Al Barzaj [Between the worlds] is a poem about the halfway world, between the visible and the invisible, sleep and wakefulness... An inner journey through underground streets, secret gardens.

He travelled to another land, a different sea, and was certain that he had found a better city. But he didn’t realise that his own city was travelling with him.

During the third Rif war, from 1923 and 1927, the Spanish army used massive quantities of mustard gas against civilians, thus making Spain one of the first world nations to use chemical weapons on a civilian population. Eighty years later, a young man from the Rif living in Madrid embarks on a race against the clock to safeguard the memories of the last remaining witnesses of that war. The Spanish government has never acknowledged its crimes. And the victims, now elderly, threaten to die without ever having spoken out about those years of suffocation and death.

Ceuta, which has always been governed by the right, is the door to Europe for thousands of sub-Saharan migrants. This was the first demonstration supporting migrants in Ceuta, one of the North African enclaves in Spain, organized by many different European organizations and individuals after the murder by shooting of more than 14 black Africans as they tried to cross the border fence.

Something happened on the Spanish-Moroccan border in Autumn 2005. A thing that is still happening today in other places and in other ways. Hundreds of sub-Saharans used ladders to cross a European border. Weapons, rubber bullets, death. Thousands were deported to the Sahara desert. Death. Spanish television broadcast images of an accelerated war. Just bodies, not individuals. Something we watched. Returning to the place where it all happened we find nothing but empty space. A landscapes without traces. What remains, that fence. How is it possible to create new representations that don't get lost in the oversaturation of images that present migrants as victims? Others had already asked themselves the same question. A group of Congolese refugees is stuck in Morocco waiting to reach Europe. They have created a theatre piece based on their experiences of migration. In the room where they live each day, it takes shape as a self-representation of each step along the path. But it is not a finished work. There is no audience and no stage, just a work waiting for its ending.

Europlex tracks distinct cross-border activities through the Spanish-Moroccan borderland and seeks to make these obscure paths visible. On their repetitive circuit around the check-point to the Spanish enclave Ceuta, the video follows in three borderlogs the smuggling women who strap multiple layers of clothes to their bodies; the daily commute of "domesticas" who turn into time travellers as they move back and forth between the Moroccan and European time zones; and the Moroccan women working in the transnational zones in Northafrica for the European market. All these trajectories move around and in between the imperative of the territorial borders. They form, however, a vital layer of the cultural and economic space between Europe and Africa.

On the border, the line as principle of property and belonging reaches an extreme dimension where it physically defines the sphere of its relations. Those who transgress it reconstruct these imaginary lines on a daily basis, redefining the traditional geography and occupying the non-spaces where others live in a temporary form of existence. These others, the non-citizens, are phantasmtic, exchangeable parts of a flexible market. Made invisible, they are permanently controlled persons. Under the pretext of a greater civilian security, they are kept clear from the public spaces reserved for the citizens with rights and pushed into non-public spaces, which are run by state and military surveillance, multinational operations servicing a European market and non-governmental organisations.