Art and Migration, Part 3

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.

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).

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.

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.