Focus On: Inhabiting Arrival

By Giovanna Astolfo, Harriet Allsopp, Stefano Mastromarino, Estella Carpi, Mahsa Alami Fariman, Rossana Leal and Camillo Boano

What do we mean by ‘arrival’ and why do we need to REFRAME it?

The term ‘arrival’ has long served as a dispositif for governing migration, tightly bound to the nation state and reflected in the imaginaries of governable subjects. Within this frame, arrival is often quantified as a border crossing, reduced to an administrable event, a tool for controlling movement and population, useful for managing territory, regulating access to resources, and establishing criteria for distributing services and rights. As a consequence, the figure of the one who arrives remains trapped in the rhetoric of scarcity and in narratives of municipal overload.

The REFRAME project begins with the assumption that arrival is not truly definable: it is at once a condition, a time, a space, a relation, a policy, and a form of capture. Rather than fixing a meaning, the project asks what arrival does, allowing its “what it is” to emerge as an imperfect and fragmentary portrait through stories, self-accounts, and art interventions. Across four territories, we have interrogated which relations arrival stabilises or destabilises; which entanglements it becomes caught in; and how it disturbs conditions of being, living, and representing.

Thinking with, from and across territories

Hastings, London, Istanbul, and Borgo Mezzanone are distant, incomparable, and incommensurable spaces with no common narrative and no possibility of comparison. They move beyond the singular and the universal. In this sense, our research is firmly decentralised: it lives in the territories, while the thinking happens with, within and from each territory.

In each of them, we have looked at arrival through refuge and home making, mobilising conceptual definitions of home (hooks, 1990; Massey, 1994; Young 1997; Blunt 2005; Banerjee 2023), homing (Boccagni 2017; Ahmed 2006), shelter (Fassin 2012; Malkki 1995), refuge (Agier, 2012; Nevius, 2021; Novak, 2025), habitability (Escobar 2019; Simone 2016), inhabitance and habiter (Lefebvre 2003; Butler 2019), dwelling (Heidegger 1971; Lancione 2019), and inhabitation (Boano and Astolfo 2020; Agamben 2019; Ferdinand 2022; Papadopoulos 2026), in all their complexity and contradiction.

Unbearable: the spatialisation of hostility in Hastings

In Hastings, UK, our work in partnership with The Refugee Buddy Project (The RBP) has examined how ‘arrival’ is interrupted and drawn out through hostile housing, and how refugee- and migrant-led community arts practices counter isolation and the harm of hostility while building inclusivity and belonging (Allsopp and Astolfo, 2026; Allsopp and Leal, 2026).

Under the UK’s hostile policy framework, housing has been constructed and practised as a deterrent to migration - a ‘technology of hostility’ - that positions asylum seekers as exceptions to UK society, ringfenced by an internal border. In a forthcoming report, ‘Unbearable: Housing and the Spatialisation of Hostility’ (2026), we highlight how one can observe its operation across three forms of accommodation that asylum seekers, refugees, and racialised citizens access: dispersal, resettlement schemes, and the private housing market. Centralising the testimonies of asylum seeking in Hastings, Rother, and Wealden, we find evidence of discrimination in the poor conditions of housing provided to asylum seekers and refugees; in the negative effects of housing on the physical and mental health of asylum seekers and refugees; and in the lack of appropriate and targeted informational support for asylum seekers and refugees accessing housing.

In parallel, our collaboration with The RBP has encompassed their annual Stitch for Change textiles storytelling workshops (Community is a Superpower in 2025 and Courage in 2026). Textiles, patchwork and embroidery are mediums employed across the world in protest, in incarceration, asserting threatened identity, threatened life, communicating lived experience, and as a therapeutic practice and expressive or occupational outlet. In Hastings, it is no different. As a metaphor for arrival, and observed in practice within SFC, the threading and each deliberate stitch, patch, repair, and embroidered emblem that it forms become an act of conscious, reflective action and reaction that produces an alternative imagining and story of displacement, journeying, and creation, which endure and progress as a relational process.

There is something particularly significant about stitching. Each thread requires an affective attachment; it moves between surfaces, disappears and reappears, joining fragments without eliminating the seams between them. The textile does not represent a linear journey or resolve displacement into a coherent story of departure followed by arrival. Instead, it holds together different places, temporalities, and attachments that are continually made and remade. In this sense, the works resonate with an understanding of home-making as a relational practice of survival and inhabitation: one arrives by making home, one continues to inhabit arrival, one arrives too late, one never arrives.

Embroidery became less a medium of expression than a material practice of care, through which refugees, asylum seekers and racialised citizens held together memories of home, relationships forged in displacement, and possibilities of belonging. In this sense, arrival became an ongoing practice of inhabitation, sustained by the capacities to care, connect, repair, endure, and imagine otherwise.

Reproducing arrival: migrant lifeworlds and urban uncertainties in Istanbul

In Istanbul, REFRAME asks what happens when arrival is no longer understood as a single moment of crossing a border, but as an ongoing condition of inhabiting the city. Working with Arabic- and Persian-speaking migrants and refugees, the Türkiye-focused case study explores how the meanings of ‘arrival’ change across languages, histories, and political contexts. With a team of five researchers who contributed at different stages of the project, we found that arrival rarely signifies a clear beginning or an achieved destination. Migration is often described through notions of refuge, uncertainty, transit, return, waiting, or temporary presence rather than permanent settlement (Carpi, 2025).

Such framings resonate with wider scholarship on displacement, which has highlighted waiting, uncertainty, and suspension as constitutive dimensions of migrant lives rather than temporary interruptions on the way to settlement (Brun, 2015; Biehl, 2015; Hage, 2009). The figure of the ‘arrival’ that dominates much European migration debate is therefore far less stable than it first appears. Arrival emerges less as a completed event than as a condition of living with uncertainty and negotiating an unfinished relationship with place (Carpi, 2025).

These questions emerged through our engagement with multilingual media, academic debates, and community-based conversations in neighbourhoods across Istanbul. As a city shaped by centuries of mobility and, more recently, by large-scale displacement from Syria, Afghanistan, Iran, and elsewhere, migrant life in Istanbul constantly challenges linear understandings of migration. People may arrive physically while remaining socially, politically, or legally suspended. Others create forms of belonging long before they are formally recognised as residents. Arrival, in this sense, is less about entering a place than about negotiating one’s relationship with it over time (Carpi et al., 2024). This perspective echoes scholarship that understands home and belonging not as fixed destinations but as ongoing practices produced under conditions of uncertainty, mobility, and partial inclusion (Brun and Fábos, 2015; Boccagni, 2017). Our focus on disaster preparedness within the framework of Istanbul further corroborated this fluid conceptual approach to arrival, revealing how urban dwelling, risk, and belonging become deeply intertwined (Carpi, 2025).

This perspective became particularly important when examining migrant and refugee lives in relation to disaster preparedness in a city facing significant seismic risk. Municipality-led preparedness initiatives often assume a stable and settled population that shares common forms of citizenship, language, and access to information. Yet many refugee and migrant residents experience the city through different temporalities, infrastructures of care, and relationships with institutions. Questions about housing security, documentation, neighbourhood networks, access to reliable information, and trust in public authorities shape how people prepare for future disasters (Carpi et al., 2024; Carpi, Darvishahmadi and Atay, 2025). As disaster studies scholars have long argued, preparedness cannot be reduced to the dissemination of technical knowledge but must be understood through broader questions of vulnerability, social position, and access to resources (Bankoff, 2001; Gaillard and Mercer, 2013). Preparedness, therefore, cannot be separated from the conditions through which migrants and refugees arrive, settle, wait, and build everyday lives in the city.

Rather than treating migrants as temporary guests or external populations, the project explores how disaster risk reduction can recognise them as urban residents whose knowledge, experiences, and everyday practices contribute to collective resilience (Carpi, Darvishahmadi and Atay, 2025). Research conducted across Istanbul’s districts demonstrates that migrant communities possess situated forms of disaster knowledge and preparedness practices that often remain invisible to formal governance frameworks (Carpi, 2025). This finding resonates with broader work on social capital and community resilience, which shows that everyday networks of trust, reciprocity, and mutual support frequently shape people’s capacity to respond to and recover from crises more effectively than formal preparedness campaigns alone (Aldrich, 2012). In this context, arrival is not a prelude to belonging; it is itself a way of inhabiting the city. Understanding how people make refuge, create social ties, and imagine futures in Istanbul helps us rethink preparedness as a shared urban practice rather than a purely technical intervention (Carpi et al., 2024; Brun and Fábos, 2015). In Istanbul, we connect the politics of migration with the politics of urban safety, asking how a city can prepare for uncertain futures while acknowledging the multiple and unfinished ways in which people arrive, remain, and make life possible together.

Stitch for Change

Stitch for Change is an exhibition showcasing artwork created through weekly gatherings of refugee and migrant women with members of The RBP. Together, they produce embroidered textiles that weave together memories of home, journeys across borders, and arrival, transforming them into collective expressions of resilience, community, and belonging. Housed in the De La Warr Pavilion overlooking the town and the sea, the exhibition brings these practices of agency, resistance, and collective care into public view. Stitched with patience, the textiles carry memories of movement, loss, and hope, bearing witness to lives in motion while affirming new forms of belonging. Together, The RBP, the Dove Café, and the textiles displayed throughout the Pavilion reveal that the refugee body is far more than a figure of displacement: she is an active maker of community and cultural expression.

Suspended between Hastings and the sea, the embroidered capes complicate any understanding of arrival as a moment that ends upon reaching the shore. They instead speak of arrival as something inhabited over time. Against the glass, these intimate, affective and performative acts of stitching become entangled with the city and the sea beyond. Dwelling is therefore neither entirely inside nor outside, neither here nor elsewhere. What the exhibition makes perceptible is precisely this unsettled condition: making a home does not mark the end of arrival but becomes an ongoing practice of making life inhabitable while memories, movements, and attachments to elsewhere persist.

Growing the work: new collaborations and creative extensions

After three years, we have come to see arrival not simply as an event, a category, a process, a condition, or a space, but rather as a disturbance, an actant. Arrival is a force that moves, reshapes, and reorganises relations, determines social (re)production, and generates affective and material consequences in the world.

REFRAME continues to grow through collaborations that extend its work into artistic practice, advocacy and collective (un)making. The Inappropriable Collective brings together artists, scholars and refugees to develop work that resists extractive research logics and fosters solidarities. UCL KEI funding supported a second round of Stitch for Change workshops on Courage, with the capes later exhibited in Bexhill and London (UCL200 Intersections).

At the DPU, three rounds of Dissertation Fellowships have advanced REFRAME’s concerns across new geographies and methods, with theses by Sunny Gupta, Kelly Flanagan, Samiksha Mukherjee and Ananya Jain exploring affect, waiting, fugitivity and oceanic thinking. The project has produced publications, reflections and a Housing Report, and all members are contributing to Inhabiting Arrival, a collective book that examines the semantics, spaces and affects of arrival.