Plants, Tandems and the Borderscape: Unsettling Care and Control in the (post-)Jungle

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Healy, Liam. 2021. 'Plants, Tandems and the Borderscape: Unsettling Care and Control in the (post-)Jungle'. In: Society for Social Studies of Science: 4S Annual Meeting 2021. Toronto, Canada 6-9 October 2021. [Conference or Workshop Item]

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Official URL: https://www.4smembers.org/event/2021_Meeting

Abstract or Description

This paper accompanies the short film Calais Then (2016), and Then (2019), a two-screen video depicting the former ‘Jungle’ camp in the industrial region of Calais, Northern France. The film juxtaposes footage shot during a tandem bicycle ride around the camp in 2016, the height of the Jungle’s activity, with footage retracing the same route in 2019 after the camp was evicted, bulldozed and landscaped into an eco-park. By revealing the re-wilding taking place on the site, the film aims to explore which kinds of life are permitted in a Europe increasingly hostile to displaced people. In the first part I will argue that forms of ‘nature’ are used on the site as a form of control and bordering practice. In the second, I relate this problem to design-research to consider how (speculative) design practitioners might engage with scales of control, and processes of becoming in and out of control by looking to the tandem bicycle that was used to make the film. In doing so I aim to outline a speculative design approach that is explicitly interested in provoking and manipulating forms of control, and suggest some ways that this might be taken forward.

Item Type:

Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)