Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies

by Alastair Bonnett

  The freeport vaults are able to conjure ever more exchange value out of cultural artifacts that possess only abstract worth. The success of this alchemical process is dependent upon the freeport’s international appeal and reach. For years the Geneva Free Ports and Warehouses Ltd., which operates the freeport, played up the idea that it was beyond the arm of government. The company boasted that it was a “genuine offshore base at the heart of Europe.” Some accounts of the freeport even give the impression that it is a kind of autonomous statelet nestled in the securely unaligned body of the Swiss nation. It’s an understandable mistake to make about a place that has for so long portrayed itself as untouchable. Reality intervened on September 13, 1995, when Swiss and Italian police raided room 23 on corridor 17. They discovered four thousand looted Italian antiquities. The Italian dealer Giacomo Medici was eventually convicted and jailed, at which point the Swiss decided it was time to regild the reputation of the freeport, although they took their time about it. They waited until 2009 to mandate full inventories and ownership details.

  Far from frightening customers away, the new regime of scrupulous honesty has only increased the attraction of the freeport. There are huge profits to be made from perfectly legal transactions within its walls and a huge, perfectly legal demand for somewhere to store objects far away from tax annoyances at home. Clever accountancy has made criminal subterfuge an anachronism.

  Speaking up for the public benefits of the Geneva Freeport, Jean-René Saillard, of the investors group British Fine Art Fund, explains, “Owners have every reason to lend generously. When works they possess are exposed by prestigious institutions, they naturally increase in value.” But it’s a rather backhanded defense. It suggests that art passes the freeport’s doors only if it is on its way to accrue some additional cash value. It also implies that the role of galleries and art museums is to service the needs of tax-exempt storage and transaction sheds. The twenty-first century looks set to be the storage century. Art will occasionally be loaded up, trucked out, and made to perform in extra-storage public spaces. But as storage grows in influence, this periodic circulation is starting to be rationalized. The Geneva Freeport is already developing gallery space. In this way items can accrue value without the risk of loss or damage. Freeport warehouses are well positioned to emerge as the century’s most significant exhibition spaces.

  The Geneva Freeport has been a success story, but it may soon be overshadowed. Today many cities in the West, and increasingly in East Asia too, are dotted with warehouses offering shelf space for the world’s glut of valuables. These urban bunkers are now part of the ordinary landscape: dreary concrete temples to the priceless and the unique. The largest growth in tax-free art storage is in East Asia. Singapore’s art freeport began operating in 2010, and the twenty-acre Beijing Free Port of Culture at Beijing Capital International Airport opened in 2013.

  The trajectory toward ever more storehousing challenges the idea that ours is an age of the virtual, an era in which real objects are increasingly irrelevant. While money flows by on computer screens, taking up no space at all, the storehouse culture has developed a power and life of its own, allowing and demanding more and more keeping, dusting, and inventory-taking. Such storage is only in its infancy, and it is not limited to art but includes all things of high value. Moreover, there does not seem to be any foreseeable limit on what can be amassed, since there is plenty of room under the earth or up in space. There may yet come a time when the valuable object is understood to have a life cycle, but we can’t yet imagine that moment—when uniquely rare cars will be crushed, say, or precious art is fed to the flames. Until then, we will build more freeports, more storage, more shelves, more vaults for our treasure.

  Bright Light, 4 Mures Street, Bucharest

  44° 28′ 04″ N, 26° 02′ 45″ E

  Number 4 Mures Street is an off-white single-story office building with plenty of large windows. It’s a cheaply built, rather rundown 1960s construction and doesn’t appear especially secure. It is fronted by modest metal railings. Behind this block, which lies on a dusty residential street in northeast Bucharest, there is a larger building painted in the same municipal shade, and behind that, some train tracks. Number 4 Mures Street looks like a place where officialdom is slowly churning and employees watch the clock, waiting to go home.

  Between the end of 2003 and May 2006, 4 Mures Street had the CIA code name Bright Light. It was a secret interrogation and detention center, a so-called black site, and acted as a link in an international chain of covert detention and staging points used in the war against terror. For those detained here and for the rest of the world Bright Light did not exist—it was a non-place. We can call such sites non-places for two reasons: because these are spaces no one notices, and because they complete the bewilderment of the inmate—even when the hood is removed and the landscape glimpsed, it means nothing, it could be anywhere. One person who has made this connection is Bruce O’Neill, an anthropologist at Stanford University who has taken a special interest in the geography of “extraordinary rendition.” In the journal Ethnography, he argues that secret detention facilities appear to “thrive in the non-places.” They can grow and breed in these empty zones because no one cares about them: they are “generic and highly functional spaces that we pass through without establishing significant social or historical relations with them.” It is places that “escape our serious attention or observation,” O’Neill concludes, that provide “the ideal infrastructural site for a new kind of camp.”

  It is the forgettableness and unseen nature of 4 Mures Street, along with numerous windowless rooms elsewhere, that make it ideal for the covert extension of state power. The building, then as now, was owned by the Romanian National Registry for Classified Information. What a spokesman calls “media speculation that the building hosted a CIA prison” has been “categorically denied,” and Romania’s foreign affairs minister has confirmed that “no such activities took place on Romanian territory.”

  But the German media, specifically the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper and the ARD television network, have done more than speculate. Their interviews with former inmates and CIA agents pinpoint Bright Light in great detail. Journalists have been able to build up a plan of the complex and uncover the names of those who were kept there and what happened to them. What they found out was that the back building has a basement with six specially designed cells, each one built on springs. The idea appears to have been that a permanent sense of imbalance would disorient inmates, though ironically the cells also had an arrow painted on the floor to indicate the direction of Mecca.

  Bright Light was used for particularly high-value inmates, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is accused of having planned the 9/11 attacks and was kept there before being transferred to the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay. Other prisoners included Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was accused of carrying out the attack on the US warship Cole in Yemen, and Abu Faraj al-Libi, Al Qaeda’s third-in-command. Al-Libi identified Osama bin Laden’s personal courier, a piece of information that eventually led to bin Laden himself.

  During their short tours at 4 Mures Street, the CIA interrogators ate and slept in the compound, shut up with the inmates. A report from the International Committee of the Red Cross, published in 2007, on the treatment of the kind of high-value detainees that passed through Bright Light, detailed the “fairly standardized” procedures that were intended to wear them down through a combination of humiliation and disorientation. In transit, the detainee “would be made to wear a diaper and dressed in a tracksuit,” the report said. “Earphones would be placed over his ears, through which music would sometimes be played. He would be blindfolded with at least a cloth tied around the head and black goggles.” Having reached an interrogation center like Bright Light, the “maintenance of the detainees in continuous solitary confinement and incommunicado detention” meant that many had no idea in which country they were. Kept in isolation, often for years, and without any i
nformation about their surroundings, the inmates were unable to provide a coherent account of their time in detention.

  Even before the story of Bright Light broke, a Council of Europe report had concluded that “secret detention facilities run by the CIA did exist in Europe from 2003 to 2005, in particular in Poland and Romania.” A couple of years later the New York Times established that the CIA’s European headquarters in Frankfurt had overseen the construction of three detention facilities in Eastern Europe, “each built to house about a half-dozen detainees.” One of these was in “a renovated building on a busy street in Bucharest.”

  It is not just the ordinariness of 4 Mures Street that deflects suspicion. Like many other government buildings in Romania, it was once used by the Securitate, Romania’s secret police. Romanians have learned to leave such buildings well alone. Although the Securitate was dissolved in 1989, it had had four decades to mold Romanian society, and at its height it had 2 million people on its payroll, or 10 percent of the country’s population. Romanians have vivid memories of the power of the security forces, who at one point had 180,000 forced laborers under their watch and a further 1.1 million political prisoners, held in more than 120 camps. While Romania’s gulag days are over, they have left the country with both a physical and cultural infrastructure, a network of secret camps and public indifference to what might be going on in nondescript government buildings. Surrounded by an unseeing world and occupied by disoriented inmates, 4 Mures Street is a perfect example of a place beyond reach, a non-place where old rules and old identities can be broken or forgotten.

  Yet by the time we hear about such places, they are usually long gone. Bright Light closed down years before its story emerged. At the very moment that global attention homes in on one particular instance of secret detention, thousands of other camps and millions of other detainees sink deeper into the dark. In many countries, such “spaces of exception” continue to expand. In 2009 the Indian magazine The Week revealed that in India between 15 and 40 secret detention camps are operated by the intelligence services. In 2012 the Chinese government passed a new law giving the police the legal right to do something they had been doing all along: hold detainees at secret locations. It is estimated that today between 150,000 and 200,000 political prisoners in North Korea are held in dozens of secret camps. Windowless and unmapped, such non-places have become a resource for regimes that appear to have little else in common.

  International Airspace

  Humans are naturally terracentric. We’re very interested in places on the earth but only vaguely aware of landscapes beneath the seas, and we rarely think about airspace as anything more than a void through which to travel. From the breath in our lungs to the sixty-two vertical miles that are stacked on top of us to the very edge of the atmosphere, air is a place both intimate and forever strange.

  Whom does it belong to? Is there any that is utterly free? In any case, I seem to have inadvertently purchased some, since, in the United Kingdom, if you own any plot of land, you also own the earth below it and the space above. The ancient doctrine of property law, once enshrined in English common law, runs, Cujus est solum, ejus est usque ad coelum et ad inferos: “Whoever owns the soil, it is theirs all the way up to heaven and down to hell.” Today that would open up some once unexpected issues, such as householders claiming toll fees from planes and satellites. So this ancient law has been whittled down. You are unlikely to be entitled to any more airspace than what is deemed necessary for the “use and enjoyment” of your plot. That still allows people to sell the development rights, or air rights, above their property. And if you want to build over someone else’s property, you can buy someone else’s unused air rights in order to do so. On a crowded island like Manhattan, where airspace is at a premium, air can be bought and sold for hundreds of dollars per square foot.

  While property owners’ rights have been deflated, sovereign airspace has ballooned. Indeed, it was the alarming increase in balloon flights at the start of the last century that first got statesmen interested in the topic. A conference in Paris in 1910 brought together eighteen countries worried by this new type of traffic to hammer out how airspace was to be controlled. The French wanted free skies, but the British liked the idea of full national sovereignty. No agreement was arrived at, but it wasn’t long before the idea that the skies needed to be defended from foreign intrusion gained ground. The 1911 Aerial Navigation Act, passed by Parliament, allowed Britain to close its airspace to hostile flights. It was an early example of what was to become a century full of attempts to demarcate airspace as an extension of national territory.

  Today national airspace extends up to twelve miles out over the sea, which still leaves plenty of the world’s air unclaimed. Like the high seas, international airspace is open to all, but exercising that right, in a plane for example, is not at all straightforward. The trouble is that according to international law, you never really escape the place where your craft is registered. In other words, if your plane is registered in Norway, even when you are in mid-Pacific, flying between Fiji and Tahiti, you are still in Norway and you have to abide by Norwegian law. This precept also suggests that babies born on planes will sometimes be citizens of the country where the plane is registered and sometimes take their parents’ citizenship (following different national laws). But it turns out that there might be competing claims on the infant. If you are born over the United States, in a foreign plane with foreign parents, you can still claim US citizenship.

  Although it is hard to get access to it, the space above the high seas is free and remains unclaimed. There is also the possibility that if you go high enough, all claims to national sovereignty cease, since the traditional “up to heaven and down to hell” approach would mean that, as the earth rotates, great cones of sovereignty would arc their way across the galaxies. So there must be a limit, and this turns out to be a sore spot in legal circles, as lawyers have been arguing among themselves for decades about where the upper limit lies. Some say it ends where an aircraft can no longer get sufficient aerodynamic lift to fly; others make a claim for the zone that “permits the completion of one circuit by an orbiting vehicle.” These are still vague limits, ranging from 43 miles to 99 miles above the earth. And even that distance isn’t enough for some. The Bogotá Declaration of 1976 saw eight equatorial countries claim sovereignty to 22,300 miles. That is the spy zone, the zone of geostationary orbit, where a satellite’s orbit is synchronized with the earth’s rotation, enabling it to effectively sit still over a country. The Bogotá group’s claim turned out to be unpopular, though, partly because it violated the idea that space is our “common heritage.”

  The arguments continue, but in the meantime we can safely assume that high above nations there is plenty of space, between the lower atmosphere and outer space, that is beyond any country’s jurisdiction. Combined with all that airspace over the high seas, it would appear that the bulk of the world’s thin rim of atmosphere is outside of national or private control.

  So what shall we do with it, if we treat the air above us as somewhere to go, possibly even to live? The idea of airborne cities has been intriguing architects for some while, and a number have been planned by the profession’s blue-sky thinkers. Some of the first schemes were set out by the countercultural architects Archigram, whose Instant City envisaged an entire city hoisted aloft by balloons and helicopters that would then move it anywhere its citizens felt like going. Such a place could easily escape national airspace. It’s an idea that has been extended by others, most recently by focusing less on transporting cities and more on the business of keeping aloft. Utopian architect Leah Beeferman envisages a kind of scattered republic: “The helicopters themselves could be liberated to form their own city—an airborne utopia, endlessly aloft, wandering through the planetary atmosphere.”

  For Beeferman, this “helicopter archipelago, or flying island-chain,” would be “an escape hatch from traditional, nation-state sovereignty.” It would roam across inte
rnational airspace: the “archipelago would be impossible to map. Atlas-makers and manufacturers of globes will simply include a pack of removable stickers, featuring small clouds of helicopters, to approximate the country’s location.” It is somehow fitting that the idea of free airspace should deposit us on cloud nine. Although a strange and alien environment, the air is also the natural place for far-fetched bids for human happiness.

  Gutterspace

  In the early 1970s the conceptual artist Gordon Matta-Clark began buying up shards of land between buildings in New York City, called gutterspaces. Most are just a few feet wide, though they are often hundreds of feet long. They are the useless remnants of the planning process auctioned off by the city authorities. Matta-Clark bought fifteen (fourteen in Queens and one on Staten Island), and over the next few years he took photos and collected the plot plans, deeds, and all the bureaucratic documentation he could get hold of associated with each of his new properties.

  Most of these gutterspaces are alleyways, sunk in shadow; lurking between buildings, they have a furtive, melancholy look. It seems that Matta-Clark was drawn to them precisely because they were advertised as “inaccessible.” In an interview he explained that he liked the paradox of owning spaces that “wouldn’t be seen and certainly not occupied.” But Lot 15, Jamaica Curb, is different: it is a long rim of sidewalk that sits in broad sunlight, an accessible, apparently public space and a flagrant bit of legal and commercial oddness. Matta-Clark’s twenty-four photos of it form an eleven-and-a-half-foot-long collage.

  Matta-Clark died in 1978 at the age of thirty-five, leaving his project, which he called “Fake Estates,” unfinished. It was already getting irksome, largely because of all the separate property taxes he had to pay. The lots, which cost him as little as $25, each incurred a tax of $7 or $8 a year. Although after he died the land reverted back to city ownership, Matta-Clark’s untidy piles of papers were assembled and put in order by his widow, Jane Crawford, and, over the past couple of decades, exhibitions, books, and bus tours have been constructed around them. “Fake Estates” has become a touchstone for a new generation of psychogeographical artists.