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.

Islands have long provided the setting for imagined utopias, as in Ibn Tufail’s 12th century tale Hayy ibn Yaqdhan and Thomas More’s Utopia of 1516. But the island of Lesvos could be described neither as a “utopia”, from the Greek “no” and “place” nor a “eutopia”, from the Greek “good” and “place”.

How do human encounters and experiences with the sea relate to the articulation of utopias and vice versa? The main aim of the workshop was to think in tandem the embracing vastness of the sea upon the planet and the necessary limitlessness of imagining better futures for all creatures upon it.