The project has focused on three different border environments located along a typical migrant trajectory linking Sub-Saharan Africa to Europe. Each of these areas constitutes a different kind of “Hostile Environment” and makes it possible to explore a specific theoretical and historical-political facet of this concept.
The first “border environment” comprises two areas in located in Sub-Saharan Africa: the Gambian coastline and the desert border between Niger and Algeria. These areas have been subjected to intensified practices of capitalist extraction that by depleting resources and creating toxic sacrifice zones often lead, in complex and non-linear ways, to displacement. At the same time, long-standing exchange networks and mobilities have been illegalised through European authorities’ border externalisation practices. Work in this area has thus focused on instances in which resource frontiers encounter bordering practices. In Gambia, we have been working with communities and groups affected by overfishing practices and in particular the establishment in recent years of industrial fish meal and fish oil factories along the Gambian coast which are threatening the livelihoods of coastal communities, pushing many to seek a livelihood elsewhere. Working with partners and stakeholders based in Gambia, Spain and elsewhere, the project team is facilitating workshops, creative encounters and a radio show and is producing audio-visual outputs, publications and installations that seek to document and make palpable the effects of these entangled forms of (im-)mobilities. Most recently, we have also started to work on the interconnections between migration, mining economies and border violence along the Niger-Algeria border, focusing on deportation practices in the vicinity of gold mining sites.
In the second “border environment”, research has focused on how border surveillance practices have weapoinsed borders’ material and legal geographies create Hostile Environments. In particular, the team has looked at how, in the Central Mediterranean, aerial surveillance activities by the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, Frontex, and others have become a central plank of the EU’s strategy to prevent asylum seekers from reaching Europe by boat and return them to Libya, where they face widespread abuse and exploitation. Through open-source and forensic methods, data, and image analysis we produced a video that was show at the renowned Venice Art Biennale 2024, as well as a comprehensive installation commissioned by the Festival d’Automne in Paris. This research also led to the publications of a visual “scrollytelling” investigation published in December 2022 in collaboration with the renowned international organisation Human Rights Watch (
https://www.hrw.org/video-photos/interactive/2022/12/08/airborne-complicity-frontex-aerial-surveillance-enables-abuse(opens in new window)). A new, wide-ranging online platforms that will present the results of this research will be published online in the first quarter of 2025.
In the third border environment, the main focus has been the area of Calais, where the project team has been carrying out interviews and various site visits, and is currently focusing on documenting a case of border death which exemplifies how the waterways in this area have been weaponised by dangerous police tactics against migrants trying to embark on small boats to reach the UK.
In addition to these research activities, the project team has also been working on a series of "critical lexicon" events, each extending over several days (the first took place in Bologna between 30 May and 1 June 2024, the second will take place in London between 4 and 7 February 2025, and the third is planned for Autumn 2025) and featuring the participation of various scholars, artists and activists. Through various modes of engagement (scholarly presentations and debates, walks, site visits, performances, screenings, etc.) these events are organised around a set of key terms that are central to the project and that we aim to collectively (re-)define.
An updated record of project outputs and achievements is available on the project website at:
https://liminal-lab.org/(opens in new window)
