Abstract

Migration professionals characterized the 2008 exodus of Zimbabweans into South Africa as a "massive refugee situation" (MRS). In response, and at the request of senior cabinet officials in the central government, South African state architects developed plans for a "model" camp along the Mozambique-South Africa border in the event of another MRS. We use the article to understand implications of the "model" on the proposed site. This requires playing with notions of the border. Play, here, occurs in a context where Mozambique is parsed from South Africa and where much of the South African side encompasses Kruger National Park as, historically, site of high apartheid and Afrikaner nationalism. Using transdisciplinary speculative design, the article's proposed intervention is a radical design intervention. Specifically, without naïvete, we gesture towards a return to a decolonized site more proximate to a spacetime without mobile matter monitored with devices, before electrified fences shocked the mobile into an organic order, and when matter across difference could go undetected because it was too wicked, too microscopic, or too subaltern while airborne, surface, subterranean, or interstitial.