Introduction

Encampments have become a highly visible and frequently utilised protest practice in the repertoire of contemporary social movements. While the practice of protest camping spans the globe, academics have only recently begun to study the spatial and performative dimensions of protest practice. In their pioneering study Feigenbaum, Frenzel and McCurdy (2013) pay special attention to the infrastructures of protest camps, which enable them to produce unique experiences of ‘participation, collaboration, collectivity and mutuality’. Following up on their focus on infrastructures, this chapter analyses the role of materiality in the formation of a specific political atmosphere and space in Istanbul's Gezi Park during the protests of June 2013. The research question driving this chapter asks: why do the similar infrastructures of protest camps not engender similar political atmospheres? Answering this question requires a deeper engagement with the specific infrastructures of the protest camp under study, in our case Gezi Park. Moreover, it also requires an analytical approach which focuses not only on a camp's different types of infrastructures, but also on how these emerge and evolve over time, what functions they serve as well as how they communicate with the protestors and resonate with the broader political environment. Lastly, developing an analysis of infrastructures with this perspective – one that pays attention to how infrastructures either facilitate or enable certain modes of action and interaction during a protest – also requires examining the relationship between specific material and spatial forms and practices and the political atmosphere created in and through those forms and practices.

Our analysis of the Gezi Park protest camp suggests that the materials, objects and infrastructures of a camp might not primarily serve to build a sustainable space of protest or to support a community of resistance, as they are often conceptualised. Instead, they allow for individuals to relate to each other in a certain way, create bonds and affects between participants and enable a process of emergence and recomposition. These functions are not inscribed in the instrumental use of the materials used to assemble the camps but were produced within the specific political and affective atmosphere of Gezi Park itself. To this end, our main argument throughout this chapter is that the conventional topology of infrastructures and practices, in which infrastructures enable certain types of actions was, in fact, inverted at Gezi Park.