The routes taken today by exiled people across the Mediterranean trace a geography—from the open sea to the shores—within which collectives organise to save and care for lives in danger. These communities form an active multitude of diverse names and statuses: NGOs, associations, residents’ collectives, private companies, public authorities and institutions, isolated individuals, as well as collectives of refugees who, through acts of mutual aid, contribute to the vitality of these multiplied gestures that sustain our humanity, now and to come.

The gestures of living hospitality refer to the whole set of actions, sometimes modest, often decisive, through which people today make themselves unconditionally present to other lives in danger, at sea and, in particular, along European shores.. These are concrete gestures, invented and reinvented at a time when climatic and geopolitical shocks force countless people to flee the unlivable.

They consist in moving toward shipwrecked persons; smiling and embracing to signal welcome; offering shelter; handing over a blanket; sharing food; tending to a wound; listening, guiding, supporting, translating. They belong to a genuine art of relation: approaching and welcoming unconditionally; recognising in the unknown person a life of absolute equality; allowing a story to be told, a silence to exist.

These gestures are invented on the open sea or right there—on a pavement, in a wasteland, on a heath—as well as within associative or professional spaces of care, support and counselling. They are looks, hands, and words that transform hostile situations into habitable spaces and times. They are bodies that build—sometimes through their mere presence—places of life that protect, connect and reorganise what was scattered. They create forms of urbanity, often unexpected, sometimes lasting, composed first of kindness and friendship.

The living gestures of hospitality build thresholds of great beauty, warm hearths, secure shelters, paths and horizons. They bind those who welcome and those who arrive in the same movement of survival, in the same intensity of life. Every gesture, however small, contributes to maintaining the continuity of the world where it threatens to unravel. In this sense, living hospitality is a precise way of building: places, bonds, possibilities, breath, futures. At a time when contemporary migrations signal the end of our distances, these gestures create a common ground in which every life, in this 21^st century, may find support to cross, resume, begin again, and still dream.

The practitioners of living hospitality form a plural assembly: residents, refugees, collectives, associations, rescuers, caregivers, and social workers who support lives in movement and in danger through concrete acts—saving, caring, sheltering, feeding, guiding, listening, protecting, accompanying. Some act independently; others operate within public reception systems that they sustain, adapt, extend or reinvent. Together they form a community without contours or fixed identity, a multitude without hierarchy, bound by the paths of those seeking a better life here and now. Their interventions, scattered yet articulated over time, weave a continuity that renders the world traversable and breathable.

Living hospitality gestures are often learned through direct contact with situations, by observation, imitation and informal apprenticeship. They are transmitted in the thickness of everyday life and collective action. Within specialised organisations—NGOs, associations, public and hospital services—these gestures also rely on more specific and continuous training processes. Ways of acting or listening, emergency or long-term assistance protocols are transmitted through practice, shared narratives and collective experience as much as through technical manuals and specialised training. This knowledge thus constitutes a diffuse, fragile yet widespread culture, notably carried by exiled people who often retain its precise memory.

Socially, these gestures undoubtedly compensate for the absence of reception policies, but above all they sketch—as pioneering acts preceding unprecedented migratory movements—policies for the 21^st century. They ensure safety, care, comfort and orientation for anyone arriving from elsewhere, thereby defining new terms, places and infrastructures for an here-and-now open to the multitude. They simultaneously strengthen local bonds, revealing or reawakening diffuse solidarities, transforming strangers into allies, neighbours into collectives, places into powerful environments. They reorganise relationships between residents, institutions and territories, creating the conditions for a desirable world to come.

Culturally, they magnify our roots, connect us to ancient poems, and re-tie us to founding narratives—to that ancestral peace pact with the stranger that inaugurated our history. Yet they are not mere reproductions; they are contemporary actualisations of millennia-old acts in the face of a radical ecological crisis that exposes our global interdependencies and unprecedented proximities. They rewrite the immemorial story of one person welcoming another in a world where the other no longer passes through, but has definitively become a neighbour of the shore. These gestures of sustaining the life of the other among us sketch a world whose history has not yet been written. In the Mediterranean today, living hospitality thus appears as the fragile yet crucial promise of a common, plural world of singular splendour, still undescribed.

The living gestures of hospitality fully align with both the spirit and the letter of the most fundamental international instruments affirming the dignity of every human being, the right to life and security, and the principle of non-discrimination. They do not contravene any international legal framework; on the contrary, they give concrete, embodied expression to its core values.

Living hospitality gestures are founded precisely on the recognition of the other, their dignity and integrity. They involve neither forced assimilation nor cultural imposition, nor any hierarchy between those who welcome and those who arrive. Instead, they create relationships grounded in attention and reciprocity, thereby strengthening mutual respect in practice.

Living hospitality gestures are rooted in a logic of care for people and environments alike. They preserve human, social and territorial resources by strengthening solidarity, resilience and collective adaptive capacity. They thus actively contribute to sustainable development goals, supporting societies’ adaptation to ongoing ecological and existential crises.

Strictly speaking, there are no formalised customary practices governing access to living hospitality gestures. This intangible cultural heritage does not rely on a codified system or prescribed protocol; rather, it is anchored in situated uses, tested attitudes, and implicit norms of care that emerge within contexts of mobilisation alongside people in situations of vulnerability.

The viability of living hospitality gestures—and their transmission to future generations—is today threatened by a convergence of political and cultural factors.

A first threat lies in their growing criminalisation. In many European contexts, welcoming a foreigner, hosting an undocumented person or providing assistance is treated as an offence. This criminalisation transforms a gesture of rare beauty into a suspicious act, breaking the chain of transmission: what can no longer be practised openly becomes far more difficult to teach.

The securitisation of our societies intensifies this threat. Fear—of the other, of scarcity, of collapse—is cultivated as a contemporary mode of governance. It produces withdrawn subjectivities for whom a gesture of hospitality appears as a risk rather than a strength. This fuels the rise of far-right movements and governments across Europe, whose programmes share an attachment to identity-based passions and hostility toward foreigners. In such a climate, practising hospitality is framed as betrayal—of a culture, an identity, a people. Language itself becomes contaminated: the words of hospitality are disqualified as naïve, dangerous or ideological, while refusal, exclusion and rejection are recoded as responsible acts.

Those who persist in practising living hospitality in dissidence are thus exposed to mounting pressures. The fragility of places and timeframes, the disappearance of common spaces, and the economic precarity of the associative sector generate a discouragement emblematic of our era. Gestures risk becoming less assured; awareness of their splendour risks fading. Representations themselves are corroded: what remains in the shared language of hospitality practitioners is increasingly the idea of a “duty of hospitality”—a burden, a charge imposed upon them, upon us. A debt. But transmitting a debt cannot constitute a programme. Those of us who practise living hospitality are running out of resources to grasp the full stature of our gestures and thus to share and perpetuate them. This calls unmistakably for urgent safeguarding: we are, without doubt, running out of breath.

The living gestures of hospitality in the Mediterranean Sea and along its shores today constitute specific forms of knowledge, know-how and ways of being. Struck by unprecedented ecological and geopolitical upheavals, we are inventing here and now a new repertoire of relations. The migrant no longer passes through but appears as a neighbour of the shore; the migrant is no longer exclusively the other, but potentially each and every one of us, confronted with the upheavals of the world. Languages resonate, new shared histories emerge—histories that only assured gestures of rescue, kindness and friendship can allow to take root and flourish.

A safeguarding plan must therefore renew the representational repertoire of living hospitality gestures. Though invented in urgency, they are also pioneers of worlds to come—possibly worlds of great beauty. Their history must be rewritten, their resonance amplified, their status affirmed as a treasure for future generations.

Such a plan must simultaneously contribute to caring for those who perform these gestures. An unprecedented movement of gratitude must be invented in their direction. New ways of mobilising around them must be articulated—not through guilt, but through the affirmation that practising living hospitality means collectively building something great. A safeguarding plan must convince that, far from being a burden, these gestures are load-bearing, as architects would say, and that the habitability of future worlds depends upon them.

We must build an archive of these gestures to render them indelible. We must extend the photographic collection initiated on 18 and 19 December 2025 in Marseille with SOS Méditerranée, enriching it with materials entrusted by those who practise living hospitality at sea and along the shores. This collection must function as a training context for professionals and the wider public alike. Such an archive and training site must first be created in Marseille, then expanded outward.

We must develop spaces of care—psychological and somatic—dedicated to maritime and land-based hospitality practitioners. We must listen to their vulnerabilities, tremors and traumas, mobilising all relevant competencies to sustain their breathing, to restore the breath they need. Such a pioneering care facility must first be created in Marseille, then extended.

We must mobilise designers and students across all disciplines to forge the tools necessary for the perpetuation of these gestures. The Navire Avenir must be launched, and the elements of design, sound, graphics, cuisine and law presented on 18 and 19 December 2025 in Marseille must be developed. Many other tools must emerge through dedicated research and creation residencies aimed at equipping maritime and land-based operators. Such a research and creation site must first be established in Marseille, then expanded.

Everything has already begun, in Marseille and beyond. And nothing must stop.

PEROU is a non-profit association founded on 1 October 2012 by political scientist and artist Sébastien Thiéry and gardener-poet Gilles Clément. The association is currently chaired by film critic Jean-Michel Frodon. PEROU brings together creators from multiple disciplines in support of those who practise living hospitality, developing in situ research and creation projects. These projects are internationally recognised, presented in numerous institutions—particularly in France—and published and taught in many schools of art, design, architecture and the humanities.

NAVIRE AVENIR is a non-profit association founded on 1 November 2021 in Marseille by members of various organisations involved in the conception of the Navire Avenir: Association des usagers de la PADA, SOS Méditerranée, Pilotes Volontaires, Assistance Publique – Hôpitaux de Marseille, and PEROU. It is currently chaired by sound artist Jean-Baptiste Lévêque, also a member of the collective Les Petits Déj’s solidaires in Paris. The association currently develops the three axes of the safeguarding plan in Marseille in close collaboration with numerous local organisations: schools, institutions, associations and collectives.

We request financial assistance from UNESCO to implement the safeguarding plan for living hospitality gestures and, in particular, to create the Navire Avenir—a pioneering vessel of a peace armada, intended also to fly the UNESCO flag.

Note: this application file is submitted to UNESCO in 2026 and is thus made available to any State wishing to adopt it in order to include living hospitality gestures in its national heritage. If this is not the case today, it is not due to community reluctance, but to impossibility—until proven otherwise.

The drafting of this address to UNESCO stems from an urgent necessity: to write a completely different story of what is happening today in order to open up the prospect of a future that is much more liveable. This cannot be achieved by a single instruction, however carefully crafted and well-founded it may be. We must continue to write and rewrite, collectively, the potentialities of our present times in order to make a certain splendour of the times to come conceivable and possible. We therefore propose to keep the cinematographic chapter of this instruction open and perpetually at work: on 10 January 2026, we are presenting a first film for UNESCO, as a kind of protocol: a first, elementary, incomplete object, calling for a multitude of other narratives, texts, languages and representations. By publishing this film, we are simultaneously calling for a thousand other films for UNESCO, lasting 5 to 10 minutes, aimed at highlighting the beauty and significance of acts of hospitality in the Mediterranean Sea and on its shores. In this way, we hope to stimulate research processes within film schools, mobilise filmmakers from here and elsewhere, inspire new programming ideas for film festivals, and thus nurture a new form of writing, at least until this breathable future arrives.

The first film submitted with this application, Nous sommes le Rivage (We are the Shore), directed by Sébastien Thiéry, in collaboration with Anna Recalde Miranda (cinematography and editing) and Jean-Baptiste Lévêque (sound), portrays a number of participants gathered on 18 and 19 December 2025 to select the ten photographies for UNESCO and features the text Des Actes. À Calais et tout autour, a repertoire compiled by PEROU between 2015 and 2017 in collaboration with Antoine Hennion, Amélie Coster and Jean Torrent, published in 2018 (Post-Éditions) and in 2020 (Gasoline).

The creation of this platform, unveiled on 6 January 2026 in Agrigento, was made possible by the voluntary commitment of a great many European citizens, by the generous hosting of this working assembly by around sixty European cultural institutions, and by the support of Agrigento 2025, Italian Capital of Culture.