Walls and islands

Abstract

This chapter critically engages with the deployment of two distinctly spatial and perpetuating manifestations of carcerality: the wall and the island. Our inquiry combines our respective scholarly positions in architecture and anthropology as we swap and share disciplinary archetypes in the anthropology of walls and the architecture of islands. The exploration takes its point of departure in, on the one hand, the realization of a prison wall around the new correctional facility Anstalten in Nuuk – Greenland’s first ever encounter with ultramodern perimeter security; and, on the other hand, the highly charged proposal for establishing a deportation centre on the small island of Lindholm in Denmark – fuelling affective public debates about immigrant threats and instantiating age-old discourses of quarantine and intentional harm. The two cases illuminate a dilemma with architectural and anthropological consequences: how state power simultaneously seek to manage deviance and produce normality through spatial protocols that keep people apart.