Digital placemaking as survival tactics: Sub-Saharan migrants’ videos at the Moroccan–Spanish border

Abstract

This article examines the use of digital media by irregular migrants in their preparation to cross the Moroccan–Spanish border. Based on long-term exploratory research that includes active participation and in-depth interviews, we analyse the videos produced by sub-Saharan young males while they live in the settlements near Ceuta. By focusing on processes of self-representation and border crossing, we highlight the role of digital media as it embodies a liminal physical experience against the violence applied by the Moroccan border security forces and the surveillance systems implemented by the Spanish Guardia Civil. Departing from recent contributions to digital migration studies, this article develops the concept of digital placemaking as an assemblage of discourses and spatial practices that serve opposite interests and generate an extremely violent confrontation through the use and control of borderspace. Therefore, we claim that the migrants’ placemaking strategies can be understood as mobile counter-discourses against border control. In this sense, the physical and digital activities of the migrants in the settlements are examples of what we call tactical placemaking, insofar as they become ways to stay alive and link their persons and futures to discussions about access to place and its consequences. To examine the migrants’ spatial tactics and their social meaning, first we will offer a brief infrastructural and historiographical account of the Moroccan–Spanish border in Ceuta. Second, we will explain our methodological perspective to shed light on the modes that placemaking experiences are created and circulated among migrants during and after their stay at the settlements. Finally, we will study the self-recordings shot in the clandestine camps of the forest in Fnideq and the border of Ceuta and consider how these videos materialize legal, cultural and physical imaginaries on migration while they simultaneously disrupt official attempts at controlling placemaking.