Tentacular Thinking in Storied Places: A Deep-Mapping of an Art-Science-Activist Worlding in Necropolis (2017 Onward)

This text emerges from within the long-term performance project Necropolis, initiated by Arkadi Zaides, and operates not as an external analysis but as a co-produced document shaped through an ongoing collaboration between artistic, scientific, and activist practices. Drawing on data from UNITED for Intercultural Action, the project engages in processes of deep-mapping and counter-forensics to render visible the largely unacknowledged deaths of migrants at European borders, constructing an evolving, virtual “city of the dead.” Through the work of NecropolisLAB, this inquiry expands into a multidisciplinary exploration of how performance, digital technologies, and cartographic practices can reconfigure modes of witnessing, mourning, and public acknowledgment. Rejecting singular authorship and linear knowledge production, the text foregrounds a relational, process-based methodology - what Donna Haraway terms “tentacular thinking” - in which knowledge emerges through entanglement, and performance functions as a site where bodies, data, and histories converge to expose the political conditions shaping mobility, visibility, and death.