ABSTRACT
Drawing a plan of Zavoj village produces a knowable form of representation and an image of a place that constructs its architectural identity. The plan produces Zavoj as a unified and preserved whole, while the village is also, after migration, abandoned and disordered. Migration joins Zavoj to many destination cities, and return travel from Melbourne, Stockholm, Cologne and San Francisco activates these connections. This travel history challenges representations of the village as traditional place. Mapping these migratory destinations together with the plan of Zavoj disrupts cartography as fixed and static geographic location of places. A plan of Zavoj has a dual purpose: to give Zavoj architectural legibility and to explore the limits of that representation by an examination of its context, history and village tales. Important to this exploration is Zavoj’s location in the Republic of Macedonia. Rather than offering a clear definitive geopolitical position, Macedonia further disrupts the knowability of Zavoj and returns the political to the discourse of migration and architecture.
