Description
The sea and shores play a critical role in the material and aesthetic production of the contemporary global border regime, yet they remain largely overlooked. Land-centred approaches to mobility control obscure the violence and fragmentation that occurs at these boundaries, as well as the imagination and possibility they hold. This paper repositions these liminal spaces as active participants in the creation, reconfiguration, and maintenance of racialising histories and geographies that underpin the mechanisms employed by states and institutions to regulate, restrict, and contain the movement of people through bordering practices. Thinking from, through, and with aqueous, coastal, and terrestrial perspectives, this paper reimagines the 2023 Cutro Shipwreck as a moment of rupture – at the edges of moving waters, shifting shores, and fragmented lands in the Mediterranean basin. It draws on creative practices and ethnographic work to trace refusals of racial-colonial topographies of violence. As the paper unfolds, it epistemologically and methodologically reflects the fluidities and discontinuities, movement and stillness, multiplicities and contradictions, erasure and persistence woven into global geographies of mobility control and the histories they carry.
