Dialogue
29.04.19

Art and Migration, Part 3

Baulan, HDK (School of Design and Crafts)

Participants

Kitso Lynn LelliottAleksander MotturiMartina TazzioliWilliam Walters

The dialogues inquire into the embodied, affective, performative, material, visual, and spatial politics of cross-border human mobilities, through arts/design as well as other disciplines and practices. It concerns all the actors involved in these mobilities: the remarkable proliferation over recent years of heterogeneous human migration formations, including labour migrants and people seeking asylum, the border enforcement infrastructures that arise in response to these mobilities, as well as how these infrastructures incorporate market-based/migration industry actors.

The dialogues will interrogate these complex alliances, antagonisms, and complicities, analysing or interpreting conditions where (nation-)states’ official infrastructures for border control coexist with migration industry infrastructures for border-crossing and market-based enterprises for border enforcement. These include border control through proliferating physical barricades, militarised policing, multilateral border cooperation, detention camps, deportation dragnets, and new strategies of surveillance; both formal and informal migration industry infrastructures (e.g. the outsourcing of migration visa processing, labour migrant recruitment agencies, remittance services, the rise of transit spaces along migration corridors, forged passport markets, migrant smuggling, amongst others); and private security contractors for offshore detention centres.

Among many other conceivable topics, the dialogues will engage with such questions as:
– How are lived experiences of these complex entanglements understood by differently positioned people as expressed in arts/design, activism, migration studies and other disciplines?

– How do people counteract, subvert, circumvent, resist, take charge of the everyday practices of these entangled bordering infrastructures?

– How can artists, academics, activist networks, and other civil society groups work together to challenge new forms of bordering in ways that are socially and intellectually relevant?

The dialogues are in collaboration with the Centre on Global Migration

Schedule

Day 1 - Monday29 April, 2019

Kitso Lynn Lelliott

Kitso Lynn Lelliott

Location: Baulan HDK

In this presentation I will be sharing some considerations that emerged through my creative practice which has led my research into histories of negation and the eliding of peoples humanity. Through a process of making (art) work I have been thinking through historic traversing of geographies as it relates to understanding the diminishing of the humanity of othered people. I have been interested in the histories of transit across geographies and the power and violence that characterised the encounters engendered by these movements as a way to sketch out the epistemological dimensions of this knot of entanglements. I interrogate the link between Coloniality of knowledge and Coloniality of Being in my engagement with the production of an ontological order shaped through the violence of ‘epistemicide’.

I consider epistemological violence, erasure of knowledge systems and the othering of the bodies that carry them as integral to the development of racial hierarchisation that began taking form during the mass migrations and trafficking over waters of the Atlantic during the formative episode that shaped the modern age. I grapple with the historic establishment of racialised global capital predicated on the epistemological violence that erased peoples knowledges, humanity and being through what Maldonado-Torres (2007: 240-270) terms “racist/imperial manichean misanthropic skepticism”. I use the idea of elision with reference to enunciations and knowledges produced as marginal through processes of disavowing the legitimacy, value or presence of ways of knowing and being that are ‘othered’ as they are different from hegemonic norms that emerged in the ‘Global North’. Elision, however, suggests that the subsumed is always (and regardless of its omission present) between and a part of that which is spoken, written and recognised. I use the language of the spectral to allude to a sense of simultaneous absence and presence that describes presence beyond the parameters of the real as it is constituted by the episteme of imperial Western knowledge.

I work with migratory histories in my creative practice to think through the repercussions of these entanglements for othered bodies in transit and just ‘being’ in multiple geographies today. I consider these formative movements of people in their relation to the contemporary socio-political realities that emerged from them and contest the violence of the erasure linked to these histories by intervening in those narratives our contemporary is predicated on. My research is informed by the theoretical and political possibilities of the de-colonial turn and shift in the geographies of reason. As such I do the work through an embodied deep memory accessed through an experiential encounter with a contemporary world shaped through those histories.  I rely multiple forms of recollection, on memories, traces and ancestralities alongside histories and archive, to re-member the elided.

Onåbara

Aleksander Motturi

Location: Baulan HDK

The intricate question of victimization is a recurring theme in Aleksander Motturi’s works. In his latest novel Onåbara (2017) a Syrian refugee tries to reach out to a Swedish writer hoping his own story on the glamorous gay life in the Middle East will be portrayed in a novel – a promise that never is fulfilled as the fictive—as opposed to auto-fictive—fiction writer is getting more obsessed with explicit traumatic aspects of the refugee crisis. Departing from a critique of contemporary trauma fetishism Aleksander Motturi describes the conditions of writing on topics where first-hand experience is lacking.

What is it in writing we are not able to do when we are writing? Certainly,we are writing. We are writing even though we know it is not possible. And when it happens, we do not know how. Things fall in their place. We do not know what it is (and why it appears in writing).

The politics of migrant dispersal. Towards an archive of Europe’s migrant spaces.

Martina Tazzioli

Location: Baulan HDK

This presentation focuses on the politics of migrant dispersal that has been enforced in Europe for regaining control over ‘unruly’ migrants’ presence and movements. It shows that dispersal is used by state authorities as a spatial strategy of governmentality and that far from being a new policy, it has a quite longstanding colonial legacy.  Strategies of migrant dispersal are today enacted by state authorities, in collaboration with humanitarian actors, for troubling migrants’ presence and autonomous movements, as well as for disrupting and dividing temporary migrant collective formations. First, it retraces a colonial genealogy of dispersal, as a political technology used for disciplining unruly populations. Then, it analyses how dispersal strategies have been put into place in France (Calais and Paris) and in Italy (Ventimiglia) not only by scattering migrants across space but also by dismantling migrant spaces of life (‘lieux de vie’). It moves on demonstrating that the politics of dispersal is mainly enforced for preventing the consolidation of migrant multiplicities, criminalising them as ‘migrant mobs’ and spatially dividing them.  However, mapping and studying dispersal is, by design, methodologically and theoretically challenging. The final part of the presentation centres on a collective digital mapping project, called “An archive of Europe’s migrant spaces”, that represents the spaces of control and migrant struggles which have multiplied over the last few years. Although these spaces are ephemeral and not-visible on the geopolitical map, they have contributed to shape the European space and the political memory of struggles.

The Secretization of Migration

William Walters

Location: Baulan HDK

This presentation stems from a book project called The Production of Secrecy. It will examine the contribution that art and design can make towards understanding of a rather weakly researched theme: the practices, functions and aesthetics of secrecy within the realm of migration control. While media and scholarly attention on the ‘clandestinity’ of migrants is rife, far less is said about the state’s uses of secrecy to control migration. I concentrate on a very specific area: the deportation of non-citizens in Europe. Here a charter flight system has been created to better insulate from the public (and the passenger’s) eye the activity of forcibly removing people from the territory. As case material I will focus on a short video called Seamless Transitions(2015). Made by James Bridle, it uses CGI to imagineer a journey through some of the sites and places which underpin the deportation of non-citizens on charter planes. These sites include a detention centre and an airport departure lounge. They are depicted as empty, dis-inhabited, and ghostly. I will make two arguments about Seamless Transitions. First, it builds on recent moves within critical photography away from a focus on ‘face’ to a concern with ‘space’ (Beckmann), and explores the possibilities which space offers for critical thought about inhumane practices. Second, it performs deportation as a secretive activity by bringing to bear a set of procedures (eg, reconstruction of scenes) and techniques (eg, CGI) which attest through their presence and their materiality to the impossibility of direct observation of deportation by a public. Seamless Transitionsshows how art and design can aid in the formation of new objects of thought and critical practice. In this case it enables us to speak of the secretization of migration.

Contributors

Kitso Lynn Lelliott

Kitso Lynn Lelliott received her PhD from Wits University for her work that emerges across fine arts, cinematic and theoretical practices. She is preoccupied with enunciations from spaces beyond epistemic power and the crisis such epistemically disobedient articulations cause to hegemony. Her current work and doctorate interrogate the production of the ‘real’ as it is shaped through contesting epistemes, their narratives and the shape these took over the waters of the Atlantic during the formative episode that shaped the modern age. Her video and installation work are an enactment of enunciating from elision and between historically subjugated subjectivities. The work privileges South-South relations that, while functioning in relation to, are imaginatively and epistemologically unmediated by the Global North. Her work has shown internationally in gallery and museum shows and she is alumna of the Berlinale Talents in Durban as well as Berlin. She was one of the Mail & Guardian’s leading 200 young South Africans and was laureate of the French Institute 2015 Visas pour la création grant. She exhibited in Bamako Encounters 2015, ’Seven Hills’ Kampala Biennale 2016, the Casablanca Biennale 2016 and the 2nd Changjiang International Photography and Video Biennale in 2017. She was the 2017 laureate of the University of Bayreuth’s Iwalewahaus art prize and she was a featured guest artist at The Flaherty Seminar 2018. In 2019 she will take up a Mellon postdoctoral Fellowship with the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape as well as be an artists in residence with the Cidage Cité internationale des arts in Paris.

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Aleksander Motturi

Aleksander Motturi (b. 1970) is a Swedish writer and artistic director of Clandestino Institute where independent critical, educational and artistic programs such as Victims & Martyrs (curated for Göteborgs Konsthall), Creative Writing for Newcomers (led by Hassan Blasim in Arabic), The Right to Narrate (in relation to many Swedish writer’s boycott of Gothenburg Book Fair 2017), The Fire Next Time (a multidisciplinary program inspired by James Baldwin’s essay) have been presented. After finishing a doctoral thesis in philosophy on Wittgenstein’s remarks on James G Frazer (Filosofi vid mörkrets hjärta– om Wittgenstein, Frazer och vildarna) he has written several novels (Diabetikern, Svindlarprästen, Broder, Onåbara), essays (Etnotism) and plays (Förvaret, Pappersgudar). He has also directed Thaumazein, an essay film based on an interview with the Ugandan-Sudanese refugee Peter Ekwiri who he first met in James Fort Prison in Accra, Ghana, 2003. The encounter with Peter Ekwiri—who had been dumped in a foreign country in Africa by Swedish migration authorities—gave birth to the Clandestino Festival. However, in Thaumazein the refugee does not merely appear as a flagrant victim of European migration politics but also as a thinker dealing in wonder with the universal questions in Paul Gauguin’s famous painting: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?

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Martina Tazzioli

Martina Tazzioli is Lecturer in Political Geography at Swansea University. She is the author of Spaces of Governmentality. Autonomous Migration and the Arab Uprisings. (2015), co-author with Glenda Garelli of Tunisia as a Revolutionised Space of Migration (2016), and she is finalising her new book, The Making of Migration. She is co-editor of Foucault and the History of our Present (2015) and Foucault and the Making of Subjects (2016). She is co-founder of the journal Materialifoucaultiani and member of Radical Philosophy editorial board and Foucault Studies.

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William Walters

William Walters teaches in the area of political sociology at Carleton University, Canada. His main research interests are secrecy and security, borders and migration, mobility and politics, and infrastructure and power. He is completing a monograph on state secrecy and a co-edited collection on vehicles, politics and migration. He is currently the principal investigator on The Air Deportation Project, a multi-country inquiry (funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) into the aerial geographies of forced removal and expulsion in and from Europe.

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