antiAtlas Journal

A software system is a set of instructions, a code or a script. I apply a similar logic to social interaction, trying to interface with others. But there is always a humanness in the interpretation of a social protocol, whereas a machine interpreter demands a precise series of directions or it fails. As technology moves ever closer to us, the scripts start to blend.

Heterographies is the issue 6 of antiAtlas Journal, featuring contributions from Crys Aslanian & Ludmilia Postel, Claire Lapique & Ana Maria Lozano Rivera, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Manoël Pénicaud and Patrick Suter. It looks at the ways in which humans write themselves and "their others". For the first time, the articles in this issue will be published progressively, between June and October 2023

The issue 5 of antiAtlas Journal addresses the question or Air Deportation through 14 international articles and unpublished researches. It is based on the work of the Air Deportation project (directed by William Walters, with Clara Lecadet and Cédric Parizot), and on a call for proposals.

Air deportation is an approach to the expulsion of people that takes seriously the systems of transportation that are central to these processes. This article introduces the idea of air deportation, embeds it in geopolitics and struggles over migration and borders, and argues that this perspective moves us beyond a Eurocentric view of expulsion.

This article reflects on the limits and possibilities of anti-deportation resistance in the UK.

In 1985, Zairean migrants were deported from Switzerland in what was presumably the first mass deportation on a charter flight titled “Action Black Autumn”. In collaborative work between a historian, artist and writer, the article aims to approach this deportation flight from different angles.

Inspired by dramaturgical sociology, this paper examines the mass deportation of 311 Indian citizens from Mexico as a dramatic production.

This is the description of what is happening during a deportation. The slow transformation of a human being in to a parcel that nobody want to receive.

This article explores deportation monitoring as a practice of migrant solidarity, mapping diverse sites in the German and Euro-African deportation regime.

The Deportees’ Malian Association is a pioneering initiative of self-organization of migrants after deportation, aimed at creating the conditions for social bonding and solidarity. In this series of interviews, Lamine Diakité, Ousmane Diarra, Mariama Kémé, Mamadou Konaté, Bassékou Sibi, Souad Touré, return to the history of the association and its daily working (in french).

This article examines anarchist struggles against deportation in France, reconstructing their fragmented history. We highlight the idea of a “deportation machine” that these campaigns popularized, and ask how these movements expand the field of political action beyond the state, entangling airlines, airports, travel agents, and other commercial actors in the struggle against deportation.

The #DearBA campaign was launched in 2019 by Lesbians and Gays Support the Migrants in response to British Airways’ centenary celebrations. Over 100 letters to British Airways were collected and shared online, all condemning the airline for carrying out deportations on behalf of the British government.

The waiting zone in Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle airport is a key space for border police action in denying foreigners admission to French territory. Approaching it as an acoustic environment enables us to understand the crucial part played by sound in the network of power relationships that are in operation here.

This article is an ethnography of voluntary deportations conducted in the Athens International Airport by the IOM Greece in collaboration with the Greek police.

As a settler colony in the Asia-Pacific region, forced mobilities from and within Australian territories are intrinsically linked to questions of belonging, possession, and sovereignty. As a remote island, Australia is entirely dependent on aviation infrastructures to carry out removals. This article examines the practices, contestations, and visual representations surrounding air deportation.

Frontex facilitates European states’ air deportations, increasing the scope of national executives and adapting to national deportation infrastructures. The article also demonstrates how the agency is embedded in an EU system that sets deportation targets and assesses the agency in numbers. Ultimately, it documents a polymorphous air deportation infrastructure where national, bilateral and European pathways intersect to exclude people on the move.

This article explores the multifarious ways in which freight and migrant mobilities have rearticulated to one another in the port of Patras. It argues that, through the re-appropriation of urban and logistical empty spaces, migrants have elaborated alternative strategies of settlement and escape that have allowed them to navigate the border and create independent patterns of mobility.

The fourth issue of the antiAtlas Journal focuses on maps considered as devices that participate in artistic, militant or scientific processes.

In Houston’s Third Ward, residents join with artists and architects to revitalize a historic African-American neighborhood. What can their maps tell us?

This article investigates how the concept of deterrence is maintained in the United States border enforcement policy of “Prevention Through Deterrence.”

La cartographie thématique de données statistiques implique de nombreux choix qui conduisent à questionner son impartialité. Il est possible d’agir sur les données, numériques et géographiques, sur les modalités de leur représentation et sur les émotions qu’elles suscitent. C'est ce que nous allons illustrer par un exercice reproductible de cartographie critique, en prenant l’exemple de la migration syrienne (2015).

Une recherche informelle, performative et dissensuelle autour de l'univers polémique et conflictuel des "faux guides" peuplant la médina de Marrakech.

Cet article analyse les dispositifs cartographiques tels qu’ils sont (r)employés dans l’œuvre romanesque de l’auteur français contemporain Jean Echenoz, en les faisant dialoguer avec des dessins de l’artiste québécoise Josée Dubeau.

The aim of issue 3 of the antiAtlas Journal is to open, extend and enrich the relevant research avenues.

The article analyzes the religious armed groups’ strategies in the borderlands of Sub-Sahara Africa, and the States responses to insecurity.

The Oniroscope, a tool for artistic and anthropological inquiry, helps groups of people to share their night dreams through a video created in real time.

This paper examines the different perspectives of the border visible at local, unofficial markets held on the India-Bangladesh border in Meghalaya.

In the laboratories of research-creation in art and computer science, hybrid works have broken down the boundaries between art and science.

This paper introduces the fundamental concepts of category theory and then shows how they can be applied to a wide variety of situations from design to the wider world.

On Countries and Hotels (2007), by Raji Bathish, dissembles linear narratives of time and place, producing a space of movement. But to what effect?

Introductory article and overview of issue 2 of the antiAtlas Journal, which focuses on the relationship between fiction and the border. The goal is to show how fiction, conceived as a strategy, cuts across and shapes very different approaches; whether they are the result of artistic experiments or of scientific research, they all tackle borders by being control mechanisms, political and economic operators and systems of representing space all at once.

The deportation of unregistered migrant Maria Amelie after the publication of her book Ulovlig norsk (2010) was a major media event in Norway. In her following book, Takk (2014), she constantly refers to windows, mirrors and camera lenses. Glass becomes a symbol of traumatic experience and configures the in/visibility of the deportation borderscape, creating a political aesthetics of the border.

This article takes up the elements of a thesis, A Lover’s Discourse: Frictions, defended at MIT. Raafat Majzoub presents two key concepts of his work, "Active Fiction" and "Sleeping Fiction", which allow him to think of his artistic approach as a narrative strategy in the political context of the Middle East. He combines excerpts from his novel, The Perfumed Garden: An Autobiography of Another Arab World and visual fragments of fictions and performances.

This article explores the potential of recording, composing or investigating borders’ sonic and vocal practices to “give voice” to these contested territories as dynamic, permeable and process-based apparatuses. It suggests that listening might be a useful instrument for a critical epistemology of the border, to rethink its linear image and the dichotomy between inclusion and exclusion in performative and relational ways.

This paper addresses the use of data and numbers in border management and proposes a criticism of the criticism against what is commonly named the datafication of borders. The current phenomenon is more a mathematization of borders, producing a particular topology of borders and using ways of computing data and numbers that are politically driven.

Many states are building barriers at their borders. This article analyzes these artifacts as symbols of "teichopolitics", i. e. space partitioning policies that are noticeable in closed cities as well as at international borders. It questions the materiality of these policies that mix visible and invisible elements, combining display and discretion.

How do images and their used participate in the violence of borders ? How can they on the contrary be used to contest this same violence ? We explore these questions through the „left-to-die boat“ case which we have documented, in which 72 passengers were left to drift for 14 days in the Mediterranean sea despite repeated interaction with state actors.

Creating a journal is a bet. That of the Antiatlas Journal is twofold: it assumes that the web offers new ways to articulate differently text, images and various media, and that this binding can renew our approach to such complex objects as the borders...

By developing new esthetic approaches, Border Art has problematized our relations to space. It has also disturbed the representations of what makes art and get closer to experimental geography. What theory of contradictory realities should we elaborate, in order to understand the role played by artists in this context of social and political activism?

The age-old question of the relationship between arts and sciences has taken on a new significance in recent years, and must be approached differently. We should analyse the different forms of scientific knowledge and the evolution of artistic practices. Photography, cinema and video had already deeply transformed art practices and their relation to science. Digital technologies have pushed forward these disruptions…

Both a paper and a cartography, Re-drawing The Experience reviews the setup of a research-creation process between an artist, a researcher and asylum seekers in Grenoble, France.

This article reviews the process of conception and development of a documentary and artistic video game: A Crossing Industry. It is elaborated by a transdisciplinary team and focuses on the functionning of the Israeli separation regime in the West Bank during the three years following the second Intifada (2007-2010).

As an aside to the adventurous realm of the arts/sciences relations (more usually called practise-based research and creation in English), this text puts the term “science” first, by offering to speak of “sciences-/arts”, and explores the critical potential of the added punctuation mark. It questions the specificity of social scientists’ commitment to carrying out experiments – and creating experiences – that are not simply beautiful or accessible but also have a political dimension. The text concludes with a proposal to renew the scientific pact.

"You think so because you are French!" - Samira told me (slightly) angrily when I said as a half joke that I saw no real man in front of me. She was wearing a frock and full make up while she claimed to be a real man like her father. And she was selling sex to other men ‘en travesti’ that night in Marseille.