.060108
The barricade is an object of erasure and inscription: in attempting to close the area from view, it highlights the vacant lot, making it arguably more visible than the camp itself was. Following the notion of inscription as a cutting or carving, the barrier makes its mark by cutting across this small area of urban landscape. In this case, the incision separates the former camp, now off-limits, from the rest of the city, where the camp's dismantling left many without shelter—a problem that has only grown (especially during the COVID-19 pandemic).
Marking this final displacement, the wall is, on the one hand, an object of the state and a record of state-sanctioned violence against migrants. The clearing of camps positions them in relation to both the spectacle of enforcement and the anonymity of non-places that are often distanced from spectacle (Augé 1995). Eviction is a hyper-visible event, and the erection of a wall inscribes that event on the physical space, acting as an “exemplary theater for staging the spectacle of the ‘illegal alien’ that the law produces” (De Genova 2002: 436). Making illegalization visible, the barrier brings the border spectacle often associated with national border zones and, more directly, the visibility of walls as bordering strategies, into the heart of its most populous cities (Hamilakis 2016). The final wall transforms the camp into a “non-place,” yet tells “a distinct material story of temporary residence” (Soto 2016) and, in the case of Baobab, of lived community, including for those who stayed at Piazzale Maslax briefly on their way north, for those who needed shelter after they were deported to Italy from other European countries, and for those who made the camp a longer-term (if always temporary) living place.
Though they mark destruction and removal, the concrete blocks and metal fence also visibilize authorities’ power over the mobility of non-citizens from the global south. The physical wall reifies the threat they are seen to represent and, long after the camp's dismantling, the wall itself remains a site of production of illegality, directly linked to bordering practices unfolding in the Mediterranean Sea and at hotspots like Lampedusa and other major arrival points.
In signaling the closing of the camp and erasing it from view, the barricade also seemingly refutes any record of the camp as a dynamic site of collective agency and struggle. The wall marks the site, simply, as a problem, off-limits. Its division of space marks a strange kind of containment—no longer of people, but of recognition or memory. This violent division of space and populations creates the conditions for non-place, detaching sites of displacement from any ready historical or cultural association (Roy 2018). Baobab, as an informal settlement constructed through ongoing collaboration between activists and migrants (not mutually exclusive terms), in many ways defied the notion of non-place; the camp was a site of transience but also community, and its ties to a number of social movements gave it a form of rootedness normally not assigned to the non-place. The barricade inscribes and is inscribed upon. This dual function, a site of tension and negotiation, can itself be read as a call to trace, both in the sense of following a line, and of going back in history.
Before the wall, the camp was less visible to passersby. Initially, the side facing the nearby station remained open to a long driveway lined with umbrella pines leading to the main lot, with abandoned buildings on two sides and a low hill in the back. Entering by car was important for volunteers who delivered meals and for the mobile clinic that visited to offer health visits to camp residents, many of whom suffered physical ailments from their long journeys and had experienced trauma. Transnational collective No Name Kitchen used its van to transport water in giant canisters they refilled at a nearby fountain. These movements all became more challenging when city authorities delivered a set of concrete blocks, closing off the entrance. Camp volunteers and residents painted them with a Pan-African flag and a line of stick figures holding hands. They separated the blocks enough for people to pass with shopping carts; delivering services became a relay. Visits with the mobile clinic became much more public, held at the camp's street-side entrance instead of behind the trees surrounding the lot. Obtaining water was a particular challenge, especially in the heat of a Roman summer.
So long as the barriers remain in place, so, too, does this record of transgression and transformation. This is not to romanticize the struggle, but rather, to acknowledge the importance of these practices in rendering the camp visible. Placing the barriers was an act of eviction and erasure—preventing access and blocking from (public) view. Yet the traces materialize the ongoing struggle between authorities who seek to erase, and residents and volunteers who seek to spread awareness of the precarity in which migrants are made to live, and simultaneously to cultivate and expand community.
When Eleanor returned to the site in June 2019, eight months following the eviction, Baobab was serving meals to migrants in an area immediately outside the station entrance, where migrants were more visible and more vulnerable. A few minutes’ walk away, banners still hung on the barricade, though their message had changed. “A CRIME” had fallen away, and the phrase “MIGRATION IS NOT” hung on its own, which could be read as an unsettling statement on the border closures many political leaders have advocated, or on the ways mobility gets blocked within the country: “Migration is not” because of the wall, or because it is not wanted. “Migration is not” for the people whose journeys are intercepted by physical and bureaucratic structures that hold them in uncertainty—who are now on the same side of the wall as everyone else.
Conclusion
Our reading of traces as disruptive testimony challenges the circulation of common representations of camps as sites of abjection or as non-places. Common narratives evoking anger, empathy, or pity do not have much material purchase in countering the effects of the camp; representations of people in camps as suspect or as vulnerable victims train viewers rhetorically to see the camp as something outside and beyond their own experience. Instead, reading traces as testimonial inscriptions highlights agentive acts of witnessing taken up by border crossers to document and dispute the logic of the camp as a perpetual limbo, a container, and a site of violence. As a result, those of us outside the camp are forced to reckon with our complicity in the continued “warehousing” or “caging” of the migrant, and the erasure of migrant agency within these spaces and their broader representation. These rows of tents and shipping containers should be understood as traces for which we are all accountable and which “speak out in their places of exile” to resist reductive narratives (Agier 2011). The method of tracing we present here lifts to the surface communal experience and negotiations between the state, the camp, and residents. Reading traces as testimonial inscriptions makes it harder to ignore how the camp implicates all of us.
This approach also raises critical ethical questions: Who is responsible for what's left behind? How do memories, inscriptions, or any other trace become evidence? Who gets to define what is trash, refuse, discardable? Are these “testimonial transactions” (Paynter, 2022) archived? How and by whom? How does the aftermath of the camp fit within a larger archive of traumatic events and practices of place-making? How might recognizing traces of displacement within such an archive help us understand the “OutLaw Yards” of today within a longer history of European border management and migrant place-making? While the traces discussed here are fragments that represent kairotic and fleeting encounters, they serve as examples of “writing for the trace,” with fragments recognized as a critical way to engage the archives. Likewise, and in line with feminist and postcolonial scholars discussing power dynamics in archival practices, we see traces of displacement as critical to the historical record (Mbembe 2002; Wernimont 2013). In this way, traces can be seen as “archives in motion” (Powell 2022), ethical counterpoints to the enumeration and tracking practices of border controls and governments.
We suggest that intentional traces can be read in sharp relief to the logic of the camp itself, even as they document it. That is, the trace prompts us to think ethically, logically, and emotionally about the function of the camp; indeed, the variety of images of traces of displacement readily available are often not produced by camp residents but rather journalists, reporters, and humanitarians. Reading traces is a way to recognize, record, and reflect on individual and collective experiences, while remaining aware of the politics of (in)visibility that shape those experiences, as camp residents confront their regular erasure from public view yet also often need the protection of anonymity.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We wish to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors of Migration and Society for their insightful comments and suggestions.
Notes
From here on (as in the article title), when referring to this full phrase, we write “OutLaw Yard” to indicate how the writer(s) split the word (see Figure 1).
As Yousif Qasmiyeh observes in poetry and scholarship, camp residents themselves write the camp through processes of witnessing and the layers of memory these processes involve. For Qasmiyeh, “trace” refers to the emergent archive of shifting conditions of the camp and the lives it shapes over time: “in documenting the trace—in bearing witness to its presence in the shape of the static, animate or otherwise—we forge a linkage between all the tenses at work. In other words, remembering thecamp becomes the prerequisite for remembering ourselves in/outside the camp.” (Qasmiyeh 2020: 54; see also his poems at the end of his chapter).
This dilemma concerns the possibilities for ethical engagements with the materiality of migration and its representation. As Yannis Hamilakis explains, “there is an inherent danger of museifying the border-crossing and migrant experience. . . This is a danger of arresting and fixing the social life of a material relic of that experience. . . There is also a danger of divorcing these material traces from the migrants themselves and from the other material and immaterial components of the migration assemblage . . . and of fixing them into a specific temporal moment” (Hamilakis 2016: 15–16).
See Chávez (2009) for a discussion about how distinctions between terms can “function as technologies of normalization, discipline, and sanctioned dispossession” (Luibhéid, 2005: xi, quoted in Chávez 2009).
For more work on traces, see the investigative approach of Forensic Architecture and their use of “situated testimony”: https://forensic-architecture.org/methodology/situated-testimony.
See also Migrant Agency and the Moving Image, a short film in which Imran Perretta, Leonie Ansems de Vries, and Signe Sofie Hansen discuss the ethical decisions that informed their project in Calais: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ihql67jy1E.
Υπουργɛίο Μɛτανάστɛυσης & Ασύλου, Twitter account of the Greek Ministry of Migration & Asylum. https://twitter.com/migrationgovgr.
Twitter account of Eleni Konstantopoulo. https://twitter.com/EleniKonstanto.
In controversial trials in 2021, six Afghan asylum seekers were found guilty of having started the fire. Four were sentenced to ten years in prison; two were sentenced to five years. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/13/moria-fire-greek-court-jails-four-afghan-asylum-seekers-for-10-years.
This section draws on Eleanor's field visits to the camp. See also the chronology on Baobab Experience's website: https://baobabexperience.org/presidi/.
These inscriptions are sometimes ironic. Amade M'charek describes a rock at the Tunisian coast with the phrase “Europe this way” painted onto it in Arabic (M'charek 2020).
They named the camp after Maslax Moxamed, a Somali asylum seeker who spent time with the collective before moving on to Belgium. Citing the Dublin regulation, authorities then sent him back to Rome, where he died by suicide.
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