Drawing Escape Tunnels Through Borders (excerpt) | Maribel Casas-Cortes & Sebastian Cobbarubias The drama of these [mass border crossings and detention-center riots] belies the increasing complexity of the border regime developing in the European Union. This regime is more than policed national borders-- it includes the development of pan-European border policies through agencies such as FRONTEX, international organizations such as the IOM (International Organization on Migration), as well as myriad of prisons and holding centers for migrants strewn throughout the EU and beyond. The mix of the explosiveness of the issues and the increasing complexity and mobility of the border regime has led to many collectives/artists/activists to dig into these questions. The border is beginning to multiply and fractalize both within and outside the razor wire fences in Eastern Poland or Ceuta. This challenges our ideas of the border as the geographical edge of a country/nation (where the color changes on the school map.) The logic of the border goes beyond physical check-points to permeate labor, institutional, family and other relationships. The population is stratified according to "internal borders" that create divisions between EU citizens and extra-communitarians . This separation is marked by an inherent racism used to justify the aggressive border regime. Among the initiatives that question this proliferation of the border, many activist efforts have used cartography as a tool in order to reorient themselves through the dizzying institutional maze of the EU border regime. In the next pages, we will explore cartographic interventions as activist experiments that are part of the burgeoning activity on border mappings in the EU.