Through Butlers (2016) definitions of infrastructure, vulnerability, resistance and Weizmans (2007) concept of political plastic I examine how vulnerability and specifically the vulnerability in the textile materiality is instrumental in the way protest camps create politics. Vulnerable gendered and racialized bodies plays and the infrastructure supporting these bodies plays a central part in making politics in public space (Butler 2011, 2016). The political resistance of the camp and the tent, I argue, is defined by the vulnerability, both the bodily and the material.
Previous discourses around the protest camp architecture as protest focuses on the contrast between the unplanned and the controlled city (for example Hosey 2000, Cresswell 1996) or a shift in reading architectural space (for example Cowan 2001, Nango 2011).
Butler (2011, 2016) describes the body as vulnerable to external forces, at the same time this vulnerability makes the bodies political. In Oslo, Norway empirical studies show how this could be seen in practice (Rubing 2017). In Oslo, the bodies of the Palestinian refugees made it possible to maintain a camp for a prolonged period. I argue that the tent is capable of extending, reinforcing and protecting the body but are simultaneously dependent on the vulnerability in the textile and of the bodies it protects and extends. The resistance and vulnerability of the textile material and the body it houses are consequently strategic in creating politics.
In Silwan, Palestine the strategic vulnerability of the textile as infrastructure simultaneously resisted the destruction of Palestinian homes and demonstrated the state violence. Through the years of the protest, the protest tent physically changed shape in relation to the violence of the authority, opposing the protest.

Anders Rubing is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Women’s and Gender Research (SKOK) at University in Bergen, Norway. Rubing is an architect educated at Bergen School of Architecture (BAS) and the Bergen Academy of Arts and Design. Anders programmes and teaches master studios at BAS where he also is a thesis supervisor. He is co-editor of the multi-award-winning book ‘The City Between Freedom and Security: Contested Public Spaces in the 21st Century’ (Birkhäuser, 2017). Rubing is also a frequent contributor to national architecture magazines like for example ‘Arkitektur N.’

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