This paper draws on ethnographic observations along the south-eastern Mediterranean informal migration route through the Aegean Sea. I focus on the Greek border island of Lesvos as the central stage where the European crisis of asylum has been recently unfolding. In the absence of coherent national and European asylum policies, newly arrived migrants, refugees, and receiving communities (comprised mainly of local residents and volunteers from mainland Greece and Europe) are left to cope with and against each other, leading to multiple personal and collective passages. In this interstitial transit space, subjectivities are made and remade through their participation and resistance to the ongoing production of EU borders. I suggest that liminality provides a useful lens through which to understand the perplexing ‘time-spaces’ and interactions between multiple actors involved in the teetering asylum system on the margins of Europe. I argue that, through various actors’ experiences on Lesvos as a complex social site, liminality emerges as a form of sustained social marginality and exclusion that extends beyond Lesvos itself. The protracted and broadened crisis context in which asylum-seekers and receiving communities of locals and volunteers on Lesvos find themselves provides a salient example of the gradual socio-spatial and temporal ‘stretching’ of liminality from a transitional phase towards a condition of permanent and portable liminality experienced at both the individual and the collective level, and both at and away from borders.

The Greek island of Lesvos has a centuries-old history as a site of departure, arrival, coexistence and resistance for the forcibly displaced. This migratory chronology, however, was overwritten by the unprecedented attention that Lesvos attracted during the 2015 ‘refugee crisis’. This paper examines vernacular aspects of bordering, specifically the practice of border crossers and other groups standing in solidarity with—or against—them, to inscribe messages on walls in and around carceral and public spaces, viewed as a process of constructing and contesting borders from below. Closely reading numerous inscriptions collected around Lesvos reveals how borders are constructed, enacted and contested from below through borderlanders’ discursive practices on some of the very walls that constitute the EU frontier’s material infrastructure. This study aims to advance understandings of the historical continuity of the Aegean borderscape as a complex landscape of border effects and affects that exceed borders’ legal, infrastructural and political dimensions, while also highlighting the persistence and importance of personal agency, self-authorship and identity reclamation by border populations even in the direst of circumstances.

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