Portable Public Space III
Atlas of the Mediterranean as a Contested Territory of Survival
Portable Public Space III: Atlas of the Mediterranean as a Contested Territory of Survival centres on the Mediterranean Sea as a “motionless deathscape” (Lo Presti, 2020), where mapping becomes a critical intervention in regimes of truth enacted by geopolitical hierarchies and networks of interdependence. The book is developed as a multiscale atlas of the Mediterranean as a transnational public space and contested territory of survival, visualising processes of forced migration entangled in the Mediterranean Refugee Crisis.
The project approaches this phenomenon as an ongoing global process with historical and colonial origins, while questioning the term ‘crisis’ as “a pejorative shorthand that produces a specific anti-migrant rhetoric” (Sager, 2019) and serves as a rationale for emergency protocols and novel control measures.
Through a forensic perspective, the atlas addresses places of exceptionality—refugee camps, border walls, maritime blockages, quasi-prison internment camps, and countless dead bodies. Working with data on “the disappeared, the missing, or the hidden” (LaBelle, 2018) becomes a practice of resistance confronting absence and disappearance.
The atlas comprises three series: 01 Mapping conflict, 02 Cartographies of hospitality, and 03 Heterotopic public space. Through these mapping operations, the project explores how plural, agonistic, and non-dominant imaginaries can fracture predetermined orders of visibility, placing complexity and intersubjectivity at their core.
The publication can be downloaded here.
Check Portable Public Space I: Embodied Responses to the Mediterranean Refugee Crisis.
Manuela Valtchanova, Toni Montes, Roger Paez & MEATS 23-24
With the collaboration of: Laura Lo Presti, Ruedi and Vera Baur