A Geography of Permission

A Geography of Permission Its beaches are the final surface of a deep geological and political stratigraphy, where the history of extraction continues under new names. I began this journey at the edge of Europe, where the continent folds into the Atlantic, and the maps run out. I ended it on the other side of the same water, where the maps were always drawn by someone else, for someone else, with someone else’s interests marking the center. To turn the map upside down, as I suggested at the outset, is not merely a metaphor: it is an epistemological act, a way of asking whose knowledge counts, whose memory is archived and whose is submerged. The sea between Lisbon and Kingston is not empty. It is the most crowded place on earth, full of unreported deaths and stories. The time has come to gather them, to bring them back into view, and to listen, carefully, tirelessly, to the voices that history tried to drown.

I'll visit

19.06.2026 | by Carlotta Pisano

Jîna ‘Mahsa’ Amini Was Kurdish And That Matters. Say her Kurdish name.

Jîna ‘Mahsa’ Amini Was Kurdish And That Matters. Say her Kurdish name. Shortly after Amini’s violent death on 16 September, protests broke out and spread from the Kurdish parts of Iran to the whole country and the world. Demonstrators chanted the Kurdish slogan “jin, jiyan, azadî” – “woman, life, freedom”. But in news reports, particularly Western ones, Jîna Amini’s Kurdish identity has been erased – she is described as an Iranian woman and her ‘official’ Persian name ‘Mahsa’ – which for her family and friends existed only on state-documents –is the one in headlines. Calls to “say her name” echo in real life and across social media but unwittingly obscure Jîna’s real name and, in doing so, her Kurdish identity.

Games Without Borders

18.10.2022 | by Meral Çiçek