borderlands*

borderlands*
Displacement, project for a migrant infrastucture, Tevi Allan Mensah
borderlands investigates the idea of architecture as a tool of a collective understanding on the border : its territories, its possible poetics.

Tevi Allan Mensah
Lyon, France, Europe / Gourougou, Morroco
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Team members
Tevi Allan Mensah
Field of work
Architecture, Visual Art, Research
Project category
Sustainable mobility
Project submitted
2022

I am an architect and a visual artist based in France.
My work is divided between projects (within the framework of individual competitions, or under the aegis of architectural agencies) and artistic creation (written contributions, artistic residencies). I have a personal practice where all scales are approached. I tend to blend my research and imagination in different mediums, from furniture to the scale of the territory, between built projects and research projects.


The border is a complex territory, an infinite notion in its relation to architecture, I decided to treat it in a particular way: by a research, a semantic exploration;
The question of borders is a culturally charged theme, it is at the heart of our current affairs, it is a source of debate as well as of conflict. And yet, we know little about it, we invoke it without understanding it, without assuming its meaning for others. Each seed is then the possibility of making an architectural project, a dreamlike hypothesis going through the different scales and times of the border.
This exploration is composed of a series of autonomous short stories that must be considered as independent fragments of thoughts or obsessions, which through the collection draws up the state of play of a term full of meaning. The 9 architectures of this research-creation are open questions, project attempts exploring the complexity of the term borders. A series of wall infrastructures, an urbanism of refuge at the American border, an infrastructure for the movement of people, an autonomous border post with information on resources and climate, the threshold of an ornamented flat, a tower that manufactures digital matter, a platform that brings us together, a garden in the blurred thickness of the border or the dreamlike possibility of an island, are all accounts of the margin of things, of this space between dog and wolf where apparently things do not mix.
These projects are situated between reality and fiction, mixing the very small domestic scale, the immediate self, with that of the continents, their drifts and ours.
The question of the border, as a whole, is eminently political.
The border is omnipresent in our current debates, in our collective imagination. However, architecture has little grasp of it on its own. To work on architecture and understand what is fixed in time we need to deeply grasp the "borderlands", where the territory is shaped by the mobilities.

Fellow

Tevi Allan Mensah
Tevi Allan Mensah
I am an architect and a visual artist based in France. My work is divided between projects (within the framework of individual competitions, or under …
France
2022


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