Migrant Temporality
The socio-spatial conditions of the Franco-Italian border are explored through the lenses of selected thematics useful to foreground the making of the inhospitable geographies migrants are forced into labour, temporality, terrain, legality and solidarity.
Through the concept of the “border as archipelago” the research aims to acknowledge the inhospitable geographies that compose the borderscapes as non-linear and dialectically dispersed assemblages; Moreover, such fragmentary framework affords us - the researchers - the ability to situate our work across various scales, media (3d modelling, video, archival practices, mapping techniques, etc.), forms of solidarity, and disciplines. to better address the borders moving between social, environmental, economic and historical formations.
Borders, the thin lines drawn on a map, have the power to segregate territories and by extension people. The routes and the time taken for border crossing by the people in transit who have faced threat/persecution in their home country involves life-threatening risks, which can lead to pushback to the detention centres/expulsion and/or death. Border Temporalities is an attempt to represent the complex process of migration by adopting time as an organising principle. The critical mapping exercise that resulted, spans various locations of interest where the temporality of management - including the compression of time associated with the forced displacement and its elongation as in the waiting time or detention - are most evident. The map also indicates a wormhole, a time slippage in an effort to mirror the difficulties faced in their migration routes, which results in a pushback to an earlier point in time and the process. The map then represents a parallel geography of exclusion from legal pathways and standard mobility, drawing new relationships of distance and proximity between these locations.
a place for water | date: october 2021 | size: 800mm x 800mm | team: ashish dalal guided by riccardo badano