Portable Public Space: Atlas of the Mediterranean as a Contested Territory of Survival

‘Portable Public Space: Atlas of the Mediterranean as a Contested Territory of Survival’ is Elisava Research’s third proposal for Navire Avenir after ‘Portable Public Space: New Public Space Formats for the Navire Avenir Rescue Ship’ (2022) and ‘Portable Public Space: Embodied Responses to the Mediterranean Refugee Crisis’ (2023). Navire Avenir is an international project to design and build a rescue ship for the Mediterranean, promoted by Sébastien Thiéry (Pôle d’Exploration des Ressources Urbaines, PEROU). One of the main objectives of this applied research project is to propose new approaches to the European refugee crisis through design practices of care.

This third iteration centers on the Mediterranean Sea as a “motionless deathscape” (Lo Presti, 2020), where the act of mapping becomes a critical intervention in the regimes of truth enacted by global and local geopolitical hierarchies and networks of interdependence. In this sense, this book is developed as a multiscale atlas of the Mediterranean as a transnational public space and a contested territory of survival, based on purposefully made maps that help to identify and visualise the processes of forced migration entangled in the complexity of the Mediterranean Refugee Crisis.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.46467/Elisava_Portable-Public-Space-3