The EU-border agency Frontex is one of the main actors involved in the bordering of the EU. Its practice reaches from the deployment of border police and equipment to the production of knowledge about the border and migration. Departing from a critical analysis of the documentaries "Frontex – Einsatz gegen Flüchtlinge – Festung Europa" (2013) and “Die Frontex-Recherche: Eine EU-Agentur und der Umgang mit Menschenrechtsverletzungen” (2019) on Frontex, this article examines the mutual interrelations of discursive and material bordering. Based on a combined reading of Laclau's work on difference and Mezzadra and Neilsons concept of borders as tools of structuring social reality through difference, the reproduction of the border is discussed. The border becomes the place where the border is enacted and reproduced on a material and discursive level. This practice of bordering is rooted in a reproduction of capital and of racist imaginations of refugees.

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.

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