Romani snapshot photography and a black sense of place: appraising infrastructure through movement, memory, and metabolism

Abstract

The concept of a black sense of place focuses on racialised infrastructural violence and black struggle in the production of space in the Americas. Addressing how this resonates with the histories of dispossession of Roma in postsocialist Europe, this article examines how a black sense of place is constituted, which it explores through Czech Romani women’s encounters with/in a postmilitary landscape. Former military areas are underexamined refuges of biocultural diversity and infrastructural de- and re-composition. Reworking participatory photography as a compositional process of snapshot photography that draws together ‘snaps’ of images, thought, and affect that do not congeal into a narrative, the analysis focuses on the modalities of movement, memory, and metabolism for collectively sensing and (re)imagining an infrastructural landscape. The concept of geocorporeality helps to specify how infrastructure bodies and knowledges co-compose with the geos, where a black sense of place materialises as metabolic ingestion, a refusal to forget or to stay in one’s place in ways that inspire the infrastructural imagination in an ostensible wasteland.