Periodic Reporting for period 4 - TopATLAS (Topological Atlas: Mapping Contemporary Borderscapes)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2022-05-01 al 2023-11-30
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.
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.
The research encompassed theoretical, empirical and applied aspects described below:
Theoretical – Digital cartographies and agency
We developed the concept of ‘horizonless worlds’ as a way to think through the use of computational technologies in border management and their intersection with visual regimes of mapping and modelling. The visual mapping approach we developed did not aim to expose migrant trajectories, instead we focused on particular border areas that are part of the circulatory movements and precarious inhabitations of migrant lives. From the migrant perspective, we worked with the idea of a ‘persistent present’ where time becomes an embodied means of control and we analysed the relationship between an imperial time of migration and the lived effects of border control on everyday life.
Empirical – Borderscape methodology
Topological Atlas combined ethnographic and participatory research with digital methods of mapping and modelling. Through a series of border ethnographies at the Pakistan-Iran, Iran-Turkey and Pakistan-India borders, the project explored the lived realities of border communities, including their role in the movement of people across borders. We also investigated the role of infrastructural development in the militarisation of border areas. The empirical research included in-depth interviews with migrants, local actors and border officials, as well as community based workshops in each of the fieldwork sites. Additionally, we analysed a large number of legal cases pertaining to migration in Pakistan and Turkey in order to gain an understanding of how the law operates at an everyday level.
Applied – Topological Atlas digital platform
We have experimented with ways to analyse interview data using visual methods that have been exhibited at international exhibitions and biennales. This work led to an exploration of the relationship between visual representations, displacement and the political subject and culminated in a new digital platform designed to enable qualitative and collaborative interpretations of research material through spatial and semantic analysis: http://otherwise.topologicalatlas.net(si apre in una nuova finestra)
This line of work has led to thinking the atlas otherwise beyond the now well trodden ground of critiquing cartographic projections and their complicity in colonisation. Instead, we have explored the role of resolution in machinic vision and the deeply embedded idea of the impermeability of the earth’s surface in relation to maps.
Theoretical – Digital cartographies and agency
We developed the concept of ‘horizonless worlds’ as a way to think through the use of computational technologies in border management and their intersection with visual regimes of mapping and modelling. The visual mapping approach we developed did not aim to expose migrant trajectories, instead we focused on particular border areas that are part of the circulatory movements and precarious inhabitations of migrant lives. From the migrant perspective, we worked with the idea of a ‘persistent present’ where time becomes an embodied means of control and we analysed the relationship between an imperial time of migration and the lived effects of border control on everyday life.
Empirical – Borderscape methodology
Topological Atlas combined ethnographic and participatory research with digital methods of mapping and modelling. Through a series of border ethnographies at the Pakistan-Iran, Iran-Turkey and Pakistan-India borders, the project explored the lived realities of border communities, including their role in the movement of people across borders. We also investigated the role of infrastructural development in the militarisation of border areas. The empirical research included in-depth interviews with migrants, local actors and border officials, as well as community based workshops in each of the fieldwork sites. Additionally, we analysed a large number of legal cases pertaining to migration in Pakistan and Turkey in order to gain an understanding of how the law operates at an everyday level.
Applied – Topological Atlas digital platform
We have experimented with ways to analyse interview data using visual methods that have been exhibited at international exhibitions and biennales. This work led to an exploration of the relationship between visual representations, displacement and the political subject and culminated in a new digital platform designed to enable qualitative and collaborative interpretations of research material through spatial and semantic analysis: http://otherwise.topologicalatlas.net(si apre in una nuova finestra)
This line of work has led to thinking the atlas otherwise beyond the now well trodden ground of critiquing cartographic projections and their complicity in colonisation. Instead, we have explored the role of resolution in machinic vision and the deeply embedded idea of the impermeability of the earth’s surface in relation to maps.
One of the main contributions of the Topological Atlas project is the development of novel methodologies that foreground the use of visual methods in spatial research in areas of conflict and contestation. This has also led to a new conceptualisation of the relationship between the production of place and migration, and the role if architecture within it.
The project combined ethnographic and participatory research on migration and borders with digital methods of mapping and modelling. Usually such work takes one of two approaches: producing visualisations using quantitative data; or visual storytelling techniques that use a map as a base to navigate a person’s journey. Our approach was different, we used the interview data itself as a base for visualisations. This meant moving away from a focus on the journey towards considering how the lived experience of movement produces spatial relations. This insight has led to a repositioning of architecture and other spatial practices in relation to increased migration and the militarisation of borders.
Both migration research and architecture operate on an assumption that staying in place is the norm and movement and displacement are exceptions. In fact, architecture is understood as a product of settlement, where an architectural engagement with migration is only considered through the provision of shelter or the integration of migrants into communities. This approach does not engage with contemporary realities of migration as perpetual displacement and unsettlement.
Through visual and textual accounts of borders and migration our research mobilized architectural knowledge in response to the consequences of migration understood as unsettlement. Our approach to mapping and visual analysis bridged the gap between the evidentiary and the affective, and mapped the exchange between the digital and the analogue, precisely because these are also modes in which contemporary borders and migration discourse functions. This has led to a repositioning of the role of architectural and spatial practices in relation to unsettlement and migration.
The project combined ethnographic and participatory research on migration and borders with digital methods of mapping and modelling. Usually such work takes one of two approaches: producing visualisations using quantitative data; or visual storytelling techniques that use a map as a base to navigate a person’s journey. Our approach was different, we used the interview data itself as a base for visualisations. This meant moving away from a focus on the journey towards considering how the lived experience of movement produces spatial relations. This insight has led to a repositioning of architecture and other spatial practices in relation to increased migration and the militarisation of borders.
Both migration research and architecture operate on an assumption that staying in place is the norm and movement and displacement are exceptions. In fact, architecture is understood as a product of settlement, where an architectural engagement with migration is only considered through the provision of shelter or the integration of migrants into communities. This approach does not engage with contemporary realities of migration as perpetual displacement and unsettlement.
Through visual and textual accounts of borders and migration our research mobilized architectural knowledge in response to the consequences of migration understood as unsettlement. Our approach to mapping and visual analysis bridged the gap between the evidentiary and the affective, and mapped the exchange between the digital and the analogue, precisely because these are also modes in which contemporary borders and migration discourse functions. This has led to a repositioning of the role of architectural and spatial practices in relation to unsettlement and migration.