Three Approaches to Deportation Architectures in Spanish Border

The kinopolitical¹ dimension of borders allows us to read their material constructions, architectures, and buildings not as isolated objects, but as responses to the entry-exit regulation of people within a political regime. Despite the theatricality that has been associated with walls and fences in different parts of the world, its expanded notion allows us to focus on other fundamental elements in the control of migrants, both upon entering a territory and their voluntary or forced expulsion. If the wall is, by definition, the architecture that best embodies a control from an exterior (or country of origin) to an interior (or country of destination), the architectures of deportation occupy the reverse place: They channel flows from an interior to an outside. This shift also affects the symbolic roles embodied in them: while the wall, as a construction of entry, acquires the weight of an unassailable architecture, architectures of deportation lack prominence, dispersing throughout the territory in a fragmented way, with a much smaller entity. And yet, they are fundamental pieces for the construction of the border apparatus² in its deportation role.

The aim of this paper is to revisit three of the main architectures that are key elements in the deportation apparatus: the foreign detention centres, rizomatic deportation architectures and finally, the airplane as the final stage. Throughout this paper, an architectural analysis will be made to understand its spatial characteristics and the different types of violence connected to them.

Related to this, the existent interrelation between architecture and politics present in these spaces will be unveiled. Specially, the architectural materialization of European and Spanish neo-colonial politics towards the countries of origin will be shown. On this neo-colonial regime, based on previous colonial orders, the migrant body is considered as less-than-human³ or as an Enemy⁴ and, therefore, exposed to a greater degree of spatial violence.

Thus, the border appears, not as a construction that boundaries the sovereignty of a territory, but as a deterritorialized apparatus, embodied in a series of buildings and agents with different natures. This apparatus modulates the space based on the actions of the bodies — their entry and exit from the territory — and therefore responds in its materialization in a much more specialized way, attending to the movements and flows of the bodies that it intends to control. It is only possible to formulate the border as a territorial construction apparatus, in which, in front of a single architecture, highly specialized spatial tactics and resources are deployed throughout the territory.

Foreign Detention Centres

In 2012 Elvin, a Bolivian migrant is incarcerated in Valencia’s Foreign Detention Center (CIE) awaiting deportation. He mapped the first plan of this opaque construction, not only at an architectural level, but also a legal and police level.⁵ For three weeks, he was held in a space configured by prison logic and regulated by police protocols, without any conviction weighing on him beyond his irregular situation in Spain. This drawing shows the first plan of the interior of a CIE. Each space is precisely delimited, where annotations are superimposed on this physical representation of the space that make visible the spatial violence’s degrees present in its interior, as well as the mechanisms used to exercise it. When he is not able to represent it as a drawing, it is immediately transformed into text at the same level — “riot control intervention,” “he hit him in the face with the baton for no apparent reason,” — reconstructing the interior of an exceptionality architecturally materialized. Inside, the imposition of rhythms and routines produces the space as the explicit violence developed by police officers and the building’s own deficiencies — “there are only three latrines, three taps and six showers: these are the services for more than one hundred inmates.” This assemblage of police officers, matter and law configures an architecture of deportation that goes beyond logics of historic prison. One of the sentences that he notes, “there is a Guantánamos within their own cities,” makes explicit how the exceptional logic linked to the border no longer operates only in its boundaries but all over the territory.

In it, the imposition of rhythms and routines and the explicit violence both by police officers and by the architectural deficiencies of the centre — “There are only three latrines, three taps and six showers: these are the services for the more than one hundred inmates” — configures an architecture of internment that goes beyond the logic of the historic prison. One of the phrases that he notes, “they have a Guantánamo within their own cities,”⁶ makes explicit how the exceptional logic linked to the border no longer only operates in the perimeter limes but is also applicable to other territories.

As part of their deportation process from Spain to their countries of origin, more than 14.000 migrants per year are incarcerated in architectures that are closely and typologically similar to prisons. However, their legal status — which is not ruled by prison protocol but rather as an extension of police cell — but exempted from complying with their spatial standards. Former prisons, disused barracks, police station basements without ventilation or natural lighting… or even ex-novo buildings have embodied the application of a law that proposes the incarceration of migrants pending deportation.

This condition — originally political — has a clear translation to architectural space and its architectural programme. There are several reports⁷ and associations⁸ that have compiled the different kind of abuses and violence deployed inside their walls. We must also include the violence exerted to the bodies incarcerated there: lack of infrastructure, use of disused facilities without any intervention, lack of spatial guarantees… derived of its infra-penitentiary nature. In other words, not being able to legally be recognized as a prison, CIEs are not forced to comply with minimum guarantees, resources and dimensions established by the law. In addition to this, the temporary nature of the incarcerated migrant population (maximum 60 days) reinforces the lack of achievement of spatial standards. Thus, the buildings acquire a clear punitive condition that would never be exposed to national population. This differentiation, embodied in the walls and architectural matter of the CIEs, shows the existing neo-colonial condition, as it is an architecture designed for a migrant population that mostly comes from former Spanish or European colonies. This condition can be extended to the assemblage of architecture linked to the border but especially tangible in these spaces.

After its creation in 1987, the current territorial network had eight nodes spread over Spanish territory, each one specialized according to their location. Despite the similarities between architectures, it is important to highlight the existing flows of migrants and their specialization. Only two of them act as departure point from the territory, while the rest operates as buffer-zones for the irregular flow of migrants entering the territory or the excess of migrant population that should be deported. Only CIEs from Barcelona and Madrid, the two main Spanish cities, channel the total outflow from Spain by air. This makes each CIE part of a highly localized network in the territory with a differentiated character that works together, generating movements of migrants between nodes.

The following approximations allows us to make a more complex approach to this network, including in it a series of agents, spaces, and institutions that enforce their effective functions, but which do not have a comparable architectural entity — a lot of them are simple rooms or minimum spaces within bigger buildings. And, by doing so, they are able to map out the deportation infrastructure throughout Spain. The first one is the capillary network of public and private spaces that act as architectures of deportation. The second one is the concatenation of spaces produced in the deportation process. In this sequence, the airplane is a key element, where an individualized control is deployed over each body. This last example unveils the dynamic character of the border, where control is not applied in a general way over large population numbers but in a highly individualized solution as a reaction of the actions of bodies.

Rizomatic Architectures

The express deportations carried out as a result of the operative turn of the border produced in the last decade as a consequence of the Great Recession,⁹ have rendered the capillarization of this infrastructure. This is not located exclusively in the nodes embodied by the CIEs, but rather has an infinity of minor nodes that operate as internment architecture. In opposition to a strongly centralized network, the border apparatus weaves a network with weak hierarchies, with the capacity of absolute development in each point of the territory since it only requires a National Police Station to be deployed, since, in an operative mode, for practical purposes, its dependencies are captured by the border. This increases the effectiveness of a territorial system that does not require the costs of maintenance or those derived from its construction compared to those of a CIE. Along with the operative capillarity, it presents a fundamental characteristic that is aligned with the contemporary architectural mechanisms of the border: architectural performativity. The spaces do not have a single function, instead are activated based on the demand for the internment of bodies. During the maximum 72 hours of detention, two independent internment regimes can coexist in the same police cell: the jail and the internment of migrants waiting to be deported.

This network is made up of a much larger set of latent nodes throughout the territory that are not only focused on those areas with the greatest demand of internment and deportation. Through its activation, a network of weak hierarchies is generated that manage to redistribute the importance of each of the internment architecture that forms, supported by protocols aimed at improving the efficiency of the border apparatus. Consequently, a space of barely 20 square meters could achieve the same relevance, at any given time, as the solid building of a CIE when it comes to ensuring the effective migrant deportation.

The cells are one of the several manifestations of latent spaces that act as vehicles or substitutes within the deportation scheme. The ‘non-admitted rooms’ at the airport also involve another series of chambers that must be linked to this infrastructure. They replicate the same functionality as flow regulators as the CIEs, but also including migrants who enter Spanish territory by plane and whose entry is denied. In those spaces, migrants who do not achieve the requirements established for access can be held in for an indefinite period — much longer than 72 hours in specific cases. Again, an infra-penitentiary situation happens since, at an architectural level, the detention does not meet the required standard — a CIE or a prison — as they are spaces without natural lighting or ventilation, without the possibility of accessing outdoor areas, characteristics indicated both by migrants held there and by the ombudsman’s office.¹⁰ Airports do not operate only as an access filter to prevent migration that does not meet this required standard of permanence — they are a bottleneck: the last architectural space before effective deportation occurs. There, migrants who have arrived through different mechanisms of deportation and origin from all over the State converge in the same space: a room or space of the airports that functions as the ultimate space of temporary detention.

The organization Ruta contra’l racism y la represión (Path against racism and repression) has elaborated a series of chronicles and reports about these flights, where they have described the effective materialization of this subtle network:

In most of the places listed above, there are no CIEs. However, this does not exclude the capacity of the border apparatus to operate on them. It uses non-architectural agents and architectures that are not autonomous, like the police units within the airport, which are linked to produce border-associated spaces. Along with them, we must include even smaller nodes in our cartography: the vehicles where they are transferred, the intermediate rooms, and the entire outsourced network that ensures the efficient operation of each of them. An assemblage of human and non-human agents, protocols, architectures, and actions whose character is not exceptional, but which replicates the same logic. This fact blurs to the point of making practically invisible the line that separates ordinary architectures and agents from those exceptional ones where the border operates, and this is due to the performativity of these architectural constructions, which are no longer located in a single point of the territory.

The Airplane

Migrants from different police stations are grouped together in a single forced exit route from Spain: the plane. The architectural scenario that embodies the end of migratory cycle is reduced to the fuselage of a commercial airliner. However, the mechanisms applied on the bodies to ensure control over them, as well as the high degree of violence that can be deployed inside this space, means that they are far from the interior of any regular flight despite sharing its physical space. Spaces where leisure and work travels coincide with exceptional places where forced sedation, the use of police force, restraint instruments, and even death take place.

This practice can be traced back to 1996, as the first incident reached public sphere. The Ministry of the Interior decided to charter five military aircraft with “fifty-two agents of the special forces of the Police Intervention Unit of Granada and Malaga and six inspectors of the Documentation and Alien Brigade […] to escort them to Mali, Cameroon, and Senegal to the 103 immigrants expelled from Melilla.” Beyond this fact, what is relevant in the case is that the migrants “are drugged with haloperidol to override their will, they are tied up with plastic ties and blindfolded.” The forced sedation, immobilization, and the cancellation of the sight, or the use of gags together with the ratio between agents and deported subjects are spatial characteristics that will be, since then, commonly used to ensure the effectiveness of the flight. The death of Osamuyi Aikpitanyi in 2007, which occurred inside a commercial flight as a result of the space conditions suffered, testifies to the high degree of violence that occurs. The gag, immobilization of the body, and high degree of stress caused in Osamuyi:

Austin Johnson’s incident in 2012 shows how violence by restraining and gagging is superimposed on physical violence exerted by the agents in charge of his custody. According to the report filed in the Valencia court, due to the deportation, he was immediately hospitalized as a result of the “direct attacks with forceful means,”¹³ which caused him multiple bruises. All these practices exemplify the exceptional character that marks the architecture of internment and, in general, the logic of the contemporary border.

Forced deportations are currently carried out through agreements with commercial airlines. Private corporations that, with public funding, oversee the chartering of flights to different countries.¹⁴ We can point out two different types of deportations with significant differences, both due to the spatial configuration of the flight itself and the consequences it has when it comes to managing migrants’ flow. When it is a relative low number of deportable subjects, a deportation is carried out within a commercial flight, where a few seats equal to as many deportations to be carried out plus two seats are saved — each one to be occupied by a policeman guarding each migrant. This implies that different realities coexist in the same scenario: a commercial flight and an architecture of deportation, no longer materialized by architectural elements but by a series of mechanisms that impede their ability to move within the fuselage of the plane and even the seat itself. The use of commercial flights exclusively for deportation is more efficient as is more affordable and it does not allow passengers to become public witnesses. Just in 2013, the deportation macro-flights represented more than two and a half million euros for nine flights organized from Spain to different countries where more than a dozen European countries participated; these figures allow us to contextualize the magnitude of this apparatus.

We are facing a characteristic that shows, once again, the performativity of architectural spaces across the border. The airplane does not require more than the presence of a migrant body — guarded and controlled — in order for it to be able to transform itself into a space of absolute exception where none of the required safety regulations apply. A space, with a clear and defined previous function — commercial flight — that can be replaced by another function in its entirety — in the case of macro flights — or that can even be limited to just one row of seats. Faced with the architecture of internment, the new border technologies carry out a highly individualized control. This individualization also shows how the actions of the migrant body are, the resistance that they oppose to their deportation the one that mediates and detonates the degree of spatial violence suffered — that is, to the architectural space built through the fuselage of the plane, the seat, the police officers as well as the control methods used by them.

Opening

The notion of apparatus as an organization to diffuse agents of different nature with the ability of assembling for joint action in the construction of certain spatialities, allows connecting architectures that would otherwise have to be studied as isolated cases due to scalar, programmatic differences. This would make it impossible to establish connections between them. This formulation — which understands the border as a device for territorial construction capable of assuming different functions — renders and maps the network of different spaces, architectures and agents linked to the production of the border. This border is not only embodied in the materiality of the wall but also in minor architectures, attached, mobile spaces, entangled with the ordinary composition of the territory. This change is no stranger to the facet of deportation that is no longer restricted exclusively to the spaces of historical internment, the CIE, but requires auxiliary elements that manage to affect the expulsion of migrants from Spanish territory.

It is important to understand that the operative turn of the border to which reference has been made throughout the article entails another twist that explains this readjustment of weights within the territorial construction, which empties the historical architectures (the wall, the CIE…) to move towards ephemeral and mobile assemblies present in any point of the territory: the exception or operability. Thus, based on operational and exceptional criteria, such as everyday spaces, and facilities, such as a police station, part of an airport, or an airplane seat on a commercial flight, they can be transformed immediately and instantly into spaces linked to the border. Ephemeral spatial constructions where logics of absolute exception are applied that would never be tolerated under normality and that are detonated by a single agent: a migrant body that is physically located in a space that is politically denied to it.