Ladders, Ketchup, and Mayonnaise

This article explores how ordinary objects – such as ladders, ketchup, and mayonnaise – become charged with political significance in the context of irregularized migration along the Balkan route. In two ethnographic case studies conducted at the EU’s southeastern borderlands, we examine how these mundane items acquire new functions and meanings in connection with border violence. Ladders, used by migrants to scale fences at the Serbia–Hungary border, circulate through informal networks and become both tools of mobility and mediators of physical harm to border crossers. Ketchup and mayonnaise, distributed as part of survival kits by solidarity networks, reappear grotesquely in instances of sadistic violence during Croatian police pushbacks. Migrants’ creative and tactical use of everyday, makeshift objects reflects the codes of structural violence, as these items become embedded in complex regimes of control and resistance. This dual appropriation – from below and from above – highlights material entanglements of humanitarianism, repression, and embodied agency. Drawing on theoretical frameworks of materiality, migration regime, and critical border studies, and by tracing their circulations and transformations, we uncover how borders are negotiated not only through policy or protest, but through the everyday use and redefinition of things.