Protests have quintessential othering imbibed into their very nature of being. There is a perception that those protesting have in some way identified a fundamental point, moment, policy or element that needs to be changed or transformed in some profound manner. These identifiers are, of course, how these protests get their names and eventually their chants and mantras. However, a very important aspect of these protests also manifests in their architecture, and how they occupy space. The importance of occupying space, taking up a place or claiming an area and denoting it as one with a purpose and very specific intentions is a spatial othering of what is considered the norm.

Dissent. Clearly, an expression of disagreement in opinions does have a spatial parallel. Frankfurt’s Deutsches Architekturmuseum (DAM) and Vienna’s MAK—Museum of Applied Arts, explore this physicality in a joint exhibition called Protest Architecture: Barricades, Camps, Superglue. The main focus of the exhibition is on 13 protests between 1968 and 2023, which took place in Austria, Brazil, Egypt, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Spain, Ukraine, and the United States. The geographical and time variation is an important fact to note, especially when you consider the corresponding book that further expands on this thesis and goes as far back as 1830.

Rebel, Revolt, Resist

The exhibition looks at Michel Foucault’s idea of spatially separated counterworlds within a society, or “heterotopias”. Foucault’s Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopia (1967) postulates the importance of spaces that while found within culture and society are outside it: “Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though they may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias.” However, one of the most interesting parts of Foucault’s essay is perhaps his assertion that “there is probably not a single culture in the world that fails to constitute heterotopias.” This is something reflected in the thesis and consequently in the exhibition itself. While the actual architectural realisation of these ‘heterotopias’ arises from the overall conditions and the protest movement's objectives, part of this also stems from the protest’s cultural roots. The exhibition makes a case to state that it “makes a difference whether people stand on the outskirts of a city on a traffic circle, or instead occupy a central square, a forest, or a piece of private land, whether they gather in one-person or communal tents, burrow underground or head for the heights.”

Occupying the Gallery

At first glance the seemingly ad hoc exhibition display gives a chaotic impression. The cacophony of different installation methods and materials seems to have a makeshift quality. It might not surprise viewers to learn that all of the installations, furniture, and lattice walls were already at the DAM. This works in tandem with the principles of protest architecture; working with either found resources, cheap materials or objects that are readily available. At the same time, the exhibition itself is still designed and not a facsimile of a protest event. However, having said that the very nature of the installation encourages views that are perhaps not the most straightforward, asking viewers to reorient how they would stand in front of an installation to properly comprehend the material displayed on it. While subtle, this detail is still very interesting, as the concept of othering that is native to protest architecture manifests in the exhibition design as a change in perspective.

The exhibition includes a large number of models, photos and a 16-minute documentary movie by Frankfurt-based director Oliver Hardt, purpose-produced for the exhibition. The curators, Oliver Elser (DAM) and Sebastian Hackenschmidt (MAK) worked with activists to adopt a suspension bridge for the tree-house protest camp in Hambach Forest (Germany). There is an innate temporality to protest. They are not meant to last forever. They have a purpose. Once the purpose is achieved, the protests no longer need to exist. At the same time, protests such as the Hambach Forest camp have been faced with a litany of opposition since 2012, protesting by occupying space to prevent mining. The protest eventually lasted till 2020 with Germany finally passing the "Roadmap for Coal Phase-out" law. Here, protest architecture, while temporary, still had to exist for an extended period. It had to be fixable, it had to be changeable, and adaptable. The ability that these protest structures needed to take on sounds like a project brief. It is through these nuances of understanding the built environment of protests, that the richness of this exhibition and its book come through.

Camping

While the intention of a protest might not be long-term, many of them evolve into them. Of the 13 case studies highlighted in the exhibition, two were transformed into tent villages, namely Hong Kong’s 'Umbrella Movement' and 'Occupy New York' tent villages were created. In the Indian capital, the Farmers Protest saw three highways towards Delhi blocked. The farmers drove up to the highways in their farm vehicles and eventually converted them into dwellings for entire 16 months. As temporary as these spatial occupations were meant to be, the constant presence of the protesters was an intrinsic requirement. This is why the nature of the architecture of the protest matters. How easy would it be to bypass tents on a highway? What would occupy the highway in an immovable capacity? With these questions, we circle back to dissent as a physical entity and not just as an opinion.

Barricading

There is a rich lexicon of what constitutes a barricade. From being impermeable to being permanent to being situational and sometimes even invisible (i.e. societal), a barricade's purpose is to create a physical distinction between an ‘us’ and a ‘them’. The two-and-a-half months of clashes on the Maidan Nezalezhnosti in Kyiv, Ukraine, led to the square becoming a fortress. In contrast, the ‘Lützi Stays!’ protests created a new type of "delaying architecture." The protest camp invented ground-based structures at a minimum height of 2.5 metres, which required special units to be called in. Here the barricade is both physical and tautological, forcing the police to engage in any repeated excavation and demolition process. While the exhibition's thesis brings all this to the forefront, it does raise an interesting question about the exhibition design. Could this exhibition make viewers experience some of these perceptions, ideas and concepts?

Superglue-ing

An important thing to note in the exhibition is the lack of the recent social media-driven protests of activists supergluing themselves to noteworthy paintings and museum walls. Do these acts of protest create a space simply by allowing the activists to occupy a place in a disruptive manner? Is it truly dissent? Does it only occupy spaces in the digital realm and not in the physical? While that is one pondering that the exhibition does incite, another is the nature of camps and barricades. In the case of protests, camps and barricades are the ways of becoming a form that the protest undertakes in order to solidify its presence. Yet there is another camp and barricade modality that exists, one that is very hard to ignore given the current global situation. The architecture of conflict, especially in war-torn parts of the world, also uses camps and barricades as temporary structures but for very different reasons. The proximity of the vocabulary and the spatiality is hard to ignore, especially when these coexist as boundary conditions across the globe. The difference in these 'counter-sites' is based on the permeability of their boundary. In the case of the protest, it is the inner surface of the boundary that is permeable, where people from within are allowed to leave should they choose to. However, in conflict regions, a camp or a barricade indicates a lack of permeability from the inner surface. The purpose of a protest occupation is for its occupants to be identified as different from the norm by choice. In conflict occupations, the occupants have been identified as different and so relegated to be in this space.

Protest Architecture: Barricades, Camps, Superglue is on view at the DAM until January 14, 2024. Later it will travel to MAK – Museum für angewandte Kunst, Wien, to be on view from February 14 - August 25, 2024. The exhibition is accompanied by a book titled Protest Architecture: Barricades, Camps, Spatial Tactics 1830-2023, edited by Oliver Elser, Anna-Maria Mayerhofer, Sebastian Hackenschmidt, Jennifer Dyck, and Lilli Hollein. The book examines the topic further using examples spanning from 1830 to 2023.

(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position of STIR or its Editors.)