Now we are bringing the project to Barcelona and the northern region of Empordà that borders France. For one week we will gather an international group of researchers to continue our investigations and situate our perspectives from this territory. We will consider how habitat and home are conceived in the region, how this relates to the Mediterranean more broadly, how migration is formulated in the imaginary of Southern Europe, and how farming and knowledge of land has the potential to instigate different relations to the crafting of cohabitation. This week will be 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, and drought and the vulnerabilities of the climate emergency, among other concerns of the region.​

 

We are excited to welcome a dynamic group of filmmakers, artists, scholars, farmers, and activists hailing from Lebanon, Brazil, Spain, Bulgaria, the US, the UK, the Netherlands, and other locations. These transdisciplinary researchers and creative practitioners resist the ways in which rising fascism, xenophobia, chronic crises, and violence invoke division and fear, weaponizing difference and fostering discord. During the laboratory, we explore 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 aim to unsettle narratives of East-West, North-South, Muslim-Christian, Arab-European, and other taken-for-granted myths and narratives that make it difficult to center human, planetary, and multispecies justice.

 

In moving beyond stories of damage, resilience, and heroism that often characterize worldviews and understandings of territory, Beyond Borders explores 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. Our work aims to surface those stories that have been lost and to generate those that have not yet been told. Seeing stories as consequential, our work argues that unless we radically shift the stories we live by, we are destined for annihilation. During this week-long laboratory, we explore how repair and restoration can expand our view of what is possible. Through practice-based activities and conversation we explore a range 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?  

• How does place—the ground, the soil, the land or ‘terra’—archive and activate events and experiences? 

• 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? 

• How can creative, performative, and imaginative narratives reconstruct the terms of politics and modes of cohabitation? 

• How can home and habitat, as a set of tactical practices, act as forms of resistance?