This event will be held in English and French.
Organized AgorAkademi in collaboration with Nomis Research Project Elastic Borders, Uni Graz, with the support of the Columbia Global Paris Center.
Register by email: [email protected]
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The issue of human mobility and border security is increasingly becoming a decisive socio-political concern, particularly with the rise in global migration trends and the militarization of borders. Border governance and its surveillance techniques serve to both restrict mobility and determine the criteria for selecting population flows.
In the context of borders and immigration, practices such as refoulement, border militarization, detention policies, and decisions regarding who is permitted to survive and who is abandoned to perish all represent facets of necropolitics. These practices not only limit people's mobility but also perpetuate conditions of precarity and insecurity, relegating migrants to the margins. In contrast, politics of solidarity and hospitality challenges this logic by emphasizing the ethical imperative to support those in need and engaging politics of care and humanity with migrants.
In this AgorAkademi seminar in collaboration with the NOMIS Research Project “Elastic Borders”, Nilüfer Göle and Bilgin Ayata bring together researchers and artists to rethink borders from the perspective of public space. Borders are not to be seen as a linear line of demarcation but as a space with its own social life. In this seminar we will approach borders from the perspective of diverse actors implicated in politics of migration and will explore the kind of public space that emerges from the co-presence and interdependence between asylum seekers, local residents, humanitarian aid workers, and border personnel.
In this transitory border-public space, migrants endure a period of waiting, transforming this threshold into a provisional home while envisioning a future beyond the border. The artistic work helps us to open our vision to human and social life at the border space as well as to bring into our consciousness the human experience of loss.
Program
9:30 a.m. Welcome Coffee
9:45 a.m. Nilüfer Göle: Introductory Remarks
10:00 a.m.-13:00 p.m. The Social Life of Borders: Space, Temporality and Transformations
- Bilgin Ayata: “The temporality of the militarization of borders: The evolving elastic border zone in the Canary Islands as a journey back in time”
- Artemis Fyssa: “From Old to New: The Time and Space Compression of the Elastic Border Zone in Samos”
Short Break
- Chiara Pagano: “Cahiers de deuiléances at Tunisian-Libyan Frontier: commemora(c)tions to turn mourning into mobilization”
- Laura Jung: “Advanced Technologies at the EU Border”
13:00-14:00 p.m. Lunch Break
14:00-16:00 p.m. Artistic Interventions: Border as a Contested Public Sphere
- Melissa Moralli: “Frontières (In)visibles: researching (in)visible borders and artivism at the crossroads between disciplines”
- Carolyn Defrin: “Can art disrupt border-constructed social relationships? Exploring possibilities for dignity and compassion through image and poetry”
- Arkadi Zaides: “Choreography as an Investigative Tool: Exploring Europe's Border Mechanisms”
16:00-16:30 p.m. Coffee Break
16:30-17:30 p.m. General discussion
