This paper ethnographically explores the border-crossing experience of sub-Saharan African migrants in Athens. The everyday social visibility and spatial mobility of migrants in the city is viewed through a critical phenomenological perspective centering on irregularity and border-crossing as a lived experience which, in times of financial crisis, is shared by other vulnerable urban dwellers beyond the migrant/non-migrant dichotomy. The salience of such practices for current discourses and policies concerning migration, urban public space, citizenship and identity in a series of socio-political scales is explored. As migrants’ im/mobility and in/visibility intersect with emerging, crisis-induced patterns of social in/ equality in Greece, they become strategic actors who construct new understandings of self and other, indicate emergent political and social configurations, and daily reassert their ‘right to the city’ in the ‘city of Others’.

This paper draws on ethnographic observations along the south-eastern Mediterranean informal migration route through the Aegean Sea. I focus on the Greek border island of Lesvos as the central stage where the European crisis of asylum has been recently unfolding. In the absence of coherent national and European asylum policies, newly arrived migrants, refugees, and receiving communities (comprised mainly of local residents and volunteers from mainland Greece and Europe) are left to cope with and against each other, leading to multiple personal and collective passages. In this interstitial transit space, subjectivities are made and remade through their participation and resistance to the ongoing production of EU borders. I suggest that liminality provides a useful lens through which to understand the perplexing ‘time-spaces’ and interactions between multiple actors involved in the teetering asylum system on the margins of Europe. I argue that, through various actors’ experiences on Lesvos as a complex social site, liminality emerges as a form of sustained social marginality and exclusion that extends beyond Lesvos itself. The protracted and broadened crisis context in which asylum-seekers and receiving communities of locals and volunteers on Lesvos find themselves provides a salient example of the gradual socio-spatial and temporal ‘stretching’ of liminality from a transitional phase towards a condition of permanent and portable liminality experienced at both the individual and the collective level, and both at and away from borders.

The Greek island of Lesvos has a centuries-old history as a site of departure, arrival, coexistence and resistance for the forcibly displaced. This migratory chronology, however, was overwritten by the unprecedented attention that Lesvos attracted during the 2015 ‘refugee crisis’. This paper examines vernacular aspects of bordering, specifically the practice of border crossers and other groups standing in solidarity with—or against—them, to inscribe messages on walls in and around carceral and public spaces, viewed as a process of constructing and contesting borders from below. Closely reading numerous inscriptions collected around Lesvos reveals how borders are constructed, enacted and contested from below through borderlanders’ discursive practices on some of the very walls that constitute the EU frontier’s material infrastructure. This study aims to advance understandings of the historical continuity of the Aegean borderscape as a complex landscape of border effects and affects that exceed borders’ legal, infrastructural and political dimensions, while also highlighting the persistence and importance of personal agency, self-authorship and identity reclamation by border populations even in the direst of circumstances.

This paper expands on the visual essay ‘Trash/Traces: Lives adrift along the border’, which narrates the author’s experiences at the frontline of refugee rescue operations during the 2015 European ‘refugee crisis’ and explores the Aegean borderscape’s affective geography by tracking the human and material traces of undocumented border-crossings on Lesvos island. Drawing on humanities’ turn to affect and new materialism, and theoretical advancements in border studies this twofold project implements visual and (auto)ethnographic methods to indicate obscured dimensions of the contemporary European border regime and illustrate the affective and somatic impact of its politics upon a variety of actors. This is done through the visual and narrative chronicling of bordercrossing humans and materials, which are regarded and handled as trash to be promptly removed from public view, through their irregular trajectories’ narration by the seawashed personal items. An archaeogeography of undocumented migration emerges through the tracing, conservation, and articulation of the flows of human and material ‘waste’ and their intersections and layerings across liminal landscapes, thereby instigating a rethinking of the affective, bodily and material economies of emplacement and mobility across the Eastern Mediterranean.

The land- and sea-scape stretching across the Greek-Turkish borders in the Aegean Sea had diachronically been a space where cultures, authorities and mobilities have interlocked and reciprocally reshaped. The advent of the European crisis of refugee reception and asylum since 2015, however, has turned the southeastern Mediterranean into a securitized zone lacerated by disquiet and death, irreversibly affecting the local topography and recasting the sociality and mobility of permanent and itinerant communities in the region. Seeking to contribute to the theoretical and analytical understanding of borders and their effects on the sociospatial landscapes they cut across, this essay offers a narrative analysis of the Aegean borderscape. This is done through the detailed parsing of a photograph depicting an inconspicuous moment of bordering, supplemented with the author’s own experiences at the frontline of refugee rescue operations in Lesvos. The unravelling of the manifold storylines interlocked within the still image that is the focal point of this essay reveals the borderscape’s materialities, its local and historical specificities, its affective intensities and the uneven power dynamics at play between a variety of actors encountering each other at the border.