Trash/Traces : Lives adrift along the border

• This paper expands on the visual essay ‘Trash/Traces: Lives adrift along the border’, which narrates the author’s experiences at the frontline of refugee rescue operations during the 2015 European ‘refugee crisis’ and explores the Aegean borderscape’s affective geography by tracking the human and material traces of undocumented border-crossings on Lesvos island. Drawing on humanities’ turn to affect and new materialism, and theoretical advancements in border studies this twofold project implements visual and (auto)ethnographic methods to indicate obscured dimensions of the contemporary European border regime and illustrate the affective and somatic impact of its politics upon a variety of actors. This is done through the visual and narrative chronicling of bordercrossing humans and materials, which are regarded and handled as trash to be promptly removed from public view, through their irregular trajectories’ narration by the seawashed personal items. An archaeogeography of undocumented migration emerges through the tracing, conservation, and articulation of the flows of human and material ‘waste’ and their intersections and layerings across liminal landscapes, thereby instigating a rethinking of the affective, bodily and material economies of emplacement and mobility across the Eastern Mediterranean.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Annan samhällsvetenskap -- Internationell migration och etniska relationer (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Other Social Sciences -- International Migration and Ethnic Relations (hsv//eng)

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

art (ämneskategori)