THE PLAN (OR, THE DISPOSSESSION)
On September 6, 1975, a 6.9-magnitude earthquake shook Lice – a district in southeastern Turkey – which resulted in 2,385 deaths and the destruction of 8,149 buildings. [1] To accommodate those who were displaced, new prefabricated houses were built 2 kilometers below the destroyed area (in the northern part of Lice). More than 40 years later, the displaced are still living in these shelters, although they have since adapted the floor plans to suit their own needs. Ownership of the shelters is a complex legal question, since they were built for temporary purposes, not to be inhabited permanently. According to state building policy, the land register can be altered to redistribute ownership only after two earthquakes. This forced dispossession via natural disaster thus becomes an ecological infrastructure for justifying colonial violence. [2]
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THE EXPANDED POLYSTYRENE (OR, THE STONE)
In addition to the prefabricated shelters, 453 polyurethane hexagonal igloos were built in the aftermath of the 1975 earthquake. [3] “The shelter is a dome-shaped Styrofoam shell about four and a half inches thick, with a 16-foot diameter on the ground. It is cast at the site by spraying Styrofoam substance on an inflated balloon. The shell is then treated with a waterproofing compound and can be set into place by two men. After the shelter is cast, a doorway and circular ports for windows are cut out for plastic covers.” [4] Does a construction material hold a spatial memory of destruction and violence? As the igloos decayed, they left behind “stones” of Styrofoam.
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THE WALL (OR, THE TRADITION)
A Kurdish town, Lice suffered violent conflict through the 1990s. With walls only 5 centimeters thick, the inhabitants of many of the prefabricated shelters built a second wall outside the first one to protect themselves from incoming bullets. During the Lice Massacre, from October 20-23, 1993, the town was burned down, and many of the shelters were destroyed. As Jalal Toufic explains:
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...surpassing disaster leads to the withdrawal not of everything, but of tradition, and touches not everyone, but a community, with the caveat that this community is reciprocally defined by it as the community of those affected by it, and this tradition is defined by it as that which withdraws as a result of the surpassing disaster. [5]
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But at what moment does the infrastructure of disaster become the tradition?
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