[UN-]registered Ege: Ship as an agency of care

Aegean Sea

 

This study situates itself in the archipelago of the Aegean Sea, suggesting an alternative reading for the unseen border architectures and politics of maritime space between Türkiye and Greece. Reading the Aegean Sea as a third body manifesting in physical and political realms redefines this body of water as a witness to the displacement, misplacement, and replacement of human and non-human ecologies. Having a thick repository of events and conflicts through history, the Aegean Sea claims a new discussion ground for architectural humanities through the displacement and replacement of human agencies, varying from the population exchange as an outcome of the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 to the present-day migration and refugee crisis, spanning the last hundred years, exploring the notion of generational trauma. Through multiple types of mapping and planimetric instance drawings, the study aims to utilize this act as a tool for research by design. The research depends on the web of relationalities around transportation agencies in an assemblage of isolated and restrictive island camps/prisons that are politically utilized as spaces for control over bodies to whom that need to be kept out of vision, hearing, and access. It presupposes a network of relations with non-fixed entities, where the circulatory vessels on the water body become the only agency of care.

 

Thus, through tracing the movement and acts of these circulatory vessels, be it the inflatable boat or the coast guard, the exhibited thick map of interdependent relations connotes the vulnerabilities and heterogeneities of care by defining critical cuts (in lime green) and the Assembly of Care (Umur Kurulu). The matrix corresponds to various types of planimetric instant drawings of institutionalized acts that utilize the water body as an element of aggressive deterrence, intervention, and an intermediary carriage, such as push-back incidents, illegal trafficking, alien species carried with the ballast water, and registered boats of population exchange. These registered and unregistered members of the Assembly, although leaving them behind a trace in the water, the wake—create an untraceable notion of motion.