Across the world, state borders are being increasingly militarized and migrants funneled into increasingly hazardous terrains such as oceans, mountains and deserts. In the last few years alone, several thousands have died while crossing these hostile environments, whose material geographies are harnessed as crucial tools of border control. At the same time, across and beyond urban geographies in the Global North, a generalized atmosphere of hostility has led to shrinking forms of social protection for those classified as outsiders, with legislation passed to deny migrants access to work, housing, services and education.
The notion of “hostile environment”, first introduced in the migration debate in the UK in 2012 to refer to such anti-migrant laws, is mobilized as a conceptual and analytical lens to capture distant but interconnected processes, and to unravel the interconnected nature of the so-called migration and environmental crises beyond catastrophist and security-oriented perspectives. In this lecture, Lorenzo Pezzani will present some of the work produced on these topics through LIMINAL, a laboratory investigating intersectional (im-)mobilities and border violence through forensic imagination.
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Lorenzo Pezzani is an architect and researcher. His work explores the spatial politics, visual cultures and political ecologies of migration and borders. Over more than a decade, as co-founder of projects such as Forensic Oceanography and Border Forensics, he has worked at the crossroad of academic research, the arts and non-governmental activism. He is currently Associate Professor in the Department of the Arts of the University of Bologna, where he directs LIMINAL, a laboratory investigating intersectional (im-)mobilities through forensic imagination, and leads the "Hostile Environments" ERC project. His work has been used as evidence in courts of law, published across different media, and exhibited internationally.
