READ: The Sea as Paradigm (Lorenzo Pezzani)

Political and Legal Anthropology Review

Lorenzo Pezzani

Goldsmiths, University of London

Since 2011, the Forensic Oceanography project which I co-founded with Charles Heller has critically investigated the militarised border regime imposed by European states across the Mediterranean Sea, analysing the political, spatial and aesthetic conditions that have led to large-scale deaths of migrants over the last 30 years. In keeping with the FLOATS conference’s invitation to embrace the sea as a simultaneously utopian and dystopian space, Forensic Oceanography attempts to redirect the light shed by the border surveillance apparatus back towards the lethal effects of bordering, thus contributing to the many forms of migrants’ rights activism that have taken the Mediterranean Sea as a central terrain of struggle. In doing so, the project has also attempted to rethink the sea as a crucial laboratory for the reorganisation of territory on a global scale.