Graves
Illegalized travelers from Asia and Africa, fleeing toward destinations in Europe, hide on train roofs, in theundercarriages of buses and trucks, or inside containers and refrigerated cargo holds in order to avoid bordercontrols, police patrols, fences, and other material or symbolic barriers—as well as the deportation anddetention. They seek passage through karst terrain and minefields, or through weaponized landscapes, forests,mountains, and numerous rivers. Some are lost while they look, wait and hope for their chance to finally crossanother border. Their premature, violent deaths are the result of contemporary bordering, racialized exclusionand persecution.Many of those that die at the borders are never found (disappearaed). If death is reported to authorities or bodies are found,a series of different procedures are carried out, after which the deceased are either repatriated or, asstipulated by law, laid to rest in graves in local cemeteries within the municipalities where they are found.These graves are among the few local material traces of the lives, escapes, and deaths of people who opposedand confronted the borders that were closed for them.
Graves of those who died along borders and because of borders are, if we speak about Croatia and neighbouring countries, scattered along roads, places of persecution, and those very borders. Often invisible, located at the margins of cemeteries, marked in various ways, with different materials or not at all, solitary or clustered together, often anonymous, these burial sites are markers of lives cut short, violent borders, and posthumous marginalization. Maintained, with permanent tombstones or simply modestly decoratedwith flowers or other tokens of care, these graves can also be places of coming together, thoughtfulness, andmourning.
Documenting and mapping those graves belong to a broader effort of tracing border deaths, a work done mainly through a transnational network of activists, scholars and others who work with and around those material traces, as a way of defying the persistenterasure of migrants’ lives, and demonstrating the brutalities of the contemporary European border regime.Mapping the graves is not just a documentary method that could eventually help families, community members,local communities, activists, and researchers, while the practice also supports acts of commemoration andpursuits of justice. Spatial representation of death enhances our perception of geographies of violence, death causes, losses,and traces, while the accompanying categorizations, where “unknown” is prevalent or among the most frequentdesignations, point not only to the features of these traces, but also to their opacity.
8/12/2025