Danae Io

The intersection of highly funded private bodies, obscure legal frameworks and spatial exclusion has enforced a notion of Europe as a ‘fortress’. As a result, refugees are seen as undesirable political subjects in need of management, deterrence and, therefore, exclusion. Research project System of Systems questions this view of migration in Europe as an issue to be ‘managed’, both within and beyond its periphery, through multiple lenses. Addressing how histories of imperialism, the extractability of resources and the formation of modern nation-states forms an entangled undercurrent to current migration management practices, their talk will situate this context alongside considering collectivity as a necessary ethic when attempting to understand and undermine these regimes.

System of Systems is a collaborative research project initiated by Rebecca Glyn-Blanco, Maria McLintock and Danae Io in 2016. They work at the nexus of public programming, publishing and practice to address the use of technology and bureaucracy in migration processing systems in Europe. By collaborating with artists, theorists and architects alongside policy-experts and activists, System of Systems endeavours to examine migration from multiple perspectives, rendering this highly complex system more accessible to non-specialists.