Paolo Boccagni will participate in the international workshop ‘Home-coming and Home-making: Conversations between Architecture and Anthropology’ at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Ethnic and Religious Diversity in Gottingen, next 20-21 September. The workshop is convened by 

Xiang Ren (University of Sheffield ) and Victoria Sakti (MPI-MMG). The title of Paolo’s presentation is Home is the place where I am in power. On the emergence of interstices of control and appropriation within temporary housing for asylum seekers. See an abstract of his presentation below.  

“Home is the place where I am in power. On the emergence of interstices of control and appropriation within temporary housing for asylum seekers”

Paolo Boccagni (University of Trento)  

My presentation advances a minimal and pragmatic understanding of home, which does not involve either the markers of origin and ascription, or the normative attributes of security, comfort, privacy, and the like. It rather has to do with the unequal and contended possibility to exert some degree of control over a limited portion of space, beyond one‘s own body, even within marginalized housing infrastructures and pathways. Seeing home as „the place where I‘m in power“ may reflect a problematically patriarchal and exclusionary view of home. However, it does illuminate forms of residual homemaking such as those I encountered during my four-year ethnography of a centre for young male asylum seekers in Italy (2018-2022). Even in a setting of precarious housing, where people are subject to heteronomous routines of control in a condition of protracted ‚waithood‘, an ethnographic gaze from inside-out reveals the significance of psycho-social mechanisms associated with home – if not with its use as a category of practice. Importantly, though, these do not necessarily involve the reproduction of an identitarian or ethnic background, as often emphasized in the home & migration scholarship. While this form of home(making) may also be there, a more fundamental, arguably transcultural mode of homemaking emerges from the degree of control being negotiated over specific portions of time and space – in a way, from being-in-power – among people that have little social power of their own, for the time being. Starting from this ethnographic insight, my presentation explores the role of micro-scales and basic infrastructures in a reception centre – including beds, rooms, doors, and keys – in affording an unequal, temporary, and yet meaningful degree of control over a place, even one that is unlikely to elicit any attachment, or to ever be called home. This has implications for the broader conceptualization of home in displacement, and for the conversation between anthropology and architecture, as I argue at last.