The Aegean Islands have represented in recent years one of the epicentres of the so-called migration crisis in Europe. As one of the main migrant landing points on European territory, they have quickly been transformed into spaces of detention, with thousands of asylum seekers held in camps or simply denied authorisation to leave for mainland Greece. The islands themselves have become an interstitial space – not quite yet part of continental Europe, not anymore part of Turkey, their liminal status mobilized to perform the work of border enforcement: to hurt, to obscure, to deter, and to hold.

             Smouldering Grounds is an online media archive investigating the repeated occurrences of fire at one of these migrant detention centres: the camp of Moria, on the island of Lesvos. The recent, devastating fire that has made headlines after destroying the camp was not, in fact, an unusual phenomenon. It was only the last in a series of more than a hundred outbreaks that have occurred in and around the camp since its establishment in 2013. The camp itself could be said to have existed in a state of constant smouldering: a precarious and highly volatile condition of slow, flameless burning that quickly erupted into sudden outbursts. While migrants themselves have been often criminalized for these fires, the outbreaks should be understood as symptoms of various intersecting phenomena: chronic overcrowding, failing humanitarian infrastructures, acts of protest against deplorable living conditions, as well as prolonged droughts and heatwaves across Southern Europe. They signal the point where infrastructures of containment and detention intersect with the increasing risk of wildfires on a warming planet.

             Smouldering Grounds operates as an investigative tool that archives reports of fires gathered from social media, official accounts, and sources living inside of the camp at the time, and locates them spatially and temporally. By offering this material in a public and interactive repository, it endeavours to prompt further research and (legal) action at the time when a new detention centre is once again being built on the island for the third time in the last few years. At the same time, by foregrounding the persistent presence of fire, the project gestures towards the deeper histories of abandonment and exile on which this carceral archipelago has been built, locating the tragedy of Moria not in the ultimate act of its burning, but in its very existence.

Text by Dimitra Andritsou, Stefanos Levidis, and Lorenzo Pezzani.

[Dimitra Andritsou is an architect
and researcher. She currently works as
a researcher at Forensic Architecture,
Goldsmiths, University of London.]

The Aegean Islands have represented in recent years one of the epicentres of the so-called migration crisis in Europe. As one of the main migrant landing points on European territory, they have quickly been transformed into spaces of detention, with thousands of asylum seekers held in camps or simply denied authorisation to leave for mainland Greece. The islands themselves have become an interstitial space – not quite yet part of continental Europe, not anymore part of Turkey, their liminal status mobilized to perform the work of border enforcement: to hurt, to obscure, to deter, and to hold.

             Smouldering Grounds is an online media archive investigating the repeated occurrences of fire at one of these migrant detention centres: the camp of Moria, on the island of Lesvos. The recent, devastating fire that has made headlines after destroying the camp was not, in fact, an unusual phenomenon. It was only the last in a series of more than a hundred outbreaks that have occurred in and around the camp since its establishment in 2013. The camp itself could be said to have existed in a state of constant smouldering: a precarious and highly volatile condition of slow, flameless burning that quickly erupted into sudden outbursts. While migrants themselves have been often criminalized for these fires, the outbreaks should be understood as symptoms of various intersecting phenomena: chronic overcrowding, failing humanitarian infrastructures, acts of protest against deplorable living conditions, as well as prolonged droughts and heatwaves across Southern Europe. They signal the point where infrastructures of containment and detention intersect with the increasing risk of wildfires on a warming planet.

             Smouldering Grounds operates as an investigative tool that archives reports of fires gathered from social media, official accounts, and sources living inside of the camp at the time, and locates them spatially and temporally. By offering this material in a public and interactive repository, it endeavours to prompt further research and (legal) action at the time when a new detention centre is once again being built on the island for the third time in the last few years. At the same time, by foregrounding the persistent presence of fire, the project gestures towards the deeper histories of abandonment and exile on which this carceral archipelago has been built, locating the tragedy of Moria not in the ultimate act of its burning, but in its very existence.