CAMARAC

In 2022, this pavilion hosted hundreds of refugees from Ukraine.
While you stand in line for hours in a pavilion like this to get clothing and food, or you shelter in your basement during an air raid, life is on hold. That is the common thread in refugees’ experiences: not rushing, but waiting. WAITING is an ongoing artistic research divided into five stages that explores the role architecture plays in refugees’ experiences. The way in which space is organised dictates our social behaviour: it can bring us together or separate us, it can make us visible or invisible, it can reinforce or abolish a hierarchy. Each stage of the project focuses on a particular scenario in which refugees are forced to wait: an Improvised Underground Shelter, an Overcrowded Station/Airport/Harbour, a Refugee Camp, a Bureaucratic Office and a New Environment. Each scenario is boiled down to its most characteristic spatial features, an abstract and decontextualised representation of it expressed in a large-format ephemeral installation that challenges our usual point of view, summoning creativity, our most precious skill to better the future.

This first stage of the project represents an Improvised Underground Shelter. The installation is composed of two layers:
Ground layer: sleeping bags scattered over the floor; material evidence of all who await, evoking the cluttered space and the feeling of uncertainty.
Upper layer: Inspired by the Ukrainian tradition of dressing trees with colourful ribbons to celebrate the rebirth of nature after winter; a sky of hope to look up to.

Waiting becomes the shroud of hope, not only for refugees but for non-refugees too. Nonetheless – and in spite of knowing that, one day, everyone will have always been against this – we wait. To those of us who get to choose: what are we waiting for?

Artists: Mark Kantalinsky-Vasilyev and Clàudia Jansana-Rodon 

The artists would like to thank: CAMARAC Association, Elisenda Baró, Ivan Blasi, Nelly Cabrera, Carmen Caballero, Renée De La Sierra, Marina Ezquerro, Agustí Jansana, Isabel Rodon, Anna Sala, Cristina Valle

© Anna Mas
Cortesia de la Fundació Mies van der Rohe