Between the Camp and the Makerspace: Commoning Practices, Temporal Autonomy and Care

Abstract

ABSTRACT The paper explores the chronopolitics of place-making in the refugee makerspace Habibi-Works and the neighbouring Katsikas refugee camp in Ioannina, in Northern Greece. Camps are created to be ephemeral and this ephemerality is reflected in their materiality and conditions the possibilities available to those that inhabit them. Camp temporalities work by way of destabilising the residents' sense of self in the present, severing their connections with the past and limiting their future aspirations. In sheer antithesis to the camp, the makerspace disrupts these (temporal) dynamics: it enables the camp residents to manage time as a common resource (commoning), creating autonomous communities of collective care. Through mundane encounters and practices, the makerspace plays an instrumental role in enacting the residents' autonomy by facilitating access to digital technologies, low-tech manufacturing tools, and skills to reproduce a sense of lost normality. We adopt an ethnographic approach to engage with the makerspace and the camp as well as the various people involved (migrants, volunteers, makers) and understand how migrants narrate their past, negotiate their present and imagine their futures in the context of everyday life. Building on the concepts of peer production, temporal autonomy and radical care, we argue that Habibi-Works opens up a new socio-political space between the camp, the makerspace and the world.