WHAT IS MALDUSA

Maldusa is a cultural association aimed at facilitating freedom of movement, supporting existing infrastructures for migrant solidarity, as well as researching and documenting border violence, on land and at sea, on the Mediterranean routes.

LAMPEDUSA STATION

Lampedusa has historically been narrated and understood merely as a border zone, with a binary representation between island of peace and island of violence. The spectacularization of crisis and emergency has oftenled to a lack of understanding of the local, continuous, daily struggles of people who inhabit and cross the island...

PALERMO STATION

In Palermo, the Maldusa cultural association seeks to bridge a multitude of local and transnational realities that derive from anti-racist struggles, migrant activism and solidarity, as well as building bridges between communities on the move and their places of departure...

PRESENCE AT SEA

The Mediterranean Sea is a contested space, inhabited by a variety of actors who struggle for and against freedom of movement. Every day, people who cross the sea, authorities who surveil and abandon them, NGOs who search and rescue, fishermen and merchant vessels crews, either attempt to defy borders or, willingly or not, reinforce them...

BUILDING BRIDGES, BURNING BORDERS - MALDUSA ONE YEAR BOOKLET

DOWNLOAD BOOKLET HERE

'BURNING BORDERS'

We dedicate this slogan to the daily struggles of people, who in North-Africa are called Harraga - "border-burners" - while crossing the border without visa and burning their ID-documents afterwards not to be deported.

In this booklet we narrate the first year of Maldusa, its vision and its projects.

With one station in Lampedusa, a second station in Palermo, a boat at sea and dozens of informal and formal relationships with solidarity infrastructures and people on the move, we created solid platforms for monitoring and reporting border violence, as well as for supporting and facilitating freedom of movement.

NEWS and PUBLICATIONS

Far from "under control" Lampedusa in the last few months

27/08/2024

From June to now, we have seen a significant increase in arrivals compared to previous months.

ECHOES n.13 - CIVIL MRCC

27/07/2024

Summertime 2024: the frequency of civil fleet rescue cooperations in the Central Mediterranean is increasing again to almost a daily level. A Tunisian Search and Rescue Region is established to extend the EU push-back regime. After the Tories were voted out of office, the UK-Rwanda agreement is finally dead. The Meloni government counts on the...

Evaluation of the Committee of Ministers: Italy's Failure to Implement the ECHR Judgment on the Lampedusa Hotspot

07/07/2024

In an important decision published on the 13th of June 2024, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe assessed that Italy had failed to adequately implement the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights J.A. and others v. Italy (Appeal No. 21329/18) regarding the detention and conditions inside the Hotspot of Lampedusa and called on...

Europe's Digital Fortress: How Palestine is the laboratory for testing surveillance equipment sold to the EU

29/06/2024

At the time of publication, Israel's assault on Gaza will be close to entering its seventh month, with a human cost of 30,000 lives at conservative estimates – not including the 416 killed and 4,658 injured since October in the West Bank – with many thousands more lost beneath the rubble of a nearly flattened region that was once home...

When the "bulwark of humanity" shows the differential value of who and what is human: a year of the Red Cross in Lampedusa"

26/06/2024

After more than three years of (mis)management by the Badia Grande cooperative, on June 1st, 2023, the hotspot of Lampedusa came under the management of the Italian Red Cross (hereafter CRI). This happened within the broader terms (narrative, logistical, and economic) of the declaration of "State of Emergency" for migration made by the Italian...