Refugees encounter borders in an immediate and embodied experience, yet this encounter is informed by and expressed through circulating representations, histories and collective memories. Their confrontation with borders is at once experiential and aesthetic. Aesthetics, in its broadest definition, includes what is seen and sensed; it is a practice of memory, survival and imagination that intertwines life and art. With the alliance of artistic representations, refugees create an art of memory, mobility and mobilization. My talk examines select literary and cinematic portrayals of border crossing at Europe's outer edges through the notion of "kino-aesthetics."
