Inhabiting spaces of holding. Practices of reception and rejection in Greater Paris and at the French-Italian border

The research investigates a series of spaces of migration in France, identifying thresholds and encounters between spaces generated by the urgency of received and rejected bodies. Practices of containment, control, and protracted displacement coexist with the production of collective resistance and solidarity. The proximity of the ambiguous forms of these legacies establishes the equally ambiguous management of bodies and spaces, building the infrastructure of waiting. The result in the urban and rural dimension is the generation of a series of sequences on edge, marked by the simultaneous intertwining of mobility and immobility, visible and opaque; spaces between the camp and the city, identified as “spaces of holding”. The research is developed through fieldwork in the holding places of Greater Paris and at the French-Italian border, aiming at recounting the different conformations that migrants’ spaces take on both their materiality and within collective imagination. Developed as a patchwork of different methodologies and representations accomplished from September 2021 until August 2022, the research aims at explaining migration by encompassing its multiple identities. The project proposal is an attempt to make visible new patterns of urban space production, neglected by the contemporary neoliberal city, and endow open scenarios for possible coexistence. Paris and the border made it possible to unfold these practices through what is left of migrants’ spaces, committed to remodelling both the inner city and its transnational infrastructure, thus constantly subverting the apparent uninhabitability of its spaces.