Undocumented: The Architecture of Migrant Detention

  • Tings Chak

An undocumented woman seeks shelter while fleeing domestic violence, a mother attempts to enroll her non-status child in a primary school, a failed refugee claimant goes to a food bank, an overstayed visitor walks into a medical clinic. For undocumented people in a city, simply carrying out one’s daily life is a challenge to borders that every day threaten detention and deportation.

We live in an era of unprecedented human migration. Mass migration (or mass displacement) is both a process and a condition, driven by global capitalism, neo-colonialism, war and imperialism, and environmental destruction. Borders, material and immaterial ones, are proliferating around and between us.

As the world has become borderless to “flows” of capital, the movement of migrant bodies is restricted as never before. And so, millions of migrants live precarious lives as precarious labourers, as refugees, and as undocumented people.

Migrants’ journeys are commonly portrayed as linear progressions from home to host nations, but in reality they are replete with interruptions and discontinuities, occupying spaces of hiding, waiting, diversion, escape, settlement, and return—spaces which are largely invisible to the public. Among those are spaces used for mass detentions and deportation.

In these illustrations you will find an incomplete view into the world of migrant detention in Canada, explored at scales descending from physical landscapes to the human body. This illustrated documentary is an ongoing project developed through reading, listening, organizing, writing, drawing, and imagining. The stories are borrowed from the lived experiences of anonymous individuals, and all figures are taken from official sources.

The first page of a comic strip shows a large graph with the labels “autonomous space” and “controlled space” on the Y axis and “temporary inhabitation” and “permanent inhabitation” on the X axis. Drawings of houses, tents, encampments, detention centres, and other places are strewn throughout the graph. Underneath is written, “Spaces of incarceration just may be the mass (ware)housing solution of our time, where those who are deemed undesirable and dangerous are caged. In a securitized world, the gated community mirrors the detention centre, the micro-condominium isn’t so different from the cell, they are sites of exclusion and seclusion. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell who is being protected from whom.
A comic strip with text that reads: “This was the first thing she said when she was released. “Take me to the sea, or the next biggest thing.” Inside, they never let you see the horizon.” The top and bottom panels depict an empty room with tall, thin windows. In the middle panel are two people at a shoreline, staring over the wide expanse of water.

*Based on description by Susan Rosenberg, interviewed by Brett Story in CBC Ideas “Alone Inside,” 2013.

Text is scrolled throughout drawings of sparsely furnished living spaces that reads: “Instead, it is a sequence of fragments. You can never wholly grasp it. Inside, you lose your spatial bearings and marking, you lose your identity... and subjecthood.”
A grid of drawings depict surveillance cameras, barbed wire fences, police, and a person being handcuffed. The bottom left panel has a Hannah Arendt quote written: “There are billions of dollars made in the incarceration of human bodies. There are a lot of hands involved in this industry, but there aren’t many faces. In these authorless spaces, we hide the casualties of poverty and displacement, we even try to hide the spaces themselves. It is a tyranny without a tyrant, where nobody rules and we are all equally powerless.”

*Hannah Arendt in “Reflections on Violence,” New York Review of Books (1969).



Undocumented: The Architecture of Migrant Detention was first published by The Architecture Observer (Montreal and Amsterdam, 2014).


Tings Chak 翟庭君 is an artist and writer based in Shanghai. She is Art Director of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and member of the art and culture working group of the International People's Assembly. Undocumented: The Architecture of Migrant Detention is based on her work as a migrant justice organizer in Toronto. Her current research focuses on the culture of national liberation and socialist struggles.

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