Constellations: Migrant Women and Collective Kinship

The term ‘constellation’ is broad in its meanings. Cosmic and mathematical definitions are reinterpreted in terms of social and urban conditions. In this project, the concept is used to create a space that blurs the line between the domestic and the institutional, as a challenge to institutional boundaries at different levels.

Cities are an accumulation of different social constellations and networks through which people interact. Cities are also an entry point for immigrants, arriving due to geopolitical, economical, or personal circumstances. With their families or on their own, every year many women come to Zürich to live and work, sometimes without any support network. Finding a welcoming community to provide information, support, and care represents an important footing for those coming from abroad.

The project was drawn out from the book Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde, a black lesbian woman from different social constellations and who represents the “very house of difference”. As Lorde shows us, social networks and constellations navigating between the domestic and public are central to care – may it be for cancer, as Lorde experienced, or other forms of illness and dependencies. Practices of care are often provided in the domestic sphere or through informal social constellations of kinship. Migrant women lack such networks of support while there is also a lack of institutional care towards their community, and more generally a lack of understanding of the migrant condition in Switzerland.

The proposed architecture aims to create a space for women who seek communal support, where they can find information, rest, and mutual care. As such, the base layer of the idea is a library, offering a wide range of different foreign literature, information, and education on migrant culture in Switzerland. Adjunct private rooms and a system of curtains provide flexible spaces for intimate settings. It challenges the threshold of the intimate and the collective adjoining a public accessible space to dwelling dependencies. In an architectural way, the new building fosters a new constellation of relationships transgressing in the typology of single-family houses by bridging two units. The proposed institution challenges the boundaries of western normative family life, imagining a space open to the public that is simultaneously the home of a migrant woman, like Audre Lorde.