beyond borders: territory is a meeting place
BEYOND BORDERS: TERRITORY IS A MEETING PLACE explored an entwined understanding of home and habitat.
Originally planned as a site-specific project in Lebanon, the project pivoted in response to the war and displacement and dispersal of participants. As previously conceived, we focused on cohabitation in ways that are propositional and speculative. During our pilot study in Lebanon, several of our interlocutors speculated that Lebanon is a laboratory—a site offering opportunities for experimental study and observation, a place to practice, to diagnose, to conduct tests and trials, a workshop where people collaborate in addressing vexing social, political, and ecological issues. This improvisational spirit and dedication to imaginative practice guided this project.
When faced with perpetual crises and the breakdown of systems, how can we imagine new ways of living together? Fields ranging from social work to humanitarianism to design, call for resilience in the face of precarity. Counter to this rhetoric, we proposed collaborative forms of creativity that deeply engage and transform the political imagination.
In summer 2025, we assembled a group of 20 artists, filmmakers, scholars, farmers, and others, with half hailing from Lebanon. We gathered in Barcelona and the northern region of Empordà bordering France to investigate how habitat and home are conceived in the region and the Mediterranean more broadly, how migration is formulated in the imaginary of Southern Europe, and how farming and knowledge of the land has the potential to provoke different relations and forms of cohabitation. The laboratory was dedicated to studying how correspondences between the socio-ecological context of an urban area like Barcelona can connect to rural practices of hospitality and regeneration, illuminating different perspectives on how we understand migration, invasive species, border infrastructure, mass tourism, drought and vulnerabilities of the climate emergency, among other regional concerns.We explored how rising fascism, xenophobia, chronic crises, and violence invoke division and fear, weaponizing difference and fostering discord. During the laboratory, we emphasized responses to current geopolitical shifts with special attention given to the Mediterranean—a region whose historical encounters have established the area as a zone of conflict. Through investigating the links between Lebanon and Spain, we unsettled narratives of East-West, North-South, Muslim-Christian, Arab-European, and other taken-for-granted myths and stories that make it difficult to center human, planetary, and multispecies justice.
In moving beyond tropes of damage, resilience, and heroism that often characterize understandings of territory, Beyond Borders explored the capacities of stories to propose alternate and more regenerative ways of living in the world. Along with policy, statecraft, and legislation, the future of migration, mobility, and living together will originate with stories—those exiled, those forgotten, and those not yet imagined. Seeing the tales we tell and the narratives we construct as consequential, this work argued that unless we radically shift the stories we live by, we are destined for annihilation. During this week-long field laboratory, we were guided by a series of questions, drawing on the diverse and robust work of participants:
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What are the relationships between experiences of rupture/crisis and the production of space and place?
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How does place—the ground, the soil, the land or ‘terra’—archive and activate events and experiences?
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How can we understand terra/territory not as a commodity or resource, but as a living system from which we can learn?
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How can site-based stories speak to the notions of belonging and estrangement in ways that differ from the dominant narratives generated by the state, NGOs, and the media?​
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How can creative, performative, and imaginative narratives reconstruct the terms of politics and modes of cohabitation?
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How can home and habitat, as a set of tactical practices, act as forms of resistance?
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