Forms of Non-Belonging - (Sternberg Press / E-Flux Journal) by Pelin Tan (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Reflections on the conditions of contemporary exile, refugeehood, migration, and community building at the margins of society.

According to Pelin Tan, there are forms of belonging that do not quite belong. In this collection of essays and conversations with artists and practitioners across twenty years of research and fieldwork, she sets out to situate the conditions of contemporary exile, refugeehood, migration, and community building at the margins of society relative to the production of space, structural violence, shifting landscapes, and desecration of the environment. She also engages methodological questions integral to critical practice, including radical pedagogy, forms of commoning, non-hegemonic instituting practices, and the imagination of survival.

How can the experience of art reveal and embody the voice of apocalyptic landscapes? How can the effects of large-scale disasters be memorialized through artistic and architectural methodologies? In addressing such questions, the book aims to advance collective critical thinking by inviting the reader to engage with particular artifacts and architectures as traces of an apocalyptic era, lands as strata of violence, cycles as Earth's navigation, and exile as a form of semi-voluntary collectivity.

Co-published by e-flux journal

About the Author

Pelin Tan is a sociologist and art historian based between Tire and Mardin (Turkey). She is a professor in the film department of the fine arts faculty at Batman University, Turkey. In 2019 Tan was awarded the Bard College's Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism. She is a Prof. Roemer Fellow at the Orient Institute of Beirut. Her books include Threshold Architecture: Unconditional Hospitality.

Eyal Weizman is the Founder and Director of Forensic Architecture and professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, where in 2005 he founded the Centre for Research Architecture. In 2007, with Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, he established the architectural collective DAAR in Beit Sahour/Palestine. He is the author of numerous books, including Hollow Land (2024), Investigative Aesthetics with Matthew Fuller (2021), Forensic Architecture (2017), The Roundabout Revolutions (Sternberg Press, 2015), The Conflict Shoreline (2015), Forensis (Sternberg Press 2014), and The Least of all Possible Evils (2011).