On the 30th to the 31st of July, over 70,000 people crossed the Moroccan border into Ceuta, a Spanish territory adjacent to the African country. After the return to Morocco of most of those who crossed, some 10,000 people still remain in Ceuta in precarious conditions, subject to all manner of deprivations and violence, predictable and unpredictable.
from lundimatin #535, 28/09/2026
A man died today, Friday 25 September 2026, in Ceuta, near the showers at Playa del Trampolín.
Of Algerian origin and in his fifties, he collapsed in this area where, for nearly two months now, men who have arrived in Ceuta have been living. Paramedics attempted to resuscitate him for more than twenty minutes. He died at the scene. It was reported that he had been unwell for several days.
Since the end of July, men have been living in Trampolín in precarious conditions that are by no means accidental. They sleep on the beach, behind the rocks or against the walls of the old factory, in shelters made of tarpaulins, cardboard and pieces of wood. They wash in makeshift showers, rely on food handouts and, day by day, scour for the essentials they need to get by: water, a few items of clothing, a socket to charge a phone, a place to sleep without being evicted.
For weeks, however, they were described less in terms of what they were going through than in terms of the problem they were supposedly causing. There was talk of a “crisis”, an “invasion”, “migration pressure” and “security”. Arrivals were counted, movements monitored, whilst camps were destroyed, personal belongings burnt, and police operations multiplied, with the army deployed around the places where they were trying to live. A considerable amount of information was thus produced about them, whilst ignorance of who they actually were remained almost total.
This is perhaps one of the most routine operations at the border. It does not merely make certain crossings difficult or impossible, but also imposes a certain way of making people “readable”. It is not so much a matter of knowing them as of making them comprehensible within a system. The complexity of a person’s existence is thus replaced by the data necessary for their administration. Origin, status, and presence in a particular place become the means by which a person is identified and processed. What becomes visible is no longer necessarily life itself, but the position it occupies within a system that must be able to locate it, manage it or move it. This regime of visibility shows a great deal yet reveals little, since it brings positions to the fore rather than lives.
Anonymity does not, therefore, necessarily stem from a lack of knowledge. On the contrary, it may arise from abundant and meticulous knowledge, provided that this knowledge retains only those aspects of a person that render them governable. One may know almost everything about a person’s position within a system and yet know nothing about the person themselves. Erasure does not always involve invisibility and can take place amidst constant exposure, when what is seen of a person is gradually reduced to what can be recorded and administered. One can be continually identified without ever being truly known. What disappears, then, is not the body—precisely because it remains in full view—but the relationship through which that body might appear as belonging to a particular person.
We do not yet know the name of the person who died today. We know their origin, their approximate age, the place where they collapsed and the length of time for which the emergency services attempted to resuscitate them. This is the information that is circulating. Whilst it is necessary to describe what happened, it tells us almost nothing about the person to whom it happened. It allows us to situate an event without restoring the existence that it has cut short. Knowledge thus stops at the threshold of the person, as if the precision of the circumstances could take the place of knowledge of the person they concern.
He had a life before Trampolín. This fact, precisely because it should go without saying, deserves to be reiterated. Trampolín was neither the beginning nor the meaning of his life. He had known other places and other faces, spoken a language in which certain words needed no explanation. He had habits, connections and memories of which we know nothing. He had been awaited somewhere and had himself waited. He had crossed borders about which we still know almost nothing, for reasons of his own. Until the moment he fell, his existence did not present itself to him as a completed story. It still held time within it.
Perhaps this, too, is what death takes away. It does not merely bring an end to what has been lived; it abolishes the as yet undetermined part of an existence – what might have happened but will no longer happen. It closes off a period of time which, for the person who lived it, remained open. Yet categories tend precisely to erase this openness by retrospectively giving a life’s course the form of a destiny. An Algerian, a “migrant”, a homeless man, who died in Trampolín. Put like this, the sentence seems to sum up a life, whereas it merely sets out a few details. More profoundly, it risks transforming the circumstances in which this man found himself into a definition of who he was, as if what a border had made of him could, in retrospect, define his entire existence. Death then risks creating an illusion of inevitability, as if, because life has come to an end, everything that preceded it had led to this conclusion.
This is undoubtedly one of the most insidious effects of these categories. They simplify a life whilst rewriting it retrospectively. A historical and political situation becomes a characteristic of the person, and this supposed characteristic then seems to hold the key to their entire story. Someone who has been forced to live on the streets becomes “a homeless person”, just as someone who crosses a border becomes “a migrant”. Gradually, the circumstance absorbs the individual. What has happened to someone ends up defining who they are. Life then seems to have always led to the word under which it will ultimately be recorded. The violence of the category perhaps lies less in its inaccuracy than in this retrospective power through which a situation ends up presenting itself as an essence.
We must therefore know their name. Not to assign them a more fitting identity after their death, nor to make them the symbol of a cause or the allegory of a border – that would still be to substitute something for what they were – but to preserve the distance between a life and the categories that claim to exhaust it. A name does not restore a life, but it reminds us that someone was there, someone who could not be confused with anyone else and whom nothing we might say about him could ever fully encompass. It is not the truth of a life; it merely marks its irreducibility.
A man has died today in Trampolín and we know almost nothing about him. This ignorance should not so much authorise us to speak on his behalf as compel us to examine what made it possible. A man can thus live for weeks before our very eyes, be the subject of constant surveillance and a multitude of reports, whilst remaining almost entirely unknown. A system can track the movements and circumstances of those it governs with ever-greater precision, whilst allowing those it claims to account for to vanish. It is therefore not the absence of a gaze that is at stake, but a gaze which, by dint of constantly recording, no longer encounters.
He had a history and he had a name. It is now vital that his death does not permanently cement this erasure.
May his name reach us.
Sylvain George
Ceuta will then appear less as a periphery than as a laboratory. What is at stake there – in one of the blind spots of European migration policy – concerns not only those who have crossed the border, nor even just the city’s inhabitants. Forms of governance, sorting, control, assignment and accustomisation are concentrated there and become particularly visible, the effects of which extend far beyond the issue of migration. We must therefore ask what this way of organising uncertainty, of prioritising presences and of becoming accustomed to their duration, reveals about the society that is being built for everyone. Ceuta will therefore appear not as a place outside Europe where acts of violence occur that concern us only from a distance, but as one of the places where the political, social and sensory transformations already shaping our shared world become particularly perceptible.
…
What must one have become for it to be the case that here, as elsewhere, a man can sleep for fifty nights in full view of the world’s cameras, be numbered, monitored, insulted, rejected, kept in a state of uncertainty – and yet for life to carry on as normal?
Sylvain George, “FUERA ! – Ceuta, ou l’épreuve du commun”, lundimatin #535, 28/08/2026.
Sylvain George (born 1968 in Vaulx-en-Velin) is a French director, writer and producer. After studying philosophy, law, political cinema and cinema George completed his first short films in the mid 2000s. Standing in the tradition of the cinétract or newsreel, these early works, first shot on Super 8 and then in digital, which would go on to become his medium of choice, always in black and white, pose a simple, but radical question: what is a political film? The answer that already formulates itself, and that George will build on is double: at once, the filmmaker is interested in documenting political movements of the present he traverses, like 15-M in Spain (Vers Madrid – The Burning Bright), or Nuit Debout in France (Paris est une fête – Un film en 18 vagues), and secondly, his filmmaking is conceived as a political gesture, not content in being a simple bystander, but rather becoming an active part in the conception of the film. Sylvain George, as Georges Didi-Huberman wrote of Harun Farocki, is a filmmaker “that takes a stance”. [from Les presses du réel]
Sylvain George, has since early August, chronicled and critically engaged with the events in Ceuta in a series of important articles for the lundimatin collective.
“Ceuta : la hogra et le monde qui brûle”, lundimatin #529, 08/08/2026.
“Notes brèves sur Ceuta”, lundimatin #532, 08/09/2026.
“FUERA ! – Ceuta, ou l’épreuve du commun”, lundimatin #535, 28/08/2026.
A man died today in Ceuta
On the 30th to the 31st of July, over 70,000 people crossed the Moroccan border into Ceuta, a Spanish territory adjacent to the African country. After the return to Morocco of most of those who crossed, some 10,000 people still remain in Ceuta in precarious conditions, subject to all manner of deprivations and violence, predictable and unpredictable.
from lundimatin #535, 28/09/2026
A man died today, Friday 25 September 2026, in Ceuta, near the showers at Playa del Trampolín.
Of Algerian origin and in his fifties, he collapsed in this area where, for nearly two months now, men who have arrived in Ceuta have been living. Paramedics attempted to resuscitate him for more than twenty minutes. He died at the scene. It was reported that he had been unwell for several days.
Since the end of July, men have been living in Trampolín in precarious conditions that are by no means accidental. They sleep on the beach, behind the rocks or against the walls of the old factory, in shelters made of tarpaulins, cardboard and pieces of wood. They wash in makeshift showers, rely on food handouts and, day by day, scour for the essentials they need to get by: water, a few items of clothing, a socket to charge a phone, a place to sleep without being evicted.
For weeks, however, they were described less in terms of what they were going through than in terms of the problem they were supposedly causing. There was talk of a “crisis”, an “invasion”, “migration pressure” and “security”. Arrivals were counted, movements monitored, whilst camps were destroyed, personal belongings burnt, and police operations multiplied, with the army deployed around the places where they were trying to live. A considerable amount of information was thus produced about them, whilst ignorance of who they actually were remained almost total.
This is perhaps one of the most routine operations at the border. It does not merely make certain crossings difficult or impossible, but also imposes a certain way of making people “readable”. It is not so much a matter of knowing them as of making them comprehensible within a system. The complexity of a person’s existence is thus replaced by the data necessary for their administration. Origin, status, and presence in a particular place become the means by which a person is identified and processed. What becomes visible is no longer necessarily life itself, but the position it occupies within a system that must be able to locate it, manage it or move it. This regime of visibility shows a great deal yet reveals little, since it brings positions to the fore rather than lives.
Anonymity does not, therefore, necessarily stem from a lack of knowledge. On the contrary, it may arise from abundant and meticulous knowledge, provided that this knowledge retains only those aspects of a person that render them governable. One may know almost everything about a person’s position within a system and yet know nothing about the person themselves. Erasure does not always involve invisibility and can take place amidst constant exposure, when what is seen of a person is gradually reduced to what can be recorded and administered. One can be continually identified without ever being truly known. What disappears, then, is not the body—precisely because it remains in full view—but the relationship through which that body might appear as belonging to a particular person.
We do not yet know the name of the person who died today. We know their origin, their approximate age, the place where they collapsed and the length of time for which the emergency services attempted to resuscitate them. This is the information that is circulating. Whilst it is necessary to describe what happened, it tells us almost nothing about the person to whom it happened. It allows us to situate an event without restoring the existence that it has cut short. Knowledge thus stops at the threshold of the person, as if the precision of the circumstances could take the place of knowledge of the person they concern.
He had a life before Trampolín. This fact, precisely because it should go without saying, deserves to be reiterated. Trampolín was neither the beginning nor the meaning of his life. He had known other places and other faces, spoken a language in which certain words needed no explanation. He had habits, connections and memories of which we know nothing. He had been awaited somewhere and had himself waited. He had crossed borders about which we still know almost nothing, for reasons of his own. Until the moment he fell, his existence did not present itself to him as a completed story. It still held time within it.
Perhaps this, too, is what death takes away. It does not merely bring an end to what has been lived; it abolishes the as yet undetermined part of an existence – what might have happened but will no longer happen. It closes off a period of time which, for the person who lived it, remained open. Yet categories tend precisely to erase this openness by retrospectively giving a life’s course the form of a destiny. An Algerian, a “migrant”, a homeless man, who died in Trampolín. Put like this, the sentence seems to sum up a life, whereas it merely sets out a few details. More profoundly, it risks transforming the circumstances in which this man found himself into a definition of who he was, as if what a border had made of him could, in retrospect, define his entire existence. Death then risks creating an illusion of inevitability, as if, because life has come to an end, everything that preceded it had led to this conclusion.
This is undoubtedly one of the most insidious effects of these categories. They simplify a life whilst rewriting it retrospectively. A historical and political situation becomes a characteristic of the person, and this supposed characteristic then seems to hold the key to their entire story. Someone who has been forced to live on the streets becomes “a homeless person”, just as someone who crosses a border becomes “a migrant”. Gradually, the circumstance absorbs the individual. What has happened to someone ends up defining who they are. Life then seems to have always led to the word under which it will ultimately be recorded. The violence of the category perhaps lies less in its inaccuracy than in this retrospective power through which a situation ends up presenting itself as an essence.
We must therefore know their name. Not to assign them a more fitting identity after their death, nor to make them the symbol of a cause or the allegory of a border – that would still be to substitute something for what they were – but to preserve the distance between a life and the categories that claim to exhaust it. A name does not restore a life, but it reminds us that someone was there, someone who could not be confused with anyone else and whom nothing we might say about him could ever fully encompass. It is not the truth of a life; it merely marks its irreducibility.
A man has died today in Trampolín and we know almost nothing about him. This ignorance should not so much authorise us to speak on his behalf as compel us to examine what made it possible. A man can thus live for weeks before our very eyes, be the subject of constant surveillance and a multitude of reports, whilst remaining almost entirely unknown. A system can track the movements and circumstances of those it governs with ever-greater precision, whilst allowing those it claims to account for to vanish. It is therefore not the absence of a gaze that is at stake, but a gaze which, by dint of constantly recording, no longer encounters.
He had a history and he had a name. It is now vital that his death does not permanently cement this erasure.
May his name reach us.
Sylvain George
Ceuta will then appear less as a periphery than as a laboratory. What is at stake there – in one of the blind spots of European migration policy – concerns not only those who have crossed the border, nor even just the city’s inhabitants. Forms of governance, sorting, control, assignment and accustomisation are concentrated there and become particularly visible, the effects of which extend far beyond the issue of migration. We must therefore ask what this way of organising uncertainty, of prioritising presences and of becoming accustomed to their duration, reveals about the society that is being built for everyone. Ceuta will therefore appear not as a place outside Europe where acts of violence occur that concern us only from a distance, but as one of the places where the political, social and sensory transformations already shaping our shared world become particularly perceptible.
…
What must one have become for it to be the case that here, as elsewhere, a man can sleep for fifty nights in full view of the world’s cameras, be numbered, monitored, insulted, rejected, kept in a state of uncertainty – and yet for life to carry on as normal?
Sylvain George, “FUERA ! – Ceuta, ou l’épreuve du commun”, lundimatin #535, 28/08/2026.
Sylvain George (born 1968 in Vaulx-en-Velin) is a French director, writer and producer. After studying philosophy, law, political cinema and cinema George completed his first short films in the mid 2000s. Standing in the tradition of the cinétract or newsreel, these early works, first shot on Super 8 and then in digital, which would go on to become his medium of choice, always in black and white, pose a simple, but radical question: what is a political film? The answer that already formulates itself, and that George will build on is double: at once, the filmmaker is interested in documenting political movements of the present he traverses, like 15-M in Spain (Vers Madrid – The Burning Bright), or Nuit Debout in France (Paris est une fête – Un film en 18 vagues), and secondly, his filmmaking is conceived as a political gesture, not content in being a simple bystander, but rather becoming an active part in the conception of the film. Sylvain George, as Georges Didi-Huberman wrote of Harun Farocki, is a filmmaker “that takes a stance”. [from Les presses du réel]
Sylvain George, has since early August, chronicled and critically engaged with the events in Ceuta in a series of important articles for the lundimatin collective.
“Ceuta : la hogra et le monde qui brûle”, lundimatin #529, 08/08/2026.
“Notes brèves sur Ceuta”, lundimatin #532, 08/09/2026.
“FUERA ! – Ceuta, ou l’épreuve du commun”, lundimatin #535, 28/08/2026.