El dispositivo frontera: la construcción espacial desde la norma y el cuerpo migrante

The Border, despite the deceptive simplicity of geopolitical maps, hides in its thickness an enormous complexity linked to its construction. The contemporary Border –versus the precise immaterial line traced over the map– articulates through multiple constructions, human and non-human agents that expand their logic over any point over the territory. The Border configures an infrastructure that adapts precisely to precise needs, that is always changing, and that adopts multiple configurations. Therefore it can only be enounced as an apparatus: The Border Apparatus. The Border, therefore, as an assemblage that needs to be mapped from the architectural discipline to unveil the spatial consequences of a specific mode of territorial and spatial production. A mode, based on exceptionality, that not acts building clear boundaries but variable intensities fields. In these fields, the mere presence of certain bodies triggers and deploy –instantaneous and temporary– architectural assemblages that respond with high precision to each situation to neutralize it. We have named this body, which positions itself physically in denied political space, migrant body. This research has been based on the architectures and scenarios that this body occupies to revert the spatial violence they suffer. Naming the Border as an apparatus of territorial production, events that appear as not connected can be seen as a whole to comprehend which logics, procedures and characteristics conform them. To do so, it is a necessary position the research in the intersection between Law, body, and space. And, from there, interrogate the potential of each of these three variables in borderspace production. A law that is not only understood as written Law, but wholly embodied in the architectural matter, a body that is not human but assembled with other realities and a space that emerges as a dynamic intertwining between Law and Body, but that also modifies both. Thus, this doctoral research appears as an operative cartography that unveils contemporary border spatial production modes –focused on the Spanish Border–, through a path that connects three different scales and expands the scapes associated with it. The research shows how the Border has overlayed over the whole territory –by increasing order of deterritorialization–, from the stable architecture of the fence, the enclosure’s architectures, to post-metropolitan Border. A territorial apparatus that operates as a software including in their spatial production agents of different nature. Agents that are temporary captured transformed or altered to generate a specific spatiality. But it is also an apparatus that can be altered by the transgression of a body that claims –through minor architectural tactics– their right to produce their own spatiality.