Grenzregime Europa

Push-back on the high seas, teaser robots at the barbed wire fences in the Bulgarian mountains, vigilante groups in southern Hungary and massive camps on Lampedusa. The EU's closed-border policy is assuming concrete forms. In a twopart event, the work of three different artists and initiatives will be introduced first, in order to then discuss their works of counter practice. Since their founding in 1989, BBM have addressed the assault on humanity through technical, ideological and architectural means. Most recently their actions and performances have considered the technological armament of the borders and the ethical latitude of independently-acting teaser robots.
Founded in 2012, the initiative Watch the Med operates an online mapping project of the Mediterranean, where they monitor deaths of refugees and violations of the Law of the Sea at the borders of the EU. At the same time they co-initiated the Alarm-Phone in 2014, an emergency number for refugees in distress at sea that can be called in addition to the coast guard. For the book project Lampedusa—Bildgeschichten am Rande Europas (Spector Books) Armin Linke, together with a group of artists a. o. Leon Kahane, has been gathering images from and of Lampedusa since 2010 in order to analyse the image production around this place.