WAITING
Mark Kantalinsky-Vasilyev
MARK KANTALINSKY-VASILYEV
Ukrainian refugee, architect, urbanist and art activist. He started his education in Architecture at KNUCA and continued at UPC. He promoted volunteer initiatives for social housing and schools for refugees in Ukraine. In 2023, he co-founded CAMARAC, a collective of artists and architects for social activism. Coordinator of all CAMARAC projects: I Have a Problem, I Hear the Noise, an artistic research on sound pollution; 72h in the Simulation, selected in the official future program of World Capital of Architecture 2026 by UNESCO-UIA; Contact grounds, a social art project in collaboration with creators from Brasil and Colombia.
CLÀUDIA JANSANA-RODON
Filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist. She graduated summa cum laude in Film Studies by Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. During her undergraduate years, she worked in several European production companies as well as on-set for films and publicity. She currently works at Coproduction Office, the film production and distribution company based in Paris and Berlin notably known for Palme d’Or’s winner Triangle of Sadness by Ruben Östlund. In 2023 she co-founded CAMARAC.
CAMARAC
CAMARAC is a non-profit international collective of young artists and architects. The collective identifies and works on social injustices within the framework of big urban systems. We consider art to be an essential tool for protest and we work to make cities evolve for the benefit of the community, and not at the community’s expense. Our work is based on the pursuit of sustainable progress, based on citizen participation, and attentive and respectful of people’s needs.
WAITING is an on-going artistic research on how architecture articulates the refugee’s experience. It began as a personal video project to reflect on my own experience three years after I fled Ukraine. Along the process I realised that, from the moment war starts, paradoxically, the common refugee’s experience is not “rushing” but “waiting”.
For this next stage of the research, we want to revisit my itinerary from Kyiv to Barcelona through the spaces I’ve had to wait in since I became a refugee.
For several weeks, I sheltered in an underground parking with my neighbours. It was a cold February, so we huddled against hot water pipes to keep warm and took turns sleeping on makeshift beds made from pallets and blankets. However, once in Barcelona, I spent endless hours each day at the Red Cross refugee centre to process paperwork and get food. I sat patiently amongst hundreds of other refugees: all of us in rows of chairs and a single table at the front, for those who held our future in their hands. These are merely two examples of how people change architecture and architecture changes people’s lives. Our idea is to draw from these contrapositions to analyse to what extent our relation to the space around us inflicts on our social interactions.
We envision this research taking shape in an installation where the visitor will transit different scenarios: conceptual recreations of the steps in the refugee’s journey from their homes to their host countries. Each will present a particular set of objects used to rest and a unique soundscape that will make these scenarios speak. Through the arrangement of this “catalogue” of scenarios, we’ll question architecture’s role in power dynamics within the refugee’s experience, offering a new perspective. Hopefully, an eye-opening one.