Curated by Julia Moustacchi

Ever-increasing numbers of people and populations are experiencing life as an extended state of emergency. In such circumstances, local, regional, national and international responses are often predicated on the notion of a state of exception. What if the state of exception becomes the conditions of life: the refugee camp becomes home for several generations or a 6-month detainment in Direct Provision becomes an entire childhood?

Vagabond Reviews initiated Emergency Knowledge: The Missing Archives as a visual arts project that combines a rigorous examination of notions of emergency with archival practices of recovery and (re)construction. Vagabond Reviews have been working with key individuals / activists, we’ve called them constructivists, in order to produce an assemblage of archival traces of specific, situated emergencies. Over a series of diagnostic conversations, each constructivist was asked to consider their situated emergency through three key registers: the visual, the acoustic and the lexical (words, documents and books). Presented as a series of Archive Pods, photography, sound, text and film have been interlaced in order to create a hybrid space of inquiry at The LAB Gallery.