The Strait of Gibraltar is a mirror-territory of the transformations taking place in the world today: Globalisation, migrations, borders, citizenship, network-society, communication, technologies (...). The border is a crossed-place, an extensive territory of life and mobile confinements where multiple social practices put pressure on established limits. New spaces and relationships emerge from and through the border between Southern Europe and Northern Africa.
Geographically, it is in a space of transition: between Africa and Europe, the Mediterranean and the Atlantic; a space that separates and connects and that has always been permeable to the continuous flows of life. Today this place fulfils a specific role as a barrier, both physical and mental, separating the legal from the illegal, like a folding line that splits our world in two. But borders are habitable territories that can’t be reduced to lines on a map. They are environments that favour mixing and exchange, highly dynamic territories that generate a gradation of shared spaces, where the nature of ‘passing through' prevails over that of the ‘barrier’. To cross their thresholds means to physically move from one place to another, but, even more so, it implies the start of a transformation, to becoming-others.
The Strait of Gibraltar is a laboratory-territory of the contemporary world. Multiple processes coexist and combine in such a way that Migrations and Work become key words for reading the transformations taking place. This enclave, a natural point of entry from Africa to Europe, underlines an abyss, a paradox of the global geo-economic order. Minimum geographic distance, maximum distance between the different levels of wealth and life options.
Watch this video about the experience of some immigrants after crossing the strait of Gibraltar.
