Helena Andersson
Architecture and Public Building
Intensely Infrastructural: Shelter for Nomadic Subjects
The Seamless Interior is a spatiotemporal condition founded on the ethos of uninhibited circulation of bodies and goods; theoretically enabling everyone to be ‘nomads’ choosing their habitats on a deterritorialised globe, yet practically entailing continuous control, synchronisation and border enforcement. 'Intensely Infrastructural' conceptualises an infrastructure for sheltering the increasing flux of mobile citizens within the European Union, thereby revealing and embracing surplus and externalities – the rugged side – of the Seamless. Engaging with the residual, at once mediating and segregating nature of the previously fortified edge of EU capital Strasbourg, the intervention rearticulates this territory as an “immanent outside” which affects and is affected by the Seamless while retaining relative autonomy. Designed from ‘nomadic points of view’, it embodies movement, albeit one of intensive subjectivation rather than efficient conveyance. An ambiguous interplay between interiorisation and exteriorisation, inhabitants and outsiders, precarity and domesticity, simultaneously enables and demands moments of expressive appropriation. Thus, the project envisions a prototypical environment for truly ”nomadic subjects” ; able to change not just their habitats, but their very habits.