A Scientific Initiative on/for Border Abolitionism
solroutes

Route 4

Atlantic and Western Mediterranean

The research unfolded as an attempt to interpret the fragile architectures of solidarity along the routes of movement, placing at its core:

a) the economic processes and forms of labour insertion in mining, fishing, and agriculture, across places of departure, transit, and arrival;
b) the mechanisms that render people on the move disappearable at the border, and the social and political mobilizations that rise around disappearances and deaths in migration;
c) the structuring of first-reception facilities in the Canary Islands, the institutional management of Malian refugees in Mauritania, and the imagined construction of an underground railway linking the Spanish islands to the shores of West Africa;
d) the failure of voluntary return policies and the generational drive to leave in the Maghreb and West Africa;
e) the entanglement between the crisis of artisanal fishing, extractivist logics of industrial fishing, and the making of a maritime infrastructure of the journey;
f) the nexus between labour exploitation in the agro-industrial sector and the emergence of safe spaces along the route;
g) the role of kinship ties, religious beliefs, and magical practices in producing undocumented mobility;
h) cultural and artistic production among travellers and the circulation of collective imaginaries;
i) the dynamics of oppression and resistance at the border, where people on the move, solidarity actors, and border agents confront each other;
j) the relationship between movement, borders, and solidarity in urban spaces, in the regulation of space and the tensions between center and periphery.

From a methodological perspective, the research relied on artistic dispositifs—music, theater, cinema, and comics—favoring co-authorship whenever possible.

Researchers

Massimo Cannarella, Camille Cassarini, Angela Curina, Enrico Fravega, Georges Kouagang, Michela Lovato, Luca Queirolo Palmas, Federico Rahola, Filippo Torre.

Artists involved

Andrea Ferraris, Jose Gonzalez Morandi, Davide Dawd Parisi, Filippo Quaglia.

Supporting Associations

AMTEF (Nouakchott -Mauritania), MP (Nouakchott - Mauritania), ASMFD (Mbour - Senegal), AMSA (Agadir- Marocco), ASGI (Italia)

Ethnographic Research Locations

El Hierro, Tenerife, Huelva (Spain); Nouadhibou, Nouakchott, Chami, Mbera HCR camp (Mauritania); Saint Louis, Dakar, Mbour, Joal, Kafountine, Cap Skirring (Senegal); Banjul (Gambia); Agadir, Rabat, Dakhla, Ben-i-Mellal, Tangeri, Oujda, Casablanca, Meknes (Morocco).