Tensión Superficial. Nubes, olas, ruido y otras figuras mediales de la vigilancia marítima.

Abstract

The land/sea interface offers a fertile space for reflecting on the material mediations that facilitate or hamper human life and agency. This article proposes an anthropological exploration of the technical mediations and ways of seeing that have transformed European waters into a securitised landscape, and its shores into an unreachable destination for racialised migrant subjects. The study deploys a methodology that combines ethnographic analysis of interviews and documents from the European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA), a hub where maritime visuality is connected to the exercise of European territorial sovereignty, with concepts from visual studies and science and technology studies. After analysing how aesthetic and political dimensions are assembled in the visuality of maritime surveillance systems, the article concludes that while EMSA was created to reverse the logistical barriers that have turned the sea into a blind spot for European sovereignty, digital visuality introduces new spaces of invisibility that reproduce power relations in the maritime space.