Glyn-Blanco, Rebecca and McLintock, Maria. 2023. 'A critical exploration of the emergent ‘closed camps’ and associated control room at the Ministry of Migration and Asylum, Athens'. In: Weaving Worlds: speculations between affect & evidence. TU Delft, Netherlands 28 - 30 June 2023. [Conference or Workshop Item]

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Abstract or Description

The control room at the Ministry of Migration and Asylum (MOMA) was established in Athens in 2021 to collect and process surveillance footage from new ‘closed’ refugee camps across Greek islands. The room is a nascent centralised typology that monitors and predicts ‘unknown threats’ across the camps through two networked surveillance systems: Centaur, which uses AI Behavioural Analytics alongside CCTV/drone footage; and Hyperion, which monitors movement in and out of the camps. Greece’s location as a first transit country and its periphery to the EU renders it a fertile ground from which to test migration management policies and technologies by the bloc’s migratory agencies. This presentation and exhibition contribution will take the control room as a site through which to consider the increasing role of technology and predictive systems evident in the EU’s migration management tactics, as well as the role Greece plays as a testing ground for emergent surveillance technologies.

By drawing on critical spatial practice and critical theory, we explore these sites through mapping out their territoriality. Our research will include analysis of the controversial Centaur system implemented by the MOMA, as well as an engagement with how such technologies literally produce new realities through prediction. We draw from US-based scholar Jackie Wang’s theorisation of predictive systems as a means of enacting the future to expose the increasing use of technological systems in migration management, in addition to scholars who investigate carcerality as a machinery of oppression that extends beyond the institution’s walls. We seek to explore questions such as: how is digital surveillance spatialised through emergent infrastructures, such as the control room/closed camp network? What are the historical, economic, and cultural implications of the emergent surveillance technologies that are being tested in peripheral states, such as Greece? And, more broadly, how do such technologies and spaces of exclusion demonstrate a colonialist approach to migration management?

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Design
Dates:	Date Event 29 June 2023 Completed
Event Location:	TU Delft, Netherlands
Date range:	28 - 30 June 2023
Item ID:	39207
Date Deposited:	15 Jul 2025 14:09
Last Modified:	15 Jul 2025 14:17
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/39207

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