FRAMEWORK

The research team highlights the affective moods among European citizens produced by the ongoing ineptitude of official politics to deal with this global humanitarian collapse. 

The socio-political crisis articulates an unlimited scenario of places of exceptionality, where refugee and dead bodies have become points, numbers or geometric lines – either alive or dead.

Out of a privileged position and the incapacity to intervene directly on the ship or with the bodies of refugees at this stage, the team has engaged their own bodies in their urban context to address this problem. Some of the main questions that arose were the following: What should the practices of care that activate the civic bodies of privileged socio-political positions be? What should the collective forms of first-world mourning and activism be? How should design approaches be in order to avoid forms of palliative hospitality, which only enhance the contradiction between ‘us’ and ‘them’? 

In this sense, this crisis-ridden context articulates a space for developing new practices of care that become radically intimate, embodied experiences of consciousness or activism beyond the politically correct salvage paradigm. 

Given these precedence, the main challenge was how to position ourselves within this complex network of practices of care, mainly conceived and developed within professional and academic structures based in the Western World. In this vein, the team opted to work explicitly from a first-person perspective, in which the own bodies become the main battlefield for negotiation with the humanitarian crisis.

In this sense, a sweet pomegranate leads to an intimate process of transaction with the socio-political crisis to convert the bodies and acts into counterhegemonic terrains for grieving, critique and responsibility. The overall aim is to explore new formats of public space related to the body-in-transit in order to propose radical design approaches to the humanitarian crisis. A sweet pomegranate is a performative mapping action that uses the body as a medium to visualize the Mediterranean migration crisis by translating specific information found in one of the provided databases into a spatiotemporal experience in public, collective or private space. With the main objective of altering the availability of data which is easily shared socially by shifting it from the usual neutral, bureaucratic, and coldness toward an embodied, situated experience with both a personal and political charges.