“PLACES, BORDERS, FRONTIERS”. Three days against the commodification of territories
Invitation to contribute [2026 Salento, june 26th-28th]
In ancient Greece, “Xénia” referred to the ritual of hospitality toward a stranger who knocked at the door. Be them a traveler, a shipwreck survivor or a fugitive, the guest received care and honors that they would one day reciprocate. Over the centuries, the rules of Xénia have made the Mediterranean a space of hybridization and intersection, a space of possibilities where the otherness and the unknown enriched the identity of peoples. Today, in the distant echo of that idea, we – who inhabit a small fragment of Mediterranean land – know that we live on the margins of that center of power called the “West”. An Empire that claims to enclose the universal horizon of history within the borders of its sovereignty. Its violence has imposed the dominance of profit and the single-mindedness of unstoppable techno-industrial development, all of this at the expense of forced migration, desertification, genocide, and the destruction of ecosystems. In the territory where we live, on the southern border of the Empire, some still speak Griko, an ancient language derived from Greek. In Griko, ‘sséno’, a mutation of xenos, indicates origin from a generic elsewhere. Even today, while the Mediterranean has become a space of rejections, militarized borders, and tourist markets, we feel connected to this historical root, and it is this conception of space that we wish to inhabit and traverse. While those in power blame foreigners for the poverty into which they have plunged entire populations, we recognize as our accomplices those who, like us, live on the margins of the Empire and represent an open breach to multiple possibilities. Living on the margins allows us to see the fortress walls up close – but also their cracks. Here, the border is a warning but also a challenge. It is the physical or imaginary line that brutally separates hope from despair, privilege from exploitation, the tourist from the illegal immigrant. And, sometimes, detention centers go up in flames. We live in a land devastated by capitalist plunder. A violence that, after the depopulation caused by the emigration of landless agricultural workers, continued with the installation of predatory industrial plants. The Taranto steelworks, the Brindisi petrochemical complex, and the oil extraction in Lucania are just the most visible wounds of a territory subjected to cosmetic operations tin order to be made attractive on the tourist market.
PROPOSAL We want to organize three days of meetings in our hometown, Salento, to give voice to experiences of struggle from different places and collectively develop political analyses tailored to the needs of our time. The interconnection of places of friendship could resemble an experience of closeness, a mujawara – as our Lebanese comrades would call it – since we believe that solidarity is not based on the performance of a “militant good deed,” rather on considering other struggles as part of our own, and vice versa. Recognition is the engine of internationalism. Let’s begin by inhabiting a place where we can share stories and perspectives, food and music; a place where we will be guests – sséni -on the shores of the Mediterranean. We will organize three days in a campsite where we will have moments of discussions and conviviality, but also time to discover our territories and share projects of struggle. You are all invited to take part in the construction of this gathering by offering contributions on your experiences, analyses, and practices developed between centers and margins; relationships between borders and crossings, between militarization and tourism speculation on the one hand, and experiences of resistance, subsistence, and internationalist solidarity on the other.
We will post further info soon. Please send us your proposal for contribution at this email address:
maisiaturista@riseup.net
*26 27 28 June 2026*
