Mapping the nervous border system: some considerations on cartographic akinesia and vulnerability

Beyond its specific pathognomonic use in the neurological field, the term akinesia has become a defining feature of current times of crisis. It comes from the Greek “a-kinesis” and literally means the absence of movement. We might have experienced this condition, to varying degrees, during the Covid-19 lockdown. Caged in forced but temporary immobilities, many of us dealt with the psychological and bodily impact of confinement, curfew, and alienation: the impossibility to move, the fear of moving while being controlled, the shutdown of transport systems. But paradoxically, there is a more structural and much longer-lasting akinesia concerning the migrant, especially the one that the contemporary nervous border system considers and frantically tracks as irregular, dangerous, subversive.