The ambition of the project was to develop an approach to the visual analysis of geopolitical borders through the experience of those who encounter them, focusing particularly on undocumented migrants and border communities. Increasing inequalities, conflict, and climate change are resulting in large scale movements of people and the further militarisation and outsourcing of the borders of the so-called developed world. Our research addressed lived realities of migration through focusing on a series of border sites along a migration route from South Asia towards Europe. In doing so, the project investigated the relationship between technologies of border security, systems of documentation, border landscapes, and the experience of crossing borders without papers.
The project questioned the traditional understanding of migration as linear movement toward and arrival at a destination by reconceiving migration as perpetual—and perpetually enforced—circulation. It aimed at developing new ways of thinking about the spatial practices and logics associated with migration, including how borders work as forms of securitized and militarized infrastructure. It challenged the normative understanding of the temporality of migration as a spectacular event or crisis, considering instead the mundane, everyday and slower aspects of displaced lives.
By addressing migration in this way the project challenged normative ways in which migration has been represented, including through methods of mapping and spatial analysis used to represent the movement of people. It aimed at representing borders as topological entities through the experience of those who encounter them. This entailed asking how technologies of mapping, sensing and spatial analysis have affected movements across borders. It also included questioning how ideas of distance and location are encoded within digital mapping platforms. Finally, the objective of the project was to produce new ways of representing borders and the movement of people through foregrounding social, cultural and political relations as spatialised phenomena that exceed the organising logics of scale and distance.
