A Breach in the Wall: Artivist no-border Atlases of Mobility

One of the main issues arising from the epistemic ‘knowledge/power’ shift as it manifests in the twenty-first century is the ‘border paradigm’ — an issue that has brought to the fore the urgency of border-oriented critical thought. The present essay examines the artivistic resistance performances to the European anti-free circulation of bodies policies along Mediterranean transmarine currents, interlacing Foucault’s interdisciplinary and bio-political analysis of power (Nail 2013) with postcolonial and decolonial methodologies (Escobar 2002; Mignolo 2006 and 2015) and with Joseph Pugliese’s concepts of geo-corpo-graphy (2007) and embodied shadow archives (2011). The ultimate aim of the essay is to develop a further shift in geo-criticism by postulating the centrality of the geo-corpo-graphy of knowledge and space, proposing a ‘Southern’ border critical thinking shaped through a conversation-contamination of Mediterranean, not-only European epistemologies, and adapting it to contemporary trans-border mobility, in line with the collective activist research project titled Un/walling the Mediterranean (smuraremediterraneo.wordpress.com). To this end, after having introduced the concept of ARTivism (Lemoine and Ouardi 2010; Cazzato and Silvestri 2016; Zaccaria 2014 and 2016) as an aesthetic-politico-cultural (no)border tactic to contest and de-legitimise contemporary border regimes, the essay discusses artivistic visual and narrative works connected to mobility and extraterritoriality, such as MTO’s graffiti titled ‘The Mediterranean Tunnel’ and ‘The Mediterranean Door,’ and Gabriele Del Grande’s book Il mare di mezzo, analysing how their powerful works instantiate new geo-corpo-psycho-graphies of resistance through an embodied poetics that is at once multilingual, plurisensorial, pluricoded and plurilingual.