Richard Mosse in conversation

About

The Irish photographer Richard Mosse presents recent work including the series Heat Maps, made using a military camera that is classified as a weapon under international law.

The hi-tech surveillance device, designed to detect body heat from a distance of over 30km, was used by Richard to track the journeys of refugees from the Middle East and North Africa.  The result is a series of large-scale prints that reconfigures the refugee crisis as a spectral, almost sci-fi drama of human endurance and survival. He has also produced an acclaimed film, Incoming from the result of the project.   

The Castle is a meticulous documentation of refugee camps and staging sites located across migration routes from the Middle East and Central Asia into the European Union via Turkey. The Castle draws attention to the provisional architecture of refugee camps – the barbed fences, security gates, portaloos, loudspeakers, food queues, tents and temporary shelters. The sequence of the book, which is divided into 28 sites, presents panoramic and close-up images underling the various ways in which each camp interrelates with, or is divorced from, adjacent citizen infrastructure – marginalised, concealed, overlooked, integrated, dispersed, regulated, militarised. 

The publication does not attempt to represent the refugee crisis in a seemingly “transparent” or objective way. Instead, it prompts question about the “visibility” of refugees and the erosion of their human rights. Richard's images, which read heat as both metaphor and index, ask us to think about the current conditions of refugees through ideas of hypothermia, exposure, climate change, biopolitics, and mortality.
 
Following the presentation Richard will be in discussion with James O’Leary, Programme Director - Situated Practice MA, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL.

The Castle is published by Mack books and will be available to purchase after the event.