Littérature scientifique sur le sujet « Wall House #2 (Groningen, Netherlands) »

The ambition of this monograph is to analyse a limited number of topics regarding house types and thus social and economic change from the extensive material that came out of the archaeological excavation that took place at Forsandmoen (“Forsand plain”), Forsand municipality, Rogaland, Norway during the decade 1980–1990, as well as the years 1992, 1995 and 2007. The excavation was organised as an interdisciplinaryresearch project within archaeology, botany (palynological analysis from bogs and soils, macrofossil analysis) and phosphate analysis, conducted by staff from the Museum of Archaeology in Stavanger (as it was called until 2009, now part of the University of Stavanger). A large phosphate survey project had demarcaded a 20 ha settlement area, among which 9 ha were excavated using mechanical topsoil stripping to expose thehabitation traces at the top of the glaciofluvial outwash plain of Forsandmoen. A total of 248 houses could be identified by archaeological excavations, distributed among 17 house types. In addition, 26 partly excavated houses could not be classified into a type. The extensive house material comprises three types of longhouses, of which there are as many as 30–40 in number, as well as four other longhouse types, of which there are only 2–7 in number. There were nine other house types, comprising partly small dwelling houses and partly storage houses, of which there were 3–10 in number. Lastly, there are 63 of the smallest storage house, consisting of only four postholes in a square shape. A collection of 264 radiocarbon dates demonstrated that the settlement was established in the last part of the 15th century BC and faded out during the 7th–8th century AD, encompassing the Nordic Bronze Age and Early Iron Age. As a number of houses comprising four of the house types were excavated with the same methods in the same area by the same staff, it is a major goal of this monograph to analyse thoroughly the different featuresof the houses (postholes, wall remains, entrances, ditches, hearths, house-structure, find-distribution) and how they were combined and changed into the different house types through time. House material from different Norwegian areas as well as Sweden, Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands is included in comparative analyses to reveal connections within the Nordic area. Special attention has been given to theinterpretation of the location of activity areas in the dwelling and byre sections in the houses, as well as the life expectancy of the two main longhouse types. Based on these analyses, I have presented a synthesis in 13 phases of the development of the settlement from Bronze Age Period II to the Merovingian Period. This analysis shows that, from a restricted settlement consisting of one or two small farms in the Early BronzeAge, it increases slightly throughout the Late Bronze Age to 2–3 solitary farms to a significantly larger settlement consisting of 3–4 larger farms in the Pre-Roman Iron Age. From the beginning of the early Roman Iron Age, the settlement seems to increase to 8–9 even larger farms, and through the late Roman Iron Age, the settlement increases to 12–13 such farms, of which 6–7 farms are located so close together that they would seem to be a nucleated or village settlement. In the beginning of the Migration Period, there were 16–17 farms, each consisting of a dwelling/byre longhouse and a workshop, agglomerated in an area of 300 x 200 m where the farms are arranged in four E–W oriented rows. In addition, two farms were situated 140 m NE of the main settlement. At the transition to the Merovingian Period, radiocarbon dates show that all but two of the farms were suddenly abandoned. At the end of that period, the Forsandmoen settlement was completely abandoned. The abandonment could have been caused by a combination of circumstances such as overexploitation in agriculture, colder climate, the Plague of Justinian or the collapse of the redistributive chiefdom system due to the breakdown of the Roman Empire. The abrupt abandonment also coincides with a huge volcanic eruption or cosmic event that clouded the sun around the whole globe in AD 536–537. It is argued that the climatic effect on the agriculture at this latitude could induce such a serious famine that the settlement, in combination with the other possible causes, was virtually laid waste during the ensuing cold decade AD 537–546.

AlrumBurnt houses at an Early Iron Age tell site in Western JutlandThe Alrum settlement is renowned in particular for producing one of the largest prehistoric finds of charred grain and seeds ever discovered in Denmark.The site was excavated in 1939 under the direction of Gudmund Hatt, but it was Hans Helbæk who carried out a detailed analysis of the plant remains. The latter were subjected to re-examination in 1994, whereas the extensive finds assemblage, stored at Ringkøbing Museum, has only now been fully investigated and analysed. The reason for this is that the excavation records, thought for many years to have been lost, turned up by chance at the National Museum of Denmark in 2000.The Alrum site is located on a slight elevation, about 1 km from Stadil Fjord and 10 km north of the town of Ringkøbing (fig. 1).The settlementThe excavation trench exposed an area of about 300 m2, within which there were sequences of six to seven house sites lying one on top of the other, resulting in cultural deposits with a vertical stratigraphy of 1.5 m, in other words a tell site (fig. 2). Two of the houses (house I and house II) had been destroyed by fire and had been abandoned in such great haste that everything remained within the burnt-out remains of the buildings. House II was the better preserved of the two, containing building timbers, c. 50 pottery vessels, straw ropes, some stone tools, a ball of wool etc. The house was 14.5 m long and 4.5 m wide (c. 60 m2), with living quarters at the western end and a presumed byre to the east. Relative to contemporary houses in Eastern Jutland, those in Western Jutland were small. The roof was borne by five pairs of posts arranged along the length of the house and was probably comprised of heather turf. The post-built walls had an inner cladding of thick oak planks, whereas the outer surface is presumed to have been covered with a layer of straw or grass. The living quarters were fitted out with a clay bench or platform at the gable, an ornamented hearth in the middle and, between the two, a stone mortar set firmly into the clay floor (fig. 3). No traces were seen in the byre of the usual stall dividers, so perhaps the house had not been fully completed when the fire broke out! Most of the pottery lay close to the clay bench, together with several bodies of untempered clay; these weighed c. 9 kg. Up against the north wall there were two impressive solid andirons, 27-28 cm in height and weighing more than 3 kg (figs. 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8). The pottery dates the house to the late Pre-Roman Iron Age.Beneath house II lay the successive remains of six to seven other houses. The pottery reveals that this small village was founded around 500 BC, whereas the latest examples are from the century around the birth of Christ (figs. 6 and 13). Only parts of house I could be excavated, but here too a great deal of pottery was encountered, together with a few stone artefacts (figs. 9 and 11).Building timberVirtually all the woodwork in the burnt houses was of oak, supplemented by a little willow and alder which are well suited to making the wattle of the walls. In each house there was a large number of roof and wall postholes, with the charred post ends still in situ; along the walls lay large pieces of so-called wattle panels. As a consequence, it was possible to measure the dimensions of the timbers. Charring leads to a reduction in size of the timber, but by how much? Information received from the Danish Institute of Fire and Security Technology states that, as a rule of thumb, there is a reduction of 0.5-0.6 mm for every minute the fire burns. Figure 10 gives the timber dimensions alongside a column showing measurements after 20 minutes of burning, to which 1 cm has been added. In spite of the latter, the timber dimensions were still markedly less than those of unburnt posts seen at for example Feddersen Wierde in the North German salt marshes. As oak is totally dominant as the building timber, this begs the question as to where it was obtained? A pollen diagram from a site located 4-5 km from Alrum shows that the landscape was open and unlikely to have had large areas of oak woodland. One possibility is that the oak wood was obtained from Eastern Jutland, perhaps being exchanged for fish and other marine resources?Agriculture and fishingThe large quantities of charred grain and seeds recovered from the site constitute an excellent basis on which to gain a detailed insight into the subsistence. The most important cereals were barley and oats, accompanied by a little wheat, flax and gold of pleasure. In addition to these, seeds had been gathered from a range of weedy species, with corn spurrey, goosefoot, and persicaria being the commonest (fig. 14). These weeds show that the arable fields were sandy and only lightly manured and this conclusion is supported by the size of the cereal grains which is also very modest. It seems likely that the low-lying fields were flooded with salt water from time to time, but barley, flax and gold of pleasure are all salt tolerant.In historical times seeds of the above weed species were used in bread, porridge and gruel by farmers living on the Jutland heath. Tubers of false oat grass were also found at Alrum; these are rich in starch and therefore represent a good food supplement. The heaps of crop plant remains can be classified as threshed and unthreshed (fig. 15). This can perhaps give an indication of the time of year at which the fire took place; it was most probably in the autumn. On the other hand, the bone material from the site is very limited due to the well-drained acid sandy soil. Mention can, however, be made of a perforated ox astragalus (fig. 11a-b). Even so, it can safely be presumed that the many good grazing areas were extensively exploited.On the basis of the site’s location and finds of stone net sinkers, it seems justified to refer to Alrum’s inhabitants as fisher-farmers.Settlement and landscapeToday, the Jutland west coast has a harsh climate with sand drift and storms as significant factors in the lives of the inhabitants. But this was not always the case and in the Early Iron Age the situation must have been quite different: Sand drift was less extensive, the coastline had a different appearance and the sea level fluctuated, as can be seen for example at Højbjerg just south of Ringkøbing Fjord and in several other locations (fig. 1). A rise in sea level of just 0.5 m would reduce the area of shore meadow considerably (fig. 16). The woodland picture was also different.The most important indicator of this very different landscape and environment is the sustained habitation which characterises many settlements, and is exemplified by Alrum with more than 500 years of activity at the same location, and even a further couple of centuries close by, as suggested by recent aerial photographs. People lived at Nørre Fjand for 300-400 years and Klegod, now located directly on the present-day coastline, was probably occupied for at least a century. Such extended occupation of the same site must also be presumed to have resulted in social and family-related changes.There was of course some sand drift in the Early Iron Age. This is apparent from sand layers between the individual house phases and on the arable fields. However, it was apparently not so extensive that it prompted people to move; the sand layers are modest in their thickness. A good example of the stubbornness of these Iron Age people is seen at the small village of Klegod where the inhabitants ploughed through a layer of sandy soil of no less than 40 cm in thickness.The course of the coastline must also have been quite different back then as remains of Iron Age settlements are revealed now and then by today’s fierce winter storms which can cut deep into the sand dunes. Klegod, which dates from c. 500 BC, is just such a locality and provides secure proof that the coast must have lain a good way out to the west at the time, perhaps as much as several kilometres.In this dynamic and changeable landscape, the fisher-farmers of the Early Iron Age managed to maintain their existence over many generations and they were perhaps not as isolated as one could easily imagine. However, one main question remains: What led these people to settle in these near-coastal areas? The numerous Iron Age sites show that many families must have been involved. Was it marine resources or the good grazing along the shore meadows which attracted them? Another factor should also be pointed out: The coastline also hosted an archipelago, with a protective row of islands located offshore as seen today in the Netherlands and Northern Germany and these provided opportunities for closer contacts with the latter areas.Jørgen Lund & Poul NissenMoesgård Museum

Ringkøbing in the Middle Ages The last 25 years have seen frequent archaeological excavations in the medieval market town of Ringkøbing. In this paper, the author presents the results and weighs them against the written and cartographic sources in order to gain an overall picture of the emergence and development of the town during the Middle Ages (Fig. 1). Over the years, several local historians have dealt with the history of Ringkøbing. They based their investigations exclusively on the few medieval sources referring to the town, however, and the main issues they concentrated on were the reason for the town being situated exactly there, the origin of its name, its age, and whether it had grown out of an earlier settlement or had been a planned construction. In the first known reference to Ringkøbing, the town is called “rennumkøpingh,” or “the town at Rindum” (Fig. 2). Rindum, or “rennum,” was the rural parish, which had transferred some of its land to the town. A town prospect from around 1677 depicts the small town as seen from the north, with ships anchored on the fjord (Fig. 3). It gives a good impression of the number of streets and their directions. Nevertheless, the first reliable survey of the market town is from the early 19th century (Fig. 4).Ringkøbing is situated on the northern coast of Ringkøbing Fjord, on the edge of a moraine hill, well protected against floods. From the early days, Ringkøbing’s existence was inextricably linked with the navigation conditions on the fjord. Geologists have pointed out that during the Middle Ages the present islands in the tidal area south of Blåvandshuk continued further north, to Bovbjerg. This row of islands is visible on a chart from the mid-16th century (Fig. 5). On the chart, one of the islands is called “Numit,” which is interpreted as “Nyminde,” or “the new mouth.” Huge floods during the 17th century started a major process of drifting of material from the north along the coast, and the channels between the islands sanded up. Just one channel remained navigable, but it moved southward and eventually closed up completely (Fig. 6), which was a disastrous development for Ringkøbing. Nevertheless, during the Middle Ages, ships could still pass unhindered from the sea into the fjord and to Ringkøbing, where they could trade and take in supplies and water.Ringkøbing is situated in an area which has been inhabited since the last Ice Age, and which was especially rich during the Iron Age. By the mid-13th century the area was divided into districts and parishes, and the market town sprouted up in the middle of a well functioning agricultural region. The first actual excavation took place in Ringkøbing in 1978, when the property of Vester Strandgade 14 was investigated by Ringkøbing Museum. An area measuring 44 square metres was examined, and the excavation revealed part of the medieval town (Fig. 7). At the bottom of the excavated area, several furrows observed in a 15 to 20-cm thick humus layer indicated that the area had been farmed right up until the beginning of the activities there in the medieval period. Of the two ditches registered in the area, the earlier one had been dug into the ploughed field, whereas the later ditch was situated approximately in the middle of the medieval culture layer (Fig. 8). Twenty-three post-holes were found, but unfortunately their relationships to each other could not be determined. An extensive layer with a 3.4-metre diameter turned out to be the remains of a well, the shaft of which had been built from granite boulders (Fig. 9). A small bronze buckle was found at the bottom of the well (Fig. 10), and several sherds of imported pottery from around 1300 were found in the filling around the well shaft.The layer sequence was visible in the walls, with the yellow-brown moraine gravel at the bottom, then the above-mentioned humus layer with furrows, and then the homogeneous, grey, medieval culture layer. Above this an earthen floor from the 17th century was visible in several places. The upper layer, with a thickness of c.60 cm, was modern.The medieval layer contained large amounts of pottery sherds, mainly from locally produced grey-brown globular vessels. The rim sherds were from two main pottery types, A and B. Type A, which constitutes the largest group, has the classical, almost S-shaped rim (Fig. 12), whereas type B is characterized by an outward-folded edge creating a flat inner rim (Fig. 13). Both types exist concurrently throughout the medieval culture layer.The glazed pottery sherds represent two types, locally produced earthenware (Fig. 14), and imported pottery. Both types were present in the Vester Strandgade excavation. Of the imported sherds, 39 are from green-glazed jugs with a “raspberry” decoration (Fig. 15). These jugs were produced in the Netherlands around 1300. Sherds from German stoneware found in the medieval layer date from the same time (Fig. 16).The Vester Strandgade excavation was followed by several large and small investigations in the town centre (Fig. 17). “Dyekjærs Have” contained several traces of medieval structures, for instance a large number of post-holes, some of which were from a small building. The pottery material was abundant and consisted mainly of sherds from greyish-brown globular vessels (Fig. 18), but there were also sherds from imported and locally manufactured jugs. Other important town excavations include that of Marens Maw’, where the numerous traces of medieval structure included a row of post-holes interpreted as the outer wall of a house, and the excavation of Øster Strandgade 4, which revealed a late medieval turf-built well (Fig. 19). The excavation of Bojsens Gård also gave interesting results. It was very close to the street, and in this area the medieval culture layer had a depth of up to 60 cm. A ditch dug into the ploughed medieval field represented the earliest activity on this spot. Several structural traces reflected a continuous settlement going back to the early days of the town. Here, too, sherds from globular vessels dominated, but glazed ceramics and stoneware were also represented. The written sources from the Middle Ages reveal nothing about the medieval appearance of the town. The archaeological excavations, on the other hand, have shown that the settlement consisted of houses made from posts dug into the ground, probably half-timbered constructions with wattle-and-daub outer walls, earthen floors, and thatched roofs. The archaeological excavations have also revealed that Ringkøbing sprang up on a ploughed field during the second half of the 13th century. There are no signs of any settlement prior to this, and it is most likely that the town was laid out all at once according to a fixed town plan. No building traces were found in the streets, on Torvet (the market square), on Kirkepladsen (the church square), or on Havnepladsen (the harbour square), and so these squares must have been planned as such from the beginning. The numerous grooves and ditches are interpreted as boundary markers made when the plots were first established. The earliest ones are dug into the ploughed field, and so they must indicate the very first land-registration of the town.In order to found the new market town, an oblong part of Rindum parish had to be confiscated, and the town was marked out in the western part of this as an area measuring approximately 550 by 250 metres (Fig. 20). The streets were laid out in the still existing regular network. There was no harbour, and the ships would anchor in the shallow water off the town. Goods were transported by barge or horse-drawn carriage.In the town centre the market square was laid out, and behind it the square by the church. Ringkøbing’s church is a small Gothic brick building from around 1400. The townsmen probably used the parish church in Rindum during the first 150 years.At the time when Ringkøbing was founded, the Crown was establishing several small coastal towns throughout the kingdom. There was a notable lack of towns along the west coast of Jutland, and the founding of Ringkøbing probably represents a wish to fill this vacuum. At the same time, it was a friendly gesture directed towards the merchants from Northwest Europe whose large merchant ships sailed along the west coast on their way to and from the major markets in the Baltic. It was in the king’s interest to control the trade in the country, as it enabled him to levy taxes and to oppose the Hanseatic League’s attempt to monopolise foreign trade.Life in medieval Ringkøbing was based on trade and crafts, and the king controlled both through his assignment of privileges. The first preserved trade licence concerning medieval Ringkøbing is from 1443, but that document is in fact a confirmation of a privilege previously granted.The archaeological excavations and the written sources have informed us that the town’s trade interests lay across the North Sea. The town’s own merchants travelled overseas, and foreign merchants passed through. Foreign goods such as glazed jugs, stoneware jugs, and woollen cloth were imported from the Netherlands, Flanders, and Germany. The sources also indicate that a hinterland reaching far into Jutland used Ringkøbing for disembarkation. After the Middle Ages, the sources describe Ringkøbing as a small town, at times rather poor, which often had to ask permission to postpone the tax payments for which it was liable. The earliest depictions and maps also give the impression of a small town taking up less space than it did during the Middle Ages (Fig. 21).It will be interesting to learn whether future excavations in Ringkøbing will radically change the picture of the town presented here.Helle HenningsenRingkøbing Museum Translated by Annette Lerche Trolle

Working drawings are produced, when a house is designed, to envisage an imagined building. They are a tangible representation of an object that has no tangible existence. These working drawings act as a manual for constructing the house; they represent that which is to be built. The house comes into being, therefore, via this set of drawings. This is known as documentation. However, these drawings record the house at an ideal moment in time; they capture the house in stasis. They do not represent the future life of the house, the changes and traces the inhabitants make upon a space, nor do they document the path of the person, the arc of their actions, within the space of the house. Other types of documentation of the house allow these elements to be included. Documentation that is produced after-the-event, that interprets ‘the existing’, is absent from discourses on documentation; the realm of post factum documentation is a less examined form of documentation. This paper investigates post factum documentation of the house, and the alternative ways of making, producing and, therefore, thinking about, the house that it offers. This acknowledges the body in the space of architecture, and the inhabitation of space, and as a dynamic process. This then leads to the potential of the‘model of an action’ representing the motion and temporality inherent within the house. Architecture may then be seen as that which encloses the inhabitant. The word ‘document’ refers to a record or evidence of events. It implies a chronological sequence: the document comes after-the-event, that is, it is post factum. Within architecture, however, the use of the word documentation, predominantly, refers to working drawings that are made to ‘get to’ a building, drawings being the dominant representation within architecture. Robin Evans calls this notion, of architecture being brought into existence through drawing, the principle of reversed directionality (Evans 1997, 1989). Although it may be said that these types of drawings document the idea, or document the imagined reality of the building, their main emphasis, and reading, is in getting to something. In this case, the term documentation is used, not due to the documents’ placement within a process, of coming after the subject-object, but in referring to the drawings’ role. Other architectural drawings do exist that are a record of what is seen, but these are not the dominant drawing practice within architecture. Documentation within architecture regards the act of drawing as that process upon which the object is wholly dependent for its coming into existence. Drawing is defined as the pre-eminent methodology for generation of the building; drawings are considered the necessary initial step towards the creation of the 1:1 scale object. During the designing phase, the drawings are primary, setting out an intention. Drawings, therefore, are regarded as having a prescriptive endpoint rather than being part of an open-ended improvisation. Drawings, in getting to a building, draw out something, the act of drawing searches for and uncovers the latent design, drawing it into existence. They are seen as getting to the core of the design. Drawings display a technique of making and are influenced by their medium. Models, in getting to a building, may be described in the same way. The act of modelling, of making manifest two-dimensional sketches into a three-dimensional object, operates similarly in possessing a certain power in assisting the design process to unfurl. Drawing, as recording, alters the object. This act of drawing is used to resolve, and to edit, by excluding and omitting, as much as by including, within its page. Models similarly made after-the-fact are interpretive and consciously aware of their intentions. In encapsulating the subject-object, the model as documentation is equally drawing out meaning. This type of documentation is not neutral, but rather involves interpretation and reflection through representational editing. Working drawings record the house at an ideal moment in time: at the moment the builders leave the site and the owners unlock the front door. These drawings capture the house in stasis. There is often the notion that until the owners of a new house move in, the house has been empty, unlived in. But the life of the house cannot be fixed to any one starting point; rather it has different phases of life from conception to ruin. With working drawings being the dominant representation of the house, they exclude much; both the life of the house before this act of inhabitation, and the life that occurs after it. The transformations that occur at each phase of construction are never shown in a set of working drawings. When a house is built, it separates itself from the space it resides within: the domain of the house is marked off from the rest of the site. The house has a skin of a periphery, that inherently creates an outside and an inside (Kreiser 88). As construction continues, there is a freedom in the structure which closes down; potential becomes prescriptive as choices are made and embodied in material. The undesignedness of the site, that exists before the house is planned, becomes lost once the surveyors’ pegs are in place (Wakely 92). Next, the skeletal frame of open volumes becomes roofed, and then becomes walled, and walking through the frame becomes walking through doorways. One day an interior is created. The interior and exterior of the house are now two different things, and the house has definite edges (Casey 290). At some point, the house becomes lockable, its security assured through this act of sealing. It is this moment that working drawings capture. Photographs comprise the usual documentation of houses once they are built, and yet they show no lived-in-ness, no palimpsest of occupancy. They do not observe the changes and traces the inhabitants make upon a space, nor do they document the path of the person, the arc of their actions, within the space of the house. American architects and artists Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio have written of these traces of the everyday that punctuate floor and wall surfaces: the intersecting rings left by coffee glasses on a tabletop, the dust under a bed that becomes its plan analog when the bed is moved, the swing etched into the floor by a sagging door. (Diller & Scofidio 99) It is these marks, these traces, that are omitted from the conventional documentation of a built house. To examine an alternative way of documenting, and to redress these omissions, a redefinition of the house is needed. A space can be delineated by its form, its edges, or it can be defined by the actions that are performed, and the connections between people that occur, within it. To define the house by what it encapsulates, rather than being seen as an object in space, allows a different type of documentation to be employed. By defining a space as that which accommodates actions, rooms may be delineated by the reach of a person, carved out by the actions of a person, as though they are leaving a trace as they move, a windscreen wiper of living, through the repetition of an act. Reverse directional documentation does not directly show the actions that take place within a house; we must infer these from the rooms’ fittings and fixtures, and the names on the plan. In a similar way, Italo Calvino, in Invisible Cities, defines a city by the relationships between its inhabitants, rather than by its buildings: in Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city’s life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or grey or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain … Thus, when travelling in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon the ruins of the abandoned cities without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking a form. (Calvino 62) By defining architecture by that which it encapsulates, form or materiality may be given to the ‘spiderwebs of intricate relationships’. Modelling the actions that are performed in the space of architecture, therefore, models the architecture. This is referred to as a model of an action. In examining the model of an action, the possibilities of post factum documentation of the house may be seen. The Shinkenchiku competition The Plan-Less House (2006), explored these ideas of representing a house without using the conventional plan to do so. A suggested alternative was to map the use of the house by its inhabitants, similar to the idea of the model of an action. The house could be described by a technique of scanning: those areas that came into contact with the body would be mapped. Therefore, the representation of the house is not connected with spatial division, that is, by marking the location of walls, but rather with its use by its inhabitants. The work of Diller and Scofidio and Allan Wexler and others explores this realm. One inquiry they share is the modelling of the body in the space of architecture: to them, the body is inseparable from the conception of space. By looking at their work, and that of others, three different ways of representing this inhabitation of space are seen. These are: to represent the objects involved in a particular action, or patterns of movement, that occurs in the space, in a way that highlights the action; to document the action itself; or to document the result of the action. These can all be defined as the model of an action. The first way, the examination of the body in a space via an action’s objects, is explored by American artist Allan Wexler, who defines architecture as ‘choreography without a choreographer, structuring its inhabitant’s movements’ (Galfetti 22). In his project ‘Crate House’ (1981), Wexler examines the notion of the body in a space via an action’s objects. He divided the house into its basic activities: bedroom, bathroom, kitchen and living room. Each of these is then defined by their artefacts, contained in their own crate on wheels, which is rolled out when needed. At any point in time, the entire house becomes the activity due to its crate: when a room such as the kitchen is needed, that crate is rolled in through one of the door openings. When the occupant is tired, the entire house becomes a bedroom, and when the occupant is hungry, it becomes a kitchen … I view each crate as if it is a diorama in a natural history museum — the pillow, the spoon, the flashlight, the pot, the nail, the salt. We lose sight of everyday things. These things I isolate, making them sculpture: their use being theatre. (Galfetti 42–6) The work of Andrea Zittel explores similar ideas. ‘A–Z Comfort Unit’ (1994), is made up of five segments, the centrepiece being a couch/bed, which is surrounded by four ancillary units on castors. These offer a library, kitchen, home office and vanity unit. The structure allows the lodger never to need to leave the cocoon-like bed, as all desires are an arm’s reach away. The ritual of eating a meal is examined in Wexler’s ‘Scaffold Furniture’ (1988). This project isolates the components of the dining table without the structure of the table. Instead, the chair, plate, cup, glass, napkin, knife, fork, spoon and lamp are suspended by scaffolding. Their connection, rather than being that of objects sharing a tabletop, is seen to be the (absent) hand that uses them during a meal; the act of eating is highlighted. In these examples, the actions performed within a space are represented by the objects involved in the action. A second way of representing the patterns of movement within a space is to represent the action itself. The Japanese tea ceremony breaks the act of drinking into many parts, separating and dissecting the whole as a way of then reassembling it as though it is one continuous action. Wexler likens this to an Eadweard Muybridge film of a human in motion (Galfetti 31). This one action is then housed in a particular building, so that when devoid of people, the action itself still has a presence. Another way of documenting the inhabitation of architecture, by drawing the actions within the space, is time and motion studies, such as those of Rene W.P. Leanhardt (Diller & Scofidio 40–1). In one series of photographs, lights were attached to a housewife’s wrists, to demonstrate the difference in time and effort required in the preparation of a dinner prepared entirely from scratch in ninety minutes, and a pre-cooked, pre-packaged dinner of the same dish, which took only twelve minutes. These studies are lines of light, recorded as line drawings on a photograph of the kitchen. They record the movement of the person in the room of the action they perform, but they also draw the kitchen in a way conventional documentation does not. A recent example of the documentation of an action was undertaken by Asymptote and the students at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture in their exhibition at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2000. A gymnast moving through the interior space of the pavilion was recorded using a process of digitisation and augmentation. Using modelling procedures, the spatial information was then reconstructed to become a full-scale architectural re-enactment of the gymnast’s trajectory through the room (Feireiss 40). This is similar to a recent performance by Australian contemporary dance company Chunky Move, called ‘Glow’. Infra-red video tracking took a picture of the dancer twenty-five times a second. This was used to generate shapes and images based on the movements of a solo dancer, which were projected onto the floor and the dancer herself. In the past, when the company has used DVDs or videos, the dancer has had to match what they were doing to the projection. This shifts the technology to following the dancer (Bibby 3). A third way of representing the inhabitation of architecture is to document the result of an action. Raoul Bunschoten writes of the marks of a knife being the manifestation of the act of cutting, as an analogy: incisions imply the use of a cutting tool. Together, cuts and cutting tool embrace a special condition. The actual movement of the incision is fleeting, the cut or mark stays behind, the knife moves on, creating an apparent discontinuity … The space of the cut is a reminder of the knife, its shape and its movements: the preparation, the swoop through the air, the cutting, withdrawal, the moving away. These movements remain implicitly connected with the cut as its imaginary cause, as a mnemonic programme about a hand holding a knife, incising a surface, severing skin. (Bunschoten 40) As a method of documenting actions, the paintings of Jackson Pollack can be seen as a manifestation of an act. In the late 1940s, Pollack began to drip paint onto a canvas laid flat on the floor; his tools were sticks and old caked brushes. This process clarified his work, allowing him to walk around it and work from all four sides. Robert Hughes describes it as ‘painting “from the hip” … swinging paintstick in flourishes and frisks that required an almost dancelike movement of the body’ (Hughes 154). These paintings made manifest Pollack’s gestures. As his arm swung in space, the dripping paint followed that arc, to be preserved on a flat plane as pictorial space (Hughes 262). Wexler, in another study, recorded the manifestation of an action. He placed a chair in a one-room building. It was attached to lengths of timber that extended outdoors through slots in the walls of the building. As the chair moved inside the building, its projections carved grooves in the ground outside. As the chair moved in a particular pattern, deeper grooves were created: ‘Eventually, the occupant of the chair has no choice in his movement; the architecture moves him.’ (Galfetti 14) The pattern of movement creates a result, which in turn influences the movement. By redefining architecture by what it encapsulates rather than by the enclosure itself, allows architecture to be documented by the post factum model of an action that occurs in that space. This leads to the exploration of architecture, formed by the body within it, since the documentation and representation of architecture starts to affect the reading of architecture. Architecture may then be seen as that which encloses the inhabitant. The documentation of the body and the space it makes concerns the work of the Hungarian architect Imre Makovecz. His exploration is of the body and the space it makes. Makovecz, and a circle of like-minded architects and artists, embarked on a series of experiments analysing the patterns of human motion and subsequently set up a competition based around the search for a minimum existential space. This consisted of mapping human motion in certain spatial conditions and situations. Small light bulbs were attached to points on the limbs and joints and photographed, creating a series of curves and forms. This led to a competition called ‘Minimal Space’ (1971–2), in which architects, artists and designers were invited to consider a minimal space for containing the human body, a new notion of personal containment. Makovecz’s own response took the form of a bell-like capsule composed of a double shell expressing its presence and location in both time and space (Heathcote 120). Vito Acconci, an artist turned architect by virtue of his installation work, explored this notion of enclosure in his work (Feireiss 38). In 1980 Acconci began his series of ‘self-erecting architectures’, vehicles or instruments involving one or more viewers whose operation erected simple buildings (Acconci & Linker 114). In his project ‘Instant House’ (1980), a set of walls lies flat on the floor, forming an open cruciform shape. By sitting in the swing in the centre of this configuration, the visitor activates an apparatus of cables and pulleys causing walls to rise and form a box-like house. It is a work that explores the idea of enclosing, of a space being something that has to be constructed, in the same way for example one builds up meaning (Reed 247–8). This documentation of architecture directly references the inhabitation of architecture. The post factum model of architecture is closely linked to the body in space and the actions it performs. Examining the actions and movement patterns within a space allows the inhabitation process to be seen as a dynamic process. David Owen describes the biological process of ‘ecopoiesis’: the process of a system making a home for itself. He describes the building and its occupants jointly as the new system, in a system of shaping and reshaping themselves until there is a tolerable fit (Brand 164). The definition of architecture as being that which encloses us, interests Edward S. Casey: in standing in my home, I stand here and yet feel surrounded (sheltered, challenged, drawn out, etc.) by the building’s boundaries over there. A person in this situation is not simply in time or simply in space but experiences an event in all its engaging and unpredictable power. In Derrida’s words, ‘this outside engages us in the very thing we are’, and we find ourselves subjected to architecture rather than being the controlling subject that plans or owns, uses or enjoys it; in short architecture ‘comprehends us’. (Casey 314) This shift in relationship between the inhabitant and architecture shifts the documentation and reading of the exhibition of architecture. Casey’s notion of architecture comprehending the inhabitant opens the possibility for an alternate exhibition of architecture, the documentation of that which is beyond the inhabitant’s direction. Conventional documentation shows a quiescence to the house. Rather than attempting to capture the flurry — the palimpsest of occupancy — within the house, it is presented as stilled, inert and dormant. In representing the house this way, a lull is provided, fostering a steadiness of gaze: a pause is created, within which to examine the house. However, the house is then seen as object, rather than that which encapsulates motion and temporality. Defining, and thus documenting, the space of architecture by its actions, extends the perimeter of architecture. No longer is the house bounded by its doors and walls, but rather by the extent of its patterns of movement. Post factum documentation allows this altering of the definition of architecture, as it includes the notion of the model of an action. By appropriating, clarifying and reshaping situations that are relevant to the investigation of post factum documentation, the notion of the inhabitation of the house as a definition of architecture may be examined. This further examines the relationship between architectural representation, the architectural image, and the image of architecture. References Acconci, V., and K. Linker. Vito Acconci. New York: Rizzoli, 1994. Bibby, P. “Dancer in the Dark Is Light Years Ahead.” Sydney Morning Herald 22 March 2007: 3. Brand, S. How Buildings Learn: What Happens after They’re Built. London: Phoenix Illustrated, 1997. Bunschoten, R. “Cutting the Horizon: Two Theses on Architecture.” Forum (Nov. 1992): 40–9. Calvino, I. Invisible Cities. London: Picador, 1979. Casey, E.S. The Fate of Place. California: U of California P, 1998. Diller, E., and R. Scofidio. Flesh: Architectural Probes. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994. Evans, R. Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997. ———. “Architectural Projection.” Eds. E. Blau and E. Kaufman. Architecture and Its Image: Four Centuries of Architectural Representation: Works from the Collection of the Canadian Center for Architecture. Exhibition catalogue. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989. 19–35. Feireiss, K., ed. The Art of Architecture Exhibitions. Rotterdam: Netherlands Architecture Institute, 2001. Galfetti, G.G., ed. Allan Wexler. Barcelona: GG Portfolio, 1998. Glanville, R. “An Irregular Dodekahedron and a Lemon Yellow Citroen.” In L. van Schaik, ed., The Practice of Practice: Research in the Medium of Design. Melbourne: RMIT University Press, 2003. 258–265. Heathcote, E. Imre Mackovecz: The Wings of the Soul. West Sussex: Academy Editions, 1997. Hughes, R. The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change. London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1980. Kreiser, C. “On the Loss of (Dark) Inside Space.” Daidalos 36 (June 1990): 88–99. Reed, C. ed. Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture. London: Thames & Hudson, 1996. “Shinkenchiku Competition 2006: The Plan-Less House.” The Japan Architect 64 (Winter 2007): 7–12. Small, D. Paper John. USA: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987. Wakely, M. Dream Home. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin. 2003. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Macken, Marian. "And Then We Moved In: Post Factum Documentation of the House." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/04-macken.php>. APA Style Macken, M. (Aug. 2007) "And Then We Moved In: Post Factum Documentation of the House," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/04-macken.php>.

IntroductionBritish initiatives to manage both the number of arrivals of asylum seekers and the experiences of those who arrive have burgeoned in recent years. The budget dedicated to asylum seeker management increased from £357 million in 1998-1999 to £1.71 billion in 2004-2005, making the Immigration and Nationality Directorate (IND) the second largest concern of the Home Office behind the Prison Service in 2005 (Back et al). The IND was replaced in April 2007 by the Border and Immigration Agency (BIA), whose expenditure exceeded £2 billion in 2007-2008 (BIA). Perhaps as a consequence the number of asylum seekers applying to the UK has fallen dramatically, illustrating the continuing influence of exclusionary state policies despite the globalisation and transnationalisation of migrant flows (UNHCR; Koser).One of the difficulties with the study of asylum seekers is the persistent risk that, by employing the term ‘asylum seeker’, research conducted into their experiences will contribute towards the exclusion of a marginalised and abject group of people, precisely by employing a term that emphasises the suspended recognition of a community (Nyers). The ‘asylum seeker’ is a figure defined in law in order to facilitate government-level avoidance of humanitarian obligations by emphasising the non-refugeeness of asylum claimants (Tyler). This group is identified as supplicant to the state, positioning the state itself as a legitimate arbiter. It is in this sense that asylum seekers suffer a degree of cruel optimism (Berlant) – wishing to be recognised as a refugee while nevertheless subject to state-defined discourses, whatever the outcome. The term ‘forced migrant’ is little better, conveying a de-humanising and disabling lack of agency (Turton), while the terms ‘undocumented migrant’, ‘irregular migrant’ and ‘illegal migrant’ all imply a failure to conform to respectable, desirable and legitimate forms of migration.Another consequence of these co-opted and politically subjugating forms of language is their production of simple imagined geographies of migration that position the foreigner as strange, unfamiliar and incapable of communication across this divide. Such imaginings precipitate their own responses, most clearly expressed in the blunt, intrusive uses of space and time in migration governance (Lahav and Guiraudon; Cohen; Guild; Gronendijk). Various institutions exist in Britain that function to actually produce the imagined differences between migrants and citizens, from the two huge, airport-like ‘Asylum Screening Units’ in Liverpool and London where asylum seekers can lodge their claims, to the 12 ‘Removal Centres’ within which soon-to-be deported asylum seekers are incarcerated and the 17 ‘Hearing Centres’ at which British judges preside over the precise legal status of asylum applicants.Less attention, however, has been given to the tension between mobility and stillness in asylum contexts. Asylum seeker management is characterised by a complex combination of enforced stillness and enforced mobility of asylum seeking bodies, and resistance can also be understood in these terms. This research draws upon 37 interviews with asylum seekers, asylum activists, and government employees in the UK conducted between 2005 and 2007 (see Gill) and distils three characteristics of stillness. First, an association between stillness and safety is clearly evident, exacerbated by the fear that the state may force asylum seekers to move at any time. Second, stillness of asylum seekers in a physical, literal sense is intimately related to their psychological condition, underscoring the affectual properties of stillness. Third, the desire to be still, and to be safe, precipitates various political strategies that seek to secure stillness, meaning that stillness functions as more than an aspiration, becoming also a key political metric in the struggle between the included and excluded. In these multiple and contradictory ways stillness is a key factor that structures asylum seekers’ experiences of migration. Governing through Mobility The British state utilises both stillness and mobility in the governance of asylum seeking bodies. On the one hand, asylum seekers’ personal freedoms are routinely curtailed both through their incarceration and through the requirements imposed upon them by the state in terms of ‘signing in’ at local police stations, even when they are not incarcerated, throughout the time that they are awaiting a decision on their claim for asylum (Cwerner). This requirement, which consists of attending a police station to confirm the continuing compliance of the asylum seeker, can vary in frequency, from once every month to once every few days.On the other hand, the British state employs a range of strategies of mobility that serve to deprive asylum seeking communities of geographical stillness and, consequently, also often undermines their psychological stability. First, the seizure of asylum seekers and transportation to a Removal Centre can be sudden and traumatic, and incarceration in this manner is becoming increasingly common (Bacon; Home Office). In extreme cases, very little or no warning is given to asylum seekers who are taken into detention, and so-called ‘dawn raids’ have been organised in order to exploit an element of surprise in the introduction of asylum seekers to detention (Burnett). A second source of forced mobility associated with Removal Centres is the transfer of detainees from one Removal Centre to another for a variety of reasons, from the practical constraints imposed by the capacities of various centres, to differences in the conditions of centres themselves, which are used to form a reward and sanction mechanism among the detainee population (Hayter; Granville-Chapman). Intra-detention estate transfers have increased in scope and significance in recent years: in 2004/5, the most recent financial year for which figures are available, the British government spent over £6.5 million simply moving detainees from one secure facility to another within the UK (Hansard, 2005; 2006).Outside incarceration, a third source of spatial disruption of asylum seekers in the UK concerns their relationship with accommodation providers. Housing is provided to asylum seekers as they await a decision on their claim, but this housing is provided on a ‘no-choice’ basis, meaning that asylum seekers who are not prepared to travel to the accommodation that is allocated to them will forfeit their right to accommodation (Schuster). In other words, accommodation is contingent upon asylum seekers’ willingness to be mobile, producing a direct trade-off between the attractions of accommodation and stillness. The rationale for this “dispersal policy”, is to draw asylum seekers away from London, where the majority of asylum seekers chose to reside before 2000. The maintenance of a diverse portfolio of housing across the UK is resource intensive, with the re-negotiation of housing contracts worth over a £1 billion a constant concern (Noble et al). As these contracts are renegotiated, asylum seekers are expected to move in response to the varying affordability of housing around the country. In parallel to the system of deportee movements within the detention estate therefore, a comparable system of movement of asylum seekers around the UK in response to urban and regional housing market conditions also operates. Stillness as SanctuaryIn all three cases, the psychological stress that movement of asylum seekers can cause is significant. Within detention, according to a series of government reports into the conditions of removal centres, one of the recurring difficulties facing incarcerated asylum seekers is incomprehension of their legal status (e.g. HMIP 2002; 2008). This, coupled with very short warning of impending movements, results in widespread anxiety among detained asylum seekers that they may be deported or transferred imminently. Outside detention, the fear of snatch squads of police officers, or alternatively the fear of hate crimes against asylum seekers (Tyler), render movement in the public realm a dangerous practice in the eyes of many marginalised migrants. The degree of uncertainty and the mental and emotional demands of relocation introduced through forced mobility can have a damaging psychological effect upon an already vulnerable population. Expressing his frustration at this particular implication of the movement of detainees, one activist who had provided sanctuary to over 20 asylum seekers in his community outlined some of the consequences of onward movement.The number of times I’ve had to write panic letters saying you know you cannot move this person to the other end of the country because it destabilises them in terms of their mental health and it is abusive. […] Their solicitors are here, they’re in process, in legal process, they’ve got a community, they’ve got friends, they may even have a partner or a child here and they would still move them.The association between governance, mobility and trepidation highlights one characteristic of stillness in the asylum seeking field: in contra-distinction to the risk associated with movement, to be still is very often to be safe. Given the necessity to flee violence in origin countries and the tendency for destination country governments to require constant re-positioning, often backed-up with the threat of force, stillness comes to be viewed as offering a sort of sanctuary. Indeed, the Independent Asylum Commission charity that has conducted a series of reviews of asylum seekers’ treatment in the UK (Hobson et al.), has recently suggested dispensing with the term ‘asylum’ in favour of ‘sanctuary’ precisely because of the positive associations with security and stability that the latter provides. To be in one place for a sustained period allows networks of human trust and reciprocity to develop which can form the basis of supportive community relationships. Another activist who had accompanied many asylum seekers through the legal process spoke passionately about the functions that communities can serve in asylum seekers’ lives.So you actually become substitute family […] I think it’s what helps people in the midst of trauma when the future is uncertain […] to find a community which values them, which accepts them, which listens to them, where they can begin to find a place and touch a creative life again which they may not have had for years: it’s enormously important.There is a danger in romanticising the benefits of community (Joseph). Indeed, much of the racism and xenophobia directed towards asylum seekers has been the result of local community hostilities towards different national and ethnic groups (Boswell). For many asylum seekers, however, the reciprocal relations found in communities are crucially important to their well-being. What is more, the inclusion of asylum seekers into communities is one of the most effective anti-state and anti-deportation strategies available to activists and asylum seekers alike (Tyler), because it arrests the process of anonymising and cordoning asylum seekers as an homogenous group, providing instead a chance for individuals to cast off this label in favour of more ‘humane’ characteristics: families, learning, friendship, love.Strategies for StillnessFor this reason, the pursuit of stillness among asylum seekers is both a human and political response to their situations – stillness becomes a metric in the struggle between abject migrants and the state. Crucial to this political function is the complex relationship between stillness and social visibility: if an asylum seeker can command their own stillness then they can also have greater influence over their public profile, either in order to develop it or to become less conspicuous.Tyler argues that asylum seekers are what she calls a ‘hypervisible’ social group, referring to the high profile association between a fictional, dehumanised asylum seeking figure and a range of defamatory characteristics circulated by the popular printed press. Stillness can be used to strategically reduce this imposed form of hypervisibility, and to raise awareness of real asylum seeker stories and situations. This is achieved by building community coalitions, which require physically and socially settled asylum seeking families and communities. Asylum advocacy groups and local community support networks work together in the UK in order to generate a genuine public profile of asylum seekers by utilising local and national newspapers, staging public demonstrations, delivering speeches, attending rallies and garnering support among local organisations through art exhibitions, performances and debates. Some activist networks specialise explicitly in supporting asylum seekers in these endeavours, and sympathetic networks of journalists, lawyers, doctors and radio producers combine their expertise with varying degrees of success.These sorts of strategies can produce strong loyalties between local communities and the asylum seekers in their midst, precisely because, through their co-presence, asylum seekers cease to be merely asylum seekers, but become active and valued members of communities. One activist who had helped to organise the protection of an asylum seeker in a church described some of the preparations that had been made for the arrival of immigration task forces in her middle class parish.There were all sorts of things we practiced: if they did break through the door what would we do? We set up a telephone tree so that each person would phone two or three people. We had I don’t know how many cars outside. We arranged a safe house, where we would hide her. We practiced getting her out of the room into a car […] We were expecting them to come at any time. We always had people at the back […] guarding, looking at strangers who might be around and [name] was never, ever allowed to be on her own without a whole group of people completely surrounding her so she could feel safe and we would feel safe. Securing stillness here becomes more than simply an operation to secure geographic fixity: it is a symbolic struggle between state and community, crystallising in specific tactics of spatial and temporal arrangement. It reflects the fear of further forced movement, the abiding association between stillness and safety, and the complex relationship between community visibility and an ability to remain still.There are, nevertheless, drawbacks to these tactics that suggest a very different relationship between stillness and visibility. Juries can be alienated by loud tactics of activism, meaning that asylum seekers can damage their chances of a sympathetic legal hearing if they have had too high a profile. Furthermore, many asylum seekers do not have the benefits of such a dedicated community. An alternative way in which stillness becomes political is through its ability to render invisible the abject body. Invisibility is taken to mean the decision to ‘go underground’, miss the appointments at local police stations and attempt to anticipate the movements of immigration removal enforcement teams. Perversely, although this is a strategy for stillness at the national or regional scale, mobile strategies are often employed at finer scales in order to achieve this objective. Asylum seekers sometimes endure extremely precarious and difficult conditions of housing and subsistence moving from house to house regularly or sleeping and living in cars in order to avoid detection by authorities.This strategy is difficult because it involves a high degree of uncertainty, stress and reliance upon the goodwill of others. One police officer outlined the situation facing many ‘invisible’ asylum seekers as one of poverty and desperation:Immigration haven’t got a clue where they are, they just can’t find them because they’re sofa surfing, that’s living in peoples coffee shops … I see them in the coffee shop and they come up and they’re bloody starving! Despite the difficulties associated with this form of invisibility, it is estimated that this strategy is becoming increasingly common in the UK. In 2006 the Red Cross estimated that there were some 36 000 refused and destitute asylum seekers in England, up from 25 000 the previous year, and reported that their organisation was having to provide induction tours of soup kitchens and night shelters in order to alleviate the conditions of many claimants in these situations (Taylor and Muir). Conclusion The case of asylum seekers in the UK illustrates the multiple, contradictory and splintered character of stillness. While some forms of governance impose stillness upon asylum seeking bodies, in the form of incarceration and ‘signing in’ requirements, other forms of governance impose mobility either within detention or outside it. Consequently stillness figures in the responses of asylum seeking communities in various ways. Given the unwelcome within-country movement of asylum seekers, and adding to this the initial fact of their forced migration from their home countries, the condition of stillness becomes desirable, promising to bring with it stability and safety. These promises contrast the psychological disruption that further mobility, and even the threat of further mobility, can bring about. This illustrates the affectual qualities both of movement and of stillness in the asylum-seeking context. Literal stillness is associated with social and emotional stability that complicates the distinction between real and emotional spaces. While this is certainly not the case uniformly – incarceration and inhibited personal liberties have opposite consequences – the promises of stillness in terms of stability and sanctuary are clearly significant because this desirability leads asylum advocates and asylum seekers to execute a range of political strategies that seek to ensure stillness, either through enhanced or reduced forms of social visibility.The association of mobility with freedom that typifies much of the literature surrounding mobility needs closer inspection. At least in some situations, asylum seekers pursue geographical stillness for the political and psychological benefits it can offer, while mobility is both employed as a subjugating strategy by states and is itself actively resisted by those who constitute its targets.ReferencesBack, Les, Bernadette Farrell and Erin Vandermaas. A Humane Service for Global Citizens. London: South London Citizens, 2005.Bacon, Christine. The Evolution of Immigration Detention in the UK: The Involvement of Private Prison Companies. Oxford: Refugee Studies Centre, 2005.Berlant, Lauren. “Cruel Optimism.” differences : A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 17.3 (2006): 20—36.Border and Immigration Agency. Business Plan for Transition Year April 2007 – March 2008: Fair, Effective, Transparent and Trusted. London: Home Office, 2007.Boswell, Christina. “Burden-Sharing in the European Union: Lessons from the German and UK Experience.” Journal of Refugee Studies 16.3 (2003): 316—35.Burnett, Jon. Dawn Raids. PAFRAS Briefing Paper Number 4. Leeds: Positive Action for Refugees and Asylum Seekers, 2008. ‹http://www.statewatch.org/news/2008/apr/uk-patras-briefing-paper-4-%2Ddawn-raids.pdf›.Cohen, Steve. “The Local State of Immigration Controls.” Critical Social Policy 22 (2002): 518—43.Cwerner, Saulo. “Faster, Faster and Faster: The Time Politics of Asylum in the UK.” Time and Society 13 (2004): 71—88.Gill, Nick. "Presentational State Power: Temporal and Spatial Influences over Asylum Sector." Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2009 (forthcoming).Granville-Chapman, Charlotte, Ellie Smith, and Neil Moloney. Harm on Removal: Excessive Force Against Failed Asylum Seekers. London: Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, 2004.Groenendijk, Kees. “New Borders behind Old Ones: Post-Schengen Controls behind the Internal Borders and inside the Netherlands and Germany”. In Search of Europe's Borders. Eds. Kees Groenendijk, Elspeth Guild and Paul Minderhoud. The Hague: Kluwer International Law, 2003. 131—46.Guild, Elspeth. “The Europeanisation of Europe's Asylum Policy.” International Journal of Refugee Law 18 (2006): 630—51.Guiraudon, Virginie. “Before the EU Border: Remote Control of the 'Huddled Masses'.” In Search of Europe's Borders. Eds. Kees Groenendijk, Elspeth Guild and Paul Minderhoud. The Hague: Kluwer International Law, 2003. 191—214.Hansard, House of Commons. 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Photo by Danie Franco on Unsplash ABSTRACT This research paper explores the family caregivers' role in resolving the ethical dilemma of deception in dementia care. Family members possess the unique capability to engage in "white lies" in a manner that both respects and upholds an individual with dementia's identity. INTRODUCTION It was our usual family Shabbat dinner: golden flames flickered in crystal candleholders, and the smell of warm challah permeated the air. “Where is Elena?” my great-grandmother anxiously asked, scanning the doorway. “I am here, sitting right next to you, babushka!’’ my mother affectionately reassured her. Having raised my mother in Russia, my great-grandmother Tsilya, then in her early nineties, had resided in our Riverdale home for several years. “No, I know you are here, but where is the little Elena?” Any attempt to explain that “little Elena” had grown into an adult only agitated my great-grandmother. She eventually calmed down, distracted by the promise of a scrumptious meal. As Tsilya’s mind wandered back into the reality of her past, where my mother Elena was a young girl living in Tsilya’s modest flat in Leningrad, what we then believed was a temporary moment of confusion turned out to be the first glimpse into Tsilya’s future. Over the next few years, as Alzheimer’s disease brought on Tsilya’s cognitive decline, erasing her memories and taking her identity with them, Tsilya’s concerns about the “little Elena” transformed into attempts at leaving the house to attend parties hosted by television celebrities. She would also cry and ask for her own mother at night. In the beginning, my mother always tried to uphold the truth and reorient my great-grandmother to the reality of her situation. However, as Tsilya’s cognitive decline advanced, my mother often had to redirect her attention to family photo albums or, in moments of extreme distress, resort to occasional “white lies” to validate some of her inaccurate beliefs. My mother’s actions provided such solace and felt so instinctive that I never questioned the legitimacy of her strategies to mitigate my great-grandmother’s distress. Nevertheless, over the last two decades, the issue of truthfulness in dementia care has become the object of study and contemplation by both medical professionals and ethicists alike. I. Person-Centered Care for People with Dementia Most current discussions about the care of people with dementia begin with the principles of person-centered care, a revolutionary new philosophy of care introduced in the 1990s by Tom Kitwood, an English social psychologist and gerontologist. Rather than treating a person with dementia in a medical, protocol, and task-based fashion, Kitwood advocates approaching the care of such patients through a more holistic method that considers social and environmental factors, rather than only the patients’ biochemical brain changes.[1] The main tenets of person-centered care include the awareness of the uniqueness and individuality of each person, the recognition of the subjective nature of experiences of people with dementia, and the maintenance of close relationships with people with dementia, allowing them to uphold bonds and lasting attachments to their loved ones.[2] This philosophy of care highlights the importance of social interactions and interpersonal relationships in dementia care. “[T]o care for others,” Kitwood writes, “means to value who they are; to honor what they do; to respect their unique qualities and needs; to help protect them from harm and danger; and – above all – to take thoughtful and committed action that will help to nourish their personal being.”[3] Kitwood also emphasizes the need for people with dementia to have “a standing or status that is accorded by others.”[4] However, the emphasis on conferring personhood onto individuals through their relationships with others introduces a challenge in implementing person-centered care. If a caretaker acknowledges and respects the subjective reality of a person with dementia, who may perceive a reality disconnected from their present, the caretaker may have to compromise their commitment to absolute truth-telling. On the other hand, if a caretaker solely adheres to the objective truth, they implicitly delegitimize the subjective reality and experiences of people with dementia. II. Truthfulness versus Therapeutic Lying in Dementia Care Scholars contemplating truthfulness versus therapeutic lying in dementia care hold different views. Some believe that maintaining the selfhood of people with dementia justifies occasional deception, while others claim that only uncompromised truth-telling can offer people with dementia the respect they deserve from others. This dichotomy of opinion presents a moral dilemma for individuals and institutions involved in the care of people with dementia. However, family members caring for individuals with dementia possess a unique capability to navigate this dilemma.[5] They have a profound understanding of their loved ones' identities and personal stories, allowing them to preserve the selfhood of people with dementia through occasional therapeutic lying without compromising the integrity of their relationships. As a result, the inclusion of family caregivers in the conversation about the permissibility of therapeutic lying in dementia care can facilitate the implementation of true person-centered care for people with dementia.[6] While a central argument for the necessity of uncompromised truth-telling to people with dementia rests on the importance of truth in maintaining human bonds, family members can uphold this value despite occasional deception. In her article “Truthfulness and Deceit in Dementia Care: An Argument for Truthful Regard as a Morally Significant Human Bond,” Dr. Philippa Byers, an ethics researcher, rejects the validity of lying for therapeutic purposes in dementia care. Byers argues that truth-telling is a moral value that establishes trustful relationships and therefore should not be denied to people with dementia. She grounds her argument in the notion of “truthful regard,” which she defines as the “regard for another person as one for whom truth matters, just as it does for oneself.” As a result, Byers contends that lying must be avoided to maintain truthful regard, rather than paternalism or condescension, in the caretaker’s relationship with a person with dementia. Despite her seemingly uncompromising stance, Byers does approve of refraining from truth-telling in interactions with a friend sharing the same story over and over again. [7] Byers claims that if one cares for their friend, one can forgo the truth-telling of informing the friend that one has heard the story before by making decisions “involving the judgment, discretion, and tact that is characteristic of (most) respectful communication with one another…without suspending our truthful regard” for the other person. In communicating with people with dementia, family caregivers embody the role of such friends. As a result, due to close social relationships with a person with dementia, family caregivers can eschew blunt truth-telling without compromising the truthful regard they hold for the person. When my great-grandmother would get upset and agitated in her desire to attend a party hosted by a television celebrity and when all efforts at redirecting her attention failed, my mother occasionally had to offer “white lies” in telling her that the host cancelled the party due to inclement weather. While not truthful, such statements did not undermine my mother’s truthful regard for my great-grandmother but served as a measure of last resort to ensure my great-grandmother’s safety by preventing her from leaving the house alone at night. Byers states that truthful regard for other people “does not require close affiliative bonds.” [8] Yet, it is precisely the existence of such close bonds that imparts special privileges on family members in their relationships with people with dementia, similarly to the way Byers affords such privileges to close friends. Family caregivers, therefore, may introduce the necessary “white lies” if their respectful judgment demands them. III. The Inclusion of Family Caregivers’ Perspectives in Navigating Truth-Telling Despite the demonstrated significance of family caregivers in navigating truth-telling in the care of people with dementia, current discourse on justifying deception in dementia care often overlooks the perspectives of family caregivers. Dr. Matilda Carter, a lecturer in philosophy at King’s College London, claims that an insistence on truth delegitimizes the subjective experiences and undermines the current identities of people with dementia.[9] Carter contends that the norm of truth-telling to dementia patients, whose cognitive decline and memory loss lead them to exist in their own version of reality, is an ableist construction that disrespects the perceived realities of people with dementia. Therefore, Carter argues that “withholding the truth from and, in limited circumstances, lying to people living with dementia is not only morally permissible, but morally required.” “Ethical deception” is morally justified as an act of respect in seeing people with dementia through the lens of “the type of person that they are.” However, Carter’s justification of ethical deception overlooks the significance of careful judgment in the use of deception in dementia care, violating the personhood of people with dementia. An example illustrating Carter’s perspective on ethical deception and the negative consequences of neglecting the voices of family members of individuals with dementia can be found in the medical case study “How Much a Dementia Patient Needs to Know” by Dr. Oliver Sacks.[10] In this short work, Sacks, a neurologist and a best-selling author, describes Mr. Q., a nursing home resident with dementia. Having been employed as a janitor in his earlier years, Mr. Q. continued performing his “duties” in the nursing home. While the nursing home staff realized that his adherence to his former identity was a delusion, they “respected and even reinforced” Mr. Q.’s identity by encouraging his actions and providing him with instruments and supplies for his janitorial duties. Initially questioning whether Mr. Q. should have been told the truth about the reality of his condition, Sacks ultimately concludes that the objective reality holds little meaning for Mr. Q and that truth-telling would be “pointless” and “cruel.” The story of Mr. Q. aligns with Carter’s concept of ethical deception, as the residential care facility staff knowingly upheld Mr. Q.’s erroneous identity. However, Carter’s philosophical framework overlooks the attitudes of family caregivers towards such ethical deception, considering the caregivers’ deep understanding of the wishes and identities of their relatives. Mr. Q.’s facility caregivers could have encouraged his janitorial activities for their own convenience, such as to minimize the time needed to attend to his care. Additionally, Mr. Q. could have believed in holding onto the truth until the very end. If not for the nursing home staff’s deception, Mr. Q.’s family could have had the opportunity to reorient him to reality. This highlights the importance of caregivers’ meticulous deliberation on the use of deception in their interactions with individuals with dementia. Without such consideration, deception may be driven by ulterior motives or may disregard the wishes of people with dementia and their family caregivers. A 2020 study demonstrated that telling a “white lie” was found acceptable if intended solely to minimize harm to a person with dementia and particularly if introduced by a caregiver who really “‘kn[e]w the person.’”[11] This acceptance was rooted in the belief that “the deep knowledge [caregivers] had about the person, their past, and their current experience allowed them to use lying in a genuinely caring and respectful manner.”[12] Even more significantly, people with dementia emphasized the importance of consulting family members in decision-making during later stages of disease because these family members “knew what mattered to them the most.”[13] Since there are no clear references to Mr. Q.’s personal beliefs or his family’s wishes, one cannot fully confirm the moral validity of the nursing staff’s approach. Conversely, my mother’s extensive years of caring for my great-grandmother, coupled with her understanding of her beliefs, provides moral justification for her use of ethical deception to ensure my great-grandmother’s safety. Therefore, family caregivers’ profound understanding of the identities and circumstances of individuals with dementia allows them to utilize deception in a manner that upholds the selfhood of people with dementia without diminishing the importance of truth. IV. Artificially Constructed Realities for People with Dementia Regardless of the caregiver's type or intentions, some critics reject deception on the grounds that it leads to the construction of artificial realities for people with dementia.[14] Such critics claim that deception inherently contradicts the innate human desire for experiences grounded in true reality, a philosophical idea developed by American political philosopher Robert Nozick.[15] Nozick introduces the concept of an “experience machine,” a device that would provide desired experiences through targeted brain stimulation. Nozick claims that while the machine can allow people to feel good “‘from the inside,’” people would reject it because they want to “do certain things, and not just have the experience of doing them… to be a certain way, to be a certain sort of person.”[16] Proponents of Nozick’s ideas might draw a parallel between Mr. Q.’s existence and a person hooked up to the experience machine since the nursing home staff’s treatment of Mr. Q. is not grounded in objective reality. However, people with dementia already live in their own subjective realities due to cognitive decline and frequent reversion to past identities. Therefore, upholding these realities differs from constructing them de novo. Furthermore, while the experience machine offers a passive existence, Mr. Q. can physically attend to the expected responsibilities of his believed identity. As a result, when artificially constructed realities are introduced with the well-being of individuals with dementia in mind, and by those who understand what that well-being entails, they offer genuine experiences that enable people with dementia to realize their individuality within the bounds of their cognitive abilities. Artificially constructed realities and the importance of family caregivers in upholding the personhood of individuals with dementia living within such realities come into focus in De Hogeweyk, the first dementia village for people with advanced dementia.[17] De Hogeweyk, which opened its doors in Weesp, Netherlands in 2009, is a gated community with a single entrance and exit where its residents receive twenty-four-seven care.[18] The village aims to maintain continuity with the residents’ past lives by grouping them into themed homes based on their previous lifestyles and by offering familiar social events and physical activities.[19] Through thoughtful planning and design, the founders of De Hogeweyk have integrated all the “deceptive” aspects of their institutional reality into the village’s infrastructure, including residences that look like real homes, a supermarket that does not use money, and a restaurant and hair salon staffed by trained caregivers who do not require payment for their services.[20] Although it is a closed facility, De Hogeweyk welcomes both family members and outside volunteers of all ages to interact with its residents.[21] While critics of De Hogeweyk have likened it to The Truman Show, multiple family members report their satisfaction with De Hogeweyk’s model of care.[22] Ada Picavet, whose husband Ben is a resident at De Hogeweyk, shares her experience of visiting him daily, playing the piano, and singing songs together. These activities serve as an attempt to preserve a sense of normalcy and continuity with their life before his dementia diagnosis.[23] While some might claim that their relationship is deceptive due to Ben’s limited cognitive abilities, Ada’s visits demonstrate a profound respect for her husband's subjective reality. She recognizes that his dementia shapes his perception of the world and maintains the continuity of his identity by allowing him to engage in activities they enjoyed together in the past, such as singing. By portraying Ada and other family members visiting their loved ones at De Hogeweyk as true partners in care, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, in his CNN report on De Hogeweyk, underscores the importance of family caregivers in addressing the moral dilemmas in dementia care through their understanding of the personal preferences and experiences of their loved ones with dementia. De Hogeweyk aligns with Kitwood’s person-centered care model that emphasizes the recognition of individuality, dignity, and well-being of individuals with dementia. The infrastructure and social environment provided at De Hogeweyk contribute to an immersive world that resonates with the residents’ personal histories and identities. Despite the constructed nature of the residents’ world, its depth and significance come from the interpersonal connections between residents and their family members outside the dementia village. As a result, family caregivers can occasionally employ carefully considered acts of beneficent deception without undermining the importance of truth-telling in dementia care. They can also transcend the limitations of cognitive decline by providing love and dedication as the fundamental truths that matter. CONCLUSION At the end of her life, my great-grandmother Tsilya could no longer recognize or communicate with family members. She would sit quietly, staring at the wall. Yet, my family members and I continued to spend time with her every day, simply holding her hand or stroking her hair. While it may be true that these visits might not have mattered to my great-grandmother, who no longer had an awareness of the outside world, they upheld her selfhood in the eyes of our family and to everyone else around her. Family caregivers, like my mother, have the knowledge and experience to navigate moral dilemmas surrounding truth and deception in dementia care. As the number of people suffering from dementia continues to rise, future studies should examine new ways to engage family caregivers in helping to establish the true meaning of person-centered care. - [1] Matthew Tieu, “Truth and Diversion: Self and Other-Regarding Lies in Dementia Care,” Bioethics 35, no. 9 (2021): 858, https://doi.org/10.1111/bioe.12951. [2] Tom Kitwood, “The Concept of Personhood and Its Relevance for a New Culture of Dementia Care.,” in Care-Giving in Dementia: Research and Applications, ed. Bere M.L. Miesen and Gemma M.M. Jones, vol. 2 (Routledge, 1997), 10-11. [3] Kitwood, 3. [4] Kitwood, “The Concept of Personhood and Its Relevance for a New Culture of Dementia Care,” 4, 11. [5] See “Holding One Another (Well, Wrongly, Clumsily) in a Time of Dementia,” an essay where Hilde Lindemann, a philosopher and a bioethicist, examines the role of family caregivers in upholding their loved ones with dementia’s identities. [6] This essay is specifically concerned with informal family caregivers, such as children, close relatives, or romantic partners, as opposed to formal paid caregivers in the medical establishment. For people with dementia who have no informal caregivers and end up in institutional care early on, the lessons learned from family caregivers can contribute to creating guidelines for institutional person-centered care. See the United Kingdom’s Mental Health Foundation 2016 report “What is Truth: an Inquiry about Truth and Lying in Dementia Care” for a further discussion regarding the necessity for non-family caregivers to understand the life stories and values of people with dementia. [7] Byers, “Truthfulness and Deceit in Dementia Care: An Argument for Truthful Regard as a Morally Significant Human Bond,” 231-232. [8] Byers, 234. [9] Matilda Carter, “Ethical Deception? Responding to Parallel Subjectivities in People Living with Dementia,” Disability Studies Quarterly 40, no. 3 (2020), . [10] Oliver Sacks, “How Much a Dementia Patient Needs to Know,” The New Yorker, February 25, 2019, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/04/how-much-a-dementia-patient-needs-to-know. [11] Dympna Casey et al., “Telling a ‘Good or White Lie’: The Views of People Living with Dementia and Their Carers,” Dementia 19, no. 8 (2020): 2583. [12] Casey et al., 2593-1594. [13] Casey et al., 2595. [14] Robert Sparrow and Linda Sparrow, “In the Hands of Machines? The Future of Aged Care,” Minds and Machines 16 (2006): 155, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-006-9030-6. [15] Sparrow and Sparrow, 155. [16] Richard Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Basic Books, 1974), 42-43.CNN’s World’s Untold Stories: Dementia Village (CNN, 2013), www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwiOBlyWpko. [17] CNN’s World’s Untold Stories: Dementia Village (CNN, 2013), 02:00-02:13, www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwiOBlyWpko. [18] CNN’s World’s Untold Stories: Dementia Village, 03:45-03:53. [19]CNN, 05:10-06:00. [20] CNN, 14:45-15:30. [21] CNN, 20:20-20:40 [22] CNN, 06:50-07:55. [23] CNN, 10:20-12:20