Paper short abstract:

This project explores the interplay between physical and imagined spaces, through the fluidity and stasis of human mobility in Cape Verde in ways that allow us to rethink our ways of understanding the state, boundaries and space. We live in an era of unprecedented migration.

Paper long abstract:

Entry and rights of access to land territories is highly regulated and policed. Consequently, millions of migrants live precarious lives as migrant laborers, and refugees and undocumented persons. Migrants' journeys are commonly portrayed as a linear progression from home to host nations. In reality, however, their spatial movements are replete with interruptions and discontinuities; occupying spaces of hiding, waiting, diversion, escape and settlement. Using drawings, I probe both these fluid and static notions of territory in Cape Verde. A country whose sea territory - spanning 200 000 km2 is fifty times its landmass (4000 km2) - it has a larger sea land ratio than most countries and its close proximity to Africa, Latin America and Europe.

A series of drawings explore this in-between space and critique two conventional underpinnings of territory: 'site' and 'state', uncovering and exploring the relationship between the formation, contestation and absurdity of territories, the production of edges, borders, site, state and nations, and the experiences of bodies through these states. While state often refers to an organized political community under one government, it also denotes one's condition at a specific time. The fluid and transient nature of the themes in my project suggests a reconsideration of the relationship between site and project. A more fruitful direction lies in the recognition that all sites are constructions, whether out of a set of empirical conditions, the imagination, or both. These findings have implications for our understanding of the state, geography and migration.