The Sea as Island

Abstract

The Mediterranean Basin – defined and restricted by its own boundness – embodies a mesocosm for the network of Critical Zones containing in its dense space all the fragilities, urgencies and uncertainties that characterize living in the 21st century, while being the world’s most appropriated, militarized and instrumentalized sea. In its deep – and often intentionally obscured oceanic space – the notion of coexistence is constantly negotiated through overlapping (re)territorialization processes, accelerated climatic or geological transformations, and increased interaction between its complex human and more-than-human assemblages, especially in light of the emerging climate crisis. As the focus of urbanization shifts from the land to the sea, the question of sympoiesis and response-ability becomes central for the establishment of a counter paradigm for the worlding of the sea; opposed to the prevailing processes of domination, expulsion and colonization that accompany anthropogenic practices in the state-regime nexus. This counter paradigm arises from the understanding of borderscapes as critical in-between conditions of proximities, intensities, and assimilations whose investigational mapping can induce soft territorial acts and practices of care.

In this context, the aim of this thesis is twofold: firstly, to critically map the Mediterranean Basin painting its fragmentary portrait as a sociocultural product of interconnected and conflicting political, cultural, historical and environmental forces – while simultaneously revealing situated traces of immanence and resistance – and secondly, to experiment with soft territorial acts and practices of care in the process of deterritorialization and creation of a new common ground for the neglected Mediterranean human and more-than-human entities. To do so, the thesis project revolves around the concept of the island as an in-between space of viscosity that reconceptualizes the spatiotemporal understanding of the boundary; connected to the prototypical human territorial act. The conceptual experimentation lands to the discovery of the ephemeral volcanic formation of Julia island that becomes the speculative (re)fabulation of a conscious act of extraterritoriality bridging the natural and the praxeological space through processes of terraforming. Using Julia, then, as a synecdoche for the whole Mediterranean Basin, the project concludes by weaving an alternative model not only for the understanding and the planning of the sea but generally for the inhabitation – or more precisely cohabitation – of the ‘damaged’ planet.