2026: Uppvaknandet / The awakening

Mareike Gebhardt + Tilman Dominka


Mareike Gebhardt is a political theorist based in Germany, who works at the intersection of critical theories, border regime studies, and gender studies. Her work is informed by a feminist and postcolonial lens. Currently, she is principal investigator with ZivDem, a reserach group on Civil Search and Rescue in the Mediterranean, based at the universities of Bonn and Münster, Germany.

At AiC, Mareike will work on her new book entitled "On Waves and Wakes: Navigating the Mediterranean Deathscape Towards More Democratic Futures" where she unpacks the inner workings of the Mediterranean border regime through a conceptual frame that centers seawater as a perpetrator of border violence, a tool weaponised in the EU's arsenal of securitisation and surveillance, and as a site of resistance against the normalised letting die of people on the move.

The book’s unique outline contributes to AiC’s posthumanist framework, as it combines democratic, postcolonial, and feminist theories with a posthuman perspective on the Mediterranean, not only as a site and tool of human interaction, but also as an agent in its own right.

Tilman Dominka (also known as seenandnotseen) is a photographer and artist who predominantly works with black-and-white analogue techniques. His works concentrate on infrastructures, often created and/or abandoned by humans, to show how they develop a life of their own, both independent and dependent on human lives. However, Tilman’s pictures not only show the dependence of non-human lives and infrastructures on humanity. Rather, they portray how infrastructures, nature, rural and urban landscapes shape and reconfigure human lives.

In the new project, spaces in pictures that shape Tilman’s photographs will be ‘filled’ with written stories by Jerker Kaj, a Malmö-based writer and musician, to bring them to life—awaken. Tilman’s pictures will provide settings and scenes for Jerker’s stories. The AiC residency program will support Tilman in launching this new German-Swedish collaboration with Jerker, with whom Tilman has previously collaborated.

Website: seenandnotseen.de

Read: Mareike co-edited an issue on 10 years of civil SAR in the Med and authored "Another Solidarity is Im-Possible: Mourning and Saving Lives in the Mediterranean both with movements: Journal of Critical Migration and Border Regime Studies

A project initiated by

With support from