Myrto Karampela-Makrygianni

The Sea as Island: Borderscaping the Mediterranean Basin

The Mediterranean Basin embodies a mesocosm for the Critical Zones containing all the fragilities, urgencies and uncertainties that characterise living in the 21st century. In its deep, obscured oceanic space, the notion of coexistence is constantly negotiated through overlapping (re)territorialisation processes, accelerated climatic-geological transformations, and increased interaction between human and more-than-human entities. As the urbanisation focus shifts from land to sea, the question of sympoiesis and response-ability becomes central for the establishment of a counter-paradigm for the worlding of the sea, as opposed to the prevailing processes of domination, expulsion and colonisation. 
Thus, the thesis paints the Mediterranean’s fragmentary portrait as the product of conflicting political, cultural, historical and environmental forces, reveals traces of immanence and resistance, and experiments with soft territorial acts and practices of care for the creation of a common ground for the Mediterranean assemblages. To do so, it situates the island concept – understood as archetypical in-between space that reconceptualises the spatiotemporal understanding of the boundary – in the ephemeral Julia formation which becomes speculative (re)fabulation of a conscious terraforming act. Using Julia as a synecdoche of the Mediterranean Basin, the project concludes by weaving an alternative model for the understanding of the sea and for the cohabitation of the ‘damaged’ planet.

More information

• Master thesis 'The Sea as Island: Borderscaping the Mediterranean Basin'