Hot and Cold Borders: Sketches for a Geopolitics of Environmental Media

In recent years, the concept of the border has undergone profound transformations and become central to a broad debate investigating the complexity of its political and social practices. The centrality of the border topic in public debate has contributed to the development of something akin to a “frontier cinema” or, better, a propensity for “filming at the border.” This paper investigates political borders as media environments and seeks to develop the idea of the “border mediascape” as a new framework at the crossroads of multiple disciplines. A movie filmed on the island of Lampedusa during the so-called European migrant crisis, the award-winning and critically acclaimed Fuocoammare (Fire at Sea, 2016) by Gianfranco Rosi, is used as a case study to reflect on the functioning of technological devices placed along borders and, thus, on the geopolitics of environmental media. The original take this documentary offers on the media devices that operate along national borders—as well as on the environmental, social, and political effects of that technology—is an aspect that has gone unnoticed by commentators. Watching this movie through the eyes of media and border studies provides the opportunity to describe contemporary national borders as a form of geopolitical asymmetry implanted in media technology.