In 2015 our TV screens, newspapers and social media were full of stories about ‘flows’ of migrants ‘pouring’ into Europe, set alongside photos and videos of people packed into boats at sea or meandering in long lines across fields. Now, this same language is being used to describe the ‘migrant caravan’ of the thousands of Hondurans leaving the violence of their home country and attempting to journey to the US.

After several days spent visiting hospitality centres for refugees in Serbia, we decide to change our plans and take a detour via Bosnia-Herzegovina on our way back home to Trieste. We have just learned during our meetings with the representatives of the Serbian Commissariat for the Refugees that the irregular refugee route towards the EU is now deflected towards that country, and in particular that in Velika Kladuša, a few kilometres away from the Croatian border, a new set of informal encampments was taking shape.

In 2015 and 2016 Bosnia-Herzegovina received almost no migrants during the humanitarian emergency that saw nearly one million refugees moving north to reach the rest of Europe, establishing an informal corridor along the so-called Western Balkan Route. This changed in 2018 when Bosnia-Herzegovina experienced a sharp increase in arrivals coinciding with a related humanitarian crisis in the north-western Canton of Una-Sana, where a significant number of refugees have gathered in the past few months waiting for the opportunity to cross the Croatian border and enter the EU.

In the summer of 2018, Trieste – an Italian port city a few kilometres away from the Slovenian border – seemingly overnight became a new arrival point for the informal refugee Balkan Route. On 25 August 2018, together with a group of other people, deputy Mayor Polidori took the initiative to remove the refugees sleeping outdoors along the Trieste waterfront, near the Port Authority headquarters, and a few hundred meters from the spectacular Piazza Unità d’Italia, the political and tourist core of the city.

This video feature accompanies the article “The social production of container space”. Although a sizable body of popular and academic literature explores how shipping containers have reconstituted the spaces through which they travel, the space within containers themselves remains largely unexamined.

Border patrolling brings together racial profiling and passing with pernicious consequences for Indigenous migrants. In the paper, I argue that migrants are differentially vulnerable to deportation based on perceived race, gender and class.

On the 24th of May 2010, Private Chelsea E. Manning was arrested by the United States government on suspicion of leaking classified military material to WikiLeaks. Manning was an intelligence analyst within the US army, and in 2009 was deployed to Iraq where she had access to classified military databases. We explore two types of data: the data leaked by Manning and released by Wikileaks, and the material of her subsequent court-martial released through Freedom Of Information (FOIA) requests.

The meanings were multiple; the ironies deliberate and critical. We later learned from a visit to the Kempsons, UK artists-turned-humanitarians who live on the northern tip of Lesvos, that many of these life-jackets are worse than useless. Sold to refugees for a small fortune in Turkey, they often turn out to be fakes filled with foam that absorbs water.

As we write, New York City counts over 62,000 homeless people on the street and in the shelter, a number that may well be short of a more accurate figure. Our city has a right to shelter, but not a right to housing, and there is a critical difference at play between the two: Shelter only removes the visible fact of homelessness from view, while doing little to change the material circumstances.

The increasingly common conjunction of contemporary art and logistics (Toscano and Kinkle, 2015) might be cause for incredulity in some quarters—not least those of logistics specialists or art historians. However crucial to the working of contemporary economic life—so much so that theorists have taken to speak of a shift to supply chain capitalism (Tsing, 2009)—the visible manifestations of this material theory and practice of the circulation and assembly of commodities appear stamped by an inexorable banality, especially in that modular metonym for global capital as a whole, the container.