Workshop, lecture and show I The world put to the test by exile

The current evolution of border regimes in the Sahara is the result of external (European) and internal (African) political logics that intersect, hybridize and are embodied in the concomitant transformation of what serves as a border and in the management of the spaces concerned. Old systems of mobility are being disrupted and reconfigured, leading not to the expected drop in migration, but to higher costs, risks, suffering and deaths in the desert.

The Canary Islands have become an elastic border zone, in parallel with the excessive militarization of the Central and Eastern Mediterranean routes. At present, it is the deadliest route to the European Union. Bilgin Ayata explores the recent increase in boat arrivals from West Africa and local resistance to becoming another island prison of the EU border regime in the wider context of border coloniality, which shapes the configuration of the archipelagos as passageways to and from Europe.

Why are Croatia’s borders among the most violent in Europe? Twenty years of restrictive migration policies were imposed on Croatia to join the European Union (2013) and the Schengen area (2023). These geopolitical games contribute to a sordid “game”, the name given to attempts to cross the border that are prevented by violent or even fatal refoulements. Exiles, authorities and local populations bear witness to this geography of inhospitality forged from above.

Barbara Pinelli offers a reflection on the strategic use of “salvation” on the Central Mediterranean route, examining the link between border regimes, humanitarian taxonomies and the iconic construction of the female subject. Through a feminist perspective and by reconstructing the discursive registers constructed on women’s disembarkation, she reveals how the use of the female body as an icon of vulnerability serves to reinforce border regimes and establish taxonomic orders between perfect victims and refugees who don’t deserve to be saved.

At the border, bodies are subjected to the gaze of doctors as well as law enforcement officers, to biomedical as well as biometric examination, to compassion as well as rejection. But above all, they are the site of the pathological, traumatic and deadly experience of crossing the border. This presentation focuses on the border of the central Mediterranean, examining the ways in which the border can reduce migrants to their bodies.

Since the 2000s, many documentary films made in Europe have focused on border areas. In some cases, these films have been made by European filmmakers. In other cases, migrants themselves have documented their journeys. A constant aspect, found in films with very different sensibilities, is the interest in media technologies that operate in border areas, enabling strategies of control, forms of assistance and tactics of resistance.

How do you document and analyze a massacre? Can we make visible the dehumanization of racialized subjects without reproducing and normalizing it? Can we account for an event from the dual perspective of its rupture and its structural conditions of possibility? These questions will be addressed in Border Forensics’ investigation, in collaboration with other partners, of the massacre of black migrants at the Nador-Melilla border on June 24, 2022.

A few years ago, a garden was created along the banks of the Tiber in Rome, below the former Mattatoio. It was created by a Kurdish refugee, who takes care of it. A lesson in hospitality in reverse, a moving prayer for the whole city… But where does Yusuf live? What’s his story? We shouldn’t confine him to his garden, but make him the man of a place that cures us of our own inhospitality. It’s a whole, invisible trajectory of exile that needs to be measured.