Page - 209 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 1/2015

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 1 2o15 Estela Schindel | Sea border crossing to Europe 209 realm that is previous or external to social life, but a socially and culturally constructed notion that has evolved through history and is subjected to, among others, political and epistemological constraints. Therefore, the boundary between nature and culture is neither universal nor con- stant but continually defined and re-defined under different historical and social contexts. The “left to die boat” case may provide a good example of this principle. In 2009 a ship with 72 migrants traveling from Tripoli to Lampedusa and running out of fuel, food and water supplies made an emergency call but received no help (heller, Pezzani et al., 2014). While Ita- lian, Spanish and other NATO forces were present in the area and knew the location and the situation of the ship, it was left to its own. Only 9 persons survived and 63 died of hunger and thirst in a sea region with plenty of military and commercial ships. This might be an extreme case due to the heavy presence of military vessels in the area, but it illustrates a pattern that can be found elsewhere, namely, the abandonment of unwanted ships to their own fate, increasing their exposure to extreme environmental factors.7 In the Greek-Turkish sea border area, in order to avoid heavy patrols on the eastern coast of the island (closest to Turkey), migrants have to take longer routes to the western coast, where corpses have increasingly been found. Mostly, however, illegalized migrants spend so much time in the water because they are repeatedly being “pushed back” by coast guard ships. Vessels of the hellenic coast Guard impede them from continuing towards the islands, and Turkish patrols push them back to Greek waters. Or as one of my informants, a politician and member of Mytilini’s city council put it: Turkish and Greek patrolling ships “play ping pong” with these boats. Boats are therefore subjected to a particular mobility regime. The Afghan travellers who told me their stories in Lesbos were explicitly pushed into a zone of exposure to bio-politically created risks. These push back operations are biopolitical devices. for these refugees, the boat crossing becomes a situation of radical indeterminacy, of absolute openness where belongings, beliefs and subjectivities are dislocated and broken apart. “Don’t sleep: Pray!” The boat crossing as an experience of radical indetermination Michel foucault coined the term heterotopia, a space other, to characterize sites with the “curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect” (fou- cault 1984,n.p.). heterotopias refer to a deviation or crisis of the normalized spaces and are linked to but also in tension with and opposition to them. Temporary heterotopias can be related to flowing, transitory or precarious spaces. The ship, according to foucault, represents the “space other” or the heterotopia par excellence: “a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea” (ibid.). foucault’s somewhat romantic depiction of the ship as a space open to dreams and adventure, “the greatest reserve of the imagination,” hardly applies to these short- lived, floating heterotopias embodied by the migrants’ boats. Their dramatic rupture with the principles that organize law and society ashore turns them to rather ephemeral and dramatic heterotopic atoms, drifting spaces of exception, torn apart from the rule of law, spaces where subjective certainties and civil belongings are temporarily challenged and suspended. 7 for a more detailed explanation of the specific risks associated with the ships’ crossings see Last and Spijekerboer 2014, 88-92.