Undocumented

Using comics, interviews, and architectural sketches, Undocumented explores a growing industry in an era of militarized borders, state surveillance, and criminalized migration. Originally released in 2014 to an architectural audience, this special edition from Ad Astra Comix features an updated afterword by Syed Hussan (No One Is Illegal, Toronto), as well as an interview with a former detainee. Focusing on Canadas migrant detention system, where detainees are often held in maximum security prisons without charges for indefinite periods of time, 'Undocumented' draws chilling conclusions about the societies that tolerate these punitive spaces of confinement. Proceeds from the sale of each book go to the End Immigration Detention Network.

This slim book does not only contain more detail of the architecture of detention centres than some scholarly works on the architecture of incarceration, but it begins to outline the invisible experience of hidden-away people in hidden-away places.' --Raphael Sperry, President of Architects/Planners/Designers for Social Responsibility (ADPSR-USA)

Even after the 20th century s concentration camps and Michel Foucault s theory of the Panopticon, Architecture arguably maintains its identity as a project cultural enrichment and social uplift. Tapping a darker side of Architecture s enlightenment legacy, this remarkable graphic novel by Tings Chak documents Canadian detention centers and sites for processing individuals whose residency is in question, revealing often hidden equations between architecture, political power and human rights. --- Richard Sommer, Dean of John H. Daniels School of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto

Tings Chak has produced an essential resource for migrant justice and prison abolition movements. The architecture of incarceration - the maze of cameras, locks, guards, fluorescent lights, crammed cells - shatters the government myth of migrant detention as a hotel. By being attune to the simple details, this graphic novel brilliantly subverts what is supposed to remain invisible and locked away." --- Harsha Walia, Co-founder of No One Is Illegal and author of Undoing Border Imperialism