Ephemerality

In a brief narrative of the history of modern painting, John Berger identifies schools of visual form-making that were concerned with the representation of time. The Impressionists, Expressionists, Pointillists, Futurists, and Cubists each recalibrated the meaning and value of the ephemeral as a visually potent means of subverting or reorienting a dominant narrative about static, timeless beauty. Some “tried to abolish the static and timeless,” and others “accorded the timeless a new place,” with the Surrealists finally making “the unresolved problematic of time the constant theme of all their work.”¹ While Berger outlines the visual representation of time by artists designated as such who worked categorically toward aesthetic expression, the protagonists of the narrative to follow surely did not assert artistic intent. Yet latent questions emerge from their work: around ephemerality in architecture and its performance as a characteristically visual medium, with an emphasis on the cultural and political life of that performativity.

This essay is concerned with aesthetics and representations that set the process of seeing architecture in relation to that of experiencing time. The object of focus—a group of refugee settlements in an East African borderland—produces a viewer, a subject, in part through the configuration of visual fields and an overall spatial regime whose meaning, I argue, is linked to temporality and specifically to that of fleeting time (as in emergency) or temporary existences (as in a camp). This understanding of the ephemeral as a constitutive aspect of an aesthetics has been better attended to in African art than in architecture, and indeed, the camp complex established by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) near Dadaab, Kenya, is an object of political and social urgency for which a meditation on aesthetics may seem unreasonable. Yet I argue that the production of a viewing subject through an aesthetic experience is linked to other productions of political subjectivity and that, at Dadaab, an aesthetics for which ephemerality is a constitutive part has produced this viewing subject. I believe that considering refugee spaces through their aesthetics—“ways in which they come to act on the world”²—offers methods for thinking with refugees and imagining environments of displacement beyond their usual framing as merely embodying lack. The following investigation follows these claims, in which the process of seeing an architecture articulated through provisional forms and a precarious visibility has the potential to yield new cultural, political, and historical meaning.

Questions of the Urban

The Dadaab refugee complex exhibits several paradoxes central to the interrogation here. It is located in Kenya’s North Eastern Province—what was once the “Northern Frontier”—an artifact of a past colonial imaginary of a territorially unstable borderland.³ Its ephemerality is performed in several registers. The establishment has been in operation since 1991, with three generations having been born in the camps and refugees having been subject to mobility restrictions under Kenyan law. As of this writing, the three original settlements (Ifo, Dagaheley, and Hagadera) and two established later (Ifo 2 and Kambioos) host 245,126 registered refugees, with unofficial counts of unregistered migrants in 2011 bringing the total to nearly half a million, the third largest population grouping in Kenya after Nairobi and Mombasa.⁴ The site has also accommodated a diverse international humanitarian labor force and facilitated considerable financial flows, with investment in refugee-related operations reaching $100 million and overall trade volume at $25 million USD in 2010; between 1989 and 2010, the surrounding host population had grown tenfold.⁵ Its boundedness and accessibility have occasioned frequent study by academic and policy researchers in a range of disciplines,⁶ compared to other UNHCR sites.⁷ Due to its political and social complexity, scale, and yet prolonged impermanence,⁸ the Dadaab site at once approaches and resists common characterizations of the urban (see fig. 1).⁹ However, it has an equally ambivalent relationship to the tenuous architectures that often signify a “camp.” In scholarship, humanitarian literature, and journalistic reports together, camps are understood as temporary or transitional. However, as a spatial formation—including the Kenyan village of Dadaab, multiple refugee camps, their peripheral settlements, the adjacent humanitarian base and regional...