Art and Migration, Part 2

(speaking via video link)

Behrouz Boochani is a Kurdish Iranian writer, journalist and human rights defender. He was born on 23 July 1983 in Ilam city in Kurdistan west of Iran. Behrouz left Iran in May 2013 because of his work. He had been writing for ´Warya´ – a magazine protecting Kurdish culture and language – when the offices were raided by the Iranian government and 10 of his colleagues were arrested. He found his way to Indonesia where he lived for four months before twice trying to reach Australia by boat. On the first attempt the boat sank; Behrouz was rescued but then arrested by Indonesian authorities and sent to prison. After escaping from prison he tried again to reach Australia but the boat was lost at sea for a week and then intercepted by a British vessel and delivered to the Australian Navy. He was exiled by the Australian government by force to Manus Island, a small province in Papua New Guinea in the Pacific Ocean. This is part of Australia´s so-called ´Pacific Solution´ that sends asylum seekers who arrive by boat to mandatory and indefinite detention offshore on remote Pacific islands. Behrouz is still in detention in Manus after nearly four years. His journey to Australia has been documented in Lukas Schrank´s animated short film ´Nowhere Line: Voices from Manus island´ (2015) which was based on a phone interview with Behrouz. Behrouz has continued to work as a journalist inside the Manus prison, often being the only source of information about conditions there as outside journalists have been banned. He has sent information and photograhs to media agencies around the world and published many articles in major Australian newspapers and journals, all via social media and on a mobile phone smuggled into the detention centre. He has worked with the BBC on a television documentary and an Iranian theatre group on a new production, both about detention in Manus, and collaborated with PNG lawyer Ben Lomai seeking the release of nearly 800 fellow detainees. He is a respected writer, having published a number of poems about Manus in Australia. He has interviewed detainees for a book by freelance journalist Michael Green that will be released in early 2017, and his own novel about his experiences in Manus is also due for release next year. Behrouz´s work inside Manus prison has come at personal cost; along with other detainees he has been punished by 8 days imprisonment in the local jail and two periods of solitary confinement in the ´Chauka´ unit within the detention centre. During his first two years in detention he used a fake name, but began using his real name when PEN International, Reporters Without Borders and other human rights organisations began a campaign for his release. PEN Melbourne his since given him honorary membership. Behrouz was recently awarded the Social Justice Award at the Diaspora Symposium at Sydney´s NSW Parliament House.

In the course of human history, we have always migrated in search for a better life. In our world nowadays, it is a big topic used by politicians to install fear, used by people in our society as an outlet for their anger. As an artist and immigrant, I – Arash – was thinking about this topic for a long time. I wanted to contribute to the discussion in a neutral way. I thought of how I could use the new technology to find a refugee who is detained, to imagine his world and his pain. I found Behrouz. We used the new media to transfer our ideas, our images, and our stories to each other just via voice messages. How can one come to an effective way of transferring the emotions, the images, and the situation lived by one person in a place so far away from the observer using only channels of digital communication?

We are confronting today in many global borderscapes (including the US/Mexico borderlands and the Mediterranean sea) a criminalization of humanitarian intervention in support of people in transit. This raises important questions with respect to the critique of the governmental turn of the “humanitarian reason” articulated in recent years by critical border and migration scholars (including myself). In my talk I will discuss these questions against the background of a “Non Governmental Action” I am involved in – Mediterranea.

During the US led wars in Vietnam and – more recently – in Iraq and Afghanistan, US citizen soldiers who identified as draft evaders and war resisters traveled to Canada in search of safe haven. Whereas the earlier generation found refuge and legal status in Canada, the more recent generation did not find safe haven (for the most part, and with important exceptions). This talk is based on recent research that took as it’s starting point a comparative lens to understand these two generations: their migrations, border crossings, and distinct outcomes in Canada. Its main methods involved the collection of oral histories and archival work. The talk traces the evolution and mobilization of this research program into various forms of art designed to engage publics in shared, cross-border histories of war and migration: a film, a visual show, and an archive. None of the three forms was envisioned at the outset of the research. Rather, each has emerged from research collaborations and with the drive to mobilize history to engage larger, broader publics in the project of remembering and engaging these histories. Collaborators involved in their design share the desire to remember the past in order to understand the present and prepare for future generations of war resisters in Canada.

The engagement of artists with politics and/or with categories of people considered “vulnerable” is not new. This has also been the case with social scientists. They have even collaborated on some projects related to migration and borders. In parallel, researchers have discussed a “border spectacle” (De Genova 2002), i.e. the border as a site or theatre for staging the spectacle of enforcement, making visible the policies and laws that produce the “illegality” of some people. What does it mean then, to engage with this spectacle, by observing or documenting it, or through different types of representation? What does it mean to engage in particular with those directly bearing the cost of this “spectacle”? What does engagement mean when it is the source of funding and careers for artists and social scientists alike? How can we locate the thin line between engagement and voyeurism?

The purpose of this paper will be to raise questions about 1) whether artists should question their ethics when engaging with migration and borders; 2) what could be the basis for an ethical engagement. Through looking at the conditions of possibility of a non-voyeuristic artistic practice dealing with migration, it will also interrogate practices of research in this field, and discuss similarities between both. Finally, it will interrogate the situated moral and economic background to these practices, and propose tentative guidelines for artistic and research practices in this field.