Tipografías políticas. Ensayos visuales en los márgenes de Europa / Political typographies. Visual Essays on the Margins of Europe, accompanied the 2007 exhibition at Fundacion Antoni Tapies, Barcellona.
The project featured a multidisciplinary collaboration on the transformation of social, political and intimate geographies that are sweeping from the Balkans to Turkey and the Caucasus; the creation of transit zones and infrastructure, sometimes aerial, sometimes underground, often invisible – satellites, oil and gas pipelines – which change spaces and societies in their wake.


This publication is a possible conclusion to the research begun in B-Zone*: Becoming Europe and Beyond (title of the exhibition held at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin) and constitutes an expansion of its results in a number of directions.
Each of the artists’ projects presented follows the visual and hidden progress and history of the construction of transnational communications infrastructures and their impact on the multiple human geographies through which they pass. The countries involved in these infrastructures are situated at the intersection between three large world regions – Europe, the Commonwealth of Independent States (the community of countries once members of the Soviet Union) and the Arab-Islamic World – a fragmented area that has undergone extraordinary mutations, the setting for wars and ethnic and religious strife, and one of the most important corridors of raw materials and workers migrating to an expanding Europe.


Ursula Biemann:
Black Sea Files is a critical research project on the construction of the BTC (Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan) oil pipeline.
Contained Mobility, by the same author, goes beyond this framework and presents a metaphorical space with numerous questions found in this project, such as the various intimate geographies crossed by transnational structures that are an expression of power and control, in this case international legislation on immigration that creates a congestion of uprooted peoples at the coast or on the edges of any system. 

Angela Melitopoulos:
Corridor X reflects on the areas of migration in a particular territory, the former Yugoslavia, in relation to the socialist project to develop infrastructure; Behind the Mountain, by Oktay Ince and Raw Footage: T[here] I [t]Here by the group of activists VideA, which focus on forced migration and political pressure exerted on local minorities in Turkey.

Lisa Parks:
Postwar Footprints is a visual and textual essay on ‘footprints’, understood as territorial areas where satellite signals can be received but that are also zones marked by a multitude of human histories, which, in the case of Yugoslavia, take on greater tension as they reveal the networks of socio-political control in places ravaged by war, territories in part devastated by the very people now trying to impose their rule from above.
homogenous, and whose potential for civilisation, and barbarism, is all the greater.
Nuria Enguita Mayo


* B-Zone: on the Margins of Europe was a new phase in the visual and textual research project begun in 2003 by Ursula Biemann, Angela Melitopoulos and Lisa Parks entitled Transcultural Geographies.