The Archipelago

The socio-spatial condition is explored through lens of selected thematic elements that manifest these inhospitable geographies navigated by migrants across the Franco Italian border: The elements of infrastructure, labour, temporality, terrain, legality and solidarity will be investigated through selected devices of knowledge production. This union between the output of analytical and media-based objects aims to produce an offering that may cultivate inquiry, collaboration and intervention among a community of actors determined to deconstruct ideologies that sustain the struggle of migrants in-transit.

 

We acknowledge inhospitable geographies as non-linear and dialectically dispersed urban formations, an archipelagic framework affords our research the ability to situate our selected thematics across distant geographies and temporalities as anti-migrant border-making practices persist contiguously among central and peripheral border regions. The approach forms an intersectional site of migrant struggle produced by the interaction of relational differences experienced by individuals within these selected regions. The assemblage of social, environmental, economic and historical formations of each inhospitable geography across the selected sites react dialectically to produce an archipelagic network that represents the collective interplay faced by migrants in-transit. This comparative methodological approach affords our research the ability to foster transregional and transnational solidarity through the lens of selected design apparatus and modes of visual representation such as film, 3D Models(digital and physical), Archives and Mapping.