Elisavet Hasa
Infrastructures of Solidarity and Care by Social Movements: Protocol Systems and Prototypical Designs
Summary
My thesis draws on the series of social movements that sprang up during the last decade to provide support to marginalised groups and their needs as a form of collective direct action to investigate how they create micro-infrastructures for care provision and interrelate in various forms with state institutions.
The argument of my thesis is that during the past decade, social movements have rendered the infrastructural domain as one of the most important public sites of collective participation and struggle. Through my research I find that social movements are wiring the activities of their spaces with the devices, networks or architectures that they deem worthy of local attention or concern. From decentralised spaces and interiorities diffused across the city to concentrated consolidations of social movements in the same area, infrastructural projects of solidarity and care, become techno-material artefacts that social movements take upon themselves to design, service and maintain. This thesis claims that such interventions signal the rise of protocol systems and design of prototypes to capture the qualitative data, design methods and relationships between different subjects and space; a fact that speaks for the transformation of the urban syntax and architecture, directly challenges the public qualities of welfare infrastructure, and reflects the power of solidarity bodies that enable another way of “infrastructuring”.
By charting an inclusive history of their activities, including political activism and spatial occupation, my work has as an aim to highlight new networks of exchange and expertise among social movements, along with the agency of social movements in design histories, but also to link the multiple forms of resistance as they develop connecting these otherwise dispersed geographies to an infrastructural movement centered around solidarity and care. In the work of these social movements, my thesis explores how other kinds of infrastructure are also visible rendering possible an international movement that reproduced large communities who gathered on site, established self-organisation protocols, reconfigured welfare protocols and care prototypes to provide, protest and protect, and they did so by establishing social and ecological interdependence and connection across borders.
Additional info
As part of the Research Biennale, each student from the PhD cohort at the School of Architecture selects to interrogate a “footnote” alongside an extract from the text of her/his thesis.
In my research, to understand institutionalisation and protocol, I have studied the work of Alexander R. Galloway, who articulates protocol as a kind of management diagram. In this part of the thesis, I investigate the intersections among the works of Alexander Galloway, Tiqqun, Gerald Raunig, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney.
Short bio
Elisavet Hasa is an architect and researcher based in London. Spanning research, architecture and design, her work investigates entanglements between social movements and the state apparatus. Elisavet is a PhD candidate at the School of Architecture at the Royal College of Art in London and a researcher at the RCA. She also has been a guest lecturer and presented her work in various institutions such as the RCA, Bartlett, Architectural Association, Weitzman School of Design, University of Oregon, University of Thessaly School of Architecture. Her work and various collaborative projects have been published, awarded and shown internationally, including at the Lisbon Architecture Triennale, Venice Biennale, Biennale of Young Greek Architects.
Elisavet is a founding member of Fatura Collaborative, an architecture and research collective practice that is developing projects across a wide range of scales, from intimate objects and performance, to architecture and urban design. She has practiced architecture in the UK and worked in the housing, healthcare and education sectors in collaboration with public authorities and established architectural practices. Prior to London, Elisavet gained experience as an architect in Athens and Madrid.
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