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FabricationsThe Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia andNew Zealand

ISSN: 1033-1867 (Print) 2164-4756 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfab20

Fugitive Borders

Sean Anderson

To cite this article: Sean Anderson (2015) Fugitive Borders, Fabrications, 25:3, 344-375

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10331867.2015.1075462

Published online: 17 Dec 2015.

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Figure 1: Centre of Temporary Permanence, Contrada Imbraciola CIE, Lampedusa. Note the burnedaccommodation structure in the background.Photograph by Carole Reckinger; accessed from www.carolereckinger.co.uk.

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Fugitive BordersEstrangement and Violence at the Centre ofTemporary Permanence

Sean Anderson

AbstractBy bringing together the violent narratives and spatial conditions incurred by andthrough the processes of migrations in the Mediterranean, this article draws attentionto the imperative of critically understanding the migrant’s body as a mobile border.Transgressing those limits that attempt to “secure” and ultimately deny access toEuropean nations, the migrant’s body is posited as that which imperils the juridicaland temporal underpinnings of sovereignty, humanitarian ethics and the formation ofborders in postcolonial contemporary architecture. The article observes recent scenesof incarceration and protest at the former Centro della Permanenza Temporanea(Centre for Temporary Permanence) on the island of Lampedusa – one component ina broader carceral network established to thwart and monitor unchecked immigrationand asylum seeking in Italy. Situated as Western Europe’s southernmost border,Lampedusa and its incipient regimes of coercion, while documented in recentcritiques, are reified by an anonymous memorialising of deaths at sea and themaintenance of boats kept as “evidence” for court cases involving human trafficking.Estrangement, represented in part by the disappearance of countless individuals onmigratory journeys, ultimately speaks to an ontology of borders that is punitive notonly by design, but also in their perilous construction.

Introduction

A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as [the] Greeks recognized,

the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing. That is why

the concept is of horismos, that is, the horizon, the boundary.1 – Martin

Heidegger

Everything depends on the power behind the violence.2 – Hannah Arendt

One could begin with a lurid description of the bodies; the bodies that

routinely wash up on the shores of Mediterranean islands. Perhaps it is

necessary to analyse the historicity of the same bodies stuffed into the boats,

dinghies and other crafts that have been attempting to cross the expanse of

water that lies between the African continent and that of Europe? Or is it more

palpable to commence with a narrative about the capsizing of the boats: the

treacheries of ill-equipped “captains” with faulty instruments and coupled with

even less able men, women and children, their minimal equipage and

ineluctable enclosures no match for the political currents that await them at

unknown destinations. These are the lives lost … missing, even.

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Fabrications, 2015Vol. 25, No. 3, 344–375, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10331867.2015.1075462© 2015 The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand

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With the changing of the seasons, when the waves become stronger and the

temperatures plummet, the boats and the bodies continue to find their way

onto the radar screens of naval craft, fishing trawlers and occasionally onto the

televisions of a not-so-attentive public. Such momentary glimpses do not

coincide with the potential visibility of these events. But it is the invisibility of

the detention facilities that is problematic. Individuals are only seen

momentarily, if ever – whether via the media or disembarking from

intercepted vessels – before entering a detention facility for unknown periods.

The migrant and asylum seeker’s disappearance marks an analogous departure

from (public) view as that commenced when they stepped into a boat to cross

the sea. Such narratives pronounce the severity of those in-between states

experienced by thousands of persons at a moment when geography is no

longer an adequate deterrent to entering a country without papers.

Architecture plays a fundamental role in the safeguarding of these negotiable

boundaries. Where borders once delimited the peripheries of states, today,

boatloads of refugees, like the buildings that house those trapped in

immigration detention, have become manifold territories in which bodies are

held captive by temporalities and spaces that exorcise external power.

Shouldered with a promise, thousands of individuals wind their way across

multiple borders, nations under siege and makeshift detention centres, until

they reach the edge of one continent in preparation for another. What exactly

occurs between these zones, however, remains unknown. Even when

broadcast, we do not necessarily consider the manifold states that have

engendered these extrajudicial movements and failures that have come to

represent the diminishing limits of sovereignty. We find, among the multiple

collapses of borders and bodies into architectural spaces, an opportunity to

interrogate the fluid, unpredictable courses of “irregular” migration, seeking

asylum and the search for new origins. These may be narratives of “un-belonging” by a “non-public”,3 as represented by the media, but when read

against the moralistic and ethical determinants of an architecture of security,

such pervasive actions have a profound effect on where we initiate histories of

the present. The incipient boundaries between here and there, now and then,

are less apparent. This is where we can start: in-between; waiting.

Migration’s attendant architectures evolve through disembodiment, risk and

violence. The migrant, refugee and asylum seeker and the borders that they

encounter during movement across treacherous landscapes are inculcated by

the vagaries of the in-between. By examining the topologies through which

migration extends the placelessness of migrants and asylum seekers today, the

architecture of Italian immigration detention serves as both an arbiter and

model for a nation’s opprobrium. Architecture may thus be critically situated

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within a schism between a conciliatory gesture and as an instrument of

control. Consequently, the architecture of global immigration detention

mediates humanitarian obligation, while exemplifying sovereign exception.4

Through an extension of “border thinking,” as outlined by geographers such as

Alison Mountz and Corey Johnson, the inherent spatiality of the border as

addressed through global networks of detention facilities resists orthodox

narratives.5 Whereas the indeterminate territories through which the migrant

and asylum seeker passes are cast off at the edge of the sea, once made visible

adrift in boats, those individuals and boats themselves embody borders in their

mobility and structuring. It may be argued that the disappearance of countless

individuals into migratory trajectories, however, results in the expansion of

immigration detention facilities and networks throughout the world.

For the broader context of the Mediterranean, the transformation of boats

into mobile borders broadens our interpretation of what constitutes

architecture for migrants and asylum seekers. Occupying boats and borders

consigns an individual to an in-between, slipping through geographic and

architectural imaginaries, for both exemplify conditions of dwelling or, as

James Clifford describes, “dwelling in travel”.6 Our current understanding of

transnational architecture has failed to grasp that by moving beyond a

conventional understanding of buildings to include conditions of mobility,

impermanency and less tangible forms of habitation, architecture plays a

fundamental role in redefining an ethics of space. The architecture of

migration, whether evidenced by the boat or border, is thus posed not only as

an instrument of coercion, but also as a coded realm, within which the

ontologies of migration are secured. This article observes aspects of a spatio-

temporal materiality apprehended by migrants as they move across and

through borders. It examines how these transits are composed of fragments of

the same architectural components we recognise, including urban settings,

landscapes, buildings and infrastructure, but are always provisional and

incomplete. Mediterranean migrations, which now account for the greatest

number of deaths of individuals in transit, have also become a mode by which

European Union nations continue to negotiate the harsh conditions of

“temporary permanence”.7

Responding to the recent crises of capsized migrant boats and multiple

interceptions on the Mediterranean, this article is structured around narratives

of movement and displacement that question understandings of the border as

a fixed and therefore “constructed” entity. It identifies the body of the

migrant-asylum seeker as a mobile border, by and through which we can

define radical temporalities. In parallel, each section of the article draws upon

the work of philosophy, geography, political theory, aesthetics and border

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studies to understand what may be construed as a juridical fashioning of

migratory practices within contemporary architectural thinking. Despite their

visibility in the media, the migrant’s boat acts as a lens through which the

unseen spaces of immigration detention centres on the island of Lampedusa

and throughout the Italian state are revealed. By extension, the article

attempts to draw together how the bodies of migrants and asylum seekers,

when rendered as an assimilated whole rather than as individuals, complicate

the efficacy of border systems within national security architectures.

Lampedusa is one of two small rocky islands that are physically closer to

North Africa than they are to the larger landmass of Sicily. Historically, the

island was rarely recorded on maps of Italy, which typically ended with the

islands of Sicily in the south and Sardinia in the west. Situated seventy miles

(112 kilometres) from Tunisia and 125 miles (201 kilometres) from Sicily, the

island has been called the “face of the frontier”, given its proximity to points

southward and the relative ease with which migrants and asylum seekers may

access a European border. With tourism primarily arising from within Italy,

the islands that form the Pelagie archipelago are known for their secluded

rocky beaches, intimate hotels and vacation homes away from the more

popular areas on the Italian peninsula and elsewhere. It is distinctly this

geographic isolation that afforded the local and federal governments an

opportunity to build structures that serve as reception and holding centres for

migrants and asylum seekers (see Fig 1).

The island of Lampedusa, with a permanent population of around 5,000,

once primarily known as a crossroads of North African and southern

Mediterranean influences, has been transformed from a humble vacation

destination and fishing centre to a place dominated by scenes of death at sea

and political oversight at the heart of an international refugee crisis. Since

autumn 2004, when the Italian authorities expelled more than 1,000 migrants

without papers from its immigration detention centre on the Mediterranean

island of Lampedusa, the network of facilities to hold migrants, refugees and

asylum seekers, formerly named Centres for Temporary Detention or Centri di

Permanenza Temporanea (CPT), has been the subject of an outpouring of

international criticism.8 One may deliberately mistranslate the descriptor of

“temporary permanence” as indicative of a larger crisis regarding the

quantification of temporality with regard to managing the international

borders in and out of Italy. Yet, the same collection of sites that are now

deemed Centres for Identification and Expulsion (CIE; Centri di

Identificazioni ed Espulsioni) present a far more precarious repositioning of

the centres’ and the Italian Government’s role in determining the lives of

individuals in and around the thirteen centres spread across the Italian

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peninsula and its islands. While many of the facilities in the network are

located in the midst of urban domains, such as the CIE, found in the suburb of

Ponte Galeria in Rome, others, like those on the islands of Lampedusa and

Sicily, are far enough removed from the dominant tourist and local population

so as not to be seen. Perhaps it is their lack of identification that also cloaks

these facilities with the unknown. Surrounded by high fences and watchtowers

with video surveillance, common among the facilities, or more often by the

coarse topography of its location, the banality of the detention centre with its

well-lit concrete courtyards, barred windows and walled-off attendant

prefabricated facilities are often stretched to capacity. Even while guarded by

members of Italy’s militarised national police force, the carabinieri, the CIE in

Lampedusa was set on fire in February 2009 by some of its “guests” – the

term used to identify its temporary inhabitants – who were protesting their

abuse at the hands of the Italian Government.

Unlike the periphery of Lampedusa, to which most visitors gravitate, the

CIE is positioned inland, on military property at the end of a road inaccessible

to most. Only located a few kilometres from the old port and principal village,

to which the single runway of the airport serves infrequent flights throughout

the year, the CIE sits behind a concrete and metal gate guarded by soldiers in

uniform. Composed of three narrow and long freestanding two-storey buildings

and a one-storey smaller structure with semi-flat roofs and simple windows,

the white structures are barely visible, due to their siting within a small valley

of rocky terrain. Two-storey barrack-style linear accommodations have been

built with Isopam, a highly flammable lightweight material. Portions of the

structures have white plastered walls and red painted tin roofs, simulating a

more permanent architecture. Surrounded by concrete walls topped with chain

link fencing, the grounds of the CIE are dotted with external metal staircases

for access to the upper floors of the narrow dormitories. The corrugated

surfaces of the buildings suggest that they are constructed as prefabricated

units or at least modular elements. Their aspect, when seen from the nearby

hills, is spartan and industrialised, unlike the more timeworn Mediterranean

character of the nearby village, with its modest limestone and stucco

agglomerations. Comparatively, a striking contrast is presented between the

Mediterranean architecture of the town, with its whitewashed facades and

concrete construction, and those of the CIE’s engineered holding facilities. This

is evident when considering that the design and implementation of buildings

at Lampedusa’s CIE presage other kinds of journeying of migratory aesthetics,

including Northern European impositions within a Mediterranean vernacular.

In Italy, Centri di Permanenza Temporanea (Temporary Detention

Centres) were first established in 1998, following approval of anti-immigration

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“Turco-Napolitano” legislation by the centre-left government. This suite of

laws allowed for the detention of “illegal” immigrants or those without

documents, while the police and their cohorts were tasked with “identifying”and “processing” them. Under the “Turco-Napolitano” law, the few previous

“reception camps” on the Italian peninsula were transformed into immigration

detention facilities. Four years later, more restrictive immigration legislation

was passed under the so-called “Bossi-Fini” law. By 2011, Italy passed a law

that extended detention times to a maximum of eighteen months – nine times

longer than had been adopted in the past. Lengthening the total length of time

by which an individual could be held at one of these centres has affected the

legitimacy of using temporary structures as detention facilities. When rendered

as transitory spaces, the same structures framed as typologies as well as

techniques upend conventional understandings of incarceration and mobility.

Individuals inhabiting these way stations have on numerous occasions

protested the deplorable conditions to which they have been subjected.

Overcrowding among Italy’s centres has become the source of much of this

antagonism, as well as the enforced separation of families and poor hygiene.

Prior to 2006, individuals arriving in Lampedusa were held at a reception

centre south of the airport and then transferred to other facilities in Sicily or

on the Italian peninsula. Journalist Fabrizio Gatti, who gained entry by

disguising himself as a Kurdish refugee, stated in a 2005 expose in L’Espressothat he frequently witnessed beatings by guards, that residents were exposed to

overflowing faecal matter in bathrooms and that they were forced to sleep on

threadbare flea-ridden mattresses.9 By 2007, a new facility housing up to 800

persons was constructed outside of town at the end of a road in the hilly

Contrada Imbriacola area. Since then, the population of the centre has been

known to house upwards of 3,000 individuals. Segregated by gender, the two

detention facilities (there is a smaller facility for women, elsewhere on the

island) on Lampedusa are regarded as “austere”, with mattresses placed on

stairwells and in outside courtyards, due to overcrowding. Because both

locations are built on military property, it is very difficult for lawyers, advocate

groups and other officials to gain access to the centres.

On the other side of the Mediterranean, three Libyan camps for migrants

“pushed back” by Italian and other European authorities present an even

darker and more insidious legacy that remains the unseen shadow of their

Italian counterparts, with torture, malnutrition and untold cruelty

commonplace.10 Their spare accommodation ranges from makeshift tents in

the Sahara to disused metal hangars on the edges of towns – all under the

watchful eyes of armed guards, who are members of various factions in and

outside the provisional Libyan Government. This comparison is not used to

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evaluate one form as better than another. Rather, the dominant forms of

immigration detention are bookended on both sides of an individual’s“Mediterranean Passage”. The paradoxical afterlives of impermanence and

immobility experienced by migrants between Libya and Lampedusa –Europe’s southernmost territory – problematises how temporality, inscribed in

the architecture of Italian detention centres, is indicative of border

aggression.11 Since the late 1990s, the United Nations’ Human Rights

Committee, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR),

the European Parliament and several NGOs have all called on Italy to

remediate the physical conditions of its immigration processing centres –including the total time of one’s detention – by which migrants and asylum

seekers are maintained at the centre on Lampedusa, as well as several other

centres throughout Italy.

This article attempts to extend the limits of theoretical constructs that

reduce migration and the invocations of borders as physicalised analogues of

power. Each section attempts to delineate the spatial conditions by which

architecture and contemporary migration coincide to realise new border

systems. Borders can be invisible, multiple, mobile and reciprocal; through

their varied manifestations, we are able to recognise the shifts within

contemporary architectural discourse regarding the emplacement of locality. As

James Clifford suggests: “When borders gain a paradoxical centrality, margins,

edges and lines of communication emerge as complex maps and histories.”12

The spatialising of history has rendered new forms of thinking through and

“in” imprisonment or stasis as a complex terrain in which the negotiable

boundaries of bodies and spaces are conveyed. Situating the border as body

and the migrant body as a mutable border provokes an examination of where

boundaries commence and how borders are embedded within boundary

formations. When the architecture deployed by national immigration

authorities is used to forestall the circulation of bodies, its principal function

has been revised to embolden a prison-like existence.

The architecture of immigration no longer points to a clear determination

of where borders begin. In locations across the Mediterranean today, borders

fashion incipient regimes of estrangement and violence. For Lampedusa and

the thousands of persons who in recent months have attempted (and failed) to

cross these lethal waters, “temporary permanence” has become, in Heidegger’sterms, a state of “Being”, linked to what Clifford has termed “dwelling in

travel”.13 Here, the pointed political, economic and social measures used by

Western European countries to thwart migration on both sides of the

Mediterranean are represented by the presence of multiple immigration camps

and centres. Fostered as an injunction against both individuals and those

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societies that seek to either repair or disengage from their maintenance,

architecture is that which strengthens the bordering of individuals and nations

alike.

How the border as body functions within the in-between nature of

migration also affects how to read the architecture of immigration detention.

The renaming and management of Italian immigration detention facilities from

2011 onward has not only transformed the means by which time is structured,

but also how contemporary spaces, including those of the city, are being

crossed with new, potentially invisible borders reified by bodies in detention.

When transposing subjectivities onto the border, architecture is fused within

the spaces of incarceration and, more broadly, within the trajectories of

migration. If borders are “constitutive feature[s] of the nation-state”,14 then

the migrant’s body, when conceived as a border, may not be able to ever

escape the confines of the nation’s domination.

Transits

Beginning in the 1960s, the majority of migrants from the African continent in

Western Europe have been from the Maghreb, including Morocco, Algeria and

Tunisia, given these countries’ proximity to Spain. However, this trend has

shifted in recent years, in part due to the creation of heavily fortified zones of

exclusion between Spanish principalities and those of Morocco and Algeria.

Today, alongside protracted wars and economic repression, more individuals

from East and Central Africa, as well as those fleeing Syria and the Levant, are

increasingly coerced or voluntarily choosing to wend their way through the

inhospitable landscapes of eastern and northern African countries to the

Mediterranean. These deadly movements frequently go unnoticed until the

flimsy boats that carry the individuals are intercepted at sea. Taken from one

vessel to another and then summarily placed into detention, the migrant

remains in transit and is rarely seen again.

Recent revolutionary actioning (see Fig 2), by former inhabitants of the

centres on Lampedusa and other camps in the region, concerning migration on

Lampedusa as well as in other European cities, evokes more poignant

discussions about the boundaries of race, fear and disenfranchisement among

refugee communities. Other localised forms of public resistance to the perils of

migration on Lampedusa have included “flashmobs” on tourist beaches and

the colourful painting of breakwater blocks by survivors of a shipwreck on

3 October 2013 near the coast guard offices. Discrete “gardens of

remembrance” have emerged in the scrublands surrounding the port, including

found photos and other items from the deceased (see Fig 3). Bulldozing

migratory camps and indefinite detention are but two of the instruments

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Figure 2: Protest of Eritrean refugees, Lampedusa, 2014.Photograph by Carole Reckinger; accessed from www.carolerackinger.co.uk.

Figure 3: Personal effects found in the Boat Cemetery, Lampedusa.Photograph by Carole Reckinger; accessed from www.carolerackinger.co.uk.

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through which governments exact a price for treading on sovereign lands. For

those “in limbo”, including the men, women and children entangled in the

extraterritorial spaces of immigration detention, there are few, if any,

alternative spaces beyond the boats that lodge their appearance. Migrants and

asylum seekers, while not initially construed as “illegal”, are caught in a

geographic and political lacuna, in which the detention centre is conceived

neither as expressly European (Italian), nor as a prison. The blurring of those

borders that formerly identified the convergence of self-determination and the

state demonstrates how individuals face uncertain routes through tangential

carceral systems of placelessness.

Fear among and of migrants is often perpetuated via rhetorical measures

that bespeak the overlay of racism and economic intransigency. Although the

Italian colonial empire was relatively short-lived when compared to other

European powers, the lingering presence of racism is apparent across the

peninsula. In recent years, the authorities on Lampedusa have struggled with

recognising that the deportation and expulsion centre’s more public profile

influences the movement of detainees, who are frequently transferred at the

government’s expense to other centres on the peninsula and Sicily. In 2004,

Libyan leader Moammar al-Qadhafi secured an agreement with Prime Minister

Silvio Berlusconi in a futile attempt to stop illegal migration to Italy. One

component of this pact was al-Qadhafi’s promise to prevent individuals from

sub-Saharan countries gaining access to Italy’s and Europe’s southernmost

borders. Libya, as Italy’s former “quarta sponda” or “Fourth Shore”,subsequently collaborated with Italy, in order to expedite the expulsion of

numerous undocumented migrants from Italy through its own detention

centres. By October 2004, for the first time, Libya readmitted illegal migrants

from Italy in exchange for the lifting of an arms embargo.15 However, in many

cases, these same persons were never transferred back to their original

departure points, remaining in Libyan detention centres funded partially by

the Italian Government.16

However, it was with the ensuing events of the “Arab Spring”, commencing

in December 2010 across a swath of these same countries, as well as

elsewhere, including Tunisia, Egypt and Syria, that a shift occurred in the Arab

League’s re-evaluation of its immigration referenda. One consequence was the

enforcement of an individual country’s right to establish the severity of its

border conditions, while discounting the borders’ permeability. Newly found

access for work, especially in North Africa, and the escape from internal

conflicts obscured the historical limits that denoted sovereignty. Points of

origination for (potential) migrants were supplanted by secondary staging

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areas run primarily by people smugglers, typically on the imperceptible edges

of countries, especially within remote Saharan and coastal communities.

In the wake of these events, the shape of North Africa’s individual states

sovereign extensity splintered. The landscapes that once conveyed scenes of

production (in the case of Libya: petroleum and agriculture) had become war

zones, in which factionalism and itinerant chiefdoms took hold. The

breakdown of ethnic and national identities in Libya served as a flashpoint for

the rapid degradation of its principal cities, Benghazi and Tripoli. In so doing,

the potential movement of persons from other countries on the continent

began to provide not only a means of illicit income for criminal trade, but also

a way in which race is asserted at national borders. Etienne Balibar has

determined that one of the consequences of contemporary migration has

effectively burdened systems of governance through “racism without races”.17

Instruments of discrimination on both sides of the Mediterranean, in the guise

of detention centres and non-binding sociopolitical deal-making, also include

punitive methods, such as refoulement and indefinite waiting in and around

the “non-places” of migration and detention. The containment of migrants

outside of normative spaces has long coalesced around cultural forms, rather

than biological ones.

Such transits within and across continents, as well as more nuanced

meanings of the promise of migration, elide the very same bodies undertaking

these fateful journeys. Movement and its apposite functions may also render

contrasting frameworks within which the boundary with its intersecting

borders and borderlands emerge. Following Georges Condominas, James

Clifford defines three conditions through which aspects of travel as movement

and social dilation are exercised. Preterrain, detour and retour advance

disputed spatial relationships through which an individual passes toward

unspecified or unknown destinations. Preterrain, according to Clifford, is

exemplified by “all those places you have to go through and be in relation with

just to get to your village or that place of work you will call your field”.18 The

slippages engendered by the movements of migrants, refugees and asylum

seekers also contract similar boundaries structured by multiple temporalities.

In the Mediterranean today, preterrain commences with the invisible maritime

borders across which Italian, Greek, Maltese and private navies have

established “patrol” areas that serve as an aqueous conduit into the

“temporary” spaces of detention centres before deportation.

The Centre for Temporary Permanence (now the Centre for Identification

and Expulsion) on Lampedusa, while regarded as a transitory enclosure, exacts

the permeable nature of its boundaries via absence. This is illustrated not only

by the centre’s short distance from the island’s primary village and port, but

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also by the desertion of some of its inhabitants once in detention. Detention

may be understood as a detour, a passage into bounded spaces such as a city

or room, through which one travels, albeit temporarily. Individuals are

frequently enmeshed in “discrepant detours and retours” in travel cultures,

according to Clifford’s readings of the descriptive works of Caribbean poet and

critic Edouard Glissant and scholar Michel de Certeau. The detention centre

incites a congruent model, through which Meaghan Morris describes roadside

motels, with a person’s passing through, a ritualised renewal of individual

rooms and ubiquity throughout the landscape, as “demolish[ing] the sense of

regimes of place, locale and history”.19 As Morris notes, such typologies

Figure 4: Fatima Ruiz, Martin Coustenoble, Giuseppe Walter Libertino, Giulia Marchi. Competition entry,“Mediterranean Big Bang”, for Geopolitical Borders.Think-Space.org (2011); http://divisare.com/projects/177911-Giuseppe-Walter-Libertino-Mediterranean-Big-Bang-Honorable-mention/slideshow.

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“memorialize only movement, speeds and perpetual circulation”,20 as the

unseen interiors of boats and exposed rubber dinghies signify the walls, fences

and windows – the “retour” propagated by the detention centre and its

systems. One may also consider the boat itself as an extension to, or an

inextricable component of, the detention centre’s adaptations. Both types of

enclosure elicit an approximation of the Real, as outlined by psychoanalysis,

which one may approach, but once crossed, cannot turn back. According to

Foucault: “the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that

exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to

the infinity of the sea”.21 The multiplication of spaces, from undisclosed

passages by boat to detention centre and across overlapping border zones,

undergirds that which has been described as the “ontology of enclosed

space”.22

The migrant and asylum seeker, no longer trapped within the confines of a

smuggler’s itinerary, a boat’s hull or deck – or even the greater sea – are

repurposed by the bureaucratic procedures and spatial conditioning at the

detention centre. For boats and detention, the arrest of movement forestalls

one’s participation in forging an awareness of themselves within a collective.

The migrant Self is no longer an individualised autonomous construct, but is

conceived without distinction as an imposition onto nations and their nascent

borders. For the artists Giacomo Cantoni and Pietro Pagliaro, the migrant and

asylum seeker occupies a netherworld akin to what they term the

contemporary “post-frontier”, in which maritime surveillance systems and

data-driven appropriations of territorial occupancy have overridden geographic

limits.23 As seen in Figure 4, the “Mediterranean Big Bang” imaged by Fatima

Ruiz, Martin Coustenoble, Giuseppe Walter Libertino and Giulia Marchi for a

competition entry, is one in which the geographic and cultural boundaries that

formerly defined continents have been erased. Unlike Clifford’s notion of

“traveling-in-dwelling”, which implies both distance from and immersion

within “foreign” designs, the migrant and asylum seeker has limited capacity,

if any, to participate in the construction of their own identity.24

It is useful “to rethink cultures as sites of dwelling and travel”,25 Clifford

concludes, as these sites and their lack of movement create “diasporacultures”26 within an increasingly globalised world. When applied to

definitions of the border, however, it is possible to include two additional

questions. Clifford demands of the migrant-traveller not “where are you

from?”, but “where are you between?”27 Significantly, when asserting mobile

formations of contemporary architecture culture, such inquiries may eschew

the inconstant circulation of persons across spaces in which their identities are

suspended, confined and imperilled. In due course, the migrant’s body is

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formulated from and within an in-between state/spatiality. Perilous mobilities

across the continent of Africa and potentially the Mediterranean and into the

detention facilities of Italy and Europe have begun to inform what may today

be called migration architecture cultures.

Nowhere(s)

A new Italian Security Set or legge, number 94, approved in 2009, changed

the name of the Centri Permanenza Temporanea to the Centri Identificazioni

Espulsioni or Centres of Identification and Expulsion (CIE).28 Two more types

of immigration detention were also introduced under the same legislation, with

the names CDA (Centri Accoglienza, Reception Centres or Centres for First

Assistance) and CARA (Centri Accoglienza Richiedenti Asilo, Asylum Seekers

Reception Centres), as seen in the maps of Figures 5 and 6.29 While

differentiated in terms of anticipated population and scale, little distinguishes

these facilities from prisons. With concrete courtyards surrounded by high

walls and fences, the common features may be the large rooms filled with

beds, shared toilets and external common areas. In most cases, the number of

available beds for persons who stay at CDAs and CARAs is less than in the

larger CIEs, where the populations routinely swell with new arrivals, forcing

mattresses to be placed outside. At the CIEs, periods of detention were

increased from sixty to 180 days in August 2009, thereby modifying the

original function of Italy’s detention policies from one of limiting movement to

one seen as punitive. One of the primary differences among the centres is the

status of the person’s application, in addition to the length of time one can be

held. The functional revision of the facilities was intended to streamline the

policies that promoted a systematic reduction of Mediterranean migration. The

expansion of detention facilities was soon mapped across the Italian peninsula

and its islands (see Figs 5 and 6). As a result, the temporal and spatial

ambiguities occupied by the migrant were intensified through the increase of

centres and their operational strategies among Italian provinces and cities. For

instance, the Agrigento prefecture in Sicily manages the CIE on Lampedusa.

Italy had effectively shaped a reciprocal internal carceral network into which

migrants, refugees and asylum seekers were indefinitely deposited. National

and local determinations of how and where border systems could be extended

announced a modification to Italy’s presence within an increasingly

corporatised sphere of immigration management. The legal enforcement of

spatial heteronomy at the immigration centres furthered the manner by which

the “deterritorialization of European borders” allowed for the (Italian) facilities

to function “as modes of temporal regulation of transit migration”.30

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The new security law also criminalised illegal immigration and its attendant

processes, including assisting with or aiding an individual seeking protected or

refugee status outside of the law’s determination. Given that members of the

public could now report the presence of an alleged immigrant, unarmed

“citizen patrol squads” might be formed to aid the police and immigration

authorities in identifying and monitoring the presence of unauthorised

persons. One outcome of the law’s statutes influenced the means by which the

Figure 5: Map of the Asylum Seekers Reception Centres (CARA).Department of Civil Liberties and Immigration, Ministry of the Interior, Italy.

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streets in and around Lampedusa and other islands of the Pelagie archipelago,

including the nearby island of Linosa and as far away as Sicily and Sardinia,

were made hostile through internal surveillance and the obligations of a nation

seeking to secure its borders. Instead, criminality was transposed onto the

person smugglers, while individual refugees’ calls for recognition were

alternatively dismissed or recast within flattened political praxis. Here, the

Figure 6: Map of the Centres of Identification and Expulsion (CIE).Department for Civil Liberties and Immigration, Ministry of the Interior, Italy.

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Italian Government, in accordance with the UNHCR, attempted to establish

conditions through which:

… the demand side of irregular migration is systematically obscured behind a

series of discursive strategies that politicians and states use – for instance by

portraying irregular migrants as victims of smugglers and traffickers – which

seems to justify the de facto exclusion and marginalization of irregular migrants

through restrictive immigration laws and border controls.31

At the detention centre camp on Lampedusa, named after the area of the

island Contrada Imbriacola, operative border economies address the security of

the nation alongside that of the island.

Italy has long endured a history of economic and political divisions on the

peninsula, in which the north is conceived as exploiting (both politically and

economically) the southern provinces. Recent political measures have sought,

in part, to closely monitor the country’s maritime borders with a militarised

operational code named Mare Nostrum (Our Sea). Established in October

2013, the term evokes the ancient Roman name for the Mediterranean Sea. By

returning to the Mediterranean as a negotiable frontier of the Italian nation,

the operation inverted this equation with the establishment of most

immigration centres across the southern provinces of the country – and with

Figure 7: Boat Cemetery, Lampedusa.Photograph by Carole Reckinger; accessed from www.carolerackinger.co.uk.

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continued, although irregular, boat interceptions and rescues at sea. Yet, as

both Slavoj Zizek and Father Mussie Zerai – an Italo-Eritrean based in Rome

– assert, the divisions of north and south, in both Italy and the rest of Europe,

present challenges for all nations that augur discrimination toward migrants

and refugees. Described by Zerai as “the fruit of a sick relationship between

the north and south of the world”, the installation of detention centres

throughout Italy does not prevent the migratory transits of individuals.32

Instead, three detention centre camp typologies have been classified as specific

points in a migrant or asylum seeker’s itinerary toward fragile permanence in

Italian detention and beyond.

CDAs are considered the first stop for migrants or asylum seekers and are

the location in which officials determine the “legitimisation” of a person’s stay.

Individuals can either remain within the CDA or, if considered as not having a

rightful claim to migration or asylum, may be sent to a CIE for deportation.

Italy’s operation of relatively non-secure reception centres for asylum seekers,

called Centri Accoglienza Richiedenti Asilo (CARA, Asylum Seekers Reception

Centre), as well as Centri di Prima Assistenza (CPA, First Aid Centres),

Figure 8: Facade of the Public Library of New South Wales, Sydney with World Press Photo Award Winnerand exhibition. Massimo Sestini/Polaris image, 2015.Photograph by Sean Anderson.

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provide services for undocumented migrants. CARAs are essentially

identification centres for “immigrants (without documents) asking for political

refugee status”, where the efficacy of their requested (refugee) status is first

determined.33 The facilities on Lampedusa, now one of thirteen long-term

Centres for Identification and Expulsion (CIE), have become the first and last

border at which the status of a migrant and asylum seeker is registered. The

unusual geographic and bureaucratic position of the centre, on the edges of

vast domains, have converted the facilities on Lampedusa into an aggregation

of the processes and spatial boundaries that function within the confines of the

CDA, CARA and CIE network.34

The boundary remains an expressive conjunction of both invisible and

visible forms within the geopolitical landscape, before the camp. Scholars have

suggested that the contemporaneous demarcation of state and sovereign lands

also encompasses multifarious borderscapes – an affective conjoining of two

natures. Suvendrini Perera situates the borderscape within an “unstable border

zone”, subject to the “crossing and recrossing of territorial and temporal

boundaries”.35 Yet, the location of architecture within the border landscape

diminishes the clarity of its boundedness. Physical manifestations of Italy’simmigration detention centres operate within a “zone of indistinction between

inclusion and exclusion”.36 While some of Italy’s immigration detention

centres are highly visible within populated urban centres, those on the islands

of Lampedusa and Sicily, for instance, are far from public view and

demarcated by militarised gestures, such as fences and watchtowers. Such are

the fictive states projected by the Croatian architect and curator Ana Dano

Beros in her project at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale. Her project,

entitled “Intermundia”, explored the border landscapes of Lampedusa not

simply as a static “waiting room” for those migrants seeking entry into

Europe. Rather, her multimedia installation attempted to encapsulate a

permanent state of “in-betweenness”, or Verfremdungseffekt, for viewers.37

When boats are intercepted at sea, the appearance of Italian Navy vessels in

the port of Lampedusa signals the process by which individuals are

transported to the Contrada Imbriacola Centre on the island for

documentation. Later, if and when said persons are transported off the island

to another facility, the airport and ferry terminals become locations for the

secure collection and dispersal of individuals. With few exceptions, movement

through the regulated boundaries of detention centres is disclosed by the

massing of individuals inside and the facility’s security procedures outside. As

Nikos Papastergiadis claims: “The camp can never deliver security or

completely confine the refugee.”38 The principal detention facility on

Lampedusa at Contrada Imbriacola “leaks” persons, due to its frequent

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overcrowding. Built to hold up to 850 individuals, it is thought that today’snumbers are more than 1,200, although known to exceed 2,500 at times.39

Images of foam mattresses placed outside in the shadow of the buildings have

been publicised. More recently, along the rocky hillsides near the CIE, small

informal encampments have been formed out of detritus from the surrounding

villages, including plastic bags and chairs and items that wash up on the

shore.40 These have become the double mirror through which we can view the

fidelity of immigration detention and its aberrant architecture.

Migrants, refugees and asylum seekers continue to subsist across the world

in “nowherevilles”,41 within which the subaltern subjects still do not speak42 –except through the dissemination of media images that narrate the penultimate

stage of their journeys toward an ill-defined future. No longer functioning at

the nexus where the national border, boat and detention centre meet, the

governance of migration is enacted upon the bodies of individuals as an

amorphous group. With the fluctuations of both maritime and land-based

national borders, the occupation of transgressive enclosures such as the boat,

the migrant’s body, forcibly locked into camps, is also subject to constant

regulation and identification. Papastergiadis writes: “These regulating policies

have invariably been formulated according to the principle that the national

community needs protection and regulation like a body. The national border

becomes like the skin of the community.”43 The skin of the migrant and

asylum seeker – with its litmus of sensate and political symbolism – may also

act as that indexical boundary through which the border is imposed and

ultimately forfeited.

A delamination of the spatial and temporal borders proscribing sites of

detention all merge to lengthen the time between one’s “arrival” on Italian

land and the point when the individual may eventually arrive. The psycho-

geographies of the migrant and asylum seeker are bound to forms of spatial

violence, in which the regenerative capacity of labour is discouraged. The

islands, landscapes and cities of southern Italy have become stages upon which

the apprehension of migrant identities is rendered invisible. Moreover, the

geopolitical handwringing following mass casualties or rescues in the

Mediterranean, incurred by the Italian State or, more broadly, Western

Europe, has resulted in resolving the political impasse of migratory practices

through the reinforcement of external borders under the banner of “FortressEurope”. Migration and detention’s “mediated proximities” across the

Mediterranean’s edges have subsequently led to the spectacularisation of

bodies and boats.44 When seen as coeval spatial happenings, the conflation of

migration and detention at centres results in a perceived “threat” to larger

populations. For many, the disappearance of large numbers of migrants and

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asylum seekers at a nation’s shores weakens the capacity to understand them

as individuals.

Detention and immigration processing has become a framework for

fostering security and surveillance. The registration of Italy’s borders begins

and ends at the detention centre as camp. If the fences and security guards of

a detention centre such as those found at the Contrada Imbriacola CIE do not

effectively thwart the movements of its detainees, it is even more difficult to

determine where the borders of Lampedusa – if not Europe – are

instantiated. While a camp is circumscribed by the boundaries by which the

militarisation and condemnation of its captives are held, then the border may

become as mobile as those bodies seeking to cross it.

Abandonment

A return of the (formerly) colonised to Western Europe, by unauthorised

migration, portends a unique problematic, in which geography is no longer an

impediment to distance or movement. The compression of geographic

boundaries – to that of the horizon and its potential – has reinstated the

post-colony in the guise of those boats that float along the edges of

sovereignties. Similarly, the “invisible” forms of collective and autonomic

migrant experiences amplify how multiple enclosures compound the border.

Borders, even when performed through military action, are subsumed by these

multiple failures. In a 2011 international competition for Geopolitical Borders,

such drifts are projected in the entry “Mediterranean Big Bang” – an image –map of continental Africa merging with southern Europe.45 The properties of

distance have conflated the African continent and the Mediterranean’s“landscapes of violence”, bringing the “Other” that much closer to those that

seek their excision.46

On 3 October 2013, within yards of Lampedusa’s shore, more than 360

individuals perished when a twenty metre vessel capsized following the

“captain’s” attempt to light a towel on fire to signal for help. Eight days later,

a second boatload of individuals was intercepted with numerous Syrians

onboard.47 The human cargo of these vessels also illustrates the divergent

starting points of those that are seeking asylum in Western Europe. Most of

the passengers hailed from the former Italian colonies of Eritrea and Somalia

in the first instance, while in the second, most were refugees from war-torn

Syria and Palestine. For both, the origins and status of those onboard extended

calls for renewing the policies regarding the patrol operations in and around

the Mediterranean Sea. A renewal of the ancient and Fascist appropriation of a

nationalist term, “Mare Nostrum”, signified increasing efforts to survey and

rescue immigrants at sea, while prosecuting those allegedly determined to be

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involved in person smuggling.48 The policies surrounding Mare Nostrum, in

allegiance with Frontex, the consortium of European states involving border

management and the conception of “Fortress Europe”, allowed for the

increased surveillance of the Mediterranean to ensure the security of the

European Union’s borders. Devised as both a humanitarian and military

campaign, the mobilisation of political, military and social agencies to

reallocate national borders evokes what Didier Fassin associated as part of the

legal foundations for a “state of emergency”.49 If the multiple grounds upon

which borders are founded signify spaces of “incommensurable

contradictions”, the imposition of occupying them also enacts reductive

oppression, which is absorbed by the migrant, refugee and asylum seeker.

Since borderscapes are governed by their dispersal across multiple sites of

influence, the establishment of borderlands “does not indicate a fixed

topographical site between two other fixed locales (nations, societies, cultures),

but an interstitial zone of displacement and deterritorialization that shapes the

identity of the hybridized subject”.50 Postcolonial subjects comprising today’s“boat people” or “maritime arrivals” on the Mediterranean are alienated from

the sociopolitical structures that formerly identified their subjectivity. The

migrant and asylum seeker have abandoned their origins and, in so doing,

presuppose any chance of return. Through such a purposeful erasure, the

migrant’s body is given over to external powers, much like a rudderless boat

entering the water. As Foucault posits: “The body is directly involved in a

political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it,

mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies,

to emit signs.”51 Across transgeographic (both land and sea) pathways of

migration, borders have become the constructed natures through which power

is remotely delimited.

The signs that migrants and asylum seekers produce are at once both close

and “far from us”. Migrants have become estranged from the very processes

that suggest their value within broader social spheres. For Georg Simmel, such

contradictions are “emblematic of modernity”, due to an ambiguity in part

regulated by one’s movements between “nearness” and “remoteness”.52 He

writes: “If wandering is the liberation from every given point in space, and

thus the conceptual opposite to fixation at such a point, the sociological form

of the ‘stranger’ presents the unity, as it were, of these two characteristics.”53

Migrants and asylum seekers, inscribed within the logic of the border, become

strangers – both to the country in which they are contained, but also to

themselves and their origins. The indeterminate stranger, as both migrant and

asylum seeker, exists in-between geographic and architectural imaginaries,

both of which formerly established corporeality and now only become

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disembodied through unregulated movement. Migration fundamentally

amplifies such ambiguous exchanges. The migrant body, through its removal

from subjecthood in transit – both in the boat and at the detention centre –transgresses the boundaries of the alienated to connote a state of abjection.

Julia Kristeva locates the abject within degrees of “foreignness”,irrespective of the boundaries that constitute one’s positioning. When one

recognises their difference, “he disappears when we all acknowledge ourselves

as foreigners, unamenable to bonds and communities”.54 Collectively

aggregated within the boat, they are simultaneously dispersed and collocated at

the detention centre and denied permanent residency, while being absorbed by

(Italian) systems of immigration detention. When the migrant and asylum

seeker are understood as having become strangers to those systems such as

architecture that attempt to “place” them, the border has the capacity of

extending their own estrangement from crucial manners of representation. The

border and its boundaries, even while inextricably tied to the sovereign limits

of state and territory, are composed of a hegemonic order. Coded externally,

the immigration detention centres on Lampedusa and throughout Italy locate

the characteristics of the border-as-body as:

Constantly guarded, reinforced, destroyed, set up, and reclaimed, boundaries …expose the extent to which cultures are products of the continuing struggle

between official and unofficial narratives: those largely circulated in favour of the

State and its policies of inclusion, incorporation and validation, as well as of

exclusion, appropriation and dispossession.55

With ever-increasing attempts to cross the Mediterranean as well as other seas

throughout the world, both the migrant’s body and the body of migrants will

continue to be equally withdrawn from the processes that define their mobility

and signification.

Corpses and Doors

Migrants and asylum seekers – their agency and value – are bound to

processes of socio-spatial fragmentation. Over the course of passing through

migration’s extreme geographies, it becomes increasingly difficult to recognise

an origin – a place or moment from which the migrant strikes out. Instead,

throughout the course of their movements, individuals are subject to multiple

temporalities that simultaneously disassemble geographic and national

identities.

Since the effects of borders are reified within liminal spaces, the symbolic

institution of an origin and destination is suspended. Is there a physicalised

space beyond “home” that governs the introduction of one’s movements? Is it

possible to pursue a taxonomic understanding for ontologies of mobility?

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Engagements with the symbolic Charter of Lampedusa [La Carta di

Lampedusa] in 2014, crafted among NGOs and other organisations following

the deaths by drowning of over 600 men, women and children over eight days

in 2013, states that the freedom of movement is a universal imperative.56 For

the signatories of the emblematic Charter as much as the island’s migrant

citizens, “moving in the world according to the needs of the global economy is

an imperative which is forced upon a large number of human beings, whilst

personal movement is a privilege accorded only to a world minority”.57 Thecondition of stasis, as one invention demonstrated by the architecture of

migration, results in a compounding of spaces through multiple enclosures of

confinement and resistance. Carceral environments, such as those found

among global immigration detention centres and camps, can thus be

understood as a coalescing of mobilities.

Having perforated the invisible boundaries that constitute the frontier, the

migrant’s body is increasingly compressed within metaphorical enclosures that

delay or deny arrival. Without a destination, there is little hope for

understanding an individual’s origin, except as memory. Walter Benjamin, in

his descriptions of German tragedy, suggests that an individual’s birth and

death may be superimposed onto each other with the advancement of time.58

When encountered through trauma, however, the same temporalities are

relegated to external conditions, out-of-bounds, in which origins and

destinations no longer have the same agency. Likewise, if death following

trauma is the ultimate disengagement from Time, the body is subject to

dissolution, broken apart by the very actions that previously maintained its

integrity. “Captured” or “petrified”, the fragment, itself a ruinous extension of

the human body and its productivity, becomes in death a counter-image of its

spatiality. Borders, whether represented by the boat or an immigration centre,

can be understood as the overlay of both bodily conditions, in which time is

broken apart and pieced back together again. Depictions of individuals being

rescued at sea, as well as those passing in and out of detention centres, exact

this new spatio-temporal dimensioning of borders. The migrant’s body,

constituted both within its subjectivity and as its displaced shadow – the

corpse – contravenes the fixity of emergence. The “allegoricaldismemberment” described by Benjamin and substantiated by death is like a

nation’s advocacy for immigration detention, part of an emblematic

“distribution” of its parts “to the manifold regions of significance”.59 For an

individual’s splitting over time throughout the Mediterranean Passage and

subsequent detention in centres and camps, death remains ever present.

On the southeastern edge of Lampedusa near the old port, a collection of

many of the boats from which migrants and asylum seekers decamp have been

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collected onshore to be used in court proceedings if needed prior to their

destruction. In a cordoned-off area continually guarded by the Italian Army,

the island’s “boat cemetery” physicalises the unmarked graves, burials at sea

and unaccounted disappearances of individuals from the detention centre from

the detention centre as seen in Figures 3 and 7. The disused boats and the

migrant’s corpse are equivocal, as both signify wreckages of bodies in and of

time: one being the waters that divide and connect; the second being that of

the hollowed migrant’s body perpetually “in limbo”, from which meaning has

been excised. The (migrant’s) corpse, in its dissolution, reifies the physicality

of the border:

The corpse and the border are both points of separation and contact between

opposing spaces. These thresholds define the space of political exchange. The

corpse and the border form a metonymy that permits political codes and values

to circulate. Corpses or stiffs become mobile borders or interfaces and thus

bearers of political spectacle.60

These ruined bodies and these empty hulls, their carcasses become “theepitome of all emblematic props”.61 Echoing Giorgio Agamben, for James

Pugliese, the brutality epitomised by the migrant’s boat or the “bare life”exposed by the detention centre, like the creation of borders, function as

“littoral zones of the dead”.62 At their edges, phantasmatic forces enfold bodies

as numbers and the aqueous graves of the migratory nameless dead.

A Ghanaian boy was quoted in a 2012 Italian daily Corriere delle Sera

article as saying “the only sorted waste collection you do here in Lampedusa is

that of the dead”, when speaking of the numbered mass graves located within

the Cala Pisana cemetery adjacent to the island’s airport.63 In the same article,

the Mayor of Lampedusa, Giusi Nicoloni, is quoted as stating:

The problem unleashed is not the tombs, it is the dead: we are the only ones who

see the bodies for fifteen years and bury them. Europe, which does not see them,

pretends they are not there. Immigration is not an emergency, we must know

how to manage: they are not illegals but refugees, and it is not fair that all these

deaths are considered normal.64

Since more bodies will inevitably float into Italy’s shores, a reckoning of how

the enforcement of the Mediterranean’s border-bodies might be configured, in

order to move beyond maritime and land-based borders dictating “anunbearable sequence of sheer happenings”.65

Arjun Appadurai speaks of an individual’s “confinement” through an

essentialisation of their representation; one aspect of their lives becoming

representative of the whole. Such metonymic inertia is as much physical as it

is intangible, in which the status of the “native” or refugee is predetermined

by a nation’s immigration policies. This induces a “metonymic freezing” akin

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to quarantine, in which “human being[s] confined in (and by) the place where

he finds himself, [are] not contaminated by exchanges of materials and ideas

with the rest of humanity”.66 The bodies of migrants and asylum seekers are

assimilated through the actioning of border systems. Even if unavoidable,

“responses” to irregular migration into southern Italy and Europe is nullified

by the continued presence of the camps and the bodies held within them.

Detention centres, like the borders they describe, affect the “production of

locality”,67 while also weakening the utility of national security in the wake of

restrictive quarantine. Determined as “illegal”, the migrant and asylum seeker

become members of a transgressive collective body restrained from without.

Individuals are no longer corralled by the same systems of governance by

which their identities – their origins – are registers of difference. One’sdeparture on the migratory path thus falls into multiple forms of detention.

Consequently, the intensity of the journey and the disintegration induced by

the carceral architecture of immigration detention supersede individuation.

Inaugurated on 28 June 2008, the public sculpture “La Porta di

Lampedusa/La Porta dell’Europa” (“The Door of Lampedusa/The Door of

Europe”) was erected in the Cavallo Bianco district on the edge of Lampedusa

(Fig 9). Designed and built by the renowned Italian artist Domenico “Mimmo”Paladino, with sponsorship from the Milan non-profit Fondazione Amani

Figure 9: Mimmo Paladino, La Porta di Lampedusa/La Porta dell’Europa (2000), Lampedusa.

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Onlus and Arnoldo Mosca Mondadori, the site was chosen in part for its

proximity to the coordinates of the multiple shipwrecks and those “massacres

without witnesses” near the island.68 Composed of ceramic refractory tiles and

shards with a steel structure almost five metres high, the portal’s surfaces are

covered with casts of shoes, texts and other items connoting the ephemeral

lives that have disappeared into the depths of the Mediterranean, as well as on

land. Apart from a 1996 seaborne event designated as a “phantasma

naufragio” (phantom shipwreck), the spectral memory of subsequent capsized

vessels on high seas and territorial waters near Lampedusa also provides a

realm in which commemoration and memorialisation haunts the island. The

two-sided aspect of the door as a symbolic gateway indexes the immeasurable

borders that exist between one small island and the nation(s) beyond. The

open door – a door that never closes – captures a treacherous horizon that

portends one’s crossing.

In a written response upon the completion of the work, philosopher

Massimo Cacciari reflected on Virgil with a quotation from the Aeneid: “Now

the wave has me, and the winds toss me on the shore” (Nunc me fluctus habet

versantque in litore venti).69 But this shore remains hazardous for most, given

the unknowns that accompany one’s landing and potential departure from

Lampedusa. Not far away, the overcrowded structures of the Contrada

Imbriacola Centro Identificazione ed Espulsione remain, the sounds of its

population reverberating on the gulley’s walls that surround it. Hidden from

public view, its occupants occasionally pass through a cut opening in the chain

link fence to climb a hill that affords a distant view of the waters they crossed,

as well as a glimpse of nearby fishing villages and holiday homes. Turning

one’s gaze from the centre toward the sea and perhaps introspectively through

the door to Europe, this island of the dead and the countenance of a nation’sboundaries beyond its shores lures, threatens, waits.

Postscript: Since the submission of this paper, over 3,500 men, women and

children are presumed to have drowned in the Mediterranean while travelling

to Lampedusa and other locations. Over 9,800 have been rescued. The salvage

operations continue.70

NOTES

1. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language and Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York, NY:Harper & Row, 1971), 154.

2. Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1970), 49.

3. Huub Dijstelbloem and Dennis Broeders, “Border Surveillance, Mobility Management andthe Shaping of Non-Publics in Europe,” European Journal of Social Theory 18, no. 1 (2015):21–38.

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4. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: StanfordUniversity Press, 1998).

5. See Alison Mountz, “The Enforcement Archipelago: Detention, Haunting and Asylum onIslands,” Political Geography 30 (2011): 118–28. For an overview of the framing of “borderthinking,” see Corey Johnson, Reece Jones, Anssi Paasi, Louise Amoore, Alison Mountz, MarkSalter and Chris Rumford, “Interventions on Rethinking ‘the border’ in Border Studies,”Political Geography 30 (2011): 61–69.

6. James Clifford, “Traveling Cultures,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Edward Grossberg (New York,NY: Routledge, 1992), 96–116.

7. For an exhaustive spatial analysis of the politics of shipwrecks in the Mediterranean, seeForensic Architecture, “The Left-to-Die Boat,” accessed March 23, 2015, http://www.forensic-architecture.org/case/left-die-boat/.

8. Global news outlets have been covering the shipwrecks and loss of lives throughout theMediterranean since the late 1990s, during which over 300 individuals drowned or died enroute from Libya to islands in Italy and Greece. More recently, the unprecedented loss of lifeand number of those rescued has increased to the point of a European-wide referendum atthe time of writing.

9. Fabrizio Gatti, “Io, Clandestino a Lampedusa,” L’Espresso, 7 October 2005, accessed June27, 2015, http://espresso.repubblica.it/palazzo/2005/10/07/news/io-clandestino-a-lampedusa-1.594.

10. A recent two-part video documentary by VICE News Media investigated claims of tortureat a network of detention centres in Libya supported, in part, by funds from the ItalianGovernment. See “Migrant Prisons of Libya: Europe or Die” with Part I, “Drowning forFreedom,” and Part II, “Trapped and Forgotten: Libya’s Migrant Jails,” VICE News, 22 March2015, accessed March 11, 2015, https://news.vice.com/video/migrant-prisons-of-libya-europe-or-die-full-length.

11. The “Mediterranean Passage,” evoking the Middle Passage of that which historian PaulGilroy has discussed as the “Black Atlantic,” evokes boatloads of (enslaved) individuals crossingthe seas awaiting the unknown. See Naor Ben-Yehoyada, “The Clandestine CentralMediterranean Passage,” Middle East Report no. 261 (Winter 2011): 18–23.

12. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 7.

13. Clifford, “Traveling Cultures,” 96–116. See also Heidegger, Poetry, Language andThought.

14. Nikos Papastergiadis, The Turbulence of Migration (New York, NY: Polity Press andBlackwell Publishers, 2000), 53.

15. See Forensic Architecture, “The Left-to-Die Boat.”

16. See the following interview from behind bars at a Libyan camp in the Sahara desert, inwhich a Nigerian gentleman repeatedly says, “… no home, no home, no home …”, accessed 25March 2015, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/libya-video/10788069/Refugees-plead-for-help-through-bars-of-Libya-detention-camp.html. See alsothe film, Closed Sea, which documents the plight of refugees who were turned back to Libyaby the Italian Navy. Dirs. Stefano Liberti and Andrea Segre, Sideways Films (2012), accessedJune 25, 2015, http://www.sidewaysfilm.com/closed-sea/.

17. Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities(London: Verso, 1991), 21–29.

18. Clifford, “Traveling Cultures,” 100. Within ethnography, Peter Pels defines preterrain asalso “refer[ing] to the power relationships in which the ethnographer is caught up, whichinclude both indigenous relationships and those brought in by the colonizers.” See “CockyHahn and the Black Venus,” in Cultures of Empire, ed. Catherine Hall (London: Taylor andFrancis, 2000), 331.

19. Meaghan Morris, “At Henry Parkes Motel,” Cultural Studies 2, no. 1 (1988): 1–47. Seealso Clifford, “Traveling Cultures,” 33.

20. Morris, “At Henry Parkes Motel,” 3.

21. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22–7; 27.

22. Peter Sloterdijk, Spharen (Frankfurt am Main, 1998–2004), Vol. 2, Globen(Makrospharologie) (1999), Chapter 3, “Archen. Zur Ontologie des ummauerten Raumes,” 251(translation mine). Roland Barthes likewise considered the ship as a symbol of refuge, a meansby which to remove oneself from life’s “storms.” Barthes observes the miniaturisation and

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metonymy of the ship within the narratives of Jules Verne, in which the ship mirrors theworld on a small scale. Roland Barthes, “The Nautilus and the Drunken Boat,” in RolandBarthes, Mythologies (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1972), 65–67.

23. Giacomo Cantoni and Pietro Pagliaro, “Post-Frontier,” in Rem Koolhaas, Fundamentals:14th International Architecture Exhibition-La Biennale di Venezia (Venice: Marsilio, 2014),364–65.

24. Clifford, Routes, 100.

25. Clifford, Routes, 105.

26. Clifford, Routes, 102.

27. Clifford, Routes, 109.

28. See Erin Komada, “Turned Away: The Detrimental Effect of Italy’s Public Security Law onUndocumented Children’s Rights to Education,” Boston University International Law Journal29, no. 451 (2011): 453–60. Under Legge 94/2009, “illegal” immigrants could also be detainedby representative authorities for more than six months and may be required to pay a fine.Housing an unauthorised migrant could now be prosecutable with up to three years in prison,thereby relinquishing the possibility of finding appropriate shelter outside of the system ofdetention centres or outdoors. It is thought that with the added public’s role in identifyingpotential illegal migrants, public servants such Italian teachers influenced an increase ofstudents dropping out of school.

29. There are thirteen CIEs, with locations in Bari, Bologna, Brindisi, Caltanissetta, Crotone,Gorizia, Lamezia Terme, Lampedusa, Milan, Modena, Rome, Turin and Trapani; and there arefourteen Reception Centres for Asylum Applicants, including facilities in Bari, Caltanissetta,Crotone, Foggia, Gorizia, Milano and Trapani, as well as Sardinia and Sicily. More recently, theMinistry of the Interior has consolidated the role and scope of these centres. Accessed June27, 2015, http://www.interno.gov.it/it/temi/immigrazione-e-asilo/sistema-accoglienza-sul-territorio/centri-limmigrazione.

30. Rutvica Andrijasevic, “From Exception to Excess: Detention and Deportations Across theMediterranean Space,” in The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space and the Freedom ofMovement, eds. Nicholas de Genova and Nathalie Peutz (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,2010), 147–65, 149.

31. Heine De Haas, “The Myth of Invasion: The Inconvenient Realities of African Migration toEurope,” Third World Quarterly 29, no. 7 (2008): 1305–22, 1318.

32. Mattathias Schwartz, “The Anchor,” New Yorker, 21 April 2014. See also Slavoj Zizek,Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (New York, NY: Picador, 2008).

33. These can include migrants apprehended at sea, after landing or in transit across Italianterritory. Regulated by Italian law no. 563/1995, CDAs are intended to perform the functionof pre-admittance detention, determining the identity of, and providing first aid to, irregularmigrants, while they remain in the facilities pending the initial determination of his/her legalposition.

34. See the human rights organisation descriptions of the various immigration facilities inItaly, especially the CIE. “What are the CIE,” accessed March 13, 2015, http://www.meltingpot.org/Cosa-sono-i-C-I-E-Centri-di-Identificazione-ed-Espulsione.html#.VRif8TuUe4I.

35. Suvendrini Perera, Australia and the Insular Imagination (New York, NY: PalgraveMacmillan, 2009), 206.

36. Bulent Diken, “From Refugee Camps to Gated Communities: Biopolitics and the End ofthe City,” Citizenship Studies 8 (2004): 83–106, 84.

37. Ana Dano Beros, Intermundia, in Koolhaas, Fundamentals, 366–67.

38. Nikos Papastergiadis, “The Invasion Complex: Deep Historical Fears and Wide OpenAnxieties,” Willy Brandt Series of Working Papers in International Migration and EthnicRelations, Malmo University, 2005, 16.

39. For further discussion and recent figures on the detention population of Lampedusa, see“Global Detention Project, Italy Detention Profile,” accessed March 28, 2015, http://www.globaldetentionproject.org/countries/europe/italy/introduction.html. See also Council ofEurope, Parliamentary Assembly, “Report on the Visit to Lampedusa: May 2011,” 30September 2011, accessed March 28, 2015, http://assembly.coe.int/CommitteeDocs/2011/amahlarg03_REV2_2011.pdf. For a broader discussion of these multi-dimensional conditions,see Huub Dijstelbloem and Dennis Broeders, “Border Surveillance, Mobility Management andthe Shaping of Non-Publics in Europe,” European Journal of Social Theory 18, no. 1 (2015):21–38, 23.

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40. VICE Media, “Migrant Prisons of Libya: Europe or Die,” 22 March 2015, accessed March25, 2015, https://news.vice.com/video/migrant-prisons-of-libya-europe-or-die-full-length.

41. Zygmunt Bauman, “In the Lowly Nowherevilles of Liquid Modernity. Comments on andaround Agier,” Ethnography (September 2002): 343–49. See also Zygmunt Bauman, SocietyUnder Siege (Oxford: Polity Press, 2002).

42. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak deploys Antonio Gramsci’s term subaltern in her seminalessay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. CaryNelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313.

43. Papastergiadis, The Turbulence of Migration, 53.

44. Nikos Papastergiadis “The Invasion Complex: The Abject Other and Spaces of Violence,”Geografiska Annaler, Series B, Human Geography 88, no. 4 (2006): 429–42, 438.

45. Fatima Ruiz, Giulia Marchi, Walter Libertino and Martin Coustenoble, “Mediterranean BigBang,” accessed June 27, 2015, http://2011.think-space.org/gallery/geopolitical-borders/?appNo=0000801682. This work was also shown as part of the Intermundia installation at the14th Venice Architecture Biennale.

46. Katharina Schramm, “Introduction: Landscapes of Violence: Memory and Sacred Space,”History and Memory 23, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2011): 5–22.

47. “Operation Mare Nostrum,” in Amnesty International, “Lives Adrift: Refugees andMigrants in Peril in the Central Mediterranean” (London: Amnesty International, 2014): 23–6.

48. Amnesty International, “The Human Cost of Fortress Europe: Human Rights ViolationsAgainst Migrants and Refugees at Europe’s Borders” (London: Amnesty International, 2014):9–20.

49. Didier Fassin and Mariella Pandolfi, “Introduction: Military and HumanitarianGovernment in the Age of Intervention,” in Contemporary States of Emergency: The Politicsof Military and Humanitarian Interventions, eds. Didier Fassin and Marielle Pandolfi (NewYork, NY: Zone Books, 2013), 9–28.

50. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, “Beyond Culture: Space, Identity, and the Politics ofDifference,” Cultural Anthropology 7, no. 1 (February 1992): 6–23, 18.

51. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (NewYork, NY: Vintage, 1975), 25–26.

52. “The stranger is close to us, insofar as we feel between him and ourselves commonfeatures of a national, social, occupational, or generally human, nature. He is far from us,insofar as these common features extend beyond him or us, and connect us only because theyconnect a great many people.” Georg Simmel, “The Stranger,” in The Sociology of GeorgSimmel, trans. Kurt Wolff (New York, NY: Free Press, 1950), 402–8.

53. Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 402.

54. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. L. Roudiez (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf,1991), 1.

55. Trin T. Minh-ha, “An Acoustic Journey,” in Rethinking Borders, ed. J. C. Welchman(London: Macmillan, 1996), 45. See also Katrina Powell, Identity and Power in Narratives ofDisplacement (New York, NY: Routledge, 2015).

56. The Charter of Lampedusa, accessed March 18, 2015, http://www.lacartadilampedusa.org/.

57. The Charter of Lampedusa, Part I, n. p.

58. John Joseph McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition (Ithaca, NY:Cornell University Press, 1993), 143.

59. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (New York, NY: Verso, 2003).

60. Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror inNorthern Ireland (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 74.

61. McCole, Walter Benjamin, 141. Joseph Pugliese, “Crisis Heterotopias and Border Zones ofthe Dead,” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 23, no. 5 (October 2009): 663–79, 678. See also Joseph Pugliese, “Transnational Carceral Archipelagos, Lampedusa andChristmas Island,” in Trans-Mediterranean: Diasporas, Histories, Geopolitical Spaces, ed. JosephPugliese (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2010), 105–24.

62. Trans-Mediterranean, ed. Pugliese, 121. See also McCole, Walter Benjamin, 141.

63. Paolo Di Stefano, “Le fosse comuni di Lampedusa per i naufraghi dimenticati” [TheGraves of Lampedusa for the Forgotten Shipwrecked], 24 November 2012, accessed March 15,

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2015, http://www.corriere.it/cronache/12_novembre_24/di-stefano-le-fosse-comuni-di-lampedusa_5c1d71b2-3607-11e2-bfd1-d22e58b0f7cd.shtml (translation my own).

64. Di Stefano, “Le fosse comuni di Lampedusa per i naufraghi dimenticati,” n. p.

65. Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1970),104.

66. For Appadurai, migration evokes a “process in which one aspect of people’s lives come toepitomize them as a whole.” Arjun Appadurai, “Putting Hierarchy in its Place,” CulturalAnthropology 3, no. 1 (1988): 36–39. James Clifford will then suggest that such stasis locksthe individual in an “ethnographic present.” See Clifford, “On Ethnographic Authority,” inThe Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 32.

67. Arjun Appadurai, “The Production of Locality,” in Counterworks: Managing the Diversityof Knowledge, ed. Richard Fardon (New York, NY: Routledge, 2003): 208–29.

68. Santino Santinelli, “Lampedusa: The Gate of Europe,” 24 October 2013, accessed March19, 2015, http://one-europe.info/lampedusa-the-gate-of-europe.

69. “Massimo Cacciari sulla Porta di Lampedusa,” accessed March 18, 2015, http://www.amaniforafrica.it/?page_id=1434. For more information about the non-profit organisationsponsoring Paladino’s sculpture, see http://www.amaniforafrica.it.

70. Between 13 and 20 April 2015 alone, approximately 1,300 persons perished or weremissing in the Mediterranean in separate shipwreck incidents.

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