Protest Fields: A study of placeholders

Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes made of ticky tacky
Little boxes, little boxes
Little boxes all the same.
— Malvina Reynolds, 1962.

Here is another primitive hut.¹ It measures approximately two by two meters in area. It’s built with rough limestone blocks and corrugated metal roofing. Sometimes it has a door and window, other times simply a doorway. It is solid, heavy, resolutely present but — curiously and crucially — empty.

Such huts can be found in many abandoned fields throughout Crimea, the Russian-occupied peninsula in Ukraine, built in rough but consistent grids. Elementary and crude in form, the hut is highly intricate in function, embodied and embedded within a web of histories of displacement and global geopolitical forces. It’s made especially complex by Russian annexation and the ongoing war in Ukraine. But the hut’s story begins elsewhere:

On May 18, 1944, by order No. 5859SS issued by Joseph Stalin, the entire population of ethnic Crimean Tatars, the people indigenous to Crimea, were forcefully taken from their homes, loaded into cattle trains and deported from the Crimean territory to Central Asia and Siberia, with the majority sent to Uzbekistan. Although most frequently called ‘the deportation,’ the death toll from executions, the weeks-long train trip and the following harsh living conditions, forced labor, poverty, starvation and disease in exile, have prompted several governments and political bodies to officially denounce it as genocide.²

Crimeans³ were prohibited from returning to their homeland until 1989. Attempts to enter the territory resulted in re-deportation to Uzbekistan or to forced labor camps. Upon the lifting of the ban, Crimeans returned en masse, finding their former homes and farms occupied by new owners, primarily of Russian or Ukrainian origin, moved into Crimea by Stalin to settle the confiscated land. Abandoning longstanding legal appeals to compensation or reparation, Crimeans adopted a strategy of illegally occupying vacant areas of land by building small huts as signifiers of claimed territory. As the practice became increasingly widespread, these huts quickly entered the vernacular of the local landscape, and the squatted lands became known as polyany protesta — Fields of Protest, or Protest Fields.

The hut is a provisional, liminal thing. It’s not built to house anyone — its primary function is that of a placeholder. It’s built in hope of obtaining legal rights to the claimed territory, taking advantage of local property and squatting laws.

It goes one of two ways: A lengthy bureaucratic process is launched, which takes at minimum several years, with the ultimate aim of obtaining official property registration. The granting of legal status is highly contingent on local politics, property values and, more recently,⁴ on larger geopolitical considerations from the Kremlin. In the meantime, the hut acts as a stand-in for property claim. Alternatively or concurrently, a larger house is built up illegally, with the hut acting as a tool shed, workshop and storage space for construction. In collaborative effort with neighboring hut-builders within the protest field, unofficial road, sewage, water and electricity infrastructures are developed over time, sometimes in informal collaboration with local authorities and providers. In both cases, the huts, and the associated larger structures, remain under risk of being demolished by local authorities, often resulting in clashes between the protesters and the police. They become, to slightly misuse Hito Steyerl’s term, ‘zones of terminal impermanence,’ existing in the grey areas of both the law and the home.

As a house, the hut is both absurd and rather convincing. Like a crude drawing by a kid asked to draw a home. It’s the idea of a home, its potentiality. While its status is shaky, its material properties are decisively substantial. It’s average size ranges from 1.5-4 meters in width and 2.4-2.7 meters in height, depending on material and funding availability. It’s capped with cheap corrugated metal roofing. It may or may not have a foundation. The main structure is built from locally sourced limestone blocks. Notably, mortar is not always used — some huts are built up simply by stacking the blocks, further underscoring the unstable, placeholder quality of the hut.

Let’s pause here for a moment. Limestone, CaCO₃, ракушечник: a porous sedimentary rock, composed primarily of calcite, formed from organic debris in shallow marine waters. Accumulating on the Black Sea bottom for an average of 550 million years, shell, coral, algal, fecal and other organic deposits turn into solid stone. Crimea is rich in large deposits of exposed limestone — its abundance, easy extraction and low transportation cost make it the cheapest available building material.⁵ In building the protest hut, the material is extracted directly from the local natural landscape and is then (re)used or reinserted as part of the built landscape. The stuff, the substance of the land becomes the very medium of reclaiming it. The act of building the hut becomes a literal grounding. A material composed of remnants of life forms much older than the human species and our peculiar capacity of reorganizing matter — the hut calls to a power of a different kind. This renders our territory disputes and the lines we draw in the sand rather silly, on the one hand. On the other, the hut becomes a bond between a people’s situated history and the primacy of ground, somewhere between the micro scale of the calcite molecule and the macro scale of geological time, the molecular and the planetary. “In the pores of those vast dramas of class and party, nation and history…It’s a question of being able to perceive both molar drama and molecular gesture together.”⁶

Let’s not forget what it takes to transform this substance into a building block. The entanglements of human and nonhuman labor, highly specialized machinery, local markets and infrastructures required to turn exposed limestone into building units are too dense to go into here.⁸ For now, let’s zoom out from the hut to the enclosing field: what’s striking here is the strictly ordered grid. This topology is rather singular. It’s difficult to classify, but we can begin to map its contours through the following related but divergent spatial forms: squatting practices, informal settlements, formal housing development and protest movements.

Squatting: a typical act of squatting is a bodily act, whose strength is in the body inhabiting a particular space or enclosure. In the case of the protest huts, the enclosure does not aim to house anyone — rather the structure itself takes on the function of a body inhabiting an environment. The hut becomes not only a stand-in for the home but also for the body.

Informal settlements: the protest fields have similar contours a first glance. From the favelas throughout Brazil, to the pueblos jovenes on the outskirts of Lima, Peru, to climate- and war-induced refugee camps proliferating across the globe — the fields are likewise informally built and operate outside legal structures and government regulation. But informal settlements are filled with life — life in and against emergency. As such, they often result in a diversity of spatial configurations and building materials; structures are heterogeneous and dynamic, ad-hoc and in-flux.

Formal settlements: as a spatial pattern, the protest filed is more in line with the language of formal development. By adhering to strict grid-like, repeatable and uniform planning, the fields informally duplicate the typical act of subdivision used in contemporary official housing development. In this aerial view ^{[Figure 7]}, we can recognize the protest field as an act of filling in, as a logical continuation of the surrounding authorized residential parcels.

Protest movements: The fields can likewise be placed within the histories of occupation as protest and protest architecture — strategies of (re)claiming space and challenging authority, borders and ownership. While that certainly holds true, how to think this further?

Connections can be made here with movements like Reclaim the Streets in London 1995, Nuit Debout in Paris 2016, and Occupy Wall Street in 2011 in New York and globally. All have utilized nonprivate property claim as a ways to think what urban space could be in non-capitalist modes of organizing space. While the Protest Fields certainly disrupt a normative order, their aim is not that of a revolution, nor a commons. It doesn’t challenge established notions of property nor offer alternatives to capitalist logics. Instead, it is a vision of inclusion into the existing social fabric, of space claimed within it. It is rather fully grounded in what Benjamin Bratton, following Carl Schmitt, identifies as the Westphalian geopolitical order: a system in which the 'modern nation state is a function of a cartographic projection that conceives of the earth as a horizontal plane full of various allotments, jagged lines topologies of loops.’

While an impressively large-scale feat of solidarity and kinship, it stops short of being a radical prefigurative project, “understanding prefigurative politics as those by which the goals of the movement are rehearsed within the modes of organization mobilized during their struggle.”⁹ The common, collaborative labor involved in the initial land seizure and protest gesture is merely a means to an end that is ultimately private, a plot of land that is one’s own. What’s rehearsed through the act of building the protest hut is a self-imposition of the regime of private property. It’s like the commons, but privatized. It’s top-down planning from below.¹⁰

So the fields can be read as not just a past wound, but a current symptom of a contemporary condition that is much more sinister — an impossibility to think alternatives to the current dominant order, a state most famously articulated by Mark Fisher as capitalist realism.¹¹

Let’s zoom out further still.

The first Russian annexation of Crimea (then the recently independent Crimean Khanate) took place in 1783, authored by Catherine the Great. Russia needed its paradise.¹²

Tsarist repression of the inhabitants’ Muslim faith resulted in a systematic process of Russification of the region throughout the following century. Crucially, a coherent Crimean identity was formulated precisely in response to the foreign occupation, as the local tribes began to develop a sense of political, cultural and linguistic unity in opposition to the common enemy. The very concept of territorially-bound national identity was itself imported from the Russian Empire.¹³

The second annexation occurred in 2014, this time masterminded by Vladimir Putin. Under the current occupation, the process of demolishing Protest Field huts is taken up with greater zeal than that of the Ukrainian authorities. Fields are leveled. Huts are crushed, people disappeared.

The ones that remain become increasingly loaded acts in the now Russian-occupied territory, multiply implicated in conflicting claims to the land at different scales. The protest field is now a battlefield. A proxy home in a proxy war. The hut is now not only a monument to former displacement, but a simultaneous counter-occupation on a micro scale, engaging with multiple layers of violence.

Steyerl: “Giorgio Agamben has recently analyzed the Greek term stasis, which means both civil war and immutability: something potentially very dynamic, but also its absolute opposite […] Stasis describes a civil war that is unresolved and drags on. Conflict is not a means to force a resolution of a disputed situation, but a tool to sustain it. A stagnant crisis is the point.”¹⁴

Consider this Google Earth sequence of a protest field at 44°58'21"N 34°04’35”E. The first instance of the huts appears in March 2007.^{[Figure 9]} Local news outlets report approximately 320 individual parcels. By 2009, we see the foundations of more full-fledged structures. The houses are built up gradually at different speeds throughout 2009-2015. The March 2016 view shows the field completely leveled, all but two houses demolished.

Moving forward, we see the contours of an apartment complex, developed by the Russian real estate development company Vladograd. A polished 3D-rendered fly-through video shows an enclave of generic apartment buildings, a familiar formula. The protest field template is replaced by another, this one state-sanctioned, well-rehearsed, copy-and-paste. The landscape is rendered into a tidy gamescape. The company website boasts of private security, video surveillance and concierge services. 10,000 apartments, 5,500 parking spaces, a school, a bank, a beauty salon, soccer fields and basketball courts, landscaped areas and boulevards ‘for strolling,’ a roller rink. You wanted a grid? This is how it’s done.

But these structures too are empty — the Vladograd website landing page advertises mortgage incentives for Russian military personnel and their families, willing to relocate to Crimea.

—

“It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with.”¹⁵ I’ve offered here a story of my people, for our times. For our contemporary condition qualified by planetary civil war,¹⁶ techno-feudalism¹⁷ or something worse,¹⁸ and the multiplying metabolic rifts of the Anthropocene.¹⁹

The protest field is temporary, tenuous, haphazard. It’s both shaky and, quite literally, set in stone. It’s a placeholder, a proxy. It’s a ‘a politics of patience, constructed against the tyranny of emergency.’²⁰ It’s a hyphen, both a cut and a bond. And, perhaps, it’s a useful concept for our times.

I’ve taken up here “the lowly task of gleaning some forgotten histories, neglected concepts, and minor stories,”²¹ in hopes that it can serve as a case study in the shared task of creating a possibly livable world. In the ‘construction of a dwelling place that makes room for one and all.’²²