“The Sea is History”: Border Violence and the Disappearance of Maritime Migrants en Route to the Canary Islands
The Canary Islands have witnessed a surge in unauthorised maritime migration and disappearances at sea – in 2024, the NGO Caminando Fronteras reported around 10,000 victims. This results from Spain's and the EU's border policies, which expose migrants to disappearance at sea while providing no safe migration routes.
This doctoral project investigates this overlooked phenomenon in an under-researched borderland. It examines how communities in the Canaries witness and experience migrant disappearance at sea. It also interrogates how the border apparatus – including policies, discourses, and technologies – produces suffering in synchronicity with the ocean's elements and materialities – the Atlantic's volume, winds, currents, mist, sun, and vastness. In the Canary Islands, this is especially interesting given the archipelago's entanglements with various (post)colonial migration histories, which situate it at the intersection of Africa-America-Europe.
Disappearance at sea is the result of a form of violence that leaves no material traces due to the ocean's volumetric, fluid and dissolving nature. This research project proposes a "negative methodology" to examine this phenomenon, combining ethnography with creative and experimental research methods, particularly experimental filmmaking, soundscaping, and critical fabulation (Hartman, 2008). Importantly, it provides an innovative epistemological and methodological framework to study watery materialities in ethnographies of borders, migration, disappearance and violence.