Documenting the Undocumented: Carceral Architecture and Migrant Bodies with Tings Chak

The last podcast published on Archipelago is a conversation with Tings Chak, Toronto-based migrant justice organizer (as part of the organization No One Is Illegal for example), as well as a multidisciplinary designer. Tings is about to publish a graphic-essay book entitled Undocumented: The Architecture of Migrant Detention (The Architecture Observer, 2014) that articulates the two aspects of her work as an organizer and as a designer. In her Funambulist Paper entitled “Racialized Geographies and the Fear of Ships,” she had already exposed how the historical and contemporary treatment of migration depends on considerations for the very bodies of the migrants themselves. Most of them are either refused, expelled, marginalized or incarcerated. In Undocumented, she engages the architectural typology of the Canadian migrant detention centers at many levels…”

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