The border as “other space”

Abstract

Refugees played a central role in public discourse in the past decade, however, self-representations were marginal. In this article, I analyze the documentary My Escape / Meine Flucht, which portrays the flight of 15 people based on footage from their mobile phones on their journey and interviews. Starting from Foucault's concept of the heterotopia, I approach the Mediterranean Sea as a place in which different power regimes intersect, engage and compete. The self-representation of border-crossing makes the enacted power on refugees visible and challenges common framings of refugees and border-crossing. I pick up the argument that the rise in migration in 2015 offers a healing potential which could mirror the reality in the “Global South” to a European Union (EU) public. I argue that self-representations in media reveal the contradictions in the self-imagination of the EU and its reality. Yet their impact remains limited.