Kafka’s novel The Castle tells the paradoxical story of “K”, a land surveyor, and his fruitless attempts to gain access to a castle whose owners have hired him to work for them. Throughout the book we can see the irrationality that reigns around the fortress. The Castle (or Europe) symbolises safety, stability and order. It plays a fundamental role in the choice and selection of its new “citizens”, but only those who meet particular characteristics and certain conditions will be admitted.
This project seeks to document different economic typologies that spring up around the idea of the border, understood as the great monster of political and economic control in which the human becomes just another commodity. Thus, the cartography considers aspects ranging from the formal or linear economy fostered by immigrants residing legally in the EU, with legitimate contracts, through the informal or circular economy, a frontier space with trade fluctuating between the legal and “alegal”, to the illegal or invisible economy generated by the mafias that take advantage of the desperation of “irregular” immigrants in their attempts to improve their living conditions.