How does one build a home within the nation-state that persecuted you for decades? 

 

The State is a political and territorial safety net. It promises to give you a homeland, a motherland, a purpose, a prescribed identity. 

Within the boundaries of the nation-state, humans are classified, layered identities flatten, and citizenship divides people into the ruled and rulers. 

The lack of Romani territorial space and nomadic habitation has led them to be viewed as outsiders wherever they went.

 

Formed through repetition and mimicry as a spatial action, this urban proposal functions as a counter territory. It configures a Romani habitation that does not rely on a state to create space, but on a structure of rituals and performances. 

 

Recurring operations bleed from the site to the city, sprawling through the nation that genocided it, while simultaneously inviting it in. 

 

No memorials are erected, but interwoven fragments creating new building typologies enacted through the action and movement of the site. 

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When thinking about what is my job as an architect, The avoided letter ‘I’ comes in, leaving most of my questions unanswered.

Should I have the power to assemble civic space? 

Who should? Should anyone? 

Is the architect a rightful agent of the construction of society? Nothing, at the end, comes directly from the speculative ideas and imagination of the human mind. 

Then, if the architect should not architecture, what is their job to design?