"Within confined waters"

2018 Alberto Favaro

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Map & booklet created for the exhibition "Mahalla Festival" as part of the installation "Inside The Border"

made with Elise Billiard Pisani

Fortress, Valletta,Malta

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Project funded by Valletta 2018 Foundation

Photos  by  Alberto Favaro

Short Description

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Nothing seems a better example of undifferentiated space than the sea, at least as usually considered the end of our inhabited reality, a stretch of space free from limits and divisions. 
Instead, many are the jurisdictional borders that divide water form water within a complex normative parceling of the sea, albeit invisible on its surface, which defines belongings and uses. The map here represented was constructed overlapping some of these jurisdictions which boundaries, interweaving and almost never matching, define the complex jurisdictional geography of the Mediterranean Sea.
Boats, as Foucault defined “heterotopia par excellence”, are the floating spaces that have to move across this intricate scenery. The recent misadventures of NGO ships show how tangible this partition of the sea is. As floating jails, where the right of space and time get reduced, having to stop at high sea or move between borders at the margins of the forbidden territorial waters. NGO vessels suggest the existence of special heterotopias (perhaps “super-heterotopias”?). In fact these are spaces where more heterotopias, as are the boat, the jail and the border space, take place concurrently.