TABLE OF CONTENTS

JOURNAL OF MEDITERRANEAN KNOWLEDGE - JMK

Themes and Perspectives

Artistic Strategies of Migration:
Art as a Resistance or as a Reinsurance?

Guest Editors,
Erik Berggren & Elsa Claire Gomis
VOL. 4 (2) - DECEMBER 2019

BERGGREN, E. − Representation, Victimization or Identification.

Negotiating Power and Powerlessness in Art on Migration, 113-136

MORALLI, M., MUSARÒ, P. & PARMIGGIANI, P. − Borders Kill.

Tania Bruguera’s Referendum as an Artistic Strategy of Political
Participation. 137-160

GOMIS, E.C. − Counteracting Dominant Discourses about Migrations

with Images: a Typology Attempt, 161-181

PETERSON, A. − Ai Weiwei and JR. Political Artists and Activist

Artists and the Plight of Refugees, 183-202

AHLGREN, K. − Art as a Trigger for Reflection in Sociolinguistic

Migration Research, 203-222

Comments and Debates

DEL GADO, J. & GOMIS, E.C. − A Conversation on Cinematic
Representation and Resistance in the films "Altered Landscapes"
(2016) by Juan del Gado and "The People Behind the Scenes" (2019),
by Elsa Claire Gomis, 223-233

MASULLO, G. − Invisible Affections and Socialization to the

Sexuality of Lesbians. A Case Study in Italy, 235-246

Reviews and Reports

PADILLA TEJEDA, C. − Review of Picarella L. & Truda G. (eds.),
Fundamental Rights, Gender, Inequalities. Vulnerability and Protection
Systems, Gutenberg, Baronissi (SA), 2019, 247-252
Editors in Chief
Giuseppe D’Angelo, Emiliana Mangone

Scientific Board
Ines Amorin (UP – Portugal), Andrea Bellantone (ICT – France), Paolo
Buchignani (UNISTRADA – Italy), Calogero Caltagirone (LUMSA – Italy),
John Chircop (UM – Malta), Angelo Cicatello (UNIPA – Italy), Folco
Cimagalli (LUMSA – Italy), Pilar Cuder Dominguez (UHU – Spain), Vulca
Fidolini (Université de Strasbourg – France), Linda Gardelle (Ensta
Bretagne – France), Carlo Gelosi (UNISTRADA – Italy), Dario Giugliano
(ABA of Naples – Italy), Monica Martino (ISIA - Italy), Ratiba Hadj-Moussa
(York University – Canada), Paolo Rocca Comite Mascambruno (UNISA -
Italy), Peter Mayo (UM – Malta), Flavia Monceri (UNIMOL – Italy),
Mustapha Omrane (Université de Khemis-Miliana - Algeria), Luc-Thomas
Somme (ICT – France), Maria José Sousa (Universidade Europeia –
Portugal), Paolo Terenzi (UNIBO - Italy), Leonarda Trapassi (US - Spain)

Editorial Board
Giulia Capacci (Copy editor), Mariarosaria Colucciello, Erminio Fonzo.

Editorial Manager
Erminio Fonzo

© ICSR Mediterranean Knowledge 2019

Via Giovanni Paolo II n. 132, 84084 Fisciano, Italy

- Peer Reviewed Journal

 Representation, Victimization or Identification.
Negotiating Power and Powerlessness in Art on Migration

ERIK BERGGREN
Linköping University, Sweden

Abstract
A commonplace idea, and worry, in much political art is the emphasis on not to victimize
the object/subject in artistic strategies, and to portray people as subjects with agency. And
the way to do this is to allow for identification. This article asks if this strong idea might be
shaped by an ameliorating guilt for victims, which in turn is partially informed by an
inability to free the gaze from a hegemonic view of people as agents. Instead the article
looks at some contemporary artists who surface an opposite recognition, the radical lack of
power for large groups within the global migration system, without attempts at temporary
symbolic solutions. It will be argued that ththe recognition of powerlessness is and has
always been a ground for political as well as artistic representation, mobilisation and
solidarity.

Keywords: Migration, identification, representation, victims, powerlessness.

Art about migration confronts us today with the problem of how to

represent the often politically unrepresented and how to exhibit an ongoing
and man-made catastrophe – the deaths at the borders. The so-called
refugee crisis appear to have created a productive crisis also of images and
facts. What should be in focus: the refugees, the victims, the camps, the
drownings, the smugglers or the systems and countries that propel this
crisis? How can commonplace questions in political art, such as those of
identification, agency, power, exclusion and inclusion be incorporated and dealt
with in an exhibition project? Neither of these questions have only one
answer. But the argument in this essay holds that the migration issue
challenges a set of prevalent ideas in contemporary political art, and, that a
closer look at some artistic strategies can deepen our understanding of the
relationship between political activism and political art, and also force us to
question a few commonplace assumptions about political as well as artistic
representation.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 113-136 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.09
 Erik Berggren

Political representation is not the same, of course, as artistic

representation. These concepts denote quite different activities, most of the
time, yet they are connected, especially when we speak of art that is clearly
motivated by a political and social condition, and carries forth a critique
and an explicit or implicit demand for change. In the most straightforward
meaning of the term, drawing on Hanna Pitkins work, (Pitkin 1967)
political representation is “to make present again.” A reminder. Political
representation occurs when political actors speak, advocate, symbolize, and
act on behalf of others in the political arena. Normally, political theory have
discussed this in terms of someone or something (a person or a party)
speaking for a citizen or group within the polis. Already here we run into a
problem, which is also a point in this article, political as well as artistic
representation have had a hard time grappling with politics across borders
(Nail, 2015). Representation in politics is of course also a practical matter
related to the democratic functioning, to let a party or someone speak for a
group or an interest is to make interest aggregation and articulation
possible and to make something present in the political arena.
Representation in art can be understood in a related way, especially when
the object/subject of art is a group of people and their current condition.
The artist take on the role of re-presenter and makes the condition of the
group present, and thus aggregates both interest and audience and
articulates, with them. The truth of the representation is not so much the
critical issue, as its accuracy relative to the condition. I will use the notion
in the original simple form, to speak and act for others and to make
someone or something “present again”.
In the following I will discuss a set of curatorial choices for the exhibition
project “Is This the Time for Art” (2014-2017 ) which I produced for The
Museum of Forgetting, a nomadic curatorial project that have for 12 years
created art exhibitions at various venues often with a political critique as
entry point. I will suggest that the topic matter itself – migration – opens up
for rethinking some of the traditional positions and common place ideas
within political contemporary art by considering the location and the real or
imagined power or powerlessness of migrants, artists and audiences. As the
title of the exhibition reveals, the project was consciously shaped by the
difficulty of matching the gravity of the issue with an appropriate artistic
expression. How represent an ongoing catastrophe in the art context? A mere

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 113-136 − ISSN: 2499-930X

114 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.09
 Representation, Victimization or Identification

aestheticization of the human suffering and lethal exclusion of the migration

system appeared perverse. The weight of the problem and the severity of the
crisis, didn´t seem to fit with an art show and it´s peculiar finality, limitations
and otherworldliness. In the curatorial work the realization emerged that it
was possible that some events seemed to disallow exhibition. Yet still need it.
Thus the question, ‘is this the time for art?’ It became a temporary solution to
the ethical problem of aestheticizing a crisis. It also expresses the difficulty in
finding a bridge between political and artistic representation. The question
turned the project into a curatorial investigation with a double aim, to find
artworks that reflected our sense of crisis and to understand the potential
role and problem of aesthetics in this crisis.
The question shares some kinship, with Adorno´s famously depressed
question about the impossibility of writing poetry after Auschwitz and, as
he later qualified, if one can “go on living” (Adorno, Negative Dialectics,
1966, p. 362). The regular yearly numbers of drowning migrants confronts
us with a morally challenging fact, which bears a dark kinship to Adorno´s
concern. There are two aspects of this. One is the mentioned difficulty to
represent the deaths along the borders of Europe, and the other is the fact
that in regard to the current migratory system, the European audience,
artist and curator, no matter how critical, are also members and in part
representatives of a polis which has put this system in place.
Here the argument is that the migration issue is in bad need of powerful
and critical representations, and thus have to revisit and rethink typical
links in political art today, such as the widespread suspicion against artistic
representation, i.e. to avoid the power move it is said to entail “to speak for
someone else.” The response to this concern have been to try to climb down
from the authoritative position as privileged speaker and mix with the
audience in strategies that embrace various expressions of relational
aesthetics (Bourriad, 1998). Here, crudely lumped together, we thus find
interactive, participatory, direct-action and performative approaches. They
all share to some degree the skepticism about representation and a concern
to avoid objectification and exploitation. With an analogy from the political
world, these artistic strategies seek to come in a more direct contact with
their ‘constituency’. Moreover, whenever representational strategies aren´t
completely abandoned, as they rarely can be, an often suggested remedy to
the problematic power position entailed in representation are aesthetic

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 113-136 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.09 115
 Erik Berggren

strategies that allow for identification together with the assertion of the
agency and subjectivity of those represented as opposed to representations
that victimize.
Many of these strategies have brought an important reflexive critique of
taken for granted positions and divisions of labour within political art. It
has been part of a widening of the voices and a ‘partitioning of the sensible’
and a dismantling of the unfair distribution and privilege of voice
(Rancière, 2013). However, the argument here is that, in a world marked
by radical exclusion, the salience of some of these standard positions in
much contemporary art must be revisited and at times called into question.
The radical exclusion that art on migration is thus not only exclusion from
art, but from the political world as such. An inquiry following this lead
may surface some of the taken for granted national, territorial and bordered
premises that the world, including the art world, have operated with, even
in politically radical and critical modes. As migration challenges borders,
and our knowledge and oblivion about them, art on migration gets a few of
its premises exposed. The concern behind the often recurring claims and
positions regarding what art about “the other”, or art on suffering, must or
must not do, is often framed as one of “ethics”. However, a closer look at
these concerns can reveal how they are also, at times, inhibiting a critical
view of what it portrays, represent or re-enact – today´s migration regime. I
will discuss this with a note on art´s political potential in general and its
relation to success or failure, and furthermore through a short look at how
contemporary art is bound up with a special relationship to space. The
spacial dimension of political art, and its political potency, is as I will try to
show an innate quality of contemporary art, yet one in need of scrutiny at
times. Lastly, a few examples of works by artists will be discussed as they
have deviated from some standard ethical demands within political art and
taken on the migration issue in innovative ways, and moreover, ways that
grapple with representation and place, the presence and absence of people
as subjects and objects. These are Nuria Güell, Daniela Ortiz and Xose
Quiroga, Oscar Lara, and Kimbal Quist Bumstead. But before I look closer
at these artistic strategies, I think it is essential to get a grip on what is at
stake in and behind the issue here discussed, the regular and well known
deaths that seem to be an integral and even accepted part of the current
migration regime.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 113-136 − ISSN: 2499-930X

116 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.09
 Representation, Victimization or Identification

1. Facts on the ground, and at sea.

The “migration issue” or the “crisis” addressed here, is, to be more

specific, the deaths and deportations, incarcerations and the destruction of
lives, that the current migration regime of Europe produce on a regular
basis. In the curatorial project “Is This the Time for Art?”, this, the most
lethal, excluding and unbearable aspects of migration today was what
triggered the project.
Today, about 25 million people are judged to be officially recognized
‘refugees’ by the UN and UNHCR. However, near 70 million are regarded
to be subjected to forced migration, including also economic, political- or
climate refugees, as well as internal refugees. (UN: International Migration
Report, 2017.) During the recent peak years of asylum seekers to the EU,
2015 and 2016, 1,3 and 1,2 million people respectively sought asylum to the
Union. Granted asylum in 2015 were almost 1,3 million, yet in 2016 this had
been halved, with no corresponding drop in asylum seekers 2016.
(Eurostat: Asylum statistics 2017.) This should be seen in relation to the
vastly larger pressure of refugees on countries near Syria. One example,
Lebanon, has taken more than 1 million refugees from Syria in this period.
The regular safe roads to the EU have been all but closed. In 2015 one
million migrants crossed the Mediterranean in an effort to reach Europe.
Since long, but increasingly since 2015, a set of systems, coordinated by
EU:s border agency Frontex, have been installed to prevent the entry in to
Europe. This has reduced the numbers trying to cross. So in 2017 EU saw
only 650 000 asylum seekers. But the danger has increased. Since 2014 to
2018, the deaths on the Mediterranean have averaged 3500, shifting from
5000 in 2016 to 2300 in 2018, yet the number who have embarked on these
journey have, as said, gone down dramatically. (UNHCR: “Desperate
Journeys – Refugees and migrants arriving in Europe and at Europe´s
borders.” January 2019, 5). Most commentators thus conclude that EU:s
efforts at stopping migrants from reaching the shores of Europe have vastly
increased the danger.
This has been long in the making. Since the 1990’ s, EU have adopted a
“remote policing” policy, in which detention and re-sending migrants are
central tools. (MigrEurope, 2013). The huge bureaucratic apparatus, with
Frontex - EU:s border surveillance agency at the center - involves smaller

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 113-136 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.09 117
 Erik Berggren

agencies, private firms and military units and local police forces. A reason
for all the deaths on the Mediterranean is a EU directive, put in place
already in 2001, which makes it illegal for airliners, ships and other
transport companies to let people travel to the EU without residence permit
(Council Directive 2001/52/EC).
The lethal aspects of EUs migration policy is not only about drowning.
The number of EU-supported detention centers were in 2012 almost 500
(473), inside EU (Migreurop, 2013). Yet, there are also a number of sites in
neighboring countries financed by the EU, in North Africa, Turkey, etc. Ad
to this a large number of invisible, clandestine and temporary sites, ad-hoc
transit stations and “hot spots” with little or no transparency or regularized
management at all, many run by private subcontractors, some by smugglers,
and so forth. The total number of camps and detained persons in EU:s
“remote policing” system is thus largely unknown, as is the number of
deaths within them. Ad to this that reports of an epidemic of suicides in the
camps have surfaced during the last years. (The Guardian, 2018).
There is today a strong consensus on a hard line on migration and calls
for evening stricter, i.e. more dangerous, policies. The movements across
Europe, often called right wing populism, but which in many instances
should be described as varieties of fascism turned main stream, have had a
clear influence over government policies on migration regulation. Anti
immigrant parties, and policy, is no longer the marginal exception
underlining the liberal-democratic rule. This has changed both laws and
the political discussion in ways that was to most Europeans literally
unthinkable 30 years ago (Berggren, 2007).
So, in sum, the migration regime in Europe today is a system that in
many ways surpass the dystopic visions expressed some two decades ago
with the notion of a “Fortress Europe”. A notion ridiculed by the defenders
of European integration, whose idealized language spoke of peace,
humanitarianism, cosmopolitanism and open borders. By and large, there
are reasons to speak of a reshaping of the political as such, i.e. the
boundaries, structures and constitutional framework of the ground on
which our political systems reside and operate.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 113-136 − ISSN: 2499-930X

118 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.09
 Representation, Victimization or Identification

2. Art´s burden.

All art can be read politically. The distinction political vs non-political

art is thus most often an impossible one, or at best, contingent upon
perspective. Yet, I will here by-pass this central boundary problem in art by
simply referring to art that explicitly speak to an issue that is already
politicized, or that seeks the attention of its audiences in order to politicize
an issue. In short, an ’issue’ that ultimately is settled outside of the art
event. Here, two elements are central in thinking about political art. One is
the weight it must carry in terms of fulfilling or failing in its political
ambition and the other has to do with its location, as the political in art has
always been intimately bound up with its space and place.
In fact, most theoretical works on art and politics treat this issue as one
of aesthetics, direct their attention to how art works include political
dimensions or how they can be interpreted within an aesthetic or critical
theory framework. Yet, more rarely as a burden or a problem which
connects the art work to the world or the gallery to the street and world
outside in a more direct way (Alliez and Osborne, 2013), say in terms of the
for politics pertinent questions of success or failure.
But, in spite of its powerlessness, I maintain that political art must take
seriously what eventually happens to the problem addressed, otherwise it
would be a mere aestheticization of a political matter. And indeed this
concern haunts much political art. However, we sense if the engagement is
sincere. I believe most is. Yet, at the same time, art cannot take full
responsibility for offering and realizing political solutions. Rancière
reminds that art also must account for its powerlessness:

Aesthetic art promises a political accomplishment that it cannot satisfy, and thrives on
that ambiguity /…/ That is why those who want to isolate it from politics are somewhat
beside the point. It is also why those who want it to fulfill its political promises are
condemned to a certain melancholy (Rancière, 2002).

This is a condition for political art: it must reconcile, yet not solve, its
political ambition with its limited capacity to actually create change. This
conundrum is further complicated in art that, as has been common in the
last decades, emphasize its autonomy while also seek to overcome or avoid
representation, escape mediation and go beyond the symbolic gesture, leave

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 113-136 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.09 119
 Erik Berggren

the allegedly segregated, privileged art space and break out, perform and
let life and art merge into art-action, into art-life (Thomphson, 2012). With
such “radical” aspirations, an even greater “failure” is lined up in terms of
political accomplishment. Yet, Rancière seems to suggest that this partial
failure is what artists and curators must bear. Only the failure save the knot
that links the autonomy and heteronomy of art (Rancière, 2002).
I think this is right, as with the Greek tragedy, the ‘failure’ is not only
honest, but also essential, as it gives something back to the audience, to
contemplate, reconcile with or be inspired to act on. Illusion without
delusion. This corresponds to what Adorno and Horkheimer suggested
was lost in late capitalist cultural industry. Without the tragic dimension all
that is left for the audience is a mimetic screening of fiction, a cover up (T.
Adorno and M. Horkheimer, 1972/1947). The failure of the world, of
politics, must of course also be included in art on failed politics. The
unfinished, the tentative and probing is essential in art as well as politics in
search of its battle ground. Uncertainty of impact is a shared quality in
these spheres of action. Any contentment, closure or satisfaction in the
activity, or the exhibition, on for example migration today, is strikingly out
of place (See Thompson 2017 for a related thought yet reached through
practice).
A first reflection on art on migration is that, beside involving an extreme
clash between the gallery and the deaths on the Mediterranean, it reaches
out, outside, not only the gallery, but the regular Polis, a specific real and
imagined community. Like migration, it transcends borders, focus and
raise questions about both the workings of art as a political tool and of
politics based on a territorial logic, as TJ. Demos has explored and
discussed with rich accounts of a variety works and their political
significance in The Migrant Image (Demos, 2103). To understand why the
spatial dimension is a challenge to contemporary artists addressing
migration we must look back for a moment on art´s relationship to space in
relation to politics and representation.
Contemporary art is described and defined in many ways, as starting at
different junctions or breaks, the 1920s, WWII, the 1960s, 1989, or it is
defined according to its content matter or its somewhat puzzling
relationship to the ‘contemporary’ itself (Karlholm, 2014). One way of
describing it however, is to think of it as being concerned with its place.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 113-136 − ISSN: 2499-930X

120 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.09
 Representation, Victimization or Identification

Thanks to, in particular, Marcel Duchamp, the room in which art is

exhibited became charged in a new way. His ready-mades transformed
everyday, banal, objects and placed them in the gallery. Ever since, art
became art, cursed or blessed, also by being moved in or out of this space.
We can think of that as domestic art politics. Duchamp revolutionized
the categories and meanings of art works and the art space, yet is rarely
seen as a typical political artist. But he flung the doors open.
In the 1960s and 1970s many artists left the traditional art space, an idea
conceptualized by Brian O´Doherty´s classic Inside the White Cube: The
Ideology of the Gallery Space, published as three essays in Art Forum in 1976,
later as a book (O´Doherty, 2000). Doherty broke down the normative
underpinnings of the gallery. The whiteness of the cube served as an
idealized screen standing in the way of the world, pretending to be neutral,
pure and ideal, it contributed to mystify art, commodify it further as well as
keeping the troubles of the world outside, or purify them into aesthetics.
His critical intervention echoed aspects of Benjamin discussion of the art
worlds response to the severed linkage to ritual in the form of l´art pour l´art
as a “negative theology”: “…the idea of ‘pure’ art which not only denied
any social function of art but also categorizing by subject matter.”
(Benjamin 1936/2000).
Since Doherty, radical movements and energies of the 1960s and 1970s,
its´ break outs from museum or gallery, have become almost in itself a
trademark of radical political art, so as to avoid excluding those subjects
one wanted to address and engage in dialogue. In fact, the critique of the
white cubes, the gallery and the museum has become a standard trope
today, even for museums. The general thrust of this move, to open up,
move outside and ‘take it (art) into the streets’ was and is of course driven
by a general inclusive and democratic aspiration. It is pursued through
actual moves, as well as symbolic gestures, and expresses an often bad
conscience about or lack of faith in the gallery space, as well as a search for
the relevant battle ground, the democratic constituency (Sholette, 2011;
Lacy 2010, Karlholm, Kaprow & Smithson, 2013; Lundström, 2015).
Another side of this engagement has been the common rejection of
representation, in favor of participation and action through performative
strategies among artists. There has been a strong tendency to try to
rearrange the power relations in the art situation, not only by moving out

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 113-136 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.09 121
 Erik Berggren

from the traditional setting, but also in how one regards the relationship
between artist and audience, speaker and listener. Negotiations that in the
1990s got renewed energy with Bourriad´s important intervention in
Relational Aesthetics (Bourriaud, 1998).

3. Art on migration - identification, subjectivity, agency and representation

In the following we shall look closer at some artistic strategies that have
dealt with the challenge to art´s ethical and political strategies, that current
migration entails. I shall discuss them in relation to some central concepts
that these artists both expose and distance themselves from. These are as
said the normative idea of identification, the couple subjectivity-agency, the
problem of representation, lastly, I bring in a notion, less frequent today,
maybe because of it´s bagage from past political projects: the system
(Jameson, 1987). A view towards ‘system’, or its equivalent here, the
‘migration regime’, it is argued, can counter some of the problems that past
notions lead us into.
An underlying thought behind this discussion is thus that all these
strategies of recent contemporary art are challenged in the confrontation
with the current migration regime. The roles of audience, artist and
constituency must be rethought. The question of who the subject and object
is and where art shall live its life, is altered, when the subject/object is
radically excluded, both from the art sphere and the political community
surrounding it or surrounded by it. And this in turn, changes the way we
can look at, or try to escape, representation.
The offer or possibility to identify with a protagonist, a subject/object of
an art work, has long been seen as an ethical requirement and possibly
even more so as the reproduction and spread of images seem to grow
endlessly. This is typically sharpened in art of a documentary,
contemporary and political vein. The anonymity of suffering people should
be broken. This was for example what Susan Sontag discussed in On
Photography (Sontag, 1977) as the “voyeuristic relation”. It was a basic
ethical question, to put captions on photos of people, especially those in
precarious situations. Hence, to name those we supposedly engage with
through images, or wants to engage in or for. This is also a requirement for

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 113-136 − ISSN: 2499-930X

122 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.09
 Representation, Victimization or Identification

how to engage an audience, only if we portray recognizable human beings

and persons as individuals, can we identify with them, i.e. see ourselves in
another. The images of anonymous people is said to objectify, turn them
into objects for desire, (shallow) empathy, or simply decoration and thus
runs the risk of becoming (and repeating) a form of exploitation. This is
also expressed as a demand to grant subjectivity to those we speak of or
with. This in turn, is connected to the notion of agency – which is also
imperative in political documentation and art. That is, to show that those
portrayed have a “will of their own”, and a capacity to act, and to lift up
this quality, rather than their positions as victims. Or better, to let them
speak themselves and so give shape and form to their own narratives.
Linked, or sitting adjacent, to these ideas are the equally common idea to
empower somebody, a person, a group and/or the audience.
It is hardly controversial to state that these requirements have had a
strong hold on artists, photographers and film makers. They are also good
ideas. Behind them lies a will to hold up a victims´ or persons´ human-ness,
and, in turn, the assumption that audience engagement and care is
dependent upon an inter-subjective relationship, a “getting to know”-
quality through a possibility for identification.
Yet, here it starts to get tricky. As the intimacy of a caption, a name, an
age or a village, is a bit thin in terms of friendship. Also, the human-ness of
people, elevated through emphasis on will, subjectivity and agency, seems to
rest on an initial worry or even assumption about the opposite. The
question is why we need to identify with someone to extend our sympathy,
empathy and solidarity and recognize their innate humane-ness? Can one
not, as we are speaking of art no less, imagine they have an identity and,
also, a will of their own, are humans, with subjective feelings and desires?
Of course, I do not question the power of identification as such. But in
relation to migration, and thus drowning on the Mediterranean, rafts, and
incarceration in detention centers: to what extent can we, as relatively safe,
privileged and dry, Westerners, identify with that fate (Compare Bal, 2015)?
Does not an image of people on a raft or of starving humans in the desert of
Sudan carry just as much or even more information about our differences?
For all the identification one can create, it can hardly counter the strong
message of such images in a gallery or a newspaper, somewhere in Europe,
that “their” situation is radically different from “ours”. What I want to

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 113-136 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.09 123
 Erik Berggren

suggest is that even though an image or art work can indeed educate and
even erect bridges between groups of humans, that are different in culture,
power, living conditions and experiences, it does so all the time, but
interwoven in that perception, in the knowledge conveyed, is also a strong
experience and plenty of information of difference.
Thus, the prerequisite of identification for sympathy or solidarity leaves
those we cannot identify with, also without our solidarity. That, in turn,
leaves us with a sad prospect for anyone, far away, in need of the solidarity
and support of others, more powerful and thus better situated to speak to
power, i.e. to take on the task of representing.
A suspicion emerges that all these efforts to break or correct the
alienation of a situation and a relation, which often is suggested as a way to
avoid a mere self-satisfying reassurance of conscience that stays in the
gallery space, and the belief that this can be accomplished in the images,
itself rests on a rather self centered attitude. For the last normative element
mentioned above, empowerment, becomes as a demand on representation,
peculiar in relation to images, art and performances that address people
and situations that at first instance hardly ask for art, and are by any
measure radically powerless. The thought that the art-situation have the
power to distribute power, hand out or give agency, in relation to subjects
that are clearly not the receivers of art, but in fact, closer to objects of it, is a
bit grand and delusional.
My ambition is not to say that these are all misguided concerns, nor are
they outdated. By and large, it has to do with direct contact, inclusion and
relevance. And the question of who and where and how photos and images
and art works portray people, is never irrelevant. All of the strategies
above, have their place and will be continuously employed. No doubt, a
shift of perspective is necessary for relevant critique, and for letting more
voices be heard. (See Mazzara, 2019) Few things are ever completely
outdated. However, the whole movement of breaking out of the museum
and questioning the white cube ideal, have lived a vital, yet deeply
paradoxical, life alongside the museum and the white cube gallery, and not
rarely been passionately embraced by these institutions themselves. Maybe
this was all, in part, contingent upon the safe Polis, surrounding the cube
and museums with relatively stable categories of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’?

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 113-136 − ISSN: 2499-930X

124 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.09
 Representation, Victimization or Identification

To further discuss how the migration issue challenges contemporary art

forms, I will bring in some artists that have chosen other strategies to
address the migration regime and try to make us think and act and engage
in a relevant way in relation to it.

Oscar Lara
The video installation “100 years” by Oscar Lara is a film that places the
human subjects/victims at the center, yet convey no initiated experience of
migration. The video shows the cropped faces of asylum seekers who have
lived in a small cell in a Danish detention center. The mouths of these faces,
which is what is seen, states how long each have been detained while
waiting for asylum. This was installed at first in a show at Fabrikken in
Copenhagen on a replica of a cell from the detention center. The piece is
very straightforward, reminding of all the years destroyed. Adding up to
100 years. But the brutally cropped faces, de-individualize and explicitly
hides or withdraw information, details, as to intentionally anonymize, most
obviously by hiding the eyes. But a jarring sense of loss is forced upon the
audience, hearing the years in detention: “7 years…five years…3 years”,
and so forth, while identification that also allows for a displacement of the
trauma, outside of ourselves is inhibited by the opacity of the cut image.
Lara uses the blocked identification as the tool with which to keep focus on
the structural matter. The dehumanization of the image reflects the
dehumanization of the system, which is on display through the installation
on a replica of a detention cell, and in the quantity of faces and years, and
also in fact, in the very anonymity of the protagonists/subjects/objects of the
piece. Still, the work also stirs the emotional register, precisely because of
what it leaves for the audience to figure out. The image reveals vaguely
age, the number of years in detention, how much life has been robbed, and
the repetitive character speaks of mass incarceration. But there are no
names, countries, stories, relatives, hopes, dreams. We can fill in the blanks.
And in so doing we have to engage our own references – hence become
interactive through interpretation.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 113-136 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.09 125
 Erik Berggren

Image 1. Still from video, “100 Years”, by Oscar Lara

Nuría Güell
Nuria Güells´ art works has another way of addressing the politics of the
migrant situation. Güell participated in 2013 with a performance at the
Gothenburg Biennale – “Offside. Too Much Melanin.” She has developed
the concept “displaced legal/moral application” to describe her method in
which she starts out from a legal or moral principle but turns it around to
reverse the power relationships involved. In this work she had the biennial
employ a so called illegal migrant, Maria from Kosovo, who had been
living with her husband in hiding in Gothenburg for 8 years, in fear of
being deported. Her three children are born in Sweden. At the biennale
Maria stood outside one of the art venues and invited people from the
audience to play “Hide and Seek” with her. She went hiding and then the
audience went looking for her. Afterwards she offered the audience to talk
about her situation with her.
Güells performance did indeed present us to an individual, a very real
person and her story as a victim of a migratory regime. And we as audience
actually had the chance to get a little acquainted. Yet, Maria´s invitation to
play, was itself a play, on top of another play with the laws that gave her a
temporary residence permit while her case was being reviewed (during
which she was employed by the biennale). In this performance the
audience were thus offered to symbolically and ironically take the role the
Swedish police and authorities have had, to look for her. There were

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 113-136 − ISSN: 2499-930X

126 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.09
 Representation, Victimization or Identification

several element in this set up that caused discussion about ethics – to “use”
Maria for art, to expose her, place her outdoors, “exhibit” her and her tragic
situation, and of course, the whole idea to “play” with a migrant was to
many indeed a bit offensive. In fact, the reality of Maria´s fate and the
fictional playful set up of the art performance seemed unreconcilable. It
reminded of a minor classic installation/performance within contemporary
art on migration, Foreigners Out! (Please Love Austria) by Christoph
Schlingensief from 2000. This performance and television show kept
asylum seekers from a detention center waiting to be deported were in a
container on the main square of Vienna and filmed them – Big Brother style
– so the audience (on web TV) could decide each who would be voted out
(and “sent home”). Last refugee standing was supposedly given a
residence permit.
Güells satire was not as drastic but, or therefore, managed to raise
several questions beyond the “scandal,” and make the art situation dense
with political and ethical uncertainty. She seemed to draw upon and
continue the exploitation and the precarious situation Maria was in. But the
ambiguity of the direction, ethics and point of this play, about who were
really addressed, targeted or mobilized, gave the work a long lasting effect
on visitors and forced us to think again and eventually see in sharp light,
the laws upholding the situation Maria was stuck in and spoke about. The
first thing the audience was asked to do, was, in a way to suspend social
decency and play hide and seek with a person who had been living in
hiding. Still, to go along, play “police”, was also to perform an act of
solidarity. The refusal to play with ‘Maria’ for example based on an ethical
consideration and concern for her precarious situation, was confusingly
similar to the way we regularly block out the suffering of others, and in this
case, that choice repeated the oblivion towards and the invisibility of Maria
that the system had forced upon her.

Kimbal Quest Bumstead

“The horizon is far away” (2015) is a video work which seemingly operates
within a traditional documentary mode. However, the arrangements in the
production does away with any such readings. Bumsteadhad manipulated
the situation beyond the typical documentary aesthetics, with cuts,
cropping, voice over, arranged meetings and so forth. His film is taking

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 113-136 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.09 127
 Erik Berggren

place in an abandoned refugee camp in the desert of Tunisia, on the border

to Libya.“Choucha” camp was established by the UNHCR to temporarily
house those that were fleeing from Libya during 2011. In 2013 the camp
was officially closed, and those who had been denied asylum, mostly from
sub-Saharan African countries, were advised to return to their countries of
origin. Many attempted to cross the Mediterranean Sea to reach Europe via
Lampedusa, and the rest stayed living in the desert waiting for a solution.
Bumstead picked and choosed among those he meet in the camp as if
casting, and what he found was a representative, an eloquent man who was
given a role rarely given away in documentaries. “Brainy”, as he is called
by his friends, probably because of his way with words, got to narrate
important parts of the films. This reminds us how rare it is, in spite of all
the emphasis on letting people be heard and to grant subjectivity, agency
and voice to people who are portrayed in precarious situations, that a
director delegate the narrating role to one of them. So “Brainy” does not
only get to tell about his situation, and of his friends, he also explains it and
is thus the educator in this work, as when he in a section of the movie
freely reflects on what it means to live in Coucha:

Do you know how painful it is to be in the streets?

We are living in the streets.
Because someone who is living in an open desert, getting to four years of the western
calendar… are exposed to different kinds of things.
So really, it’s very difficult to interpret, and painful at the same time to explain.
Because do you think someone who sleeps in a tent, someone who sleeps in a tent, can
give a definition of hope?
Because inside the tent, there is nothing that symbolizes hope.
So in other words, the man cannot even define hope.
Especially when you are sleeping in a system that is explaining nothing to you, and yet,
is in control.

These words aren´t complaints or outcry, they amount to a calm

reflection which makes clear for everyone the lack of power which he
speaks of, as well as the lack of empowering or agency that supposedly
could have been distributed in this meeting. Discouraging as that may
seem, it is a case of speaking truth about power.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 113-136 − ISSN: 2499-930X

128 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.09
 Representation, Victimization or Identification

Image 2, Still from video film “The horizon is far away”, by Kimbal Quist Bumstead

Daniela Ortiz and Xose Quiroga

Daniela Ortiz and Xose Quiroga have collaborated on a series of art
projects that address questions of migration and political boundaries, while
they simultaneously ask questions about the image of migration. Their
works are often based in the reality of refugees, with images and
experiences that are regularly suppressed and forgotten in the media flow.
However, their conceptualizations engage us but also adress our own
position as witnesses, bystanders and possibly even perpetrators? I will
bring in two of their projects here. The first one – “Aluche-Barajas”, is a
web based project gathering images from phone clips uploaded on social
media sites by the public around Europe, from detention centers, air ports,
busses, carriers, ferries. The images are depicting the concrete and brutal
operations of the migration authorities, and their extensions. Ortiz and
Quiroga seem at first to be operating within a logic of traditional exposure
of that which is hidden, suppressed and forgotten, i.e., to bear witness. But
as revealing images meant to stir us and maybe take action they carry a
paradox in that these images are already out there, on YouTube, Instagram
and the likes. In the corner of the image the artists have added a small piece
of information, the extent to which the film clips have been shared and
gone viral or not. And, although images such as these are rarely published

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 113-136 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.09 129
 Erik Berggren

in mainstream media, they are indeed suppressed, while also familiar. We

have seen glimpses. Watching them in this work evokes, I think, chock and
also a sense of repulsive familiarity and sadness, as these are images of
something simultaneously forgotten and widely published and shared,
well-known and denied. Another aspect of these clips are their repetitious
and rather anonymous quality. Who took them, who are filmed? One sees
bodies, people wrestling, places, cries, i.e. deportations, but get to know no
one. The anonymity denies us the relief of identification or any illusion of
having established an ethical relationship between watcher and watched.
The other work is also based on information “out there”, in this case
reports of deaths along Europe’s borders, printed in long lists on panels
and hung from the ceiling in the gallery space. In “NN 15543” anonymity is
thus explicit and central. The number states the number of dead migrants
encountered on the shores and on borders or in centers of Europe, between
1998 and 2012. The years as well as the number reveals little, yet, we know
that the numbers are too low. What is listed is what made it to public
knowledge through media and from police reports, so that an activist
group could gather names or information about the encounters.
Ortiz and Quiroga deleted the few cases with identifiable names from
the original list, and ended up with the figure 15543. They printed these
lists on panels that hung in a slight ironic monumental set up from the roof.
Importantly, the installation also added information about which
institutions, departments, and companies that upheld the system and thus
are implicated in the deaths of migrants. In several small tablets opposite
the panels, the audience could read about Frontex, the EU, Iberia Airlines,
the Spanish Government, GS4, and so forth. Underneath each logo of these
organizations were information about their activities and further below
each organization’s tablet there sat another tablet detailing specific deaths
connected in various ways to these organizations.
The whole work made up a strong “je accuse!” in regard to the
migration regime. However, the lack of people to identify with, see as
subjects, empowered agents and so on, was striking. Instead it showed us
the operations of a system, a regime, a machinery in operation and its
material physical, political and economic logic and consequences.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 113-136 − ISSN: 2499-930X

130 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.09
 Representation, Victimization or Identification

Image 3. Detail of “NN 15543” by Daniela Ortiz and Xose Quiroga, by Caroline Kvick

Image 4, from Aluche-Barajas, by Daniela Ortiz and Xose Quiroga

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 113-136 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.09 131
 Erik Berggren

Conclusions

When we set out to make an art exhibition about the current migration
regime, a starting point was Hanna Arendt´s laconic and sad conclusion in
a passage of The Origins of Totalitarianism of the fate of the Jew, the law and
thus political space:

If a human being loses his political status, he should according to the implications of the
inborn and inalienable rights of man, come under exactly the situation for which the
declarations of such general rights provided. Actually the opposite is the case. It seems that
a man who is nothing but a man has lost the very qualities which make it possible for other
people to treat him as a fellow-man. (Arendt, 1994, p.300)

We saw the same lack of extension of rights to migrants as Arendt had

identified in her analysis of Europe´s fascist regimes. Arendt´s verdict
caught our interest also because it spoke of the boundaries of the political,
and the danger in ending up outside its realm. To loose political status is
lethal. This moreover speaks to the necessity for representation for those
who are not legally included in the polis, that is lack political status, vote
and voice, and also, in relation to what was discussed above, the tragic
vanity of trying to assert the humanity of people who have been denied
legitimate political status.
The artists presented in this article have chosen strategies that account
for the changed landscape for art and politics that migration entails. That is
the main reason for my selection of them, but it took a while to understand
what these artists had to teach about the migration issue, aesthetically. By
and large, in these works they turn away from direct actions that try to
escape representation. (Although, many of them make work that sits in
between performance/action and symbolic gesture/representation, as for
example Güell´s game of hide and seek). Representation becomes
recharged with meaning in relation to subjects that have been deprived a
voice in a radical way, are outside of the polis, stuck in camps, or at risk in the
desert or on rafts at sea. Although the suspicions against representation
have often rested on an inclusive participatory rational, a rarely surfaced
premise have nevertheless been, as said, the ordered political community,
with relatively unquestioned borders. But when the radical exclusion from
is brought into the equation, the implicit premise that the street is the place

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 113-136 − ISSN: 2499-930X

132 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.09
 Representation, Victimization or Identification

where the desired object of engagement/subject of change/ is sought is

challenged. To put it simply, “the problem” addressed is also largely
excluded and fenced out behind barbed walls. The “break out” from the
white cube and the museum thus runs the risk of becoming a paradoxical
and mute action. This mustn´t be understood as a literal move to an actual
street, but is often pursued through more or less convincing efforts to
simply open the space to new audiences – a relevant art-political act in
itself, or temporarily create events and actions in the city, yet not erect
“public art” (See for example Thompson 2017 and 2012, or Lundström
2015). The argument here is that the constituency to be mobilized – the
audience – is not the same as the subject/object of this art, i.e. the migrant.
So what this demands is to mobilize an audience not to break their
shackles, but to solidarize and help out. In another way, represent,
politically, the unrepresented. In the gallery this can only be propelled by
artistic representation.
Migration and radical exclusion forces us thus to think again about the
meaning of the art room, its withdrawal from the rest of society, and the
prospect for transcending unequal shares of power for those involved -
artists, curators, audience and subject/objects of the art in question, in this
case, migrants and refugees. As the art-space is recharged with another
meaning, it forces representation back. In relation to those not let in to the
gallery or the street outside, there are few options other than to start
“speaking for someone”, i.e. to represent in the political sense of the word.
And in societies where the toil of migrants is largely out of sight and
inclusion of them is questioned by the main stream political establishment,
the withdrawn art space can become a refuge in itself, where, maybe,
resistance can grow, as well as anywhere else.
As is clear by now, these works also do not seek an opening for
identification, i.e. they are not nervous about anonymity or distance, rather
they use it, experiment with it and hold it up as a specific condition of the
migrant regime: the disenfranchising, rightless, voiceless, nameless and
origin less state many migrants are forced into. Consequentially, there is
not so much concern in convincing the audience of the humanity of the
migrants in focus. That is in most cases a premise. Secondly, it would be
counter to a central point many of these artists make, in some different
ways: that the political system´s denial of peoples humanity (rights,

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 113-136 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.09 133
 Erik Berggren

political status, etcetera) cannot get an artistic solution. It is a political matter.

This has also to do with the fact that the message that someone, or some
group, is part of humanity, is always by the implication that this might be in
doubt, a possible insult. Yet, again we live in a world, and Union, where this is
something many need to be reminded about. But such a reminder, moreover,
rest on another contestable assumption, that the culprits, the perpetrators of
the “inhuman” migration regime, the agents of what I have called “the
system”, would rethink their policy had they or it only understood that
migrants are human beings. This is a hope we often cling to. It is expressed in
the many cries and graffiti tags in refugee camps: “Are we not human?” “We
are not animals!”. A legitimate question, but, when taking a closer look at this
idea one can ask if that is really the problem, i.e. the lack of insight that these
people are human. It is indeed a typical way of understanding racism. But is it
not the other way around? The dehumanization of the migrant, or for that
matter, the black person, the Jew or the Sami, is the tool for which to
rationalize racism, in other words, the denial of asylum, rights, legal status,
precarisation and exploitation, land grabbing and so forth, ultimately thus,
tools for protecting privilege and power?
In sum then, a central focus of the works presented above are thus not the
individual migrant, as human, as subject or as agent, but their powerlessness,
and the system that breeds it. This is a very accurate focus, as it more efficiently
solve many of the problems that had shaped prior political strategies. A focus
which include a critique against the system upholding the migration regime
and which also includes the audience as both implicated and responsible, by
the power we have as people with political status within the system that
excludes, and thus as potential agents of solidarity in relation to the precarious
situation of so many migrants. Hence, the directness sought, can be found in
the gallery as well as any other place within the walls of exclusion.
Powerlessness might seem to be a strange choice. But, if we ask why
powerlessness and lack of agency, victimhood and objectification are so
detested today, an inability to deal with collectives comes into view. The
dominant shape of the individual today is as an agent on a market, this
runs through all walks of life and within all institutions. Could it be that
this blinds us to the systematic victim, not the “victimized”? The atrocities
of the migration regime is enabled by an extreme categorization i.e.
collectivization of human beings into a group not worthy our care, our

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 113-136 − ISSN: 2499-930X

134 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.09
 Representation, Victimization or Identification

deepest values, our solidarity. And this, in turn, rests on the paradoxical
disqualification of all groups and collectively expressed grievances,
political identities, formed out of historical repression and exploitation.
This paradox, the collectivizing denial of rights, and the denial of the right
to become a political collective, is a major characteristic of our times and of
the migration regime (Jonsson & Willén 2016). It is a sort of reversed veil of
ignorance, where everybody, in the EU, find themselves safe, on the other
side of the veil, yet, oblivion about where they were in the past, where they
came from, and that they too, and/or their forbearers were once ignorant
about where they would end up (Rawls, 1977).
Powerlessness can however be a starting point, and an entry to solidarity.
As it has been before. The recognition and shared experience of
powerlessness and exploitation have been an ignition to political
mobilization through time. For the civil rights movement, the feminist
movement and the workers movement and so forth, it seems as just as
relevant a ground for a migration movement. And as anyone familiar with
these historical movements, they have all benefitted on solidarity across
borders and boundaries between the powered and the powerless, and by
representatives from within their own ranks and from the outside.

References

Adorno, T. (1997) Negative Dialectics. London: Continuum.

Adorno, T., Horkheimer, M. (1972). The Dialectics of Enlightenment. New York: Herder and
Herder.
Alliez, É. and Osborne, P. (2013). Spheres of Action: Art and Politics. London: Tate Publishing.
Arendt, H. (1994). The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Books.
Bal, M. (2015). The Last Frontier, Migratory Culture, Video and Exhibiting without
Voyeurism. In A. E. Coombes and R. B. Phillips (Eds.), The International Handbooks of
Museum Studies: Museum Transformations. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley/Blackwell.
Benjamin, W. (2000) Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. (1936). In C. Cazeux, (Ed.),
The Continental Aesthetics Reader. London: Routledge)
Berggren, E. (2007). Danish Xenophobia - Power Logic in Motion. In E. Berggren, B. Likic-
Brboric, G. Toksöz, N. Trimikliniotis, (Eds.), Irregular Migration, Informal Labor and
Community: A Challenge for Europe. Maastricht: Shaker Publishing.
Bourriaud, N. (1998). Relational Aesthetics. Paris : Les Presse Du Reel.
Demos, TJ. (2013). The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis.
Durham: Duke University Press.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 113-136 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.09 135
 Erik Berggren

European Commission. Council Directive 2001/52/EC. (2001). Retrieved from

https://europa.eu/european-union/eu-law/legal-acts_en
Eurostat (2017). Asylum statistics 2017. Retrieved from https://ec.europa.eu/home-
affairs/content/annual-report-migration-and-asylum-2017_en
Jameson, F. (1988). Cognitive Mapping. In C. Nelson, C. and L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism
and the Interpretation of Culture. Chicago: University of Illionois Press.
Jonsson, J., Willén, J. (2016). Austere Histories in European Societies: Social Exclusion and the
Contest of Colonial Memories. New York: Routledge.
Karlholm, D. (2014). Kontemporalism : om samtidskonstens historia och framtid. Stockholm: AXL
Books.
Karlholm, D., Kaprow, A., Smithson, R. (2013). Vad är ett Museum?. Stockholm: AXL Books.
Lacy, S. (2010). Leaving Art: Writings on Performance, Politics, and Publics, 1974–2007. Durham:
Duke University Press.
Lundström, A. (2015). Former av politik: Tre utställningssituationer på Moderna Museet 1998-
2008. Göteborg: Makadam.
Mazzara, F. (2019). Reframing Migration: Lampedusa, Border Spectacle and Aesthetics of
Subversion. Oxford: Peter Lang.
MigrEurope Brief (No 2, 2013). Detention of Migrants. MIGREUROP - Observatoire des
frontières. Retrieved from
http://www.migreurop.org/IMG/pdf/Note_de_MIGREUROP_detention_EN_Web.pdf
Nail, T. (2015). Migrant Cosmopolitanism. Public Affairs Quarterly, 29 (2), 187-199.
O´Doherty, B. (2000). Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space. London:
University of California Press.
Pitkin, H. (1967). The Concept of Representation. Berkeley: University of California.
Rancière, J. (2002). The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes. New Left Review 14, 133-151.
Rancière, J. (2013). The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. London:
Bloomsbury Acedemic.
Rawls, J. (1999/1971). A Theory of Justice. Cambridge: The Belknap Press.
Sholette, G. (2010). Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture. London: Pluto
Press.
Sontag, S. (1977). On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Taylor, D., Walker, P., Grierson, J., (2018, October 11). Revealed: two suicide attempts every
day in UK deportation centres. The Guardian Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.
com/uk-news/2018/oct/11/revealed-two-suicide-attempts-every-day-uk-deportation-
detention-centres).
Thompson, N. (Ed) (2012). Living as Form. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Thompson, N. (2017). Culture as Weapon: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life. New York:
Melville House.
Smith, S. (2018, October 28) “Europeans who help migrants find themselves on the wrong
side of the law”, NBC News. Retrieved from https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world.
UN (2017). International Migration Report, 2017.
UNHCR (2019).“Desperate Journeys – Refugees and migrants arriving in Europe and at
Europe´s borders.” January 2019, 5. Report. Retrieved from https://www.unhcr.org/
desperatejourneys/

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 113-136 − ISSN: 2499-930X

136 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.09
 Borders Kill. Tania Bruguera’s Referendum as an Artistic
Strategy of Political Participation ∗

MELISSA MORALLI, PIERLUIGI MUSARÒ & PAOLA PARMIGGIANI

University of Bologna, Italy

The project “Atlas of Transition -New Geographies for a Cross-cultural Europe” was co-funded by
the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.

Abstract:
Since the rise of modern nation-states, borders have played the important role to order
society because they have the power to define territories, not only on the ground, but also
on the level of the imaginary by shaping national identities and perceptions of the world.
Borders can be intended not as places, rather as processes, as socially constructed and
shifting structures of practices and discourses that produce norms of difference and
exclusion. Within this context, arts, and particularly performing arts, can play a role in
challenging these forms of representation, overturning the spectacle of the border into
collective performances. Drawing upon these conceptual premises, the article presents the
empirical insights related to Tania Bruguera’s ‘Referendum’. Referendum was intended
both as a performance and as a form of political activism, inviting people to vote on the
following question: “Borders kill. Should we abolish borders?”. After analysing the
collaborative procedure that led to the final results of the performance, we reflect upon the
role of arts as pedagogical and political tool capable of changing the existing imagery on
borders - and specifically on the Mediterranean Sea - and human mobility, stimulating new
forms of debate and responsabilization in terms of co-citizenship.

Keywords: Border, Imaginary, Citizenship, Art, Political Participation.

∗
The authors worked together to the conceptualisation and construction of the article.
Although, Pierluigi Musarò wrote paragraphs 1 and 2, Melissa Moralli wrote paragraphs 4,
4.1 and 4.2, Paola Parmiggiani wrote paragraphs 3 and 5.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 137-160 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.10
 Melissa Moralli, Pierluigi Musarò & Paola Parmiggiani

"We're Prisoners of War" Chacko said. "Our dreams have been doctored. We belong nowhere.
We sail unanchored on troubled seas. We may never be allowed ashore.
Our sorrows will never be sad enough. Our joys never happy enough. Our dreams never big enough.
Our lives never important enough. To matter..."
Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

1. The multiplication of borders

Globalization is far from creating a “world without borders”, as some

people might have thought in the 1990s (Omae, 1990). In recent years, we
have witnessed a multiplication of borders, also in the immediate sense of
an increase in nation states. Borders, therefore, continue to play an
important and often lethal role in the lives of millions of people. Around
borders people die in many parts of the world: from the Mediterranean to
the border between Mexico and the United States, just to mention the two
most striking examples of the fatal relation between migration and borders
(Mezzadra, 2018).
In the last 20 years, over 30 thousand people have experienced how fatal
it is to feed the dream of the crossing if you start from the wrong side of the
Mediterranean Sea. Thousands of ghosts whose voice does not reach us,
protagonists of a tragedy that has transformed the Mediterranean into a
liquid cemetery, the most dangerous border in the world.
For those fleeing wars and famines, poverty and dictatorships, the
possibility of shipwreck is the price to pay for trying to re-exist (and resist)
on the other side of the Mediterranean. Along the coast between Senegal,
Libya and Turkey, men and women feel both desire to leave and nostalgia
for home (Ahmed, 2014). Yet they do not give up. They undertake “the
Journey”that lasts a few months or many years. A reality that often
becomes a nightmare, transfiguring an even deeper abyss: the one that
separates the migrant from the rest of humanity. A journey that breaks
against the wall of the Mediterranean, in whose profound silence the
stories of the media all over the world drown. Even if they present strong
and moving images, capable of indignating or arousing pity, they dissolve
like any event consumed between a click and some commentary on the

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 137-160 − ISSN: 2499-930X

138 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.10
Borders Kill. Tania Bruguera’s Referendum as an Artistic Strategy of Political Participation

sidelines (Squire, 2014; Colombo, Murri & Tosoni, 2017; Georgiou &
Zaborowski, 2018).
Although European policies try to discourage aspiring asylum seekers
through blockades, rejections, repatriations and communication campaigns
ad hoc 1, themiddle sea - Mare Medi Terraneum in Latin, the sea in the middle
of the land - that the Romans called Mare Nostrum - still attracts thousands
of people seeking for a better life.
More than a border between Africa and Europe, the Mediterranean is a
“liquid continent”.In this sense, for example, Braudel (1986, p.55) recognizes
the dual nature of the Mediterranean: barrier that extends to the horizon and
at the same time of a place that unites, common denominator of trade
exchanges between populations sharing the same habits and paces of life.
The Mediterranean has also become the theatre of diasporas and
conflicts,hopes foundered in the form of massacres, human trafficking,
arrests and solidarity. Although international agencies such as UNHCR,
IOM, and the EU High-Level Working Group on Asylum and Migration
acknowledge that asylum seekers travel side by side with people fleeing
from poverty and seeking better opportunities, most European states are
keen to show they are differentiating between asylum seekers escaping
war, and those seeking a better life. This blurred distinction between forced
and voluntary migration is at the basis of policy-making and is crucial for
the future of newcomers. In order to prevent irregular arrival of asylum
seekers, several states of the “Fortress Europe” have invested massively in
border control, and made bilateral agreements for externalisation of
borders (the EU-Turkey agreement on March 2016 and the Memorandum
of Understanding between Italy and Libya on February 2017, among
others). European governments from both sides of the political spectrum
have enacted draconian measures to prevent, deter, and punish those
engaged in the smuggling of migrants – both as smugglers and smuggled
migrants (Andersson, 2014).
Despite the importance to inform citizens about what is happening in
the Mediterranean area,the ways media report on migration and EU

1 For further information: https://openmigration.org/en/op-ed/dangerous-journey-

limited-effect-of-information-campaigns-to-deter-irregular-migration/, last access on
17/07/2019.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 137-160 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.10 139
 Melissa Moralli, Pierluigi Musarò & Paola Parmiggiani

policies and practices often contribute to create acategorisationof migrants

as voluntary/forced, desirable/undesirable, and legal/illegal. In their
attitude to report uncritically the political discourse on the “invasion” of
migrants crossing the EU border, media often contribute to normalise the
extraterritorial border by negatively stereotyping migration, or even
criminalising ita priori. Moreover, this media uncritical approach not only
deny the difference between people who have the right to ask for asylum
and economic migrants who cross the border without a regular visa. They
also reduce the complex narrative of human migration into simple
dichotomies of good and evil, fostering, in turn, bad policies that put
migrants at risk while, at the same time, empowercriminal organisations.
Moving from the theoretical assumption that nowadays the border
seems to break down and then recompose itself, often in lethal ways on the
bodies of men and women in motion, this article aims at exploring howarts,
and particularly performing arts, can play a role in challenging these forms
of representation, overturning the spectacle of the border into a political
collective performance. In this sense, arts can represent a space to reflect
critically on the denial of rights during migration, as well as on geopolitical
relations and marginalizing migration policies (Mirzoeff, 2011;
Papastergiadis, 2013). Drawing upon these conceptual premises, the article
presents the empirical insights related to the performance “Referendum”,
presented by Cuban artist and activist Tania Bruguera within the
international festival “Atlas of Transitions | Home” 2. This festival was
organized in Bologna in the frame of the project “Atlas of Transitions. New
geographies for a cross-cultural Europe”, aiming at promoting alternative
representations of human mobility and cultural diversity in European
cities. Referendum was intended both as a performance and as a form of
political activism. Lasting ten days, it implied the activation of an urban
referendum campaign that invited people to vote on the following
question: “Borders kill. Should we abolish borders?”. After analysing the
collaborative procedure that led to the final results of the performance, we
reflect upon the role of arts as pedagogical and political tool capable of
changing the existing imaginary on borders - and specifically on the

2 http://bologna.emiliaromagnateatro.com/atlas-of-transitions-biennale-home/, last access

on 16/07/2019.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 137-160 − ISSN: 2499-930X

140 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.10
Borders Kill. Tania Bruguera’s Referendum as an Artistic Strategy of Political Participation

Mediterranean Sea. In fact, we argue that in order to understand the

meaning (and functioning) of borders, it is necessary to look at their
processes of “externalization” and at the symbolic aspects of bordering, to
unveil the typical narratives of mainstream media and politicians,
overcoming the stereotyped imaginary of the humanitarian or securitarian
approach. On the other hand, arts become a new public agora, an
interactive arena where different ideas, opinions, insights on conflictual
phenomena, such as borders, stimulate a renovated individual and
collective responsabilization in terms of co-citizenship (Balibar, 2003).

2. The physical and symbolic dimensions of borders

Combining the freedom of movement within the Schengen space with

the control of external frontiers, the 1990s are marked as the period when
the EU began tightening and militarizing its borders (Bigo, 2002; Mezzadra
& Nielson, 2013). The last decades are, indeed, characterized by a
justification ofthe massive investments in border controls through the
narratives of national security – combating human smuggling and potential
terrorists –as well as through the humanitarian narratives –the rescuing
ofasylum seekers’ lives (Albahari, 2015).
As we have shown in other articles (Musarò, 2017; Musarò &
Parmiggiani, 2018), media performances contribute to shaping the
Mediterranean border as an emotional and physical setting in which fears
and insecurities can be used to produce and perpetuate the colonial
geographies of exclusion.
Nevertheless, since the rise of modern nation-states, borders have
played the important role to order society because they have the power to
define territories and delimit the geographies of nations. This happened not
only on the ground, but also on the level of the imaginary, by shaping
national identities of people and their perceptions of the world. Therefore,
borders and the process of bordering are not only social phenomena, but
they are also essentially political, which makes the border making a
strategy to control both imaginary and real space, governing the
“borderlands” (Agier, 2016). Borders can be intended not as places, rather
as processes (Vaughan-Williams, 2015), socially constructed and shifting

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 137-160 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.10 141
 Melissa Moralli, Pierluigi Musarò & Paola Parmiggiani

structures of practices and discourses that produce norms of difference and

exclusion across bodies and voices of would-be migrants (Musarò, 2017),
sustaining projects of geo-political sovereignty. As technologically driven
process of rhetorical identification and control (Chouliaraki & Musarò,
2017), the process of bordering thus systematically produces its own
“discursive or emotional landscapes of social power”(Anssi Paasi, 1996).
Stressing the elasticity of borders and the symbolic dimensions of the
bordering practices helps to define the perspective from which borders can
be studied today. Although borders are often conceptualized as stable lines
drawn on maps, we should acknowledge that the representation of borders
as linesis an invention of European modernity). In fact, the drawing of
these lines is the condition for the existence of the state territory and
therefore has a constitutive function in relation to the state (as well as to “the
people” who live there and to the citizenry that establishes their rights).
However, more generally, the history of the linear border is intertwined
with the history of European colonial expansion – with the continuous
opening of border areas (often related to the genocide of native peoples),
with the protean geography of imperial rules and, finally, with borders
drawn with set square and pencil between the Berlin Conference of 1884-
1885 and the Sykes – Picot Agreement (Giordana,2018).
There is now a rich literature exploring the extraterritorial border
management, focussing on two different aspects of this practice: the
securitization of territory adjacent to physical borders and the topologies of
biopolitics governing racialized bodies.
Several scholars have documented the extraterritorial “stretching of
borderwork” (Casas, Cobarrubias & Pickles, 2010) through transnational
statecraft manifesting securitized territories as “buffer zones”, alternatively
defined archipelagos (Mountz, 2011), or borderlands (Agier, 2016), among
others. At the same time, research documenting the biopolitics dimension of
the border management tends to emphasize the disciplining of undesired
migrants through the toll deflection, detention, surveillance and deportation
of migrant bodies (Agamben, 1998; Feldman, 2010; Amoore, 2013).
On the other hand, what requires greater attention is how states attempt
the symbolic control of unwanted migrants, the use of extraterritorial
subjugation as a practice of pre-emptive border security, how governments
implement border externalizations through extraterritorially acting upon

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 137-160 − ISSN: 2499-930X

142 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.10
Borders Kill. Tania Bruguera’s Referendum as an Artistic Strategy of Political Participation

people’s perceptions of migration, including depicting irregular migration

in a negative light. Yet, these symbolic and imaginary dimensions of border
externalization have received little scholarly consideration(Collyer & King,
2016).
Beyond the physical aspect of the border, thus, it is fundamental to
consider its symbolic dimension. Images and discourses reporting the
European ways to tackle the “migration crisis”, while illegalizing those
who attempt to cross the border - focussing on their endeavour in terms of
risks, death, prohibitions, acts of breaking the law, failure of the arrival -
are part of how the media and communication contribute to shape the
border (Cuttitta, 2014).
The media portrayals of people crossing the border, through narratives
and images of security and salvation, for example, can be understood as
representational barriers, that construe their identities as “desirable” or
“undesirable”. We can define it the “narrated border”, which is part of the
wider “mediatized border”, intended as a regime of reception characterized
by the digital fusion of caring compassion and military protection from
mobile populations, which results from mediated practices. In other words,
assuming mediatization as a process in which “the media exert a
particularly dominant influence on other institutions” (Hjarvard, 2008, p.
13), we can describe the mediatized border as a techno-affective network of
mediations around migrants and refugees, where emotions of fear and
empathy co-exist through digital connectivities, ritualizing our relationship
with the other and sought legitimation of the territorial border through
discourses of difference and superiority.
Thus, to capture the symbolic and affective role of managing human
mobility through a necropolitical approach (Mbembe & Meintjes, 2003), we
need to explore and unveil how theseemotionalspatial imaginaries are
extraterritorially disseminated by the states to symbolically normalize
certain territorial relationships. Through their normalization, spatial
imaginaries (re)shape social perceptions about places and people, being
used as a “positive power” by the states to normalize human behaviour. A
power that contributes to aid the policing of migration, through the
shaping of the choices and desires of people.
Within this context, in the next sections we will examine how arts, and
particularly performing arts, can challenge these power(full) structures,

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 137-160 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.10 143
 Melissa Moralli, Pierluigi Musarò & Paola Parmiggiani

while sustaining operations of de-bordering in a dual sense: a de-bordering

of the ways borders are narrated and represented, in their physical,
symbolic (and mediatized) interpretations, as well as a de-bordering of the
spaces of responsibility and resistance through creative actions (Giudice &
Giubilaro, 2014; Moralli, 2016).

3. Atlas of Transitions. New Geographies for a Cross-cultural Europe

Atlas of Transitions is a European project co-financed by the European

programme "Creative Europe" which includes ten partners in seven
countries - Italy, Albania, Belgium, Poland, France, Greece and Sweden - The
partners involved in the project are mainly theatres and cultural
organizations that collaborate with a network of university stakeholders. The
network has the aim to investigate the relationship between migration and
performing arts through the methodology of action-research (McNiff, 1998;
Levy, 2017), sharing different methodologies and knowledge. 3Through an
innovative use of performative practices, the project intends to challenge the
stereotypical imagery conveyed by the mediatisation of contemporary
migratory phenomena, working on new ways of perceiving public spaces
and coexistence between European citizens, migrants and refugees. For these
reasons, the project develops both a part of artistic action on the field, and a
part of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research that involved artists,
curators, researchers, migrants, students, citizens.
As a consequence, the project deals with performing arts and migration
through different perspectives: it alternates theatre performances with
bottom-up urban itineraries created by asylum seekers, public meetings on
the theme of borders and the right to mobility, participatory dj-sets in
suburban areas, but also installations, workshops on movement,
conferences, and shared actions of political activism.
In Italy, the project was developed in the city of Bologna by Emilia-
Romagna Teatro Foundation, the artistic collective Cantieri Meticci and the

3 The list of the partners included in “Atlas of Transitions” can be found at:

http://www.atlasoftransitions.eu/partnership/, while list of academic institutions at:

http://www.atlasoftransitions.eu/research/, last access on 15/10/2019.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 137-160 − ISSN: 2499-930X

144 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.10
 Borders Kill. Tania Bruguera’s Referendum as an Artistic Strategy of Political Participation

University of Bologna. Here, the action-research began with an exploratory

phase of context analysis, at national and local level, on the phenomenon of
migration and ethnographic observation of the artistic workshops carried
out in the city of Bologna by the collectives Cantieri Meticci and
Zimmerfrei, accompanied by in-depth interviews with artists, curators,
participants and activists. 4 On the basis of this first analysis, the research-
action has provided different tools including meetings between all
stakeholders involved, interdisciplinary conferences and seminars on
project issues, public debates open to citizens, workshops and art
workshops, training in high schools and university courses, involvement
and comparison with the communities of migrants in the territory of
Bologna. The analytical framework was completed by the administration of
questionnaires(230 in total) to the audience of two festivals held in 2018
and 2019.
The first festival, "Right to the City", which took place in the city of
Bologna from 15 to 24 June 2018, focused on the theme of the right to the
city as the right of all to live, to participate and to re-inhabit symbolic and
physical urban spaces (Lefebvre, 1968). The second festival, "Home", which
animated the city from 1 to 10 March 2019, dealt with the concept of "home"
conceived as feeling to feel at home or being away from home, starting
from the reflection of Ahmed (2014), which proposes to overcome a reading
and a representation of the migrant as "ontologically uprooted". A
perspective that, on the basis of a feminist and post-colonial approach, tries
to challenge ethnocentric narratives for which migrants are seen as an
indefinite category that belongs nowhere, and primarily to a Europe with
borders fortified by the Schengen agreement. 5
These conceptual frameworks were therefore used as narrative
expedients to reflect on issues such as identity, belonging, inclusion,
borders and citizenship. The primary objective of the project was to try to
deconstruct the imagery conveyed by stigmatising media and political

4 The participating observations continued throughout the duration of the project but
were concentrated mainly in the first seven months (November 2017- May 2018). Moreover,
a total of 47 in-depth interviews were carried out.
5 The specific projects developed within the two festivals are reported at:
http://bologna.emiliaromagnateatro.com/right-to-the-city/ and at:
http://bologna.emiliaromagnateatro.com/home2019/, last access on 17/10/2019.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 137-160 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.10 145
 Melissa Moralli, Pierluigi Musarò & Paola Parmiggiani

rhetoric. Imagesthat represent migrants as victims to be saved (fuelling an

imbalance of power and conveying pietism), or as invaders to be rejected
(supporting a criminalization of diversity and growing episodes of
“everyday racism”). Themes capable of stimulating connections and
cognitive effervescences, that convey different ways to reflect on social
inequalities linked to the right to move. But, also, collective experiments of
new forms of social integration capable of enhancing diversity.
Among these projects, in the next sections we will explore a specific
project entitled “Referendum”, proposed by the Cuban arti(vi)st 6Tania
Bruguera during the festival “Home”, held in 2019.In particular, we will
present the results of the analysis undertaken during the realization of the
performance and the public debates that preceded the performance. These
results have to be considered as part of the action-research presented
above, coordinated by University of Bologna, involving both the project’s
partners and the academic stakeholders.

4. Referendum

In our theoretical framework we have argued that some of the most

intense conflicts of our time are taking place around borders, creating
symbolic borders which are transformed into spaces of everyday exclusion.
Tania Bruguera's artistic interventions refer to this conceptual macro-frame,
seeking to intervene politically through art and its institutions. Drawing
upon a Critical Institutional approach, Tania Bruguera combines her role as
an activist with that of artist (artivism) 7. Among the main projects, she

“Artivist” is a portmanteau word combining "artist" and "activist".

6

7Tania Bruguera creates performances and installations that address global issues
related to power, migration, censorship, repression, examining the effects on the lives of the
most vulnerable individuals and communities. Her interventions investigate the possibility
of transformation of institutional structures, of collective memory and education in the
broadest sense. Through participatory practices that overturn the role of citizens from mere
spectators to "active actors", her works target and reveal the effects produced by the work of
political power on societies. She received an Honorary Degree from the School of the Art
Institute in Chicago and was the first artist-in-house of the New York City Mayor's Office of
Immigrant Affairs, http://bologna.emiliaromagnateatro.com/spettacolo/tania-bruguera-
referendum-2/, last access on 12/07/2019.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 137-160 − ISSN: 2499-930X

146 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.10
 Borders Kill. Tania Bruguera’s Referendum as an Artistic Strategy of Political Participation

founded the Immigrant Movement International, based on acts of protest,

participatory formats, workshops, meetings, works on the issue of
migration. 8 Another interesting project, Arte Útil, was developed by Tania
Bruguera and curators at the Queens Museum, New York, Van Abbe
museum, Eindhoven and Grizedale Arts, Coniston. Arte Útil case studies
show how arts can help to deal with issues that were once the domain of
the state, depicting this process as part of a larger historical trajectory that
is now shaping our contemporary world. A trajectory where self-organised
groups, individual and collective initiatives bring to new methods and
social strategies in order to answer emerging issues, intervening directly on
the field. 9
On the basis of a shared perspective of arts as a space of political
intervention, Tania Bruguera was invited to propose a collective
performanceduring the festival “Atlas of Transitions | Home”, 10. The artist
proposed the project “Referendum”, a performancelasting ten days in the
form of aurban referendum campaign. 11In particular, Referendum
represented an invitation to vote and to reflect on a question concerning
migration and borders, originated from a public and militant debate that
engagedlocal organizations, activists, social workers, citizens. For the
whole duration ofthe festival “Home”, everyone could vote in different
parts of the city, while a scoreboard marked the daily results of the
referendum, making visible the urban response to the question and
monitoring the choices of the participants. Referendum engaged students,

8 http://immigrant-movement.us/wordpress/, last access on 13/03/2019.

9 https://www.arte-util.org/about/colophon/, last access on 24/08/2019.
10 The characteristics of the audience attending the Festival will be illustrated in a further

publication. However, the questionnaires collected (108 in total) showed that the 47, 54% of
the audience was used to attend performing events between 0 and 4 times/year. Moreover,
the audience was mainly composed by women (67,21%) between 19 and 35 years old
(54,10%). In relation to the nationality, 81,1% of the audience was Italian, 2,5% UE citizens
and 3,3 % extra-UE citizens. However, since the audience who voted during Referendum
could not be examined within the general audience of Home Festival, the number of non-
Italian participants could be much higher (particularly because the voting polls were
positioned in different parts of the city of Bologna).
11 For further information on the collaboration of Tania Bruguera within “Atlas of

Transitions | Home”, please visit: http://www.atlasoftransitions.eu/cuban-artist-tania-

bruguera-in-bologna-with-2-projects/, last access on 17/09/2019.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 137-160 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.10 147
 Melissa Moralli, Pierluigi Musarò & Paola Parmiggiani

activists, refugees, tourists, researchers, artists in different parts of the city,

proposing a collective exercise in order to re-think the conceptual meaning
of the “border”. 12
Before Bologna, Tania Bruguera performed Referendum in Toronto
(2015) and in New York (2016), but, as we will see, the performance in
Bologna was developed in a different way, giving citizens the possibility to
re-think and transform the initial statement/question and to participate to
public debates on issues such as freedom of movement, borders and rights.
In fact, differently from the previous experience, the project in Bologna was
conceived as a participatory project consisting in six (only partially
consecutive) main phases: the organization of open public discussions held
in Bologna at the Arena del Sole theatre, where the participants were
invited to discuss the statement and the question to be used in the “artivist”
performance; the training of the volunteers and students assisting in the
voting stations; the promotion of the project through site-specific posters in
different areas of the city; the realization of the “referendum” with static
and mobile voting positions in the center and in the periphery of the city of
Bologna; the organization of six open discussions during the duration of
the performance and the presentation of the results in a final event.

4.1 Debordering Imaginaries

Borders limit and connect. They exclude and set the conditions for inclusion. Since the
mythical story of the foundation of Rome, the walls, whose boundaries often surround each
other, are bathed in blood (…). Originally characterized by a plurality of meanings
(delimiting the sacred from the profane, the good from the evil, one private property from
another), the border progressively assumes a specific political value in European modernity,
marking - through its representation as a line in the maps - the territories of states and
performing various functions in facilitating colonial expansion. It is this linear image of the
border that still today organises our geo-political atlas, the map of the world with which we
are familiar. 13

Referendum was attended by 2,519 voters, but the people involved in all the phases of
12

the performanceare many more, as we will discuss below.

13 http://bologna.emiliaromagnateatro.com/spettacolo/tania-bruguera-referendum-2/, last

access on 16/08/2019.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 137-160 − ISSN: 2499-930X

148 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.10
 Borders Kill. Tania Bruguera’s Referendum as an Artistic Strategy of Political Participation

On Festival’s website, Referendum’s description begins with these

words. Suggestive words ofreflection, disruptive imagination,critical
deliberation, echoing and explicating the inequalities linked to the
misfortune of being born on the wrong part of the (socially constructed)
atlas. In these words, but especially in the main statement/question driving
the referendum (“Borders kill. Should we abolish borders?”), the aim of this
artistic intervention is clear: to challenge mainstream narratives on borders,
to unveil power imbalances in the mobility justice (Wihtol de Wenden,
2013; Sheller 2018), in a world where some are dying to cross symbolic and
physical borders and others are buying passports as part of economic and
political strategies (Abrahamian, 2015).
This ambition started before the performance itself: in the weeks
preceding the public performance, Tania Bruguera asked the curator of the
festival, Piersandra di Matteo, to open the artistic intervention to the
people 14, letting them to decide whether change the statement and the
question. Inviting them to rethink the project in line with the Italian context
and recent political events 15, the artist underlined how arts can represent a
flexible mechanism of collective reflection on actual political and social
challenges (Mouffe, 2007; Martiniello, 2016; Smithner, 2019). At the same
time, Referendum became a space of political participation, sustaining the
direct intervention of social actors in an artistic politically-oriented project,
as we will see in the second section of this paragraph.
One half month before the performance, three public consultations were
organized (January 2019) at the theater Arena del Sole (Bologna), between 8
p.m. and 11 p.m., experiencing the participation of about 40 people for each
meeting.These occasions were not only important moments of discussion
that led to the (partial) reconfiguration of the initial project, but they
represented, primarily, fertile ground of open debates on actual political

14 The people who participated in the meetings were from civil society organizations,
individual citizens interested in the topic, activists, migrants, students, researchers, local
administrators.
15 In winter 2019, when the project was developed, Italian minister of Interior had

recently promoted a new Decree-Law on Immigration and Security, an anti-migration

decree causing a growing social exclusion of newcomers and a formal criminalization of
NGOs, declaring that Italian ports were closed for migrants. These acts worsened the
situation in the Mediterranean Sea, making this liquid border even more dangerous than
before.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 137-160 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.10 149
 Melissa Moralli, Pierluigi Musarò & Paola Parmiggiani

facts and events. In other words, they became fundamental moments to

discuss about borders, rights, citizenships, exclusion, conviviality.
The process itself wasinteresting 16. During the meetings, different
considerations on migration and borders arose. Among others,discussing
about the statement and the question to beadopted for the Italian
Referendum was also a reflexive mechanism to reflect about borders and
the inequality of lives.In this case, the participants discussed about how
bordersare socially constructed, becoming mediatized borders where
images and narratives shape and legitimize unequal geographies of the
world (Chouliaraki & Georgiou, 2017). Thus, one of the first issues faced
during the public meetings concerned the deconstruction of the border as a
fixed reality, questioning its nature and its socially embedded character. As
an example, a participant stated:

“We should ask ourselves what breaking down a border means: if the border is intended
as something material it is easier, but if it is of another kind you must first of all make it
visible, politicize it, understand whatthat border is like. It is necessary to make the border
visible to identify the forms of struggle. My suggestion would be to find another question
that is just as dry, but that keeps in consideration the difference between diverse types of
border”(participant C.).

In fact, as wearguedin our theoretical framework, the concept of the

border is something deeply complex and frequently disorienting. As a
consequence, the riskcould be that of taking into consideration only the
geopolitical or physical dimension of borders, minimizing their symbolic
and psychological facets.
However, as we stated, borders are essentially mediated. They are
constructed not only through wars, internal conflicts, international treaties
and economic agreements. They are narrated, represented, imagined. In
other words, borders are also shaped by social imaginaries (Abruzzese &
Borrelli, 2000), expressed in images (visual or symbolic), as well as in
interpretative categories. Images and categories that reveal a specific vision
of the world represent simplifications of social life, influencing common

The three meetings were analysed through the technique of participating observation.
16

During the meetings, we focused mainly on the participants’ perceptions about borders,
relational dynamics, interactions among “experts” and “non-experts” in the form of
knowledge co-construction.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 137-160 − ISSN: 2499-930X

150 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.10
Borders Kill. Tania Bruguera’s Referendum as an Artistic Strategy of Political Participation

sense (Jedlowski, 2005). In the case of borders, as many authors sustain,

these social imaginaries are mainly linked to a dual perspective,
securitarian and humanitarian (Walters, 2011;Albahari, 2015), supported by
mainstream political and mediatic rhetoric, and leaving a very narrow
space for other interpretative perspectives and voices.
Through the disruption of a “simple” and direct question, Referendum
broke these dualistic representation strategies, stating that borders kill and
that everyone is called to do something (or at least reflecting on their role in
such a setting). A call to reflection and, potentially, action, that invited,
even before the general public, the participants to the meetings who
underlined the importance to include, in the formulation of the
statement/question,“their attitude towards borders”(participant F.). This
aspect emerged abruptly when the participants were invited to decide
between the following options: “Borders kill. Should we abolish our
borders?” or “Borders kill. Should we abolish borders?”. In this case, the
collective reflection was so intense that the participants remained in the
meeting room to discuss till after midnight, until a further (third) meeting
was organized for the following week. Why a simple “our” was so
important for them, at the point that they agreed to meet a final time before
launching the project? How such a short term could change the meaning of
the question? The answer clearly shows the complex nature of the concept
of the border. The participants who supported the inclusion of“our” in the
question argued the necessity to explicit the psychological dimension
linked to the experiences of individuals andtheir personal barriers. They
claimed, therefore, a form of individual responsabilization in eliminating,
first of all, personal and psychological borders.
On the contrary, other participants highlighted how the focus on the
private dimension of borders could minimalize the disruptive effects of
geopolitical ones. Moreover, they sustained that “our” implied the
identitarian dimension of borders, constructed through the years by
modern nation-states to define territories and delimit the geographies of
nations. This symbolic dimension works not only on the ground, but also at
the imaginary level by shaping national identities of people and their
perception of the world (Massey&Jess, 1996). According to this vision,
therefore, these are semantic strategiesused by politicians and amplified by
media to outline contemporary geographies of power, creating the

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 137-160 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.10 151
 Melissa Moralli, Pierluigi Musarò & Paola Parmiggiani

distinction between “us” and “them”, between who has the right to move
and who is depicted as a victim or as an invader without the right to feel
part of this “game”. Who says that the borders are “ours”? As a result of a
long process of reflection, the decision was to leave “our”, attempting to
challenge the traditional rhetoric depicting “us” on the right side of the
world. In fact, as a participant underlined “we should also try to overcome
the dichotomy between us and them, we should find a phrase to make the
person who responds part of the project but avoiding power relationships”
(participant G.).
Both in the process of the formulation of the statement/question, and in
its communicative power, Referendum entailed alternative imageries on
migration and borders, challenging mainstream linkages between political
discourse, mediatic representationsand moral imaginaries. The statement
and the question unveiled specific narratives behind which hides a
hierarchical gaze that legitimizes disparities in mobility for different people
(Musarò&Moralli, 2019), normalizingborders as natural facts. As the
analysis disclosed, Referendum contributed to challenge an imaginary
composed of fixed borders capes and the paradoxical spectacle of the
rescue andincursion, in a private space of reflection, critical interpretation
and, consequently, in individual and collective responsabilization. A
performance that supported the public visibility of borders and their
effects, their psychological, symbolic and physical dimensions… In other
words, an act of de-bordering of imaginaries around borders.

4.2 Debordering Resistance

Moving from the premise of Referendum as a critical space of symbolic

and communicative de-bordering, this second level of analysis focuses on
arts as a form of resistance and, potentially, deliberative political
participation. A form of “participatory aesthetics” (Dezeuze, 2012), where
taking part in artistic work can foster awareness about actual social issues,
linking the political, civic and artistic sphere.
This particular characteristic of Referendum has partially been exposed
in the previous section (e.g.: underlying that the statement/question was
identified after a long process of open debates)but can be unveiled by many
other aspects emerged during the action-research.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 137-160 − ISSN: 2499-930X

152 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.10
 Borders Kill. Tania Bruguera’s Referendum as an Artistic Strategy of Political Participation

First of all, during the 10 days of voting, four further public debates
were organized in order to discuss about the artistic intervention and
discuss on the topic of borders. The first debate was organized at Damslab -
an experimental interdisciplinary space of the Departments of Arts of
University of Bologna - andinvolved the participation of Tania Bruguera.
During this occasion, the artist explained the parallelisms between
migration in Europe and in America and the political aim of Referendum.
In her words:

The objective of the Referendum is to bring issues concerning migration to the public, to
bring out thoughts and feelings through a direct, face-to-face relationship, using the
structure of a democratic legal institution: the vote, which implies taking a position through
a gesture. It's a way to ask yourself why it's so difficult to relate to this phenomenon [...] The
statement expresses a strong opinion: ‘borders kill’, which forces to make some reflections
right away. The same question was asked in different contexts, despite differences. I am
very happy with the process that you are developing in Bologna, it is essential to identify
the right question to be asked now in Italy(T.B.).

The second debate concerned the presentation of the project

“Mediterranea – Saving Humans”, a Non-Governamental Action promoted
by civil society to monitor and denounce what is happening in the
Mediterranean Sea after NGOs have been criminalized for their rescue
role 17. Finally, the last two debates focussed on the recent Decree-Law on
Immigration and Security and the gradual criminalization of NGOs – a
process gradually started in 2016 (Fekete, 2018).
Secondly, the public debates as well as the voting stations, have tried to
involve not only the central areas of the city but also the peripheries. 18 From
the circles for the elderlyto the tourist bubbles of the two Towers and
Piazza Maggiore, from social centresto the academies, theatres and
intercultural centres... The acts of de-bordering did not only concern urban
symbolic borders but also the physical ones, involving the elderly,
students, tourists, migrants, in the centre as well as in the suburbs. A
political engagement intention that tried to involve different opinions,

17https://mediterranearescue.org/en/, last access 27/08/2019.

18 For a list of the spaces involved in the project, both in terms of places where the open
discussions took place, and of voting stations, please visit: http://bologna.emiliaromagna
teatro.com/spettacolo/tania-bruguera-referendum-2/.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 137-160 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.10 153
 Melissa Moralli, Pierluigi Musarò & Paola Parmiggiani

perspectives, insights, asking the question in different languages, in

different urban contexts and multiple situations. This has contributed to
create alternative spaces of political participation, in opposition to
the"confined” forms of citizenships, constantly filtered from above - since
institutions establish the political agenda and define the spaces, times and
communication methods of participation. During the ten days, urban
bulletin boards, radio interventions, leafleting boards, workstations in
theatres, etc. literally invaded the city of Bologna. Moreover, thanks to the
collaboration with Cheap, site-specific posterswere affixed in the Cheap on
Board noticeboard circuit. 19 All these interventions were aimed at
transforming the public space into a space of discussion, participation, re-
appropriation (Lefebvre, 1968).
Thirdly, the training of the volunteers - mainly high-school and bachelor
students - who oversaw the voting stations helped to argue artistic choices
and promote an opendialogue on the topic of borders in everyday life with
passers-by.20 The training itself represented an occasion for talking about
borders. This aspect was fundamental for the political core of the artistic
intervention – as an active part of the action-research – for two main
reasons. On the one hand, it sustained the de-construction of academic and
scientific discourses about borders to find new communicative and
accessible ways to explain geopolitical and symbolic assets characterizing
international migration in Europe nowadays. In other words, during this
phase, researchers, artists and volunteers discussed on the complexity and
the multidimensionality of the concept of “border”, trying to avoid
stigmatizing mainstream communicative mechanisms. On the other hand,
these communicative mechanisms have been adopted in the voting

The CHEAP on BOARD project is a collaboration between CHEAP, a Street Poster Art
19

Festival, and the City of Bologna, with the aim to display unconventional street poster art
and communication projects on the city government’s unused notice boards, several
hundred boards scattered around downtown Bologna, http://www.cheapfestival.it/en/on-
board/cheap-onboard/, last access on 20/08/2019.
20 Before the performance (February 2019), two different training meetings were

organized both for the university and the high school students who where doing their
internship within the project. In particular, the training concerned a critical and historical
analysis on borders, past and actual geopolitical settings, the evolution of the right to move
and European policies on migration.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 137-160 − ISSN: 2499-930X

154 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.10
 Borders Kill. Tania Bruguera’s Referendum as an Artistic Strategy of Political Participation

stations, transforming the public space into an open space of interaction,

reflection and dialogue on borders.

“After the debate to formulate the question, the second operative part was to bring the
question to the whole city, to make its inhabitants take a stand. We had real voting stations
where people could vote. Voting stations with people who were ready to dialogue with the
public and to reflect on the question”(organizer A.)

Indeed, a space where to experiment and promote new citizenships, in

plural, just as Mouffe (2007) suggests when she speaks about artistic
practices as capable of subverting the dominant hegemony through an
“agonistic approach”. An approach which considers the differences instead
of evening them out, a space of alternative political participation, a space of
resistance in the urban space.

5. Beyond the spectacle of the border

In this article we proposed to focus on the symbolic dimension of

borders, as they have the power to define territories and delimit the
geographies of nations, not only in a physical sense, but also at the level of
social imaginaries. In fact, borders can be intended not (only) asplaces,
rather as socially constructed processes (Vaughan-Williams, 2015),
producing norms of difference and exclusion. Drawing upon a reflection on
the double nature of borders, the second part of the article focusses on the
project Referendum, organised within the international festival of the
project ‘Atlas of Transitions. New geographies for a cross-cultural Europe’.
Intended both as a performance and as a form of political activism, this
project represented a symbolic and political space of reflection about
borders and their complex nature.
Focusing onartsas an important space to enhance alternative social
imaginaries, forms of political participation and resistance (Belfiore &
Bennett, 2007), the paper explored Referendum as a form of symbolic and
physical de-bordering. This double role was underlined by the artist but
put into practice by the creative capacity (Moralli, 2019) of the multitude of
social actors who participated in the process of identification of the
statement/question, in the public debates, in the streets at the voting

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 137-160 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.10 155
 Melissa Moralli, Pierluigi Musarò & Paola Parmiggiani

stations, in the dialogues with the artist, in the notice boards and in the
training of the volunteers. Hence, Referendum became a space where
hegemonic representations were challenged through the creation of open
spaces of collective reflection and creativity. An intention expressed also in
the description of the performance:

In our time, a set of global processes has put this consolidated representation of the
border in tension, transforming borders into places of intense and often lethal conflict.
Mobility control is at the heart of these conflicts, in which other definitions of the border,
such as race, gender, social, cultural, linguistic, etc., become central again. While the drive to
cross borders is clearly driven by a search for freedom and a claim to equality, its
containment or denial aims to reproduce an unequal distribution of freedom of movement
and end up in reaffirming the original link between borders and violence. Violence that
kills. 21

Starting from a critic towards the forms of representation of borders as

natural and fixed elements, this innovative artistic intervention not only
sustained the double conceptualization of border as - symbolic and
physical - social construction, but also became a space of resistance,
activism and creative intervention in the public space. Thus, the
experiential and relational nature of Referendum expressed the power of
arts as social and political tools capable of shaping new social imaginaries
and new forms of political participation.
In other words, Referendum can be considered as an “active sub-
politics” (Holzer & Sørensen, 2003), meaning a solution to the lack of
accountability that characterizes traditional political organizations and the
assumption of responsibility on the part of citizens in their daily life, going
beyond both the public and private sphere. In this perspective, Referendum
has opened up new forms of individual and collective responsibilities,
thanks to its ability to challenge(at least in part) the imaginary on borders:
between symbolic and physical borders, between the centre and the
periphery, between artistic and political intervention, between watching,
reflecting and acting.In such a perspective, performing arts can provide
innovative ways to represent migration, deconstructing conventional
narratives and contrasting the post-humanitarian attitude of the “ironic

21http://bologna.emiliaromagnateatro.com/spettacolo/tania-bruguera-referendum-2/, last

access on 16/08/2019.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 137-160 − ISSN: 2499-930X

156 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.10
 Borders Kill. Tania Bruguera’s Referendum as an Artistic Strategy of Political Participation

spectator” (Chouliaraki, 2012).It also represents a space for inclusion,

recognition and citizenship (Isin & Nielsen, 2013).
In this context, arts can have a “deconstructing potentiality”, promoting
a re-signifying process to propose alternative narratives on migration.
Moreover, this capacity of Referendum in intervening not only at the level
of practices, in central as in peripheral urban spaces, but also at the level of
social imaginaries, partially solved the limit of temporariness of the project
itself. Indeed, even if the project had a limited duration, by challenging the
dynamics of visibility/invisibility and resisting the status quo of
mainstream political discourses,it displayed the politicised dimension of
migration, becoming an alternative form of political participation in the
shape of an “aesthetics of subversion” (Mazzara, 2019, p.10).
To conclude, a question remains: Will it be possible to abolish borders?
2030 voters replied yes, while 489 people voted against it. 22 It is difficult to
answer this question, but we agree with Mezzadra (2018, p. 6), who
suggests that “a border policy can aim to abolish some of them, to
transform others from barriers to bridges, and more generally to make
space around them for freedom of movement, meeting and multiple
crossings” 23.

References

Abrahamian, A. A. (2015). The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen. New York:
Columbia Global Reports.
Abruzzese, A. & Borrelli, D. (2000). L’industria culturale. Tracce e immagini di un privilegio.
Roma: Carocci.
Agamben, G. (1998). Homo Sacer. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Agier, M. (2016). Borderlands: Towards an Anthropology of the Cosmopolitan Condition.
Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons.
Ahmed, S. (2014).Willful Subjects. Durham: Duke University Press Books.
Albahari, M. (2015). Crimes of Peace: Mediterranean Migrations at the World's Deadliest Border.
Philadelphia: PENN.
Amoore, L. (2013). The politics of possibility: Risk and security beyond probability. Durham: Duke
University Press.

22We expressly reported the result of the performance in the last part of the article

because we preferred the analysis to be focused on the process and not on the outcome.
23Translated by the authors.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 137-160 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.10 157
 Melissa Moralli, Pierluigi Musarò & Paola Parmiggiani

Andersson, R. (2014). Illegality, Inc. Clandestine Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe.
Oakland: University of California Press.
Balibar, E. (2003). We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Belfiore, E. & Bennett, O. (2007). Rethinking the social impacts of the arts. International
Journal of Cultural Policy, 13 (2), 135-151.
Bigo, D. (2002). Security and Immigration: Toward a Critique of the Governmentality of
Unease. Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 27 (1), 63-92.
Braudel, F. (1986). Civiltà e imperi del Mediterraneo nell’età di Filippo II. Torino: Einaudi.
Casas-Cortes, M., Cobarrubias, S. & Pickles, J. (2010).Stretching Borders beyond Sovereign
Territories? Mapping EU and Spain's Border Externalization Policies. Geopolitica(s), 2 (1),
71-90.
Collyer, M. &King, R. (2016). Narrating Europe’s migration and refugee ‘crisis'. Human
Geography: a new radical journal, 9(2), 1-12.
Chouliaraki, L. (2012). The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of Post-Humanitarianism.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Chouliaraki, L. &Georgiou, M. (2017). Hospitability: The communicative architecture of
humanitarian securitization at Europe’s borders.Journal of Communication, 67 (2), 159-180.
Chouliaraki, L. & Musarò, P. (2017). The mediatized border: technologies and affects of
migrant reception in the Greek and Italian borders. Feminist Media Studies, 17(4), 535-549.
Colombo, F., Murru, M. F. & Tosoni, S. (2017). The post-intermediation of truth.
Newsmaking from media companies to platform. ComunicazioniSociali, 3, 448-461.
Cuttitta, P. (2014). Borderizing the Island. Setting and Narratives of the Lampedusa Border
Play. Acme 13(2), 196-219.
Dezeuze, A. (2012). The 'do-it-yourself' artwork: Participation from Fluxus to new media.
Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Fekete, L. (2018). Migrants, borders and the criminalisation of solidarity in the EU. Race &
Class, 59 (4), 65-83.
Feldman, I. (2010). In the name of humanity: The government of threat and care. Durham: Duke
University Press.
Georgiou, M. &Zaborowski, R. (2018). Media coverage of the “refugee crisis”: A cross-European
perspective, Council of Europe report, Council of Europe. Available at:
https://rm.coe.int/1680706b00.
Giordana, E. (Ed.) (2018). Sconfinate. Terre di confine e storie di frontiera. Torino: Rosenberg &
Sellier.
Giudice, C.&Giubilaro, C. (2014).Re-Imagining the Border: Border Art as a Space of Critical
Imagination and Creative Resistance. Geopolitics, 0, 1-16.
Hjarvard, S. P. (2013). The mediatization of culture and society. New York & London:
Routledge.
Holzer, B.&Sørensen, M. P. (2003). Rethinking Subpolitics. Beyond the ‘Iron Cage’ of
Modern Politics?Theory, Culture and Society, 20 (2), 79-102.
Isin, E. & Nielson, G. M. (2008). Acts of Citizenship. London: Zed Books.
Jedlowski, P. (2005). Un giorno dopo l’altro. La vita quotidiana fra esperienza e routine. Bologna: Il
Mulino.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 137-160 − ISSN: 2499-930X

158 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.10
 Borders Kill. Tania Bruguera’s Referendum as an Artistic Strategy of Political Participation

Lefebvre, H. (1968). Le droit à la ville. Paris: Anthropos.

Levy, P. (2017). Handbook of Arts-Based Research. New York: Guilford Press.
Martiniello, M. (Ed.) (2016). Multiculturalism and the Arts in European Cities. New York
&London: Routledge.
Massey, D. & Jess, P. (Eds.) (1996). A Place in the World?: Places, Cultures and Globalization.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Mazzara, F. (2019). Reframing Migration: Lampedusa, Border Spectacle and the Aesthetics of
Subversion. Bern: Peter Lang Pub Inc.
Mbembe, J.-A.&Meintjes, L. (2003). Necropolitics. Public Culture, 15 (1),11-40.
McNiff, S. (1998). Art-based research. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
Mezzadra, S. (2018). “Prefazione”. In E. Giordana (Ed.), Sconfinate. Terre di confine e storie di
frontiera (pp. 5 – 8). Torino: Rosenberg &Sellier.
Mezzadra, S. & Neilson B. (2013). Border as Method or The Multiplication of Labor. Durham:
Duke University Press.
Mirzoeff, N. (2011). The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham: Duke University
Press.
Moralli, M. (2016). Fostering Interculturality in Urban Ethnic Neighbourhoods:
Opportunities and Limits of the Responsible Tourism Approach. Journal of Mediterranean
Knowledge, 1, 165 – 183.
Moralli, M. (2019). Innovazione sociale. Pratiche e processi per ripensare le comunità. Milano:
Franco Angeli.
Mouffe, C. (2007). Art and Democracy. Art as an Agonistic Intervention in Public Space. Art
as a Public Issue, 1-7.
Mountz, A. (2011). Where asylum-seekers wait:feminist counter-topographies of sites
between states. Gender, Place & Culture, 18 (3), 381-399.
Musarò, P. (2017). Mare Nostrum: the visual politics of a military-humanitarian operation in
the Mediterranean Sea. Media, Culture & Society, 39(1), 11–28.
Musarò, P. & Parmiggiani, P. (2018). Taxi o ambulanze del mare? Politiche dell’immagine nella
crisi dei migranti nel Mediterraneo. In F. Colombo & M. F. Murru (Eds.), Iconismo e potere.
Politiche dell’immagine nell’era digitale. Problemi dell'Informazione, 1, 87-113.
Musarò, P. &Moralli, M. (2019). De-Bordering Narratives on Tourism and Migration. A
ParticipatoryAction- Research on Two Innovative Italian Practices. Italian Journal of
Sociology of Education,11(2), 147-173.
Omae, K. (1991). Il mondo senza confini. Lezioni di management nella nuova logica del mercato
globale, trad. it. Milano: Il Sole 24.
Paasi, A. (1996). Inclusion, exclusion and territorial identities. The meanings of boundaries
in the globalizing geopolitical landscape. Nordisk samhällsgeografisktidskrift, 23, 3-17.
Papastergiadis, N. (2012). Cosmopolitanism and Culture. London: Polity Press.
Sheller, M. (2018). Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes. New York:
Verso.
Smithner, N. (2019). Editorial. ArtsPraxis, 5 (2), iii-viii.
Squire, V. (2014). Desert «Trash». Posthumanism, Border Struggles and Humanitarian
Politics. Political Geography, 39, 11–21.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 137-160 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.10 159
 Melissa Moralli, Pierluigi Musarò & Paola Parmiggiani

Vaughan-Williams, N. (2015). Europe’s Border Crisis: Biopolitical Security and Beyond. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Walters, W. (2011). Foucault and Frontiers: Notes on the Birth of the Humanitarian Border. In U.
Bröckling, S. Krasmann& T. Lemke (Eds.), Governmentality: Current Issues and Future
Challenges (pp. 138-164). New York &London: Routledge.
Wihtol de Wenden, C. (2013). Le droit d'émigrer. Paris:CNRS EDITIONS.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 137-160 − ISSN: 2499-930X

160 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.10
 Counteracting Dominant Discourses
about Migrations with Images: a Typology Attempt

ELSA CLAIRE GOMIS

University of East Anglia, United Kingdom

Abstract
This article examines a series of art and media images which have contributed to
counteracting dominant discourses about migrations. Through recourse to recent research in
political science and psychology, it suggests that both the genre of the images and the very
nature of their message contribute to shapingopinions and public policies. Specifically, it
emphasises how the recurrence of certain motifs helps to diffuse a feeling of anxiety about
the migration “crisis”. By doing so, this article updates the “Funnel of Causality”,a
theoretical tool elaborated by political scientists to analyse voting behaviour that is now
used to understand attitudes toward migrations. In this scheme, the media effect, in which
images play an increasing part, is consideredto be of minor importance, whereas moral
values appear to be crucial. However, the present article shows how these very values are
fostered and conveyed by certain images, particularly those of fictional nature.

Keywords: Migration, Images, Funnel of Causality, Motifs.

Introduction

During the First World War, at the time when the American population
was influenced by the isolationist Monroe Doctrine, President Wilson’s
administration hired the advertiser Edward Bernays to promote U.S.
commitment to the war (Aumercier, 2007, p. 452). The publicist proposed to
disseminate cartoons picturing Germans looking like Hun monsters killing
babies. The aim of this campaign was to convince the American population
to enter into the war. Bernays’caricatural choice of representing Germany
as a threat to freedom helped in raising awareness of the European conflict
and in triggering American involvement in the war.
This set of images can be viewed in relation to other photographs
publicised by the Polish Government-in-exile during the Second World
Warthat aimed to bring attention and support to another situation. Graphic

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 161-181 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.11
 Elsa Claire Gomis

photographs representing an accumulation of totally emaciated bodies and

a dead toddler of a frightening thinness were published by Shmuel
Zigelboim, a member of the National Council of the Polish Government-in-
Exile. They were illustrating a pamphlet titled“Stop them now, German
Mass Murder of Jews in Poland”. These photographs fall into a broader
action undertaken by the Polish underground National Council, andin
particular by the Catholic resistance-fighter Jan Karski, to inform the Allies
on the fate of Jews in Poland (Becker, 2018, p. 19). These terrible
photographs were sent to the Foreign Office in London, but even though
they seem to bestow a prophetic significance to the images published
during the First World War, they failed in ending the genocide. Similarly,
the Allies did not pay attentionto the concentration camps, although they
were clearly visible, in the aerial photographs through which they sought
to identify industrial installations to be bombed (Rancière, 2012, p. 33).
What is intriguing here is that, in the first case, fictitious images
managed to alert an opinion which was until then indifferent to the need to
enter the war; whereas, in the second case, images of a realistic genre did
not manage to change the course of history. Viewedin the light of the
currentmigration ”crisis”, this historical aesthetic divergence raises the
question of the ability of images to counter the dominant discourses that
receive an ever-increasing audience in the present day. This article aims to
identify and to analyse the images which have influenced today’s opinions
on migration.
Assuming that images have the ability to influence opinions, the article
starts by investigating the relationship between contemporary art
productions and media images currently picturing the migration issue.
Examining on equal terms these two kinds of images,the objective is to
extract common trends with regard to their main topic, their genre, and
their framing,which could explain their potential influence on attitudes to
migration, in particular within the European Union.In doing so, this article
questions a conceptual device elaborated by political scientists from the
Observatory of Public Attitudes to Migration (OPAM) to understand the
causal variable at play in the policy process, which has had some success to
date. Based in Brussels and implemented by the European Commission in
2017, the goal of the OPAM is to enhance knowledge “of attitudes to
migration” with the ambition of producing a “step-change in our collective

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 161-181 − ISSN: 2499-930X

162 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.11
 Counteracting Dominant Discourses about Migrations with Images: a Typology Attempt

understanding of perhaps the definitive public policy issue of the twenty-

first century in Europe” (OPAM website).For this purpose, the OPAM uses
an analysis tool that is an inherent part of the Michigan model elaborated in
the 1950s. Known as the “Funnel of Causality”, this conceptual tool
contributes to explainingvoting behaviours by a series of social and
psychological factors. The team of researchers at the OPAM have
transferred the conclusions of this reading grid to the field of migration
studies. In particular, following the lessons of the “Funnel of Causality” in
the field of voting behaviour,the media would have little influence on
electoral choices. When transferred to the field of migration, the
conclusions drawn from the “Funnel” in relation to the media would be
similarly expected to have little influence on attitudes toward migratory
flows. In this essay, the impact of the media on attitudes to migration will
be questioned, first, in the light of a typology of art and media images
about the migration crisis, and then with regard to a psychological theory
connecting emotions to moral values. The presence of common repeated
motifs, in both art and media images, seems to bind these two kinds of
representations together in what could be considered as the media entry in
the “Funnel of Causality” conceptual scheme. From this vantage point, if
both these kinds of images may have largelyfailed in deflecting the conduct
of repressive policies, a few of them seem to have succeeded. More
specifically, the successful cases include a fictional feature-length film, an
iconic press photograph and a magazine cover, all dealing with the subject
of migration.
The analysis of this set of still and moving images leads to the discovery
ofa few commonfactors all conveying emotion: the identification process,
the presence of a child, and the fictitious dimension of the image. Following
Christine Tappolet (2000), a philosopher specialising in ethics, emotions
appear to be levers for opening and shaping moral values. To the extent
that these psychological factors and values are the most critical elements in
the Michigan model, some images would therefore have the ability,
through the use of emotions, to influence opinions on migration. Therefore,
the “Funnel of Causality”would need to be updated to include Tappolet’s
conclusion on the relationship between rationality and emotions.
This study will begin by assuming that a narrow range of specific motifs
bind together the media and images of current migrations by conveying a

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 161-181 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.11 163
 Elsa Claire Gomis

general feeling of anxiety (I). It will then consider how a few determining
factors in images appear to play a key role in triggering emotions and
moral values influencing attitudes to migration (II).

1. A narrow range of motifs binding the media and art images of migrations

In an article intended to highlight the permanence of interest in the

“Funnel of Causality”, Matt Wilder (2016) stresses the ability of this
conceptual model ”to link the structural concerns emphasised in political
economy to the micro level behaviour of agents”. The early attachment to
parties, in particular through sociological and parental characteristics, is
recognised as the most decisive factor in explaining political behaviours.
The media is also mentioned in the reading grid which composes the
“Funnel” but, as the impact is perceived as being less powerful, it exists at
one of the furthest places of influence. In the “Funnel” evaluation grid, the
further the factor is from the attitude, the more the attitude is rooted in the
behaviour.
The following evaluations aims to determine if the place assigned to
media in the “Funnel of Causality” should be reconsidered. In this
perspective, images that usually accompany the migration crisis subject in
the mainstream media, namely those that the audience would have in mind
about this topical issue, should be analysed.
To designate what composes the opinions formed in the collective
consciousness is a perilous and slippery enterprise, not only regarding the
definition of the ”general public” in itself, but also in respect of the
“collective imaginary” that accompanies it. Yet, both notions are as elusive
asthey are crucial in the conduct of policies. More precisely, a series of
relationships are at stake: the one between political decisions and the
population’s wish, and the one between these two components of public
affairs and the set of shared perceptions of a phenomenon. These shared
perceptions are what I would call a “collective imaginary”. The latter
would be composed of the images, whatever their medium, that are the
most frequently confronted bya group of people. The images most
frequently used to describe a situation would be decisive in the collective
perception of the situation.Regarding migrations, the anthropologist Liisa

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 161-181 − ISSN: 2499-930X

164 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.11
 Counteracting Dominant Discourses about Migrations with Images: a Typology Attempt

Malkki noticed that ”photographs depicting refugees are so abundant that

most of us, having seen them before, have a clear and fixed image of what a
‘refugee’is”(1995, p. 10). Delineating which images are associated with
migration would be a first step in addressing the relationship between
policies implemented to deal with a phenomenon and the perception of it.
A survey conducted from 2013 to 2016 by the Reuters Institute for the
Study of Journalism of the University of Oxfordshows that, in the United
Kingdom, people get their news mostly online and from television. During
the period considered in the survey, respondents answering they have
usedprinted newspapers as a source of news the past week witness a
decline from around 60% to less than 40%.Regarding the same question,
online news sources (including social media) remain stable around 70%. In
2016, online sources of information exceeded for the firsttime television as
the most followed source of media. This change of source in direction of
online information can be explained by the preferences of a younger
generation. Considering “the gradual erosion of television as the single
most widely used source of news, to the point that by 2016 it has been
overtaken by online sources in terms of reach” (Nielsen, 2017)and the
widespread access of the population to the internet (for example, 92% of
the UK population in this study), the focus will be placed on images
available online in the present study.
Regarding migrations occurring by the Central Mediterranean route,
using the keywords “migration” and “Mediterranean” in Google’s search
engine generates a limited range of colours, materials and objects. Their
combination around several themes leads to five main motifs: boats,
endless lines of people, lifejackets, survival blankets and press infographics
including maps. Motifs are defined as identified forms and objects
contrasting with the background of the images. The word motif derives
from the Latin ”motivus” which means ”what moves”, as the nature of
motifs is to move and to be repeated from one image to another. Free from
spatial and temporal borders, this circulation affects all kinds of images,
whether they be documentary or fictitious, media or artistic. Then, doing
the same research toward artworks related to migration yields a similarly
limited scope of images displaying boats, lifejackets, and survival blankets.
As it is currently used by the OPAM team, the “Funnel of Causality”
indicates thatthe media is classified by political scientists as a “contextual”

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 161-181 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.11 165
 Elsa Claire Gomis

factor with little influence on opinions (Dennison & Dražanová, 2018, p. 7).
Contemporary artworks making use of the same motifs than the media
should thus also be largely ineffective with regard to changing opinions.
An example case can be found in the art productions of Chinese
activistAi Weiwei, such as his 2016 installation at Berlin’s concert hall
which included 14.000 discarded lifejackets; Reframe (2016) composed of 22
rubber boats attached to the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence; Circle of Animals/
Zodiac Heads (2016) consisting of the wrapping of twelve sculptures located
in front of Prague’s National Gallery Trade Fair Palace with survival
blankets; his 2016 re-enactment of Nilüfer Demir’s famous photograph of
the young Aylan Kurdi; the Law of the Journey (2017) made from an 80-
metre long rubber boat;and Soleil Levant (2017) composed of 3.500 salvaged
life jackets. As they predominantly repeat, generally in gigantic
dimensions, the media motifs picturing the crisis, these art productions
deliberately refer to the media images covering the crisis. More precisely,
on a chronological timeline, the media images precede the artworks. They
also evoke artistic practices such as the metaphor (for instance, the
lifejackets as dead bodies), the accumulation (of lifejackets on seashores) or
the wrapping (of refugees into survival blankets). On the other hand, the
contemporary art images also seem to anticipate the media images.
These media motifs are also embedded in the works of other
contemporary artists such as Alex Seton (Life Vest M (Emergency), 2014;
Durable Solutions 1, 2014), Banksy (Dismaland refugee boat, 2015), Gandolfo
Gabriele David (We Are Here, 2017, flags made from life jackets) and
Arabella Dorman (Flight, 2016, with a rubber boat;Falling, 2016,with life
jackets and rubber boats).
While stating that media and artistic images seem to be connected by
common motifs, the iconological approach, initiated since the creation of
the Mnemosyne Atlas(1924–1929) by Aby Warburg and subsequently
theorised by Georges Didi-Huberman (2002) under the term The Surviving
Image,deserves to be embraced. This method of interpretation implies that
images bear various temporalities. As Didi-Huberman claims to see the
Jackson Pollock dripping gestures within a Fra Angelico fresco, various
temporalities in the image generate collusions that may be anachronistic.
The temporal movability of today’s images of migration would thus be
fostered by the circulation and recurrence of several motifs over time. In

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 161-181 − ISSN: 2499-930X

166 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.11
 Counteracting Dominant Discourses about Migrations with Images: a Typology Attempt

relation to the present typology of images, their dissemination highlights a

dialogical relationship between the two registers of images: those relating
to the media and those relating to the contemporary artsphere. Drawing on
this observation, representations originating from both the media and the
artistic sphere will be perceived under the generic notion of image in the
present article. Depicting the so-called migrant crisis in a massive number
of works, characterised by a limited range of motifs, these media and
contemporary art images would contribute to define the current Western
collective imaginary of the migration in the Mediterranean.
Yet, with the notable exception of the Swedish and German
governments which decided to accept significant numbers of refugees in
2015, mainstream images of the crisis (whether created by journalists or
contemporary artists), neither succeeded in impacting national policies,
nor, as shown by the success of populist parties, did they prevent the rise of
hate speech. At a European level, a Eurobarometer survey conducted in
2014–2018, namely during the peak of the migration crisis,showed that the
majority of respondents have a negative feeling toward immigrants from
other EU member states and from non-EU member states (Dennison &
Dražanová, 2018, p. 14).
Semiotic analysis of these recurring motifs can help to explain their
impact on public opinion. Research in art history, in particular works
conducted by Michel Pastoureau (2005, p. 114) regarding perceptions of
colours, shed light on the images of migration in 2010. Associated with
lifejackets, the colour orange, very present inthe images containing
lifejackets and rubberboats, conveys the feeling of a subtle threat. It
connects the viewer to the imminence of an emergency, as a signal meant to
warn of some insecurity. The choice of framing is also crucial in the
photographic compositions. Playing on this aspect, the UK Independence
Party successfully used Jeffrey Mitchell’s photograph of an endlessqueue of
refugees walking along the Croatian-Slovenian border. This photograph,
displayed on a truck by pro-Brexit politician Nigel Farage, emblematises a
specific use of images in the service of a border shutdown agenda. As the
art historian Antigoni Memou (2019, p. 8) observes, the line of refugees
walking to the Croatian-Slovenian border is in stark contrast with the
stillness of Farage when posing in front of the image. Besides, the
anonymity of the homogenous crowd of exiles is opposed to the unique

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 161-181 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.11 167
 Elsa Claire Gomis

silhouette of the politician. Whereas the viewer can individualise and

identify him, the refugees remain an indistinct mass, in which the gaze
cannot fix its attention on any of those who compose the
scene.Furthermore, in Mitchell’s photograph, the beginning and the end of
the queues are kept out of frame, conveying the feeling of an endless line.
Opponents to Farage’s UKIP movement denounced Mitchell’s photograph
for its similarity to images in theNazi footage had been shown on BBC TV
in 2005 (Stewart &Mason, 2016). Within hours of the unveiling of the
poster, Twitter users pointed out the inadvertent similarity of Mitchell’s
photograph with the Nazi propaganda footage of migrants. If Godwin’s
law has been opposed in reaction to this comparison, as ittends to end the
debate, the historical reference nevertheless remains telling regarding the
significance and afterlives of motifs associating migration with invasion.
Visual historical imprints also seem to be at stake within press
cartographies depicting refugee “crisis”. Large arrows pointing to Europe
in these infographics bring the impression of an invasion. In the blink of an
eye, other cartographies and other geopolitical images conveying the
notion of strategy are summoned. The latter are close to other cartographies
related to military displacements, from Soviet to German operations during
the Second World War, which convey the idea of a massive invasion.
The relationship between images, texts and speeches seems to contribute
to a social construction leading to consider vision not as a purely optical
process.In the images illustrating today’s migrations, the exiles are tight
against each other on doomed-to-wreck vessels, in seated positions, their
gazes blank. Media images sold by press agencies display the vision of
incomplete and unable humans. Coming from countries that are subjected
to the West, the refugees are, in their turn, subjected in the pictures which
represent them and subjected to a reality which denies their basic rights.
More or less overtly referring to historical slave practices, the media images
representing the migrants’ crisis contribute to the feeling of a necessary
“objectification” of migrants. Maintaining exiles outside of the scope of
human rights, these images contribute to a sentimental humanism
perception of Westerners toward their own selves.
As demonstrated by the American scholar Yogita Goyal (2017, p. 543),
media coverage has repeatedly invoked slavery as a “grim historical
parallel”, which evokes moral outrage associated with Atlantic slavery

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 161-181 − ISSN: 2499-930X

168 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.11
 Counteracting Dominant Discourses about Migrations with Images: a Typology Attempt

andshowsmigrants as the “living embodiment” of a Western transcended

past. The idea seems to have impregnated the collective mind so well that,
in 2015, the Word Press Photo award was granted to Massimo Sestini for an
aerial photograph of the former Mare Nostrum operations picturing
refugees pressed up against each other in a boat. This photograph evokes
the 1788 campaign launched by a British abolitionist group which
disseminated a diagram of the cramped conditions of the Brookes slave ship.
In 2016, the same photographic award was granted to Sergey Ponomarev
for a photograph of refugees arriving on the shores of the Greek island of
Lesbos. Ponomarev’s photograph is reminiscent of Géricault’s masterpiece,
The Raft of the Medusa(1818–1819), whose particular aim was to denounce the
persistence of slave practices. For Goyal (2014, p. 52), this historical reference
“accrues hegemonic power” and prevents thinking about the specificity of
the political situations which have led to these humanitarian
situations.Metamorphic motifs evokingthe slave narrative contribute to the
delineation ofa collective imaginary of migration and, in the same
movement, act as a shield hiding the role played by the West in generating
these very circumstances. For example, 70% of the arms exports made in the
European Union are intended for regions outside the Union, among which
the Middle East is the first beneficiary (Sabbati & Cîrlig, 2015).Looking at
small arms exports, 83% are shipped to countries located outside the
European Union,including Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab
Emirates. These countries act as transit countries for fuelling the Syrian civil
war (Angelvoski, Patrucic & Marzouk, 2016; Fisk, 2018).
Above all, there petition of this narrow range of motifs conveys rather
negative feelings toward migrants that appear to be linked to negative
opinions to migration. As established by the OPAM research team (2017),
statistics provided by the Eurobarometer at the height of the crisis show
that negative opinions toward migration remain stable at a European level.
Following the Michigan model’s analysis about attitudes to
migration,which concludes the media has little influence on opinions, the
narrow range of motifs present in both media and art works lead to the
encapsulation of refugees in a visual vocabulary strictly falling under the
humanitarian field. Far from conveying identification, and from attracting
sympathy from opponents, they lock exiles into the narrow representation
already assigned by the media. In view of the reciprocal influence of media

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 161-181 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.11 169
 Elsa Claire Gomis

and art images, these art productions, far from proposing innovative forms
of representation, lag behind the media, to which they are content to be
echo chambers.
To synthesise the previous cited collection of art and media images, the
collective imaginative vision regarding today’s refugees in the
Mediterranean would take the shape of an overcrowded rubberboat of
black people who need to be rescued with recourse to lifejackets and/or
survival blankets. The combination of these few motifs seems to delineate
today’s collective imaginary of migration. This imaginary appears to be
that of coloniality. Born in the aftermath of movements of decolonialisation
during the nineteenth century in South America, and in the 1960s in the
African continent, coloniality designates the legacies of colonialism that
perpetuate a relationship of domination and dependence from countries of
the global North in the direction of countries of the global South. “You do
not see coloniality, but there is no way you cannot sense it” claims Walter
Mignolo (2018, p. 365). The traces left in the mind, by the mere repetition
ofa few motifs that are picturing today’s migrations in the Mediterranean,
are evidence of the pervasiveness of coloniality.These traces also transpire
in Jeffrey Mitchell’s photograph of refugees walking through the Balkans
into Hungary,in which an indistinct and apparently infinite mass of bodies
heads toward the viewer.
Making refugees fully subjects within these images contributes to
decolonialisation of theWestern gaze, Western representations and the
collective imaginary attached to them. In this respect, a decolonial view on
images “brings to the foreground the coexistence […] of stories, arguments,
and doxa ignored by Eurocentered languages”(Mignolo, 2018, p. 365). This
specific “partition of the sensitive” (Rancière, 2000, p. 12), at the core of
universalist values, seems to be achievable through a few images which
have influenced migratory policies. They deserve further examination.

2. Reaching moral foundations

In 2009, the film Welcomeappears to have influenced French public

debate on migration. Dealing with the story of a master swimmer in Calais
helping a young Kurdish guy to cross the Channel, the movie became a

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 161-181 − ISSN: 2499-930X

170 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.11
 Counteracting Dominant Discourses about Migrations with Images: a Typology Attempt

box-office success. It inspired the proposition of a law put forward by

French deputy Daniel Goldberg, with the film being explicitly referenced in
the proposal, whose aim was to withdraw the mention of “crime of
solidarity”in the French legal corpus. How is it possible to explain this
success and its following outcomes in French public life?
In an interview conducted in 2010, on the occasion of the DVD release of
the film, the French director Philippe Lioret raises the notion of
identification. He does not estimate that the success of the film lies in its
social and political dimension. Based one hundred public screenings, and
on his own writing from the characters, the director argues that the
audience sees it as a story about people:

The film touches the heart first and then moves to the brain. A political pamphlet would
engage the mind without involving any feeling, any emotion, and have less impact. When
you involve the emotions first, and then engage the mind, it has more impact. That’s why
the film was such a word of mouth success (Lioret, 2010).

Being aware that the emotions conveyed by images are built on

perceptions of values would be key to exploring art as a form of resistance
against dominant discourses. According to the philosopher Christine
Tappolet (2000), emotions are vehicles which allowus to access and to build
moral values. In relation to theoretical explanations of attitudes and
political behaviour, the research team of the OPAM, the “first Observatory
of its kind dedicated to producing comprehensive, pan-EU data and
accounts of public attitudes to migration in Europe” by the European
Commission (European Commission 2017), distinguishes ten determining
human values. Among them, only four matter regarding attitudes to
immigration. Among these four values, only one of them makes someone
pro-immigration, and that is universalism: namely, the belief that everyone
around the world should be treated the same and that we should break
down barriers. The other three moral foundations concern motivations that
can make someone anti-immigration and are related to self-
preservation.They are tradition, conformity and security.
By triggering emotions through identification, the artistic experience
would open up these moral foundations in the viewer. This process would
be especially relevant when art evokes dramatically different lives and
pathways.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 161-181 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.11 171
 Elsa Claire Gomis

In the absence of lived experiences, the attendance of certain works of art –one can think
of literary works, but also of pictorial art and the seventh art –can have an impact on the
way values are perceived. By identifying with the characters in a novel, the reader relives
their emotions. As a result, the reader will have the opportunity to experience emotions that
were previously unknown to him. In addition, he will learn in which context such emotions
are supposed to be appropriate (Tappolet, 2000, p. 254. (personal translation from ”En
l’absence d’expériences vécues, la fréquentation de certaines œuvres d’art – on peut penser
aux œuvres littéraires, mais aussi à l’art pictural et au septième art –peut avoir un impact
sur la façon de percevoir les valeurs. […] En s’identifiant avec les personnages d’un roman,
le lecteur revit les émotions de ces derniers. […] Le lecteur aura de ce fait l’occasion
d’éprouver des émotions qui lui étaient jusqu’alors inconnues. De plus il apprendra dans
quel contexte de telles émotions sont supposées être appropriées”).

If it is true that, as argued by Tappolet, the emotions provoked by

images allow awareness to values: which of their specific characteristics
would be the determinant factors at stake?
Among the various images produced to illustrate migrations more
broadly, two of them seem to have led to changes of direction in matter of
opinion. Their common point is the presence of children. Paragons of
innocence in regards toadults’ actions, images including child victims
appear as impactful factors to influence policies.
The first image led President Trump to step back on his decision to
separate migrant families. The BBC (2018) reported that “he had been
swayed by images of children who have been taken from parents while they
are jailed and prosecuted for illegal border-crossing”.Trump’s policy had led
to the separation of 2.342 children from 2.206 parents between 5 May and 9
June 2018. When signing the executive orders in which he backed down from
his previous decision, the American President declared: “I didn't like the
sight, or the feeling of families being separated”(Nakamura, Miroff &
Dawsey, 2018).Among the images of children that may have swayed him,
one had experienced particular success on social media. It pictures a little
Honduran girl in tears wearing a pink jacket. Although it later appears that
the toddler was not separate from her mother, as they were actually caught
together by the American authorities (Mosbergen, 2018), it is worth being
examined because it went viral and was chosen by Time Magazineas a
poignant cover image for the issue disseminated 2 July 2018. The weekly
cropped the toddler’s silhouette and pasted it in front of a photograph of

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 161-181 − ISSN: 2499-930X

172 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.11
 Counteracting Dominant Discourses about Migrations with Images: a Typology Attempt

President Trump, under the title “Welcome to America”. In the meantime,,

the NGO RAICES, which provides education and legal aid for immigrants in
Texas, raised more money than any other single donation campaign in its
Facebook history (Jacobs, 2018). Perhaps, as a result of its wide
dissemination, the photograph of the little girl, in particular when associated
with President Trump’s silhouette on the magazine’s cover, contributedto
the shift in his policy.
The second image that influenced policies is the one that led Chancellor
Merkel to ease German migratory regulations. The image of Aylan Kurdi
was published on 2September 2015 at 8:42 am by the Turkish news agency
DHA (Dogan Haber Ajansi). On 14 September, the photograph had been
shared 2.843.274 times between various social media, blogs, news, and
forums(Thelwall, 2015, p. 32) and had been viewed by more than 20 million
people across the world in the space of 12 hours (D’Orazo, 2015, p. 16).
Above all, it became viral in the circumstances because the young boy
materialised both the consequences of the Syrian civil war, and the
incapacity of the Western powers to deal with the issue of hosting
refugees.During the night between 4 September and 5 September, Chancellor
Merkel decided to open the German borders to migrants.Besides, in the
aftermath of the image, people helped NGOs massively by giving donations
(Slovic, Västfjäll, Erlandsson & Gregory, 2017, p. 642).
Why, while the Syrian civil war had been costing the lives ofso many
victims for four years, did the photograph of one of them, of the young Aylan,
suddenly move the whole world? What did people recognise in this
photograph?
Considering the repetition of motifs as a lever of circulation and the
inclusion of images in the common imaginary, the photograph of the young
Aylan Kurdi would implicitly refer to the Pietà, a Christian theme
representing the Virgin Mary, as she cries with her child held in her arms.
For Jim Aulich, “the imagery carries a huge potential charge as it connects
to a heritage in western life and culture” (Aulich, 2015, p. 50).“As we as
viewers are ‘primed,’ trained to perceive aestheticized corpses through the
Christian tradition, Aylan’s body is reworked into that of a sleeping
angel”,adds cultural theorist Olga Goriunova (2015, pp.7–8).As a
correlation is drawn between the dissemination of the image and the
ensuing global commitment worldwide into helping Syrian refugees

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 161-181 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.11 173
 Elsa Claire Gomis

(Slovic, Västfjäll, Erlandsson & Gregory, 2017), or as stated by media

scholar Anne Burns, between “viewing and doing” (2015, p. 39), the
evocative power of this iconic motif, in particular its religious connotation,
suggestive of the spirit of charity(Aulich, 2015, p. 51), caused people to act
in a moral way toward migrants.
Besides, the photographs of Aylan Kurdi were widely disseminated, and
through this movement, were encountered by many diverse spectators.
Following Dr Simon Faulkner (2015, p. 54), this very movement contributed
significantly to the affective force of these images. The affective force
trigged by the Pietàmotif belongs to a visual Christian tradition of death
aestheticisation aiming to trigger a moral duty of charity. This value relates
to the universalism that is shown as a lever to positive attitudes to
migration in the “Funnel of Causality”. As compassion fades when seeing
images staging more than two persons, behavioural scientists consider that
the lone toddler with his hidden face contributed to a process of
identification among viewers (Slovic, Västfjäll, Erlandsson & Gregory, 2017,
p. 642) and thus contributed to its dissemination worldwide.
Accordingly,the Oxford Dictionary defines empathy as “the ability to
understand and share the feelings of another” and universalism as the
“loyalty to and concern for others without regard to national or other
allegiances”, and therefore the capacity to identify oneself in a picture
would be essential in bringing about positive attitudes to migration.
This raises the question of how the specific register of images can serve
as an explanation for the way in which they may counter dominant
discourses. In the case of the cover of Time Magazine, the form is that of an
obvious collage which recreates a political situation: that of the
consequences of Trump’s policies on children. Because of the overtly false
juxtaposition that it sets, the cover brings into the same light two totally
opposed individuals. Jacques Rancière (2012) notices that with the entrance
into the realm of photography, the “age of History” begins. “History is the
time when those who do not have the right to occupy the same place
canoccupy the same image”(personal translation from “L’histoire est le temps
où ceux qui n’ont pas le droit d’occuper la même place peuvent occuper la même
image”, Rancière, 2012,p. 19). For the philosopher, the “age of History” does
not deal with equal conditions with regard to the camera shutter, but to a
certain way of “sharing the light” that goes along with the notion of justice.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 161-181 − ISSN: 2499-930X

174 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.11
 Counteracting Dominant Discourses about Migrations with Images: a Typology Attempt

Following this point, the little Honduran girl would hold the American
President accountable for her tears. In the age of History, an image can
yield universalism. Yet this value, seen as a lever to creating positive
attitudes to migration according to the “Funnel of Causality”, must be one
that allows a coexistence between the main subjectsof the images, e.g. in the
matter of migration, that of the exiles and the viewer. The cover of Time
Magazine openly constructs this face-to-face encounter. Regarding the film
Welcome, the coexistence is fostered by the process of identification with the
master swimmer. Western viewers could see themselves in the character all
the more, so that the screenplay arranges two parallel love stories: one
between the master swimmer and his former wife and one between the
Kurdish boy and his girlfriend.
To resist dominant representations of migration, coexistence can be
achieved by the catharsis of emotions, and/or by a certain setting in the
image. In both cases, identification is what provides the sense of agency: to
the exiles as human beings, and to viewers, enabled, thanks to the image
setting, to access the values that are open to a common sensitive condition.
In this light, images that seek to foster pity, for example, by individualising
one specific exile who cries, do not bring identification. Their emotional
power appears to be ineffective on people who cherish the values of
tradition, security and conformity, which are shown in the “Funnel of
Causality” as determining negative opinions to migration. When a
shouting father is seen holding his crying baby and crossing a European
barbed wired fence, the viewer who embraces these values does not
associate his own life with that of the refugees. Conversely, this viewer, as
s/he seeks tradition, security and conformity, would find himself in total
contrast with the despair of the refugee pictured. As a result, miserable
images of refugees might, in the best case, strengthenthese anti-
immigration values.
To avoid this response, disseminating images which convey, on the
contrary, a “positive image” of the refugees issimilarly inefficient with
people that hold these values. As shown by Henrietta Lidchi (2015, p.
291),when discussing the charity campaigns of developing NGOs, “positive
images are not, in any sense, closer to the “truth”. They were, and are,
deliberate, highly motivated answers to the truth claims and immediacy of
negative images”. The scholar bases her demonstration on the analysis of a

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 161-181 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.11 175
 Elsa Claire Gomis

photographic image from the 1990 campaign of the British NGO Christian
Aid. The latter represents a cycling Bengali Woman who has, hanging on
her bike, a bag picturing the RedCross. The accompanying text mentions
that the woman, whose name is given as Elizabeth, cycles every morning to
villages to provide a health service and sanitation advice. Here,
individuality and activity are sought in opposition to the homogenous
masses and passivity portrayed in negative images. Staging an empowered
woman, whose name is indicated, this image is created as a response to
representations that reify those to whom aid is addressed. Development
NGOs using “positive” representations of refugees seek something better
and truer than images that reify migrants. Yet, followingJohn Berger,
empowering visions of refugees still fail to influence security discourses
and migratory policies:

The well-fed are incapable of understanding the choices of the under-fed. The world has
to be dismantled and re-assembled in order to be able to grasp, however clumsily, the
experience of another. To talk of entering the other’s subjectivity is misleading. The
subjectivity of another does not simply constitute a different interior attitude to the same
exterior facts. The constellation of facts, of which he is the centre, is different(Berger, 1975,
pp. 74–75)

From this stance, what is crucial would be the emancipation of the

viewers themselves.
The subliminal force of the motifs, which act to prevent the viewer from
experiencing both the exiles’ shared humanity and the role played by the
West in generating these migrations,serves as a determining factor to
accessing “the experience of the other”. For now, the repetition of the
narrow range of motifs (rubber boats, lifejackets, lines of people, survival
blankets), leads to a situation where both sets of looks are captive: on the
one hand those of the exiles, the “collateral victims” of globalisation’s
forces (Cava, Parito & Pira, 2018, p. 57), are subjected to practices of
enslavement, and on the other hand, in a more surreptitious way, so are the
Westerners. The Western gaze and attention appears to be subjected to
more imperceptible and painless predation processes. To this end, “Tobii
Pro Glasses” have, for example, been designed to determine motifs which
are generating buying decisions. Western companies using these high-
technology glasses analyse the successive points of focus of the look on

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 161-181 − ISSN: 2499-930X

176 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.11
 Counteracting Dominant Discourses about Migrations with Images: a Typology Attempt

consumer products to understand what particular colour, inscription or

motif could have attracted their customers’ attention, and thus generate the
act of purchase(Hermann, 2012). With the help of neuroscience, these
companies therefore assume that analysing the gaze is analysing the brain.
The repeated confrontation with a brand (with its logo, the imagery
associated with it), contributes to the installation of a “reward circuit” in
the brain. From then onwards, the sight of the brand instantly solicits a
neurotransmitter, dopamine, which enhances actions considered beneficial,
by providing pleasure by activating a sort of “reward system” in the brain
(Schaefer & Rotte, 2007). On the other side of the border the exiles, subject
to smugglers and human trafficking (IOM, 2016), also seek to attract these
looks. Yet the mechanism of attraction of the Western gaze occurs in a
closed circuit: when the consumer’s eyes encounter the brand motif, this
image immediately causes a molecule of pleasure, reinforcing the positive
opinion that he seeks to feed. Thus, the meeting of the gaze does not take
place in the Western context. Instead, far from encouraging coexistence, the
repetitive motifs of mainstream images keep the exiles themselves out of
the Western gaze;meanwhile, the Western consumer is struggling with
other merchant circuits affecting their own bodies.
The collective imaginary of today’s migration is composed of a narrow
range of repeated motifs. Simultaneously,in both their spatial spread, over
various supports, and temporal distribution, the motifs’ circulation binds
together art and media images. Used as a conceptual tool for deciphering
the factors at stake in the matter of opinion toward migration, the“Funnel
of Causality” appears to be updated by Christine Tappolet, whose research
demonstrates that emotions allow access to values. As, on the one hand,
emotions can be triggered by identification and setting into images, and, on
the other hand, values are determining factors of political opinions,
dissemination of media and art images could thus be key in attitudes
toward migrations. Yet, refugees are subjected in the mainstream art and
media images dealing with the topic. The limited range of motifs to which
they are associated convey a mixed feeling of anxiety and passivity, which
are inherited from a broader implicit analogy between contemporary
refugees and slavery, as pointed out by Goyal (2017, p. 543):

When some seven hundred people traveling from Libya to Lampedusa drowned in

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 161-181 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.11 177
 Elsa Claire Gomis

April 2015, and in the same month at least five boats sank in the Mediterranean and twelve
hundred people lost their lives on the way to Europe, the visual imagery of black bodies lost
at sea was a stark reminder of the atrocity named by Zong [Goyal refers to the 1781
disappearance at sea of 133 slaves, thrown overboard by their owner so that he could claim
them as insurance losses. At the time, the tragedy contributed to draw attention to the anti-
slavery discourse].In the words of the photographer Aris Messinis, what he witnessed on
the Mediterranean made him think that the analogy to slave ships sailing the Atlantic “was
exactly right—except that it’s not hundreds of years ago.”

The cases of the three varied images discussed here,of the filmWelcome,
the press photo by Nilüfer Demir, and the TimeMagazine cover, show that
fostering the coexistence of the viewer and the exiles represented is key to
counteracting these discourses. Allowing coexistence in the image, whether
by means of an identification process or through the use of composition, is
key to initiate a process of decolonisation of the gaze.
At the time I am writing these lines, the NGO SOS Méditerranée had to
give up its action due to the withdrawal of both its flags by Gibraltar and
Panama and an indictment opened by the Prosecutor General’s Office of
Sicily – which had already prosecuted other humanitarian vessels in the
past – into alleged anomalies in the treatment of waste on board. To carry
on its mission, SOS Méditerranée disseminated a video depicting the
following scene. A man and a woman meet on a beach. They do not have
the same view of the Mediterranean: for her it represents a swimming
pleasure, for the man it signifies a threat. “When I look at it, I don't see the
sea, no. It's a huge wall ready to crush me”, he tells her. Both of them share
the same desire to live; the desire that pushes entire families to risk their
lives at sea every day. The narrative puts forward the common human
conditions that they share, namely the coexistence of the stories called for
by Mignolo for decolonialising the collective sensing of marginalised
populations.

References

Angelvoski, I., Patrucic, M.& Marzouk, L. (2016, 27 July). Revealed: the £1bn of weapons
flowing from Europe to Middle East. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com
/world/2016/jul/27/weapons-flowing-eastern-europe-middle-east-revealed-arms-trade-
syria. Accessed 7 October 2019.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 161-181 − ISSN: 2499-930X

178 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.11
 Counteracting Dominant Discourses about Migrations with Images: a Typology Attempt

Aulich, J. (2015). The Life of Images: The Iconography of a Photograph of Aylan Kurdi's
Body and the Turkish Policeman. In F. Vis& O. Goriunova (Eds.), The Iconic Image on
Social Media A Rapid Research Response to the Death of Aylan Kurdi (pp. 50–52). Sheffield:
Visual Social Media Lab.
Aumercier, S. (2007). Edward L. Bernays et la propagande. Revue du MAUSS, 30(2), pp. 452–
469.
BBC News (2018, 21 June). Trump backs down on migrant family separations policy.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-44552852. Accessed 19 November 2018.
Becker, A. (2018). Messagers du Désastre. Paris: Fayard.
Berger, J. &Mohr, J. (1975). A Seventh Man: A Book of Images and Words about the Experience of
Migrant Workers in Europe. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Burns, A. (2015). Discussion and Action: Political and Personal Responses to the Aylan Kurdi
Images. In F. Vis & O. Goriunova (Eds.), The Iconic Image on Social Media A Rapid Research
Response to the Death of Aylan Kurdi (pp. 38–41). Sheffield: Visual Social Media Lab.
Cava, A., Parito, M. & Pira, F. (2018). The aesthetics of pity. Italian media representation of
migrants and emotional audience. In G. D'Angelo & E. Mangone (Eds.), ICSR
Mediterranean Knowledge, Working Papers Series, Vol. 2018, pp.49-81
Dennison, J. & Dražanová L. (2018). Public Attitudes onMigration: rethinking how people
perceive migration. An analysis of existing polls inthe Euro-Mediterranean region.
Observatory of Public Attitudes to Migration – Migration Policy Center, European
University Institute, Florence https://cadmus.eui.eu/bitstream/handle/1814/62348
/MPC_OPAM_Public_attitudes_on_migration_study.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y.
Accessed 7 October 2019.
Didi-Huberman, G. (2002). L’image survivante: histoire de l'art et temps des fantômes selon Aby
Warburg. Minuit: Paris.
D’Orazo, F. (2015). Journey of an Image: From a Beach in Bodrum to Twenty Million Screens
Accross the World. In F. Vis & O. Goriunova (Eds.), The Iconic Image on Social Media A
Rapid Research Response to the Death of Aylan Kurdi (pp. 11–18). Sheffield: Visual Social
Media Lab.
European Commission, online resource, OPAM: Observatory of Public Attitudes to
Migration, https://ec.europa.eu/knowledge4policy/online-resource/opam-observatory-
public-attitudes-migration_en. Accessed 7 October 2019.
Faulkner, S. (2015). Aylan Kurdi and the movability of images. In F. Vis & O. Goriunova
(Eds.), The Iconic Image on Social Media A Rapid Research Response to the Death of Aylan
Kurdi (pp. 53–55). Sheffield: Visual Social Media Lab.
Fisk, R. (2018, 23 July). I traced missile casings in Syria back to their original sellers, so it’s
time for the west to reveal who they sell arms to. The Independent.
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/syria-missile-arms-deals-west-us-uk-saudi-
arabia-a8459731.html.Accessed 7 October 2019.
Goyal, Y. (2014). African Atrocity, American Humanity: Slavery and Its Transnational
Afterlives. Research in African Literatures, 45(3), Africa and the Black Atlantic (Fall 2014),
pp. 48-71.
Goyal, Y. (2017). The Logic of Analogy: Slavery and the Contemporary Refugee. Humanity,
8(3), Winter 2017, pp. 543-546.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 161-181 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.11 179
 Elsa Claire Gomis

Hermann, L. (Producer and Director). (2012, May). Neuromarketing: votre cerveau les
intéresse, Cash investigation. https://vimeo.com/43304021. Accessed 13 January 2018.
IOM, Analysis (2016). Flow monitoring surveys. The human trafficking and other
exploitative practices. Prevalence indication survey. http://migration.iom.int/docs/
Analysis__Flow_Monitoring_and_Human_Trafficking_Surveys_in_the_Mediterranean_
and_Beyond_-_6%20_October_2016.pdf. Accessed 27 March 2019.
Jacobs, J. (2018, 19 June). They wanted to Raise $1,500 for Immigrant Families at the Border.
They Got Over $20 Million. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06
/19/us/raices-charity-border-immigrants.html. Accessed 27 March 2019.
Kleis Nielsen, R. (2017, 30 May). Where do people get their news? The British Media
Landscape in 5 Charts. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. University of
Oxford.https://medium.com/oxford-university/where-do-people-get-their-news-
8e850a0dea03. Accessed 18 July 2018.
Lidchi, H. (2015). Finding the Right Image, British Development NGOs and the Regulation
of Imagery. In H. Fehrenbach & D. Rodogno (Eds.), Humanitarian Photography (pp. 275–
296). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lioret P. (Director), Rossignon, C. (Producer).(2010). Welcome.[Motion picture]. DVD of the
film. Paris: Nord-Quest Productions.
Malkki, L. (1995). Purity and exile: violence, memory, and national cosmology among Hutu refugees
in Tanzania. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Memou, A. (2019). Spectacular images of the “refugee crisis”. Photographies,12(1), pp. 81-97.
Mignolo, W. (2018). Decoloniality and Phenomenology: The Geopolitics of Knowing and
Epistemic/Ontological Colonial Differences. The Journal of Speculative Philosophy. 32(3),
Special Issue with the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, pp. 360–
387.
Mosbergen, D. (2018, 18 June). The Heartbreaking Story Behind That Viral Crying Toddler
Photo. The Huffington Post.
Nakamura, D., Miroff, N. &Dawsey, J. (2018, June 20). Trump signs order ending his policy
of separating families at the border, but reprieve may be temporary. The Washington Post.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-signs-order-ending-his-policy-of-
separating-families-at-the-border-but-reprieve-may-be-temporary/2018/06/20/663025ae-
74a0-11e8-b4b7308400242c2e_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.4d1659711b83.
Accessed 28 March 2019.
Pastoureau, M. &Simonnet, D. (2005).Le petit Livre des couleurs. Paris: Seuil.
Rancière, J. (2000). Le partage du sensible. Paris: La Fabrique.
Rancière, J. (2012). Figures de l'histoire. Paris: Minuit.
Sabbati, G. & Cîrlig, C. C. (2015). European Parliament, EU Member States’ arms export
2013, Infographic, December 2015 http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/
ATAG/2015/572805/EPRS_ATA(2015)572805_EN.pdf. Accessed 7 October 2019.
Schaefer, M & Rotte, R. (2007). Favourite brands as cultural objects modulate reward circuit.
NeuroReport, 18, pp. 141–145.
Slovic, D., Västfjäll A., Erlandsson, D. & Gregory, R. (2017). Iconic photographs and the ebb
and flow of empathic response to humanitarian disasters. Proceedings of National Academy
of Sciences, USA, 4, January 24, pp. 640–644.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 161-181 − ISSN: 2499-930X

180 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.11
 Counteracting Dominant Discourses about Migrations with Images: a Typology Attempt

Stewart, H. & Mason, R. (2016, 16 June). Nigel Farage’s anti-migrant poster reported to
police. Unison’s Dave Prentis said poster showing a queue of migrants and refugees
incites racial hatred. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/16
/nigel-farage-defends-ukip-breaking-point-poster-queue-of-migrants. Accessed 18 July
2018.
Tappolet, C. (2000). Émotions et valeurs. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Thelwall, M. (2015). Undermining Aylan: Less Than Sympathetic International Responses.
In F. Vis & O. Goriunova (Eds.), The Iconic Image on Social Media A Rapid Research Response
to the Death of Aylan Kurdi (pp. 31–36). Sheffield: Visual Social Media Lab.
Vis F. & Goriunova O. (Eds.), (2015), The Iconic Image on Social Media A Rapid Research
Response to the Death of Aylan Kurdi (pp. 31–36). Sheffield: Visual Social Media Lab.
Wilder, M. (2016). Whither the Funnel of Causality?Canadian Journal of Political Science,
December 2016, Vol. 49, Issue 4, pp. 721-741
Zigelboim, S. (1942). “Stop them now, German Mass Murder of Jews in Poland”
https://www.marxists.org/subject/jewish/stop-murder.pdf. Accessed 7 October 2019.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 161-181 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.11 181
 Ai Weiwei and JR.
Political Artists and Activist Artists and the Plight of Refugees

ABBY PETERSON
University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Abstract
The article will address Ai Weiwei’s and JR’s political engagement with the refugee crisis,
the former as a political artist and the latter as an activist artist. Ai, in a series of conceptual
installations and the feature film Human Flow, as did JR at Tecate on the Mexican-US border,
have sought to shed light on the securitization of migration and the hollowness of
neoliberalism’s human rights discourse. More generally, the article will interrogate the roles
of the socially concerned political artist and the socially involved activist artist. An
underlying question deals with the power of representation inevitably wielded by artists.
While the ‘dilemma of representation’ cannot be resolved, the article explores the different
approaches to this dilemma employed by Ai and JR to mitigate the dilemma.

Keywords: Activist Artist, Dilemma of Representation, Movement Artist Scholars, Political

Artist, Refugee Crisis.

Introduction

For Europeans the north-eastern rim of the MediterraneanSea has been

the focal site of the Syrian tragedy and refugee crisis.Fleeing the war in
Syria Alan Kurdi’s family set off from the Turkish coast for the Greek
island of Kos in an inflatable boat. Within minutes of pushing off, a wave
capsized the vessel, and the mother and both sons drowned. Photographer
Nilüfer Demir of the Dogan News Agency found three-years-old Alan’s
lifeless body on a Turkish beach and the resulting image became the
defining photograph of the on-going war and refugee crisis. The
photographgalvanized public opinion across the globe in support of
refugees, at least for a time (Sohlberg, Esaiasson & Martinsson, 2018).
Similarly, non-verbal (and verbal) images and interactionscan evoke

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 183-202 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.12
 Abby Peterson

emotions of compassion and the humanitarian will to help and protect.The

work of artists can educe empathetic insights into the plight of refugees.
Artists are involving themselves in different ways with what Passy
(2001) calls the “altruistic solidarity movement” and the plight of refugees
producing images and aesthetic interactions that are intended to awaken
public support. The article addresses Ai Weiwei’s and JR’s political
engagement with the refugee crisis and border life. More generally, the
paper will interrogate the roles of the socially concerned political artist and
the socially involved activist artist for political contention. Have they
resolved the dilemma of representation? Do they as artist scholars bring
their superior skills of representation to work with a movement, and/or an
aggrieved community, or do they work solely for?

1. The roles of movement scholars and the dilemma of representation

In this paper I argue that Ai Weiwei and JR strategically employ their

celebrity status as darlings of the Western neoliberal art world to
undermine the securitization and human rights discourses from the inside.
In different ways Ai and JR represent the experiences and grievances of
refugees and ‘paperless’ migrants—those who lack the “right to have
rights” (Peterson, 2017)—to the outside world. Are they working within
solidarity movements or outside? How have Ai and JR resolved the power
of representation dilemma?
A wide body of social movement literature highlights the cultural spaces
opened for movement intellectuals, what I call movement scholars along
the lines of Dieter Henrich’s (1985) notion of the artist scholar, that is,
authors, musicians and artists. In short, according to these theorists, social
movements provide the cultural context for critical scholars. Social
movements in general are breeding grounds for new forms of artistic,
musical, and literary experimentation (Eyerman and Jamison, 1998; Kaplan,
1992). With the emergence of alternative cultural spaces, movement
scholars, whether they are writers, musicians or artists, find new audiences
of readers, listeners and viewers for which to direct their cultural and
political challenges. The role of movement scholars is heatedly debated
among activists and social movement researchers alike. One group of

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 183-202 − ISSN: 2499-930X

184 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.12
 Ai Weiwei and JR. Political Artists and Activist Artists and the Plight of Refugees

theorists draw attention to the role scholars play for expressing the
collective identity of social movements as “truth-bearers” for the
movement (e.g. Eyerman, 2002; Eyerman and Jamison, 1998; Eyerman and
Jamison, 1992; Frascina, 1999; Kaplan, 1992;). For these theorists, the work
and lives of movement scholars provide the key for understanding the
collective identity of the movement.
(Peterson,2012) took a different analytical strategy and used the life and
work of one movement scholar artist, Anselm Kiefer, who was neither
ascribed the role of movement truth-bearer nor bore the collective truth-
claims of the German Student movement and New Left. Movement scholars
are often understood as both embodying the movement and leading the
movement. And while I agree that some movement scholars can be seen as
embodying the movement (as long as they accept the role of truth-bearer),
they more seldom lead the movement. It is not uncommon, I have argued,
that movement scholars are at odds with the wider movement, expressing
their challenges or alternative truth-claims at the outermost fringes of its
context. Movement scholars not only challenge the wider society with their
truth-claims, they challenge the movement itself, extending the cognitive
boundaries for what can be acknowledged at a given moment in the
movement’s history (Peterson, 1994). In short, movement scholars are often
even uncomfortable for their social movement publics. Anselm Kiefer
became a thorn in the side of the German Student Movements with his
obstinate denial of moral innocence for German responsibility for the
atrocities committed during World War II (Peterson, 2012).
However, none of the social movement theorists mentioned above have
directly addressed the question of power within movements, what Walter
Nicholls and Justus Uitermark call the “Power of Representation dilemma”
(2015, p. 189).

Intellectuals can be a force for the movement but may also exercise power over others
within the movement. The resulting Power of Representation dilemma – intellectuals have
superior skills of representation but if they use them for the movement, they marginalize
others within the movement – has been a topic of heated debate within many movements
(emphasis in original).

Movement intellectuals are central players in all social movements, but

they undeniably assume a position of power in the movement on the basis

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 183-202 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.12 185
 Abby Peterson

of their superior skills and knowledge in producing discourses. But there

are risks involved in the power of representation, as Nicholls and
Uitermark point out. For example, artist scholars can repress images that
do not ‘fit’ their representations, thereby marginalizing some groups. The
risk is probably higher when the people they represent have scarce cultural
and symbolic resources, which is the case of refugees, who, for the most
part, do not represent themselves and their grievances but are represented
by altruistic ‘others’ — movements and individuals.
A second group of movement theorists, trying to resolve the power of
representation dilemma, outline a new role for movement intellectuals
using the notion of “specific intellectuals”, neither leading nor speaking for
the movement.Specific intellectuals lend their concrete expertise in
different areas (e.g. political, planning, law, psychiatry) to struggles,
“speaking with the people in those struggles rather than speaking for
them” (Nicholls and Uitermark, 2015, p. 190; also Kurzman and Owens,
2002). So rather than bearing the truth claims of the movement, specific
intellectuals use their political, cultural and technical resources to facilitate
marginalised groups to represent their own interests in public. However,
this is often an idealised vision of the role of movement intellectuals.
Highly marginalised groups, for example refugees and failed asylum
seekers, most often lack the political and cultural resources to effectively
represent themselves and their grievances in the public sphere. As Nicholls
and Uitermark (2015, pp. 194-95) call attention to, then movement
intellectuals are indeed key players in movement struggles in that they
have the resources and knowledge which permits the experiences of
marginalised groups to get into the “information system”. Specific
intellectuals “become key players as representational brokers mediating
relations between marginalized groups and the outside world” (p. 201),
thereby maintaining the representational gap between the people involved
in the struggle—the aggrieved—and movement scholars. In these cases
movement scholars inevitably exercise power in movement struggles.

2. Political artists and activist artists

Art critic Lucy R. Lippard (1984, p. 342) succinctly defines political art as

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 183-202 − ISSN: 2499-930X

186 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.12
 Ai Weiwei and JR. Political Artists and Activist Artists and the Plight of Refugees

an art that reaches out as well as in. To varying degrees it takes place simultaneously in the
mainstream and outside of accepted art contexts. … It often incorporates many different
media in a long-term project. … As an art of contact, it is often hybrid, the product of
different cultures communicating … [activist art] provides alternative images, metaphors,
and information formed with humor, irony, outrage, and compassion, in order to make
heard and sagen those voices and faces hitherto invisible and powerless.

Lippard distinguishes between “political artists” and “activist artists”.

The work of political artists is socially concerned commentary and/or
analysis. The work of activist artists is socially involved within its contexts,
with its audience. She emphasises that this distinction is not a value
judgement on her part. Political artists and activist artists are often the
same people. The subjects, and sometimes contexts, of political artists
reflect social issues, most often in the form of ironic criticism. Activist
artists work within the community in order to stimulate the active
participation of their audience and mobilise for social change.
Ai Weiwei, in a series of conceptual installations and the feature film
Human Flow, as did JR at Tecate on the Mexican-US border, sought to shed
light on the securitization of migration and the hollowness of
neoliberalism’s human rights discourse. Both artists are not solely
producers of discrete objects, but are collaborators and producers of
situations, or in the words of British artist Peter Dunn,they are “context
providers rather than content providers (cited in Kester, 2005, p. 76). They
facilitate dialogues between different communities around the refugee
crisis.Both artists are politically involved with the refugee crisis, but in
different ways—JR more from within movements, Ai more from without. I
argue that Ai is the quintessential political artist, JR the quintessential
activist artist. In the following pages I will look more closely at the roles
these artists play for altruistic solidarity movements and their different
approaches to the “power of representation dilemma”.

3. JR activist artist

JR, the French street artist who only goes by his initials, is a “self-
proclaimed ‘artivist’ somewhere between artist and activist—and a

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 183-202 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.12 187
 Abby Peterson

‘photograffeur’—somewhere between a photographer and a graffiti artist”

(Ferdman, 2012, p. 12). He has built his reputation pasting over-sized
portraits of individuals in cities and towns across the world. According to
Ferdman (2012, p. 13), his exhibits perform alternative narratives of urban
spaces by giving a voice, “through the medium of photography, to
actors/inhabitants who are often otherwise ignored in mainstream media,
and who often live in poverty”. JR’s work, which he calls “participatory
art”, involves the communities — the audiences — he is engaging with in a
lengthy process in which community members are involved in both the
aesthetic decision making and the execution of the action. JR’s work is
ephemeral; if authorities do not tear it down, it is washed away by weather.
Only the documentation of the action process remains as proof that the
work existed, and it is the documentation, which gets inside the gallery.
JR has addressed a number of issues, but in this paper I will focus his
“border work” (Peterson, 2017). In 2007 JR and his collaborator Marco, aided
by community volunteers, staged what they claim was the largest illegal
photography exhibition ever. They covered the entire surface of the Israeli
West Bank Barrier, on both sides, with monumental close-up photographs of
paired Israelis and Palestinians who held the same jobs, making a similar
expression for the camera—teachers, farmers, students, taxi drivers, and so
on, laughing and grimacing. The large-format photographs were posted
side-by-side, face-to-face, so that onlookers couldn’t tell who belonged on
which side of the fence. Their intention was to make visible the similarities
between Israelis and Palestinians — “twin sisters and brothers”—and the
absurdity of the conflict and the border wall1.
Ten years later in 2017 JR again confronted the absurdity of borders
walls, this time at the Mexican-US border at Tecate. In Tecate, JR, his team,
and on-site volunteers, constructed a huge scaffolding and posted a
monumental 20 metre high photograph of the year-old toddler Kikito
innocently peering over the border fence between Mexico and the US. A
month later on 8 October 2017, a huge dining table was constructed on both
sides of the border wall, with the eye of a “Dreamer” on both sides. JR
hosted a one-day gigantic picnic which gathered Kikito, his family and
hundreds of guests from the US and Mexico to share the same meal.

1 http://www.jr-art.net/projects/face-2-face, retrieved 18.04.2018;

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 183-202 − ISSN: 2499-930X

188 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.12
 Ai Weiwei and JR. Political Artists and Activist Artists and the Plight of Refugees

“People gathered around the eyes of a Dreamer, eating the same food,
sharing the same water, enjoying the same music (half of the band on each
side). The wall was forgotten for a few moments…” 2. The event of course
could have been shut down, but it was not. One of his co-artists posted a
video of herself bringing tea to a US Federal Agent on one side and JR on
the other side. Standing on each side of the lathes of the wall, JR asks the
border agent, “will you share tea with me now?” Whereupon the agent
smiles as they clink their cups of tea with a salud from JR (Ibid.). The
installation and performance offered a moment of humanity amidst the
infected debate on Trump’s rejection of DACA a month earlier (but offering
a six-month window to find an alternative solution) and the construction of
a border wall 3. And like the face2face exhibit, JR in Tecate received massive
media attention in, among other venues, CNN, New York Times, Washington
Post and Los Angeles Times.
In 2011 JR was awarded the prestigious TED Prize and the opportunity
to “change the world” 4. JR received $1,000,000 and access to TED’s vast
resources and professional networks to start his Inside Out Project— “a
global art project with local ramifications, responding to local problems,
mounted by local people. The work belongs to the people who created it
and to those who saw it” (Ferdman, 2012, p. 22). The Inside Out Project that
he initiated in 2011 has a relatively simple conception. Anyone can contact
the Inside Out website with their photo portraits and a statement of their
cause. If approved the action group is sent large-format copies of their
photos (costing a suggested $20 donation per photo) and their action group
is then included on the website where the action process is photo-
documented, the portraits are presented and archived, thereby spreading
their messages beyond the communities that are engaged in the action.

2 http://www.jr-art.net/news/gigantic-picnic-at-the-US-Mexican-border, retrieved
18.04.2018; Young undocumented immigrants were organised in what was called the
“Dreamers Movement”.
3 The Obama administration passed the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)

in 2012 and an executive order in 2014, which provided approximately four to five million
young undocumented immigrants with temporary residency.
4 TED is a non-profit organisation that promotes innovative ideas in such areas as

technology, education and design. Each year the TED Prize is awarded to an individual to
develop an initiative that can spark social change.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 183-202 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.12 189
 Abby Peterson

There are however strict guidelines for prospective participants; for

example, only one subject in the photograph, no animals, objects or people
in disguises. Portraits must be framed closely around the subjects face. The
actions cannot involve commercial actors, be used for branding, nor
actions, which do not promote a progressive cause. While the actions,
carried out across the globe, vary, they share “the visual trope of striking,
black-and-white portrait posters of diverse individuals that are grouped
together in a public space” (Orpana, 2014, p. 68). At the time of writing the
project has included 1.318 group actions with 260.000 portraits of
participants in 129 countries worldwide 5.
Many of the Inside Out action groups have addressed community
causes along borders, for example, “Inside Out Juarez”, as well as in
support of refugees, for example, “Justice for Afghan Refugees in
Belgium”, support for Syrian refugees in Canada, “We Are People Too”,
and for Syrian refugees in Turkey, “The Forgotten Refugees of Balaban” 6.
An Inside Out project in Palermo and Sicily sought to highlight the energy
of departures and flows on the island with 4.000 portraits in a square.
“They are the memory that intertwines past and future in a continuous
exchange that makes possible a cultural rebirth based on acceptance and
integration. Thousands of faces in one square that will show our desire to
remain truly human” 7. With Inside Out JR provides the resources for those
working in support of refugees, which would appear that he is taking on
the role of specific intellectual in the solidarity movement, and to a certain
degree this is true. He does provide the technical resources and aesthetic
trope to altruistic movement activists who are speaking for refugees, but
they are most often not speaking with the refugees they in turn represent.
In 2017 the Emerson Collective launched a nationwide participatory art
initiative, “Inside Out/Dreamers” 8 .According to their press statement,
“Inside Out/Dreamers travel the country taking individual portraits that
give visual expression to the overwhelming support for Dreamers”. They
organize community events and pop-up press conferences with Dreamers,

http://www.inside-outproject.net/en, retrieved 09.07.2018;

5

http.//insideoutjuarez.tumblr.com, retrieved 03.07.2018;

6

7 http.//insideoutproject.net/en/group-actions/, retrieved 17.11.2018;

8 The Emerson Collective centres its work on education, immigration reform, the

environment and other social justice initiatives.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 183-202 − ISSN: 2499-930X

190 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.12
 Ai Weiwei and JR. Political Artists and Activist Artists and the Plight of Refugees

activists, elected officials and local leaders to underscore that “with the
repeal of DACA in September 2017, hundreds of thousands will begin to
lose their status early next year unless Congress acts now to pass The
Dream Act” 9.
On the Inside Out Dreamers website we find the following statement:

We are here. We are here with an open mind and heart, not an open hand. We are here
to give. To add value.To be inspired.To inspire. We are here to start a small business, write a
song, find a cure, open a law firm, become a teacher, discover a new star, bring home a gold
medal, develop new technologies, and so much more — if you give us that chance. We are
the same as every immigrant who has come before us. Filled with dreams. Determined to
contribute. See our potential. We are all here. AND OUR STORY IS AN AMERICAN
STORY 10.

The Emerson Collective’s discursive strategy locks into what Nicholls

and Fiorito (2015) have called the “bounded dreamers”. The strategy
stressed the deservingness of this group of immigrants; these minors were
“the best and brightest” and fully American in all but their social security
numbers and who stood to make important economic contributions to the
country. But this representation of the Dreamers neglects the fact that not
all Dreamers are straight-A students. Many, living in severe poverty, have
had a rocky road in the school system. Pragmatically the Emerson
Collective is trying to deflect the dominant discourse in Trump’s US by
emphasising the deservingness of a specific group of immigrants, thereby
closing the door for other groups — the power of representation dilemma.
The new social turn, or more accurately labelled “social re-turn”
(Bishop, 2012), in political art is situated within the many faces of
neoliberalism, which is not only economic policies that are widening the
gap between the rich and poor, but also a “powerful public pedagogy and
cultural politics” (Giroux, 2005, p. 15). With the state rolling back, civil
society is increasingly called upon to create innovative ways to revitalize
local communities and fill the gap of a retreating welfare state. As a public
pedagogy and cultural politics promoting creativity, flexibility,

9 https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/emerson-collective-launches-inside-
outdreamers-project-to-underscore-urgency-of-passing-the-dream-act-300543154.html,
retrieved 06-05-2018;
10 http.//www.insideoutproject/dreamers/, retrieved 06-05-2018;

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 183-202 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.12 191
 Abby Peterson

individualism, and entrepreneurialism the social turn in political art is

embedded in these dominant neoliberal discourses (also Kester, 1995 and
2005). And as Bishop (2012) points out, the new re-turn to socially engaged
participatory art projects emerged, at least in Europe, with the dismantling
of the welfare state as a new form of community “soft engineering”. JR’s
work can be seen in this context. His work has found considerable
institutional support, despite his claims that most of his actions have been
carried out illegally. And many of his photographic interactions have
appeared to re-vitalise a sense of community, in, for example, Rio’s favelas,
Paris’ banlieues, and Sicily. As an activist artist, using close-up facial
portraits as his medium, JR is forced to engage with a given community in
a dialogue to obtain their trust and involvement working with movements.
While JR’s work reflects what Claire Bishop (2005) calls”the social turn”
in contemporary art practices, he has repeatedly separated his politics from
his art, “clearly demarcating the ‘art’ as the autonomous space where
things can happen” (Ferdman, 2012, p. 15; also Orpana, 2014). In his
acceptance speech of the TED Prize on the topic “Can art change the
world”, JR discussed the role of art for social change. He argues that it is
possible for art to change our perceptions of the world by starting
conversations and addressing stereotypes through creative strategies that
make people, and their causes, more visible. He stated:

In some cases art can change the world. I mean, art is not supposed to change the world,
the practical things. But it can change perceptions. It can change the way we see the world.
Actually, the fact that art cannot change things, makes it a neutral place for exchanges and
discussion 11.

It is within this what he calls neutral space, that JR produces highly

community-involved installations — challenging people to see the world in
new ways. Ai Weiwei, in contrast, does not see art as an autonomous,
neutral space disconnected from politics. According to Ai, “all creative
activism, if it works well, is a work of art. The same way that every good

11 http://www.ted.com/talks/jr_s_ted_prize_ wish_use_art_to_turn_the_world_inside_
out, retrieved 18-04-2018;

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 183-202 − ISSN: 2499-930X

192 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.12
 Ai Weiwei and JR. Political Artists and Activist Artists and the Plight of Refugees

work of art, if it concerns itself with reality and politics, is a form of

activism” 12.

4. Ai Weiwei—political artist

According to Christian Solace (2014, p. 396), “Ai Weiwei’s artistic

material is the flesh of politics: the decrees of China’s Communist Party. …
His defining artistic practice is to metabolize social contradictions and
harsh realities”. His art has called attention to government cover-ups and
corruption. Most controversially in connection with the Sichuan schools
corruption scandal, when shoddily built schools collapsed in the 2008
earthquake. Ai initiated a “Citizens Investigation” to uncover the names of
the children who had perished, which the government had refused to
release. 5.219 names were collected and posted on his blog, which the
government promptly shut down in 2009. Ai created the work
“Remembering”. He covered the whole of the Haus der Kunst’s façade in
Munich with 9.000 children’s backpacks, spelling out in Chinese a message
that a bereaved mother had told him.Ai claims that it was this artwork,
which made him the most dangerous man in China 13. He was arrested in
2011 and held without charges for eighty-one days. In 2015 he was allowed
to leave China and is now working in Berlin. Just as Ai took the empty
gestures of the Chinese Communist Party as points of intervention when
living in China, he, now living in Germany, takes on the empty gestures of
neoliberalism’s human rights discourse with his political-aesthetic
interventions.
Ai Weiwei has produced installations calling attention to the refugee
crisis across Europe; the following is just a sample. For “Law of the
Journey” at the National Gallery in Prague, Ai installed a seventy-meter
long inflatable boat with 258 oversized faceless refugee figures. Ai draped
thousands of bright orange life jackets discarded by refugees on Lesbos

12 https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/sep/17/ai-weiwei-without-the-prison-the-
beatings-what-would-i-be, retrieved 19-04-2018;
13 https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/feb/15/ai-weiwei-remembering-
sichuan-earthquake, retrieved 13-07-2018;

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 183-202 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.12 193
 Abby Peterson

around the classical columns of the Berlin’s Konzerthaus. Athens’ NJ

Goulandris museum of Cycladic art displays on one wall thousands of tiny
photos of Lesbos taken with his smartphone; a marble sculpture of two
rubber inner tubes from truck tyres used by refugees to float ashore. An
installation places spent tear gas canisters from a riot at the Idomeni
refugee camp in northern Greece next to ancient glass grief vases that held
human teardrops. He has wrapped the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence with
twenty-two orange lifeboats 14.
He withdrew his exhibition at Faurschou Foundation in Copenhagen, in
protest of a new law passed by the Danish parliament that allows
authorities to seize asylum seekers’ valuables and to delay family reunions.
However, he did not boycott Australia’s offshore detention policy by
withdrawing his exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia;
despite the Australian high court ruling that week that “the government
had the right to detain people offshore, leaving the way clear for it to return
267 asylum seekers, including 39 children and 33 babies, to conditions in
Nauru that the UNHCR has deemed inhumane” 15 . He donated to the
museum his major installation there that gives homage to Australian
activists involved in the refugee human rights movement. As Guardian art
critic Toby Fehily points out, Ai is not consistent in his use of boycotts as a
political tool, an example of the power of representation dilemma. Ai gave
his support for Australian activists, but not for Danish solidarity activists—
the power of representation dilemma.
In one of his most controversial works Ai posed lying face down on a
beach in Greece, recreating the now-iconic 2015 photograph of drowned
Syrian refugee infant Alan Kurdi for the magazine India Today and an
accompanying exhibition at the Indian Art Fair. Fehily delivered a scathing
salvo in The Guardian:

If he’s identifying with Kurdi, he shouldn’t – there are no useful comparisons to be

drawn between a refugee child dead at the age of three and a highly successful living
artist.It is, however, an accomplished piece of viral imagery – a very specific kind of viral
imagery, too; the kind that piggybacks on another viral image with slight variation and

www.aiweiwei.com, retrieved 11.06.2018;

14

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/feb/06/there-are-better-ways-for-ai-
15

weiwei-to-take-a-political-stand-than-posing-as-a-drowned-infant, retrieved 11.07.2018;

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 183-202 − ISSN: 2499-930X

194 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.12
 Ai Weiwei and JR. Political Artists and Activist Artists and the Plight of Refugees

without adding anything. It is a meme. And like all memes, it got attention. But just because
it gets attention doesn’t mean it’s good art, and it certainly doesn’t mean it’s good political
art. The problem with the refugee crisis isn’t a lack of attention; the problem is we are aware
of their plight, but are not doing enough to help 16.

Ai explained the photograph as a spontaneous idea reached between

himself, the photographer and the journalist as they walked along the
beach.

I [wanted] to be in the same condition – to touch my face on the sand, to hear the ocean –
which that little boy had no privilege to do that. And that little boy Alan is not a single
person: it's thousands of refugee kids [who] lost their lives… 17.

Ai’s caption for the photograph at the India Art Fair reads, “Artists are
free to make art for art’s sake, and I respect that, I do not criticize them. … I
am not born an artist. I am born a human. I care about human conditions
rather than the opinions. I have no choice”. Nevertheless the question is
raised: how do you respectfully represent the situation refugees are facing?
Ai Weiwei’s film Human Flow is an epic documentary about the world’s
response to the refugee crisis. It looks at mass movement from Syria, Iraq
and parts of Africa to Europe; of the Rohingya people from Myanmar to
Bangladesh; from Palestine to Jordan, at the Texas-Mexico border. In one
shot, taken by a drone over a camp in Iraq, the beige tents appear like a vast
abstract canvas. Then the camera is slowly lowered to show the viewers all
the people who live there. Ai puts faces to statistics and through a series of
intimate interactions between Ai and refugees tells individual stories. We see
Ai handing out hot tea on the beaches at Lesbos, comforting a woman inside
a makeshift studio and cooking kebabs in a dusty refugee camp.
Ai explains that he always tries to find a language, a medium that can
bring the voices of those who have no voice to the people who will not hear.

I always have to try to find a language to build up this kind of communication between
the people who [are] desperate, have no chance to have their voice to be heard, and the

16 https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/feb/06/there-are-better-ways-for-ai-
weiwei-to-take-a-political-stand-than-posing-as-a-drowned-infant, retrieved 11.07.2018;
17 https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/ai-weiwei-invu-1.4309871, retrieved
11.07.2018;

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 183-202 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.12 195
 Abby Peterson

people who [are] privileged and almost think those incidents have nothing to do with our
real life and turn their faces away. So as an artist, I always have to make this kind of
argument and try to find a language to present my ideas’ 18.

Having been exiled as a child with his family during the Cultural
Revolution, Ai seeks a common ground with his subjects. “I am a refugee,
every bit,” he says. “Those people are me. That’s my identity” 19. Ai intends
to represent the face of refugees, but is it possible? Can the very real
differences that exist between artists and a given community, in our case
refugees, be transcended by well-meaning rhetoric and acts of aesthetic
'empowerment'?In one film sequence, he humorously swaps passports
with Mahmoud, a Syrian refugee. Mahmoud is happy to do so and adds
they should probably swap houses as well: a nice Berlin studio in return for
a hot, crowded tent. Ai laughs, but won’t take him up on the offer. “It’s a
moment that exposes the gulf between them” (Ibid). In an interview with
Xan Brooks Ai remembers the sequence.

Yeah, that was the worst feeling. That really got me. Because [if] you’re passionate, you
think you mean what you say. You tell these people that you’re the same as them. But you
are lying because you are not the same. Your situation is different; you must leave them.
And that’s going to haunt me for the rest of my life (Ibid.).

Ai is painfully aware that he cannot fully represent the people who he

identifies with; their situations are vastly different. A highly acclaimed
artist with free mobility (at least in the west) does not share the same
situation as a refugee trapped in a crowded dusty camp. He cannot resolve
the dilemma of representation by denying difference. Ai is speaking for
refugees from an elevated position of power. His voice is heard, but it is not
the voice of refugees.
Brooks posed a question Ai was anticipating:

All day long, the media ask me if I have shown the film to the refugees: ‘When are the
refugees going to see the film?’ But that’s the wrong question. The purpose is to show it to

18 https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/ai-weiwei-invu-1.4309871, retrieved
11.07.2018;
19 https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/sep/17/ai-weiwei-without-the-prison-the-
beatings-what-would-i-be, retrieved 11.07.2018;

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 183-202 − ISSN: 2499-930X

196 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.12
 Ai Weiwei and JR. Political Artists and Activist Artists and the Plight of Refugees

people of influence; people who are in a position to help and who have a responsibility to
help. The refugees who need help – they don’t need to see the film. They need dry shoes.
They need soup (Ibid.).

Ai makes a relevant point here. He is acutely aware that art on its own
cannot change a situation. It is not enough to produce political art. The
plight of refugees must be taken over by the institutions and people who
have the influence and the responsibility to address the situation. Ai’s
audience is not the refugees he is representing. His expressed mission is to
give voice to the refugees, which is the signature of a political artist
working for marginalized ‘others’.

Conclusions

A now dominant trend in the discourse on political art in general and

participatory art in particular is an emphasis on a compassionate
identification with the other, in which, Claire Bishop (2012, p. 241) warns
that an ethics of interpersonal interaction risks prevailing over a politics of
social justice.

In insisting upon consensual dialogue, sensitivity to difference risks becoming a new

kind of repressive norm – one in which artistic strategies of disruption, intervention or over-
identification are immediately ruled out as ‘unethical’ because all forms of authorship are
equated with authority and indicted as totalising. Such a denigration of authorship allows
simplistic oppositions to remain in place: active versus passive viewer, egotistical versus
collaborative artist, privileged versus needy community, aesthetic complexity versus simple
expression, cold autonomy versus convivial community.

As an activist artist JR is involved in the communities he approaches and

arguably co-constructs the aesthetic representation of the community. He is
committed to the participatory logic of his aesthetic community
interventions. In the case of the group actions in the Inside Out Project he
even denies authorship. However, JR’s reliance on black-and-white poster
portraits, in his own work and in the Inside Out Project, determines the
aesthetic framework for the representation of the community. In this sense,
in the end, he nonetheless retains (partial) authorship of the work.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 183-202 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.12 197
 Abby Peterson

JR’s work can be characterized by a playfulness that does not seek

confrontation, but dialogue. His work tends to elicit a smile, as was the case
with the US Federal agent at Tecate. While perhaps not always appreciated
by the authorities, it opens a convivial and welcoming space for human
interactions.
Bishop (2012) critiques the influential art critic and curator Nicolas
Bourriaud (2002) who contrasts contemporary relational art from that of
previous generations.

The main difference, as he sees it, is the shift in attitude toward social change: instead of
a “utopian” agenda, today’s artists seek only to find provisional solutions in the here and
now; instead of trying to change their environment, artists today are simply “learning to
inhabit the world in a better way”; instead of looking forward to a future utopia, this art sets
up functioning “microtopias” in the present (Bishop, 2012, p. 54).

Bishop neatly sums up JR’s political intentions in her critique of

Bourriaud. JR is quoted as saying:

(A)rt is not meant to change the world, but when you see people interacting, when you
see an impact on their lives, then I guess in a smaller way, this is changing the world. …So,
that’s what I believe in. That’s why I’m into creating more interactions 20.

Even Ai Weiwei, while not enacting “microtopias” in the present, sees

the demise of “big politics”. Ai is quoted as saying: “I think that our age,
the age of big politics is vanishing, and that the micro-politics of countless
individuals will begin to emerge. As Chairman Mao said: politics is the
soul. I am now dealing with the soul” (quoted in Sorace, 2014, p.406). Ai is,
however, not as modest as JR with the micro-politics of his aesthetic
interventions. He is convinced that individual micro-politics, and his
individual aesthetic interventions, can bring about social change.
In sharp contrast to JR’s interventions to create cosy spaces for human
interaction, Ai Weiwei’s work is based on political confrontation;
confrontation is the precondition, the motor for his art. Ai has spent his life
in opposition to his homeland – in a perpetual state of friction. Ai is quoted
as saying: “Duchamp had the bicycle, Warhol had the image of Mao. I have

20 http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/18/opinion/zhang-jr-inside-out/index.html, retrieved
12.07.2018;

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 183-202 − ISSN: 2499-930X

198 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.12
 Ai Weiwei and JR. Political Artists and Activist Artists and the Plight of Refugees

a totalitarian regime. It is my readymade” (quoted in Sorace, 2014, p. 396).

Sorace (2014, p. 397) claims, that “it would not be an exaggeration to argue
that without the Chinese state there would be no Ai Weiwei”. Xan Brooks
also suggested in an interview with Ai that without China he wouldn’t be
an artist at all.

Yeah, exactly, says Ai. The notion pricks his interest. I would be what? he asks.
Without all the yelling, without the prison, the beatings, just what would I be? Probably
right now I’d be walking down Broadway, just like all the other immigrants. Trying to
find the next job, pay next month’s rent. Or I’d be back in China, running a restaurant.
Or in a suit, in an office, another Chinese citizen 21.

Ai’s work has readily elicited criticism: for over-identification in the

Alan Kurdi mock-up, for heavy-handedness with his political messages, in
China he is portrayed as the “running dog for Western interests, obsessed
with money” (Sorace, 2014, p. 404), for egomania, or simply for his
phenomenal fame as the art world’s superstar—Art Review named him the
most powerful person in the art world.
While between forty and one hundred assistants work in his Berlin
studio (16.000 Chinese artisans in his “Sunflowers” exhibit at Tate Modern),
Ai’s art, unlike JR’s art, is not collaborative. He certainly does not declaim
authorship; he claims sole authorship. “I’m the one who makes all the
decisions, covers every inch, every setting, material, paragraph, I try to do
as much as I can” 22. His activism is as well more or less a one-man show.
Unlike JR Ai does not ordinarily directly engage and co-operate with the
communities whose grievances he aesthetically represents (an exception is
perhaps the “Citizen’s Investigation”). The refugees he interacted with in
Human Flow were not co-producers of their representation in the film—this
was Ai’s work. He is passionately engaged in the refugee struggle but he
does not seek collaborators. His role in the altruistic solidarity movement is
one of individual entrepreneurial provocateur. Ai is in a sense a one-man

21 https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/sep/17/ai-weiwei-without-the-prison-the-
beatings-what-would-i-be, retrieved 11.07.2018;
22 https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/sep/12/ai-weiwei-exhibition-royal-
academy-from-criminal-to-art-world-superstar, retrieved 14.07.2018.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 183-202 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.12 199
 Abby Peterson

refugee movement who bears the truth-claims of refugees who do not have
a voice, the classic example of the role of intellectuals. While JR works
comfortably within the neoliberal discourse of community revitalisation, Ai
works in direct confrontation with neoliberalism’s hollow promises, just as
he head on confronted the Chinese government in regards to their broken
promises. I agree with Sorace (2014), Ai Weiwei does not practice liberal
politics, but is rather in conflict with the neoliberal global discourse. For
sure he exploits his celebrity position in the neoliberal art world, but to
undermine the politics of neoliberalism.
By cutting short the post-production process—which their status
allows—both Ai and JR use the temporality of their political-aesthetics to
retain (more or less) control of their artistic products and the political
messages they are intended to convey. Neither Ai nor JR resolve the
“power of representation dilemma”, but one can argue that the dilemma is
unresolvable, even for the most well-meaning specific intellectual as
championed by Foucault (1984). Suffice it to simply recognize that the
power of representation is unequally distributed. Artist scholars such as Ai
and JR, with their valuable resources of aesthetic representation, exercise
their power to bring the grievances of refugees to the public and
authorities. Whether they like it or not, some refugee voices are heard,
some are not.
Paradoxically, the “Trojan horses” (Bishop, 2004) Ai and JR are both
minions and critics of neoliberalism—but in different ways; the political
artist Ai speaking for refugees, the activist artist JR speaking for but even
with movement activists and border communities. As an artist scholar Ai
effectively represents in his art the plight of refugees, revealing to the
world the grievances of refugees and the vacuity of neoliberalism’s human
rights discourse, but his art is not produced within a movement context
that can bear a truth claim as to what a better world might be. His art is a
plea to the world, to those who bear responsibility, to address the
grievances of refugees. JR’s art—his “microtopias” in the present—
produced within movement contexts, not only calls attention to the plight
of refugees but also provides a glimpse as to what the world might be were
there no borders and respect for human rights prevailed.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 183-202 − ISSN: 2499-930X

200 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.12
 Ai Weiwei and JR. Political Artists and Activist Artists and the Plight of Refugees

References

Bishop, C. (2004). Antagonism and relational aesthetics. October, 51-79.

Bishop, C. (2005). The social turn: Collaboration and its discontents. Artforum, 44 (6), 178.
Bishop, C. (2012). Artificial hells: Participatory art and the politics of spectatorship. London: Verso
Books.
Bourriaud, N. (2002). Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les Presses du Réel.
Eyerman, R. (2002). Cultural Trauma. Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Eyerman, R., & Jamison, A. (1991). Social Movements: A Cognitive Approach. Cambridge:
Polity.
Eyerman, R., & Jamison, A. (1998). Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Traditions in the
Twentieth Century. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Ferdman, B. (2012). Urban Dramaturgy: The Global Art Project of JR. PAJ: A Journal of
Performance and Art, 34(3), 12-26.
Frascina, F. (1999). Art, Politics and Dissent. Aspects of the art left in sixties America.
Manchester, UK and New York: University of Manchester Press.
Foucault, M. (1984). The Foucault Reader. Paul Rabinow (Ed.). New York: Pantheon.
Giroux, H. A. (2005). The terror of neoliberalism: Rethinking the significance of cultural
politics. College Literature, 1-19.
Henrich, D. (1985). The Contemporary Relevance of Hegel’s Aesthetics. In M. Inwood (Ed.)
Hegel (pp. 251-279).Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kaplan, T. (1992). Red City, Blue Period. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Kester, G. H. (1995). Aesthetic Evangelists: Conversion and Empowerment in Contemporary
Community Art1. Afterimage 22.
Kester, G. (2005). Conversation pieces: The role of dialogue in socially-engaged art. In
Kocur, Z., & Leung, S.(Eds.) Theory in contemporary art since1985 (pp. 76-88). Oxford:
Blackwell.
Kester, G. H. (2011). The one and the many: Contemporary collaborative art in a global context.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Kurzman, C., & Owens, L. (2002). The sociology of intellectuals.. Annual Review of Sociology,
28(1), 63-90.
Lippard, Lucy R. (1984). Trojan Horses: Activist Art and Power. In B. Wallis (Ed). Art after
modernism: Rethinking Representation (pp. 341-358). New York: New Museum.
Nicholls, W. J. & Uitermark, J. (2015). Giving Voice: The ambivalent roles of specific
intellectuals in immigrant and LGBT movements. In Jasper, J. M., & Duyvendak, J. W.
(Eds.). Players and arenas: the interactive dynamics of protest (pp. 189-211). Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press.
Nicholls, W. J. & Fiorito, T. (2015). Dreamers Unbound: Immigrant Youth Mobilizing. New
Labor Forum, 24(1), 86-92.
Orpana, J. (2014). Turning the World Inside Out: Situating JR’s Wish within Cultures of
Participation. RACAR: revue d'art canadienne/Canadian Art Review, 39(1), 66-75.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 183-202 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.12 201
 Abby Peterson

Passy, F. (2001). Political altruism and the solidarity movement. Giugni, M., & Passy, F.
(Eds). Political altruism?: Solidarity movements in international perspective (pp. 3-25).
Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Peterson, A. (1994). Elin Wägner and Radical Environmentalism in Sweden: The Good
Earthworm. Environmental History Review, 59-74.
Peterson, A. (2012). Wounds That Never Heal: On Anselm Kiefer and the Moral Innocence
of the West German Student Movements and the West German New Left. Cultural
Sociology, 6(3), 367-385.
Peterson, A. (2017). Humanitarian Border Workers in Confrontation with the Swedish
State’s Border Making Practices: “The Death of the Most Generous Country on Earth”.
Journal of Borderlands Studies, 1-17.
Sohlberg, J., Esaiasson, P., &Martinsson, J. (2018). The changing political impact of
compassion-evoking pictures: the case of the drowned toddler Alan Kurdi. Journal of
Ethnic and Migration Studies, 1-14.
Sorace, C. (2014). China’s Last Communist: Ai Weiwei. Critical Inquiry, 40(2), 396-419.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 183-202 − ISSN: 2499-930X

202 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.12
 Art as a Trigger for Reflection in Sociolinguistic Migration Research

KATRIN AHLGREN
Stockholm University, Sweden

Abstract
Research methods that are inspired by the arts have recently become subject to increasing
attention for language researchers working in migration contexts. There are various studies
that show how arts-based methods can be used in socially-engaged research in order to better
understand language practices and ideologies. Drawing on a longitudinal study of lived
experience of language use in Sweden, the present article demonstrates how language
portraits and poetic transcriptions have the potential to generate alternative narratives and
creative forms of representation. Moreover, the article illustrates how participatory action
research can prompt migrants to reflect on their experiences and emotions together with
others in the creation of drama performances. These kind of visual-, textual-, and performative
representations have a connotative force that invites the receiver to emotionally engage with
the migrants. Such representations can thus function as a trigger for reflection and enable
people to react to un-equal sociolinguistic orders.

Keywords: Sociolinguistics, Migration, Arts-Based Methods, Representation.

My heart is blue
it is French
my black arms Arabic
my yellow eyes English
and I talk Swedish now

I’m taking my first steps

with green feet
and a red brain
filled with words

in a new land
that is mine
but where
I do not
belong

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 203-222 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.13
 Katrin Ahlgren

Introduction

The poetic sequence above originates from a conversation with Esraa, a

young woman, originally from Egypt, who now lives in Sweden. She is one
of several migrants whose lives I have followed over a long period of time
(2001-2019) in an ongoing ethnographic research project entitled Narratives
of language use in a multilingual Sweden1. The above verses demonstrate how
Esraa locates the different languages that she can speak in a ‘body map’
and how she relates to colours when she describes her sensation of living
in-between languages and cultures (Weisman, 2012). Esraa’s narrated
experience in poetic form has the potential to appeal the imagination and
affect the reader’s emotions more directly than conventional transcriptions
methods.
In recent years, there has been considerable interest in the use of creative
and aesthetic methods in the collection, analysis, and representation of data
in qualitative research. This thus challenges more traditional means that are
employed to understand human action and experience (Leavy, 2019;
Salvin-Baden & Wimpenny, 2014). Even if artistry has been previously used
in socially-engaged research, there are actually very few references to the
deployment of the arts in this manner before the 1980s – when the post-
modern turn opened the door to a variety of visual-, literary-, and
performance approaches in the social sciences (Cahnmann Taylor, 2017 p.
355). The concept of arts-based methods was first introduced in 1993 at an
educational conference organised by Elliot Eisner, who is one of the
pioneers in the field (Barone & Eisner, 2012). Lately, the notion of creative
inquiry has been appealed to in the domain of sociolinguistics, where
researchers engage with people's complex communicative practices in
relation to language ideologies and political realities. Such inquiry entails
the study of art, the production of art, and a reliance on a wide variety of
other creative- and aesthetic expressions (see The AILA Research Network
on Creative Inquiry, 2019).
This creative inquiry has informed discussions about the quality and
ethical validity with respect to arts-based methods; raising questions such
as whether the data that is generated during such inquiry can be

1 The project (1579801) is funded by the Swedish Research Council.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 203-222 − ISSN: 2499-930X

204 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.13
 Art as a Trigger for Reflection in Sociolinguistic Migration Research

considered art and whether such data lacks consistency and credibility
(Pirtoo, 2002). A further question that is raised is whether the data
generated by creative inquiry affects the potential for engaged (activist)
researchers to make social difference. Some scholars have argued for a
classification framework which can be used to delineate systematic and
transparent genres in this domain (Wang et al., 2017). Other researchers
have highlighted the fact that the transcendence of existing categories lies
in the very nature of arts-based methods, and that it may never be possible,
or even desirable, to standardise genres and categories because they then
run the risk of losing their unfettered imaginative properties.
In this article, I will not take position in this debate, but I will contribute to
it tangentially – by introducing a ‘definition of art’ that is based on reflections
of the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas 2 (Armengaud, 2019; Cohen,
2016; Hofmeyr 2017). Levinas is known for his guiding concept the face (le
visage) which refers to the ethical moment that takes place in the encounter
with another person; i.e., face-to-face (Levinas, 2004; Cederberg, 2010). This
confrontation does not necessarily need to be related to the actual face of
another person; it can also be associated with the body, or the mere presence
of another person. Moreover, the concept is linked with language, as Levinas
(1987 p. 55) puts it: “the epiphany of the face is wholly language”.
Transferring the concept of the face and the idea of the ethical moment to a
discussion about art, we observe that, for Levinas, art is meaningful only
when it is capable of affecting the senses, the sight, and the perception of
the receiver, when it enables a confrontation with the other. In this sense, art
is always a singular experience, with the ultimate function to captive the
receiver’s attention and create a desire in terms of engagement. In other
words, rendering Levinas, art is based on the idea that people, by means of
artistic expression, enter into a relationship with alterity; another person who
can never be indifferent to us. Most importantly, he points to the fact that
this kind of engagement has a crucial function of triggering a reflection; not

2 This ‘definition of art’ build on Levinas reflections about the relation between aesthetics
and ethics, explained inter alia, in a discussion with Françoise Armengaud, published 2018
in: THINK ART Series of the Institute for Critical Theory: Zurich University of the Arts and
the Centre for Arts and Cultural theory. A first excerpt of this discussion appeared in:
Levinas, E. & Armengaud, F. (1989). Art & Text, 33, 30-41.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 203-222 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.13 205
 Katrin Ahlgren

primarily in a form of aesthetic values, but in a form of a critical reflection

that proposes something, that calls for a response (Mersch, 2019 p. 80).
In the present article, I thus employ Levinas’ reflections about art, and
draw on examples from my own research project. First, I contextualise the
project in sociolinguistic-theoretical terms. I then relate this to my
experience of using language portraits to prompt research participants to
reflect upon and create complementary narratives about their lived
experience of language use. Next, I apply poetic transcriptions to transmit
these narratives in a creative and evocative way. Thereafter, I go beyond
my actual research project and engage in a discussion about how
participatory action research has the potential to include research participants
more actively and produce narratives in collaboration with others in the
domain of performative art. Finally, I demonstrate how this way of
proceeding resonates with critical approaches in sociolinguistics;
approaches which have the goal to empower individual speakers (the
research participants) and aspire to transform unequal sociolinguistic
relations in society.

1. A multilingual reality and a monolingual norm

Due to globalisation and a significant increase in immigration in recent

years, Sweden has become a multilingual country. This has led to certain
changes in society, not least in the way people use different languages in
their everyday lives. More and more people speak a form of Swedish which
they have learned in their adulthood. These people also regularly
communicate in one or several other languages.
The Swedish population has often been characterised in terms of
diversity and multiculturalism, but there also exists a parallel movement in
Sweden that favours a strong regimentation of society with increased
demands for homogeneous Swedish values (Milani, 2013). Even if multi-
lingualism is mainly perceived as something positive, it still occurs that
people who speak languages other than Swedish – or a variant of Swedish
with an accent that indexes non-nativeness – are met with disbelief
(Lindberg & Sandwall, 2017). Such attitudes can be observed not only in
Sweden. Linguistic diversity – particularly as a result of immigration – is

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 203-222 − ISSN: 2499-930X

206 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.13
 Art as a Trigger for Reflection in Sociolinguistic Migration Research

often seen as a threat, both to social coherence and to integration since a

standardised national language and a monoculture is the dominant norm
in most Western societies (Blommaert, 2010; Wodak, 2015).
In accordance with a critical approach in sociolinguistic research, there is
a growing movement in academia that is driven by the idea of
transforming social relationships and changing this monolingual norm, or
mindset, that often leads to linguistic discrimination (Márquez Reiter &
Martín Rojo, 2019). The goal is that people should avoid reproducing
linguistically-mediated hierarchies and inequalities and that all speakers
should develop respect for themselves and for others so as to achieve
linguistic agency (Ahearn, 2001; Pujolar, 2019). This social change can be
facilitated by questioning norms and values that are traditionally assigned
to languages that are considered legitimate. Linguistic agency is aligned
with the proposal for a more inclusive linguistic order (a so-called
sociolinguistic citizenship) that also recognises linguistic resources that are
not officially approved and mixed language practices, with the aim of
fostering increased democratic participation in society (Stroud, 2015).
Given the ideological context described above, to counterbalance and be
able to resist and even transform an unequal sociolinguistic setting, it is important
to understand the lived experience of people who have a migration background.
In my research project mentioned previously, I closely follow six individuals
that came to Sweden in the early 2000s in order to explore how their language
trajectories develop over time in relation to their social-, cultural-, and political
circumstances. These six individuals form a heterogeneous group in regards to
their origin, age, gender, social-and educational background. By using
biographical narratives, the project adopts a phenomenological perspective and
investigates embodied dimensions of language use (Ricœur, 1990; 1983-1985).
This approach is informed by the idea that language is “intersubjective bodily-
emotional gestures which relate the speaker to the other and to the world”
(Busch, 2016 p. 7; Merleau-Ponty, 1945). Thus far, the outcomes of the project
show that the research participants experience a wide range of emotions,
including shame, fear, frustration, but also satisfaction, joy, and pride (e.g.,
Kramsch, 2009; Pavlenko, 2012). These emotions are experienced depending on
(i) how the participants relate to their language resources, (ii) how they are
recognised by others, and (iii) how they understand the opportunities that are

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 203-222 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.13 207
 Katrin Ahlgren

given to them as they take part in society and establish themselves on the labour
market (e.g., Duchêne & Heller, 2012).
The negative emotions that the research participants give expression to in
their narratives can be explained by the fact they experience learning Swedish as
a much longer and more difficult process than what they expected when they
first arrived to the country. Still, after eighteen years in Sweden, most of the
participants experience difficulty in talking Swedish in certain contexts since
they feel ashamed of their accent and they are afraid of speaking grammatically
incorrect. This indicates that the participants have internalised a legitimised and
dominant model of speakerhood3 where the native, normative, way of speaking
serves as a model (Márquez Reiter & Martín Rojo, 2019). The use of categories
such as ‘native-speaker’ versus ‘migrant-speaker’ leads them to understand
themselves in terms of being ‘competent’ or ‘incompetent’, which leads to
constant frustration.
One of the methodological tools that is used in my project is conversational
interviews and, in such encounters, it is normal that the participants recall critical
moments (Pennycook, 2004). These moments are of particular interest since
there is a strong potential for development in narratives that deal with
difficulties and negative emotions, not least for the participants' own insights
and reflections over what such situations signify and how they might be open to
future change (cf. Pavlenko, 2007). Notwithstanding this, I have found it
important to compensate for these narratives by asking the participants to give
account for their positive experiences of language use. By introducing language
portraits as a methodological tool (see the discussion in next section), I have been
able to capture a more complete picture of how the participants experience their
diverse linguistic practices in more neutral, and even positive, terms.

2. Language portraits

The poetic sequence found at the introduction of this article originates

from my first methodological experiment with language portraits. Initially,

Speakerhood has been defined as a linguistic process of social becoming (Márquez

3

Reiter & Martín Rojo, 2019).

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 203-222 − ISSN: 2499-930X

208 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.13
 Art as a Trigger for Reflection in Sociolinguistic Migration Research

I hesitated to employ this tool because I thought that the participants might
think it childish, but it turned out to be an effective way to visually
illustrate and represent the participants' embodied multilingual resources (eg.,
Busch, 2018).
This methodological tool is not a recent invention. Language portraits
have for instance been used since long in schools to promote language
awareness (e.g., Krumm & Jenkins, 2001). More recently, the method has
been applied in research into migration and language diversity, where the
portraits have generated conversations that reveal power relations and
language ideologies (Busch, 2018). Furthermore, conversations about
language portraits have been shown to have a therapeutic quality, and
have been used in projects involving trauma therapists and linguists in
order to strengthen resilience (Busch & Reddeman, 2013).
In previous studies, research participants have been asked to draw
their languages and other modalities of communication in a prefabricated,
empty silhouette (Busch, 2018 p. 9). While, in my project, the participants
were asked to draw a complete body portrait of themselves on a white
paper and fill it with colours that represent their different linguistic
resources. This resulted in various creative interpretations; including
colourful and imaginative portraits with strong symbolic values. These
visual representations can speak for themselves, inviting the observer to
interpret and create meaning. However, they can also be used as prompts
that give rise to, or triggering, narrative explications. Two language portraits,
followed by such explications, are provided below:

Figure 1. Esraa’s portrait (left) and Tekle’s portrait (right)

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 203-222 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.13 209
 Katrin Ahlgren

The first portrait was drawn by Esraa 4 (shortly presented in the

beginning of the article together with a poetic transcription of her narrative
explication). In our discussion about her drawing she clarifies that ‘blue is
the colour of freedom and hope’. The blue heart illustrates how much she
‘loves’ the French language. Growing up in Egypt, her father decided to
place her in a French school (where Arabic and English were also used as
mediums of instruction) when she was four years old. Although she never
had the opportunity to cross the ocean and visit France, the ‘land of her
dreams’. Regarding Swedish, she has painted it in red, at the head of the
portrait, so as to illustrate how cognitively demanding it is to learn a new
language as an adult. Living in a Swedish environment, she says, is like
having a ‘boiling pot’ in the place of one’s brain. She has also used a green
pencil, filling in the feet of the portrait to illustrate her ‘first steps’ in the
new language and in the ‘peaceful nature’. Further, she placed Arabic in
the arms of the figure since the language is accompanied by a great deal of
gesticulation. The colour black illustrates her ‘mourning’, since she does
not have many opportunities to speak Arabic today. The two squares that
replace the eyes in the portrait symbolise English, the language of the news
programs that she follows on television. These squares are yellow, thereby
mirroring the light of the television screen. Esraa refers with a playful tone
to her ‘artistic freedom’ and laughs when she realises that she has painted
her heart on the right-hand side of her body.
The second portrait is by Tekle, a man in his sixties, originally from
Eritrea. He draws his portrait in silence and with concentration.
Afterwards, he explains: the Swedish language is in the head since
‘foreigners’ like him have to ‘think a lot’ when they talk. The head is
coloured red, he clarifies, because Swedes get easily burned in the sun.
Further, he refers to Tigrinya as his roots, placing this language at the feet
in the image. The feet are black, representing the ‘dark skin’ of the people
in his country. These are people who regularly walk barefoot (since the
weather permits it), and are often poor (shoes are expensive). Unlike Esraa,
for Tekle the colours that he used in his portrait do not mainly symbolise
feelings and emotions, but a more practical, cultural reality. The other
languages that he masters are Amharic (official language of the neigh–

4 The names of the research participants (Esraa and Tekle) are pseudonyms.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 203-222 − ISSN: 2499-930X

210 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.13
 Art as a Trigger for Reflection in Sociolinguistic Migration Research

bouring country Ethiopia) and English (learned at high school). He refers to

these languages as ‘useful clothes’ (a yellow sweater and green pants) that
can be put on and off when needed. The hands of the portrait are painted in
blue. Tekle remarks that his ‘fingers are Italian’, since the Italians (Eritrea
was an Italian colony 1890-1947) are good ‘hand workers’, something he
claims to have inherited. In earlier meetings with Tekle, he always referred
to the difficulties ‘having a black face’ in Sweden and being subjected to
discrimination. Nothing on this topic came up when he commented on his
language portrait. In fact, he expressed pity for Swedes since so many of
them are sensitive to the sun and have difficulties in understanding
‘migrant Swedish’.
There are significant differences to be found in these two narrated
explications that can be explained by taking the research participants’
different cultural-, educational-, and linguistic backgrounds into account.
However, what the participants have in common is that they do not
categorise the languages that they speak as either their first language,
second language, third language, and so on. Instead, they refer to their
linguistic resources as a whole, a linguistic repertoire, in which different
languages complement each other and are used in different contexts for
different purposes (e.g., Busch, 2017; 2018).
Moreover, my conversations with the participants about their language
portraits often created a translanguaging space where the participants used
several different languages when they explained the content of their
portraits (Wei, 2011; Bradely & Atkinson, 2019). This took place, for
instance, when Esraa learned that I speak French and then changed from
speaking Swedish over to French. Subsequently, she continued her
explication by mixing the two languages, sometimes even adding English
words. This act of translanguaging was performed without comment (it
was considered as normal) since the different languages that she used were
immediately connected with her personal experiences and attitudes
towards the languages she was talking about. Even Tekle engaged in
translanguaging, by exploiting a well-established strategy of replacing
Swedish words and expressions that were difficult for him to pronounce
with English terms so as to ensure that he was understood.
Consequently, the participants presented themselves as multilingual
subjects when they made their comments about their language portraits. A

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 203-222 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.13 211
 Katrin Ahlgren

notable aspect of their narrative explications is that the portraits produced

a distance that provided space for an interesting form of self-reflection to
take place. This was manifested when the participants occasionally shifted
from talking about themselves in the first person (I) to the third person
(s/he) or by using impersonal pronouns (one, you, it). In the drawings, they
could see their own faces and bodies on paper, thereby gaining insight into
themselves from another perspective – from a visual representation. This
shift in perspective can be related to Levinas’ concept of face; the portraits
enabled the participants to enter into an ethical moment; taking up a
particular relationship with themselves, by seeing themselves as an ‘other’.
According to Levinas, art can be described in terms of a doubling of reality
(Hofmeyr, 2007; Cohen, 2016 p. 173). However, he does not restrict art
objects to only the visual product, but also considers criticism to be an
essential element of all artistic expression. In such critical comments, he
places particular emphasis on observations with a didactic value (Cohen,
2016 p. 184). The use of language portraits as a methodological tool gives
space for these aspects (visual representations, narrative explications,
critical- and didactic comments) to emerge.

3. Poetic transcriptions

In my project, I have developed a practice of creating poetic sequences of

the research participants’ biographical narratives. The approach stems from
an anthropological tradition where certain linguists re-transcribe narratives
(initially American native folk stories previously presented in prose) in a
particular poetic layout (e.g., Rothenberg & Tedlock, 1970). According to
Dell Hymes (1981; 2003), the pioneer of the field ethnography of
communication, oral talk has an inherent poetic organisation, since it is
always performed in shorter sequences, in so-called discourse units. Hymes
is also one of the originators of ethnopoetics, a rather complex method of
transcribing oral talk in a poetic form. This method builds on a faithful
rendering of a narrative, respecting the speakers’ discourse markers (words
such as oh, well, so, but, you know), false starts, and repetitions, etcetera
(see Hymes, 1981; 2003 for a more detailed description). Lately, a number
of sociolinguists have shown some interest in ethnopoetics, using this

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 203-222 − ISSN: 2499-930X

212 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.13
 Art as a Trigger for Reflection in Sociolinguistic Migration Research

method in the transcription of everyday narratives in different domains,

particularly in education, but also in other kinds of encounters such as
asylum applications and courtroom hearings (Blommaert, 2007; Blackledge
et al., 2016). The primary motive behind the adoption of this method has
been to give voice to people who otherwise would not have been heard since
they have been marginalised by society. In migration contexts, there has
also been an attempt to reconstruct and revaluate linguistic varieties that
deviate from normative ways of speaking (Blommaert, 2006).
In my own practice, I have been inspired by the field of ethnopoetics,
but also by a subsequent movement in the social sciences; the so-called
poetic inquiry approach that employs poetic transcription in a more creative
way than previously (Glense, 1997; Richardson, 1992). Scholars who engage
in poetic inquiry are often poets themselves and have consequently
established a somewhat subjective approach to the transcription process.
Following this approach, the point of the departure in my practice is
always the words of the participants, although I frequently reconstruct
their speech order in short sequences so to reveal thematic structures more
clearly. Further, I divide the participants’ speech sequences into lines,
verses, and stanzas (standard poetic terms, also used by Hymes, 1981; 2003)
based on the participants’ prosody, shorter pauses, and silences. In this
way, the transcriptions capture (to some extent) the original rhythm of the
performed narratives.
It is important to note that this transcription practice includes a close
analyse of the context, and (on the part of the transcriber) a choice as to
whether to accentuate (or not) certain aspects that are considered important
for the result of the study. However, transcribing and quoting research
participants always requires a discussion about the notion of reflexivity, in
order to give account for the ontological-, epistemological-, and method-
logical assumptions that lie behind the researcher’s approach (Bucholtz,
2000). Such concerns are related to ethical validity and also demand careful
interrogation of the question of who is entitled to tell the stories of others, as
well as how they should be told, and why they are told in a certain (Shuman,
2015; Kohler Riessman, 2015). In this context, note that feminist theorists
have have taken into critical consideration the risk of objectifying people by
reproduction of unequal relations, or by speaking for or about people who

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 203-222 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.13 213
 Katrin Ahlgren

normally do not express themselves in the public domain (e.g., Spivak,

1988; Shuman, 2015).
In my work, I refer to this poetic transcription practice as transformation
process in order to underline the fact that the narratives have undergone an
important change by my hand (this has been explained elsewhere, Ahlgren,
2014; in process). Furthermore, it should be noted that this kind of
transcriptions no longer contains any trace of the interactive aspects of the
conversation and discussion that took place with the participants (e.g.,
Bucholtz, 2000). Notwithstanding this, poetic transcriptions have several
advantages, not least for the dissemination and the reception of the
narratives, both inside and outside the academic world. Primarily, the
graphic form of the transcriptions, together with the fact that they do not
contain so many words, adds to their readability. The form also lends the
narratives a rhythm that adds life to them, something which facilitates the
reader’s connection with the narratives and imaginative engagement with
the experiences of the participants.
Moreover, poetic transcriptions accentuate the participants’ linguistic
creativeness and the resourcefulness in the way they speak, and can thus
instantiate alternative models of speakerhood (Márquez Reiter & Martín
Rojo, 2019). All such aspects cannot be perceived in the poetic sequence
created from Esraa’s narrative (cited in the introduction of this article) since
it is based on a conversation that was carried out mainly in French, and has
been translated into English. Tekle’s narrative (as represented in the poetic
sequence below) is given in a bilingual version that illustrates his particular
way of speaking Swedish and his translanguaging, since he incorporates
English words and phrases (in italics in the English version) when he
comments on his language portrait:

Svenska är i huvudet Swedish is in the head

du måste veta språket här you have to know the language here
annars är det inte möjligt otherwise it is not possible
to integrate to integrate

Tigrinja finns i fötterna Tigrinya is in the feet

hans barfötter är svarta his bare feet are black
tröjan är yellow och byxan green the sweater is yellow and the pants are green
like protection and relax like protection and relax
har jag Amharinja och English I have Amharic and English

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 203-222 − ISSN: 2499-930X

214 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.13
 Art as a Trigger for Reflection in Sociolinguistic Migration Research

Mina blå fingrar är italianer My blue fingers are Italians

för dom är duktiga med händerna since they are good with their hands
vi har lärt av dom we have learned from them
att jobba hårt to work hard

4. Toward participatory action research and the performative arts

In my research project, I use language portraits and poetic transcriptions as

complements to other more conventional means of collecting, analysing,
and representing migration narratives about language use. By combining
two established methodological approaches – for the first time in this
article – and by creatively adapting them for the purposes of my project, I
provide an example of the hybrid nature of research methods that are
inspired by the arts (Barone & Eisner, 2012, Chanmann Taylor, 2017). The
visual and textual representations that these methods give rise to can be
presented independently, with or without comment and further
explication, depending on the context in which the representations are
disseminated. An important potential of these representations lies in their
connotative force, that invites the audience to engage emotionally, to reflect
over their content, and to enter into a relationship with the individuals who
are represented (Mersch, 2019).
Another method that is particularly suitable for prompting migrants to
reflect over their experiences and emotions together with others (be they
other migrants, researchers, or artists) is participatory action research (Reason,
2008). In accordance with the critical approach in sociolinguistics,
participatory action research has an explicit objective to raise awareness of
the collective dimension of the participants’ situation so that inequalities in
society can be addressed. Similarly, participants can facilitate the
development of strategies and the discovery of alternative ways of coping
with issues that are difficult to talk about, by exploring such issues in
confidence and with trust. Earlier projects have shown that collaborative
practices through the performative arts, such as drama and theatre, can
create safe spaces in which lived experiences of language, as well as multiple
forms of belonging, can be narrated and explored (Lehtonen & Pöyhönen,
2019). Feelings of belonging – or rather non-belonging – are something that

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 203-222 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.13 215
 Katrin Ahlgren

the participants in my research project often report on in their biographical

narratives, especially when they talk about how they experience a sense of
in-betweenness (e.g., ibid.; Wiesman, 2012). This in-betweenness refers to
places, relationships, and languages from which they are dislocated, as well
as to places, relationships and the language in the new country.
Moreover, drama and theatre can help to strengthen the use of a new
language, since such performative practices build on collaboration and
communication; not only on oral communication but also on additional
means of expression such as gestures and other facial and body signs
(Schewe, 2004). Performative practices can also enable people with
alternative models of speakerhood and multilingual resources and to gain
recognition by acting on a stage in front of an audience.
Within the context of the performative arts, personal testimony has been
considered as a tool for empowering individuals through the sharing of
subaltern experiences caused by social injustices (Spivak, 1988). But since
such representations of victimhood can be problematic to share with others,
it has turned out to be rewarding to blur the borders between reality and
fiction. This approach has been implemented in a project in Italy, where
newly arrived refugees participated in a drama workshop to create a
performance in which they proposed an inverted migration journey,
thereby radically changing expectations and perspectives with respect to
actual human migration (Dalziel & Piazzoli, 2019). The Italian workshop
resulted in a performance that included people from the North (Europe)
and their migration journey to the South, i.e., to the African continent. Once
in the South, they encountered problems related to weather acclimatisation,
difficulties in language learning, and the struggle for integration in a
xenophobic environment. In the creation of this (sometimes) ironic and
humorous performance, the imagination of the participants filled in the
gaps of the narrative. Additionally, the performance was produced in a safe
space, where people from Nigeria and Cameron took up ‘expert’ positions
by virtue of the fact that they possessed knowledge and skills about the
language and society that was on display in the performance, the project
turned out to be empowering and beneficial for the participants.
In Sweden, there are several ongoing projects where migrants are
working together with artists to produce drama performances. The group
Acting for Change is one example of collaboration where migrants from

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 203-222 − ISSN: 2499-930X

216 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.13
 Art as a Trigger for Reflection in Sociolinguistic Migration Research

Syria, Eritrea, and Afghanistan share their experiences of creating a new

home in Sweden (Malmberg Linnman, 2018). One of their performances,
Home or About Love, is based on the participants’ thought and narratives.
This performance is intimately intertwined with Del amor (teatro de
animales), a play by the Spanish writer, Fédérico García Lorca, where an
absurd and humorous intrigue gives account for how a dove, a pig, a
donkey, and a nightingale discuss their liberation from human oppression.
Another example from Sweden is TeaterInterAkt (2019), a community
theatre group that base their performances on documentary material,
collected through interviews and workshops. In No Border Musical, they
portray an imagined utopian future, where everybody has the right to
settle wherever they want. In the performance, they refer to the European
migration ‘crisis’ and the policy of closed borders as a bizarre condition
and a situation that recalls the past, when refugees were forced to live
without papers and without rights.
Enabling migrants to create a distance from their own experiences and
allowing them to step outside the role of the victim permits the enactment
of new, powerful narratives where these individuals re-acquire the agency
to transform their life world (Dalziel & Piazzola, 2019). In such a process,
being acknowledged by an audience is of particular importance, since it is
an avenue by which they can relate to society and the surrounding world.
Moreover, it is a method which can be used to position ‘bodies in a space’
in a theatrical setting that proposes and offers up a relationship to a wider
audience outside the academic world. Having said this, we return to
Levinas’ reflections about art. For him, the ethical aspect of this encounter
(between the participants and the audience) is fundamental, because it
relates to the vulnerability of the other – in moments of joy and pleasure, as
well as in moments of discomfort and suffering. It is, however, important to
underline that when Levinas talks about the face of the other, this should
not primarily be construed as referring to a person’s uniqueness,
emphasising the fact that each and every person is different, whether this
be by dint of the person’s ethnicity, language, class, gender, religion, or any
other biological or cultural difference (Cederberg, 2010). The otherness of
the other is to be found in the precise sense of the human as such and one’s
encounter with the other. According to Levinas, art initiates an ability, in
the viewer, to see the other. In that sense, performative art is perfectly

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 203-222 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.13 217
 Katrin Ahlgren

aligned with his idea of how the face is revealed: the body and the language
of the other opens up an arena of shared experience, creating empathy
through a change of perspective. This is an area of central importance to the
creation of a sense of solidarity in society.

Concluding remarks

The application of creative methods that are inspired by the arts to

sociolinguistic migration research enables researchers to explore subjective
descriptions, emotions, and ideologies that are intimately related to the
research participants’ language trajectories and linguistic repertoires. The form
of representations that these methods offer – visual, textual, and perform-
ative representations – invites the receiver (the observer/reader/audience)
to enter the life-world of the research participants. The invitation is moreover
a proposal, the purpose of which is to facilitate understanding of the
participants’ perspectives – not necessarily in terms of identification – but,
rather, in terms of an emotional confrontation that creates a relationship
with the examined persons (Mersch, 2019).
Invoking Levinas’ reflections about art is a way to illustrate how arts-
based methods can create empathy and compassion and trigger critical
reflection that enables people to react to social injustices. In the present
study, the injustice is instantiated by the monolingual norm as opposed to a
multilingual reality. This injustice pertains not only to Sweden and the
northern part of Europe, but also to countries in the Mediterranean region.
One might wish to talk about arts-based methods in terms of resistance to
more conventional methods, since they allow for the exploration of
creativity – linguistic as well as aesthetic – and challenge established
principles in qualitative research. Not least by offering new ways of
communicate research finding and make them more accessible to larger
and diverse audiences. Moreover, one can also highlight the dimension of
reinsurance that this kind of method provides since they offer a way of
blurring borders – not only between methodological approaches but also
between reality and the imagination. Thereby, they offer ‘protection’ to the
individual research participant since this kind of representations are
obviously based on a construction of reality (something that immediately

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 203-222 − ISSN: 2499-930X

218 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.13
 Art as a Trigger for Reflection in Sociolinguistic Migration Research

invokes a discussion of reflexivity). This protection is also in place when

the research participants comment on their language portraits instead of
themselves, or performon a stage (as one of several dramatis personæ).
Considering oneself as another is a face-saving activity that satisfies an
ethical concern which should be taken in consideration in further
discussions about validity in arts-based research (Goffman, 1967).
This article has focused on the outcomes, the results – the
representations – that arts-based methods give rise to and their ability to
engage an audience – inside and outside the academic world. Further, it
has elaborated on how such arts-based methods can raise awareness in
research participants, thereby enabling them to learn about themselves and
to build (positive) recognition for their multilingual resources. This has
been done by respecting the claim that arts-based methods have the ability
not only to show how the world is, but also why it is thus, and how it can
be transformed.

References

Ahern, L. (2001). Language and Agency. Annual Review of Anthropology, 30, 130-37.
Ahlgren, K. (2014). Narrativa identiteter och levande metaforer i ett andraspråksperspektiv
[Narrative identities and living metaphors from a second language perspective]. Disser-
tations in Language Education. Stockholm: Stockholm University.
Armengaud, F. (2019). On Obliteration: An Interview with Françoise Armengaud concern-
ing the Work of Sonso, in Emmanuel Levinas On Obliteration. THINK ART Series of the
Institute for Critical Theory: Zurich University of the Arts and the Centre for Arts and
Cultural theory. Zurich: Université de Zurich.
Barone, T. & Eisner, E. (2012). Arts based research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Blackledge, A., Creese, A. & Hu, R. (2016). The structure of everyday narrative in a city
market: An ethnopoetics approach. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 20(5), 654-676.
Blommaert, J. (2006). Ethnopoetics as functional reconstruction: Dell Hymes’ narrative view
of the world. Functions of Language, 13, 255-275.
Blommaert, J. (2007). Applied Ethnopoetics, in M. Bamberg (ed.) Narrative – State of the Art.
(pp.215-224) Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Blommaert, J. (2010). The sociolinguistics of globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Bradley, J. & Atkinson, L. (2019). Translanguaging and bricolage: Meaningmaking and colla-
borative ethnography in community arts, in E. Moore, J. Bradley & J. Simpson (eds.)
Translanguaging as transformation: The collaborative construction of new linguistic realities.
Bristol: Mulitilingual Matters.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 203-222 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.13 219
 Katrin Ahlgren

Bucholtz, M. (2000). Politics of transcription. Journal of Pragmatics, 32(10), 1439-1465.

Busch, B. & Reddemann, L. (2013). Mehrsprachigkeit, Trauma und Resilienz. Zeitshrift für
Psychotraumatologie, 11(3), 23–33.
Busch, B. (2016). Methodology in biographical approaches in applied linguistics, Working
Papers in Urban Language & Literacies 187.
Busch, B. (2017). Expanding the Notion of the Linguistic repertoire: On the Concept of
Spracherleben – The Lived Experience of Language, Applied Linguistics, 38(3), 340-358.
Busch, B. (2018). The language portrait in multilingualism research: Theoretical and
methodological considerations. Working Paper in Urban Languages & Literacies 236.
Cahnmann Taylor, M. (2017). Arts-Based Approaches to Inquiry in Language Education, in
K. King, Y.-L. Lai & S. May (eds.) Research Method in Language and Education.
Encyclopedia of Language and Education. Springer Link.
Cederberg, C. (2010). Resaying the human. Levinas beyond humanism and antihumanism.
Stockholm: Södertörn Doctoral Dissertations.
Cohen, R. (2016). Levinas on Art an Aestheticism: Getting “Reality and its Shadow” Right.
Levinas Studies, 11, 149-194.
Glense, C. (1997). That rare feeling: Re-presenting research through poetic transcription.
Qualitative Inquiry, 3(2), 202-221.
Dalziel, F. & Piazzoli, E. (2019). “It comes from you” Agency in adult asylum seekers’
language learning through Process Drama. Language Learning in Higher Education, 9(1), 7-
32.
Duchêne, A. & Heller, M. (2012). Language in late capitalism: Pride and profit. New York:
Routledge.
Hofmeyr, B. (2007). "Isn't Art an Activity that Gives Things a Face?" Levinas on the Power of
Art. Image & Narrative, 18, 1-10.
Hymes, D. (1981). "In Vain I Tried to Tell You": Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics. Phila-
delphia: University Press.
Hymes, D. (2003). Now I Know Only So Far: Essays in Ethnopoetics. London: University of
Nebraska Press.
Goffman, E. (1967). Interaction rituals in face-to-face behavior. Chicago: Aldine.
Kohler Riessman, C. (2015). Entering the Hall of Mirrors. Reflexivity and Narrative
Research, in A. De Fina & A. Georgakouplou (eds.) The Handbook of Narrative Analysis.
(pp. 219-238) Chichseter, West Sussex, Malden, MA: John Wiley & son.
Kramsch, C. (2009). The multilingual subject. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Krumm, H.-J. & Jenkins, E.-M. (2001) Kinder und ihtre Sprachen – lebendige Mehrsprachigkeit:
Sprachenportraits gesammelt und kommentiert von Hans Jürgen Krumm. Wien: Eviva.
Lehtonen, J. & Pöyhönen, S. (2019). Documentary theatre as a platform for hope and social
justice, in E. Anttila & A. Suominen (eds.) Critical Articulations of Hope from the
Margins of Arts Education. International Perspectives and Practices. (pp. 31-44) London:
Routledge.
Levinas, E. (1987). Philosophy and the idea of Infinity, in collection H.L. van Breda, Centres
d’Archives-Husserl, Collected Philosophical Papers. Phaenomenologica, 100, 47-55.
Levinas, E. (2004). Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence. Paris: Le livre de Poche.
Leavy, P. (2019). Handbook of Arts-Based Research. New York, NY: Guilford Press.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 203-222 − ISSN: 2499-930X

220 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.13
 Art as a Trigger for Reflection in Sociolinguistic Migration Research

Lindberg, I. & Sandwall, K. (2017). Conflicting Agendas in Swedish Adult Second Language
Education, in C. Kerfoot & K. Hyltenstam (eds.) Entangled Discourses: South-North Orders
of Visibility. London: Routledge.
Malmberg Linnman, M. (2018). Home or About Love [HOME eller Om kärleken]. Acting for
Change. Retrieved from http://www.tgvs.se
Márquez R. & Martín Rojo, L. (2019). Experiences of speakerhood: Migrant speakers’ battles
for inclusion in traditionally monolingual and bilingual contexts. International Journal of
the Sociology of Language, 257.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945). Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard.
Mersch, D. (2019). Levinas the Ethics of the Arts: And Epilogue, in Emmanuel Levinas On
Obliteration. THINK ART Series of the Institute for Critical Theory: Zurich University of
the Arts and the Centre for Arts and Cultural theory: Zurich: Université de Zurich.
Milani, T. (2013). Språkideologiska debatter i Sverige, in K. Hyltenstam & I. Lindberg (eds.)
Svenska som andraspråk – i forskning, undervisning och samhälle [Swedish as a second
language – in research, teaching and society]. Lund: Studentlitteratur.
Savin-Baden, M. & Wimpenny, K. (2014). A Practical Guite to Arts-related Research. Rotter-
dam: Sence Publishers.
Schewe, M. (2004). Theatre in Education, in Handbuch Theaterarbeit in sozialen Feldern
[Handbook Theatre Work in Social Fields]. Frankfurt: Brandes & Aspel.
Stroud, C. (2015). Linguistic citizenship as utopia. Multilingual Margins: A journal of
multilingualism from the periphery 2(2), 7-21.
TeaterInterAkt (2019) No Border Musical. Retrieved from: http://teaterinteract.se
Pavlenko, A. (2007). Autobiographic Narratives as Data in Applied Linguistics. Applied
Linguistics, 28(2), 163-188.
Pavlenko, A. (2012). Multilingualism and emotions, in M. Martin-Jones, A. Blackledge & A.
Creese (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Multilingualism. (pp. 454-469) London: Routledge.
Pennycook, A. (2004). Critical moments in TESOL praxicum, in B. Norton & K. Toohey (eds.)
Critical Pedagogies and Language Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Piirto, J. (2002). The question of quality and qualifications: Writing inferior poems as
qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 15(4), 431-445.
Pujolar, J. (2019). Linguistic mudes: an exploration over the linguistic constitution of
subjects, in Marquez, R. & Rojo, L. (eds.) Linguistics of Participation and Exclusion. New
Speakers’ Struggles for Mobility in Europe, International Journal of the Sociology of
Language, 257, 165-189.
Reason, P. & Bradbury, H. (2008). The Sage Handbook of Action Research: Participative Inquiry
and Practice. London: Sage Publication.
Richardson, L. (1992). The consequences of poetic representation, in C. Ellis & M.G. Flaherty
(eds.) Investigating subjectivity: Research on lived experience. (pp. 125-137) Newbury Park:
Sage Publication.
Ricœur, P. (1983-1985). Temps et récit. Tome I-III. Paris: Seuil.
Ricœur, P. (1990). Soi-même comme un autre. Paris: Seuil.
Rothenberg, J. & Tedlock, D. (1970). Statement of Intention. Alcheringa.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 203-222 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.13 221
 Katrin Ahlgren

Shuman, A. (2015). Story Ownership and Entitlement, in A. De Fina & A. Georgakouplou

(eds.) The Handbook of Narrative Analysis. (pp. 38-55) Chichseter, West Sussex, Malden,
MA: John Wiley & son.
Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak?, in C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (eds.) Marxism
and the Interpretation of Culture. (p. 271-313) Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
The AILA Research Network on Creative Inquiry (2019). Retrieved from http://creative-
inquiryaila.worldpress.com
Wang, Q., Coemans, S., Sigesmund R. & Hannes, K. (2017). Art-based methods in socially
engaged research practice: a classification framework. Art/Research International: A trans-
disciplinary Journal, 2(2), 7-39.
Weisman, H. (2012). Penser entre les langues. Paris: Albin Michel.
Wei, L. (2011). Moment Analysis and translanguaging space: Discursive construction of
identities by multilingual Chinese youth in Britain. Journal of Pragmatics, 43(5), 1222-1235.
Wodak, R. (2015). The politics of fear: What right-wing populist discourses mean. Los Angeles:
Sage Publications.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 203-222 − ISSN: 2499-930X

222 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.13
 A Conversation on Cinematic Representation and Resistance in the
films "Altered Landscapes" (2016) by Juan del Gado
and "The People Behind the Scenes" (2019), by Elsa Claire Gomis

JUAN DEL GADO* & ELSA CLAIRE GOMIS**

* Qisetna, United Kingdom
** University of East Anglia, United Kingdom

Abstract
This is a conversation between Juan del Gado and Elsa Gomis about their respective films.
Juan del Gado has made the film Altered Landscapes (2016), which is the first part of
a cinematically projected triptych entitled Drifting Narratives. Elsa Gomis has produced the
film The People behind the Scenes (2019), a full-length film, which builds on interviews and
memory work and address current visual representations of migration by the Mediterra-
nean.

Keywords: Film, Refugees, Mediterranean, Representation, Migration.

1. Choice of methods

Elsa Gomis: The name of your film is “Altered Landscapes”. Landscapes

are one of the main pictorial genres chosen by visual artists. Why did you
choose to focus on this genre to deal with migration?
Juan del Gado: There are many ways to look at landscapes: I am looking
at it as both a physical place and as a symbolic place, a mental landscape
that has been culturally “naturalised” as the European landscape.
Generally speaking, the landscape is everything you can see when you look
across an area of land, including hills, rivers, buildings, trees and plants. As
symbolic landscape, its significant meaning goes beyond what it simply
looks like due to cultural associations.

EG: Which cultural background did you had in mind?

JdG: As Europeans we have a particular perspective, a particular way to
think about Europe. What is our definition of a European landscape, rural

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 223-233 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.14
 Juan del Gado & Elsa Claire Gomis

and urban, from a historic and contemporary perspective and how is this
identity used to contrast with that of the "other" landscape?

JdG: You intertwine footage shot by your grandfather of Mediterranean

places with those interviews with local residents of Malta, who share their
stories about their bond to that sea as you came back to “shoot images
embedded in my memory”. You build the story through interviewing
residents, a fashion designer, fishermen, film location manager, as well as
those who were transiting this place, i.e. tourists, EU data collectors. The
narratives are presented as flows of words in the shared space (of this
island). What were you planning to achieve through this method?
EG: In relation to the theoretical research I pursue in my PhD, the film
deals with current visual representations of migration by the Mediterra-
nean. Following the Greek writer Nicki Giannari (2017, p. 21), I believe that
migrants who arrive in Western countries “pass and conceive us”. They
pass because their great majority is led to temporary camps when not fac-
ing homelessness and deportations. For Giannari migrants “think us” be-
cause they mirror European democracies and in particular of their misfunc-
tioning. Border crossings thus constitute as such a reading grid of Western
social behaviours. From there, if analysing the passage left by today’s exiles
is a source of reflection for European societies, the production of images
intended to represent them would thus be an anthropological tool to think
migration policies applied to them.

EG: To get back to your title, what has ‘altered’ these landscapes?
JdG: I am using ‘altered’ in the sense of changing our perception of the
landscape. The landscape captured in the film has witnessed something
that we have not been able to perceive. It has witnessed an influx of
migrating bodies carrying with them an undetectable pain. The landscape
has had physical contact with them. It feels, senses and absorbs their
trauma, on which they have left an invisible imprint. In the film the
landscape screams silently from this trauma. In the film, the main character
is crossing the geopolitical countryside of the Balkans and eventually
arriving at the increasingly fortified borders at Calais, France. These
landscapes have been ‘altered’ by the fences and panopticon watchtowers
built to contain those on the move and ultimately defend borders.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 223-233 − ISSN: 2499-930X

224 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.14
 A Conversation on Cinematic Representation and Resistance

EG: The landscapes are filmed as empty spaces, which render them
impersonal and interchangeable. Yet, the places you chose to shoot were
specific places and ‘hotspots’ in Greece (Macedonia and Calais) that host
refugees. How do you explain these choices?
JdG: In my research, into an on-going project called Qisetna: Talking
Syria, I interviewed many people who were either displaced inside their
country, in transit while attempting to cross borders, and those who were
stranded, waiting to move on, in countries such as Greece, France and
Turkey. Many of those itinerant people spoke of their feelings of being
invisible despite the massive influx of global images from the mainstream
media that we’re addressing this issue.
Before May 2015, people on the move were crossing borders by hiding in
cardboard boxes allocated for luggage in the coaches traveling from
Istanbul to Greece. In Athens and Thessaloniki, they were at the mercy of
an international web of smugglers who only saw them as “merchandise in
transit”. During two weeks in Orestiadas, Idomene (Greece) and Gevgelija,
(Macedonia), I listened to the experiences of many young Syrians.

EG: What did they tell you?

JdG: One night I met Abdullah, a lawyer from Damascus, who after two
months of being stranded in Athens as a result of trying to cross the border,
lamented to me “how much else do I have to erase from myself so that you
can see me?” His eyes were enquiring. He wondered about why all this was
happening. Why after having lost everything and risking his and his
family‘s lives, fleeing his hometown, which was now converted into rubble
-his world abruptly wiped out- why after surviving all this, he felt he was
still being treated as a criminal and had to hide from the border police?
“We are not criminals, we are victims of war, and we need help” I heard
later in the days I spent at the Jungle in Calais.

JdG: And yourself, how did you choose the people you interviewed?
EG: To deal with those who pass, the film's bias is to focus on those who
remain, namely on those who are not led to leave. For this, I conducted
around forty interviews of local residents in various locations of Malta,
Gozo and Comino, the three islands that make up the Maltese archipelago.
The interviews were notably carried out with people who have an indirect,

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 223-233 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.14 225
 Juan del Gado & Elsa Claire Gomis

past or metaphorical relationship with exile. It could be elderly people

whose family experienced exile – such as my own parents and grandpar-
ents-, a statistician gathering data about migrants of an EU’s organisation,
an ornithologist specialised in migratory birds or a passionate reader of
Ulysses' Odyssey. Besides, as my research is related to current media and art
images of migration, I also wanted to meet people whose activity is related
to the notion of ‘representation’ in the broadest sense: a designer of haute
couture clothing, a traditional weaver or the person in charge of renting
Malta's film studios. Yet, relationships between these two ‘kinds’ of inter-
viewees appeared: the fashion designer’s work is related to the successive
settlements to which the island has been subjected; the weaver, whose chil-
dren are abroad, has the same activity as Ulysses wife; the man renting the
film studios has a particular interest in shipwreck films such as Titanic. Al-
ternating the interviews of people with these backgrounds allowed me to
gradually put in place my subject, while avoiding today’s mainstream im-
ages on migration. Hereby, the film however also offers a reflection on
these very images.

2. Counteracting the mainstream

EG: Since the Romantic period, artists, in particular painters, use

depictions of the landscape as tools for conveying inner states and moods.
This artistic process also seems to be important for your work. Why did
you find it relevant to convey the feeling of exile and to counter the
dominant images of the “crisis” of migrants? The urban and city landscape
you shot seems to correspond to a romantic vision in which natural
environment reflects the mood. In what way do you think it counteracts
mainstream images of the migrant ‘crisis’?
JdG: The city represents a territory through which the character
wanders, between past and the present, searching for clues: “I need a sign”.
As the narrative continues, he becomes increasingly immersed in the urban
space that is charged with layers of historical significance: “I live in a world
of silence”. It seems the character has become both an individual but also a
metaphor of this entity named Europe, a symbolic body that is changing:
“Everything I know, has started to disintegrate”. Yet, the body remains off

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 223-233 − ISSN: 2499-930X

226 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.14
 A Conversation on Cinematic Representation and Resistance

camera, only his voice over is interacting with the influx of images of a
harbour, deserted streets, silenced monuments…

JdG: Your filming style seems to fall into the traditional documentary
storytelling. The narrative is structured in chapters or headlines - To fly, To
imagine, To count…- all inviting the viewer to think of the filmmaker’s inten-
tions. It that what you were looking for?
EG: My Spanish forefathers settled in Algeria at the time when this terri-
tory was colonised by France and became 'pieds-noirs'. The geopolitical
and social contexts of the communities now exiled by the Mediterranean
and those of the 1962 returnees are totally different. Trying to draw a com-
mon sense of exile that can bring together exiles from yesterday and today
is the challenge. When my own family embodies a national past that does
not pass, namely France's colonial past, the search for a shared feeling with
those who suffer the repercussions of exploitation policies, particularly the
exploitation of natural resources that have since continued, is a perilous
exercise. However, involving my own family history was not premeditated
when shooting in Malta. Back from the archipelago, I looked again at my
digitised family archives, which I know very well due to previous works
from them, and I realised that I had unconsciously chosen to film situations
or objects that had been filmed by my grandfather in Algeria. These family
archives constitute my imagination of exile. They made an imprint on the
choices of images shot 2018 in Malta and shaped the editing process. I de-
cided to organise the film around the twin images (those of today and those
of yesterday) and to title according to these reminiscences, as chapters of an
imaginary research in the pursuit of images of exile.

JdG: What connects these various visual mediums?

EG: The mixture between family archives and contemporary high-
definition images, but also, between videos taken on mobile phones or
posted on YouTube, is organised around a common thread: that of the circu-
lation of visual and auditory motifs that bear the imaginary of exile by the
Mediterranean.

EG: You once told me that you were inspired by this statement of
Malcolm X: “If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 223-233 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.14 227
 Juan del Gado & Elsa Claire Gomis

people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the
oppressing.” How does this idea influence your artistic practice?
JdG: As a filmmaker and moving image artist, I want my stories to
develop without imposing a strict meaning. By this means, I want to detach
my film practice from mainstream cinema, leaving a certain level of
ambiguity and therefore, encouraging the viewer to engage with the story
more personally. I am very aware of the role and responsibility I have as an
artist and a producer of film culture who has become preoccupied with the
representation and the narratives of displacement.

EG: How do you implement this responsibility?

JdG: As I see it, the narrative of displacement is strongly connected with
the landscape in which they occur. In this sense, I wanted to animate and
activate the landscape and give it a voice. My decision is influenced by my
interest in the aesthetics of the sublime, which revolves around the
relationship between human beings and the grand, yet terrifying, aspects of
nature. In the film, nature has been forever marked by the traces of those
who fled and transited through it. As viewers we react to a cluster of
images of a landscape that is strikingly bright, of hills, trees, a river. All this
whiteness seems to wash out the memories, those words the character
presented in the grainy, shaky footage during the first part of the film, such
as the traces of torn clothes caught in a tree, fluttering in the howling wind,
echoes of the barking dogs that punctuate the nocturnal journey.

JdG: On your side, did you deliberately choose editing certain sequences
to make statements about the body and the place, i.e. swimmers floating on
the swimming pool and wrecked ships in the nearby coast?
EG: Absolutely. Intertextuality, i.e. the relationship between the different
registers of images, is arranged in a triangular way between the archives,
the film in progress and the media images. Left out of focus or only evoked
through fragmentary motifs scattered in several places in the film, media
images connect the words collected today with yesterday's family docu-
ments. The images whose circulation and repetition are the most significant
are therefore used as a lever to build a dialogue between different image
formats but also between points of views. This dialogue shapes the state-
ments you are mentioning, which are formulated through the film into

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 223-233 − ISSN: 2499-930X

228 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.14
 A Conversation on Cinematic Representation and Resistance

chapters headings. The latter can be seen as so many proposals opening

way to an alternative imaginary of migration by sea.

EG: These empty landscapes, which could be anywhere, also convey the
feeling of a rather universal experience. Are they a reaction of the graphic
images of the ‘crisis’ to which it difficult to identify as Westerners?
JdG: Yes. The narrator tells the stories of refugees but the moodily shot
black and white film never shows the actual characters, but instead
presents the journey through which they chose to travel, the vacuum left by
the migrant body. This emphasis on emptiness of the space with no human
presence is in sharp contrast to the actual deluge of images published by
the mainstream media in recent times. Ultimately, the landscape becomes
the witness of what remains as an un-representable wound.

JdG: Your film also explores the territory, including the underwater ar-
chaeological remains. In what seems to be an irony, the narrative avoids the
current systematic portrait of the Mediterranean Sea as a grave in which
thousands of people are drowned. Can the leaving out that “other” content,
the bodies that tragically have disappeared in the sea, be read as a counter-
act to the images from mainstream media?
EG: Dealing with current images of exile without showing them was the
goal. Before leaving Britain for Malta, I analysed a lot of media images pro-
duced to capture the migration “crisis”. This work led me to gather them
into a narrow range of materials, colours and motifs dealing with humani-
tarian rescues at sea. They display precarious ships, life jackets, rescue
boats or survival blankets.

JdG: In particular, it seems that you had one famous media image in
mind…
EG: Yes, the iconic photograph of Aylan Kurdi’s body. It has been the
subject of numerous reframing and quotations, also occupied a significant
place in these typologies of images. The film is based on both the intense
repetition and circulation of these motifs. More precisely, it relies on the
imprint that these circulations leave in the imaginaries. I considered that
the imprint of these motifs were powerful enough to evoke the rest of the
images they convey into fragmented and implicit ways: by showing re-

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 223-233 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.14 229
 Juan del Gado & Elsa Claire Gomis

mains of inflatable boats on rocky shores, boats in the form of shreds on

rocks, canoes stowed on liners or life jackets stored on shelves. Regarding
the photography of the Aylan Kurdi, I relied on its similarity with the
iconological theme of the Pietà, present in the gestures of a British tourist
and in the frescoes of several churches in the archipelago. Avoiding to pic-
ture what you designate as the ‘other content’, namely as the most burning
images with regard to migration, is indeed an attempt to propose alterna-
tive ways of representing it. Not recreating them or not directly showing
them provides a reflection on the way mainstream images colonise Western
viewers' imaginations. Their absence helps shaping the way a collective im-
age is built.

3. Specific questions about respective arts and inspirations

EG: Another theme of your work is apparently mutation, in particular

the metamorphosis of an insect. Why did you make this choice and by
which other means do you think images can convey this experience that is
inherent to exile?
JdG: The film is a journey that starts in a darkened room punctuated by
flickering lights that penetrate through the windows. The perception of
reality is different at night than in the daylight. The narrator reminds us
that, “we are afraid of darkness”, but for him “I am terrified of the reality
that surrounds me.” As viewers we might ask of which particular horror he
is terrified? He is describing a ‘maladie’ that is affecting his body. The
transformation of the landscape is echoed by the irreversible physical
change as the main character transforms.

EG: One has in mind Franz Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ when seeing this
sequence…
JdG: Actually, two pieces of writing have inspired me in the making of
the film: Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915) and Susan Sontag’s
Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), which look at our human response to
other people‘s suffering. The process of mutation encapsulates the core
drive of this film: the character is forced to move from where he is “out of
fear of becoming paralysed”. Again, the narrative navigates this ambiguity,

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 223-233 − ISSN: 2499-930X

230 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.14
 A Conversation on Cinematic Representation and Resistance

which triggers questions: why he is afraid of becoming paralysed? Where is

he moving from and to? What or who is the motivation that forces him to
move? Kafka's Metamorphosis is supposed to make us question our
existence and ask, "Why are we here? "What purpose does our existence
have?" and "Does it rest on what others think of us or are we valuable
enough in our feeble existences to overcome the obstacles of perception?"
These questions are particularly worth asking with regard to the existence
of those among us who are often perceived as less valuable.

EG: What is the moth representing?

JdG: The moth is an eerie presence, which marks the peak of the
narrative arch. The heavy breathing and voice will be irreversibly muted as
the insect is seen flying away from the darkness into a strikingly white and
luminous landscape. Words are replaced by the sounds of nature, including
the harrowing voice of the wind. This abrupt shift in the narrative seems to
evoke a sense that the immense emptiness produced in the individual by
forced exile and loss, which cannot be described with words (Manea, 2012).

JdG ‘The people behind the scenes’, a statement said by one of the tour-
ists about the current situation of migrants in Brexit’s Britain. This title
could also be interestingly applied to those who are also absent in the film,
the migrant bodies, whose narratives aren’t seen and yet are strongly felt.
What made you decide on the title?
EG: Exactly. The People Behind the Scenes, those who allow the show to
take place: these are the stowaways of our democracies, the essential but
invisible key to their functioning. As I mentioned earlier, following Gian-
nari (2017, p. 21), “They come, and they think us”. Those who pass are
those who, forced to play subordinate roles, allow the sequence, as a whole,
to appear true. Thus, the refugees housed in Cinecittà in the post-war pe-
riod gradually took the place of extras during the filming that took place
there. “The figure of the extra”, notes Marie-José Mondzain (2011, p. 289),
“operates as an indicator of credibility that gives the star and the story their
place in the real fabric of our history. An index of reality, without a name,
without glory or history, it alone perhaps gives fiction its support and de-
termines its plan for inscribing itself in a sensitive reality, both historical
and filmed”.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 223-233 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.14 231
 Juan del Gado & Elsa Claire Gomis

EG: To what extent have the various meetings you made on the field
affected your work?
JdG: These encounters had a profound impact on the way I later decided
to construct the narrative of this story. Altered Landscapes (2016) is the first
part of a cinematically projected triptych entitled Drifting Narratives, a
series of moving image works in which I continue my enquiry about
displacement and trauma while presenting the landscape as the only
witness to this chronicle of loss in which the human body remains invisible.
The darkness is punctuated by the menacing sound of barking dogs.

JdG: How do you see the European democratic regime applying to those
who are only seen as extras?
EG: Refugees, whose exploitation underpins the functioning of agricul-
ture and construction and whose surveillance feeds high technology
through national and European public markets, allow our national fictions
to exist. It seems that based on this intuition, between 200 and 300 asylum
seekers tried in vain to interrupt a performance of the Comédie Française
on the 16th of December 2018. The exiles would be the missing image of our
national films, which would nevertheless allow our democratic fictions to
take place. The arrival of the “pieds-noirs” through the Mediterranean al-
lows us to think about the French society of 1962, that of the exiles of the
years 2010 offers a reflection on the contemporary European Union.

EG: And you, do you see this occurring in today’s Europe?

JdG: In the film Altered Landscapes, I select the Acropolis of Athens, as a
departing point to develop a narrative that fluctuates between
documentary and fiction. The Acropolis is an ancient citadel located on a
rocky outcrop above the city and contains the remains of several ancient
buildings of great architectural and historic significance. It is considered
one of the most enduring symbols of Western civilization, a concept used
very broadly to conform to the heritage of ethical values and belief systems
that have their origin in Europe.

EG: Could you tell me more about some previous works that also deal
with migrations by the Mediterranean?

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 223-233 − ISSN: 2499-930X

232 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.14
 A Conversation on Cinematic Representation and Resistance

JdG: In Altered Landscapes I address the topics of loss and trauma, which
I had examined in a previous work, Fléchés Sans Corps (2003), an on-site
installation presented in the harbour of Cartagena, in Southern Spain in
2008. Fléchés Sans Corps was set up inside a shipping container covered by
sand and shoes and framed by a rear projection of seashore under a stormy
sky. The footage showed the endless ebb and flow of waves edited on
reverse mode: this view presents the sea as a menacing environment whose
monstrosity is revealed in the waves crashing against a rocky coastline. A
female voice emerges between the violent poundings of the water. Her
voice sounds like an elegiac song based on Rumi’s poem to those absent
bodies. Eventually the sea is perceived as a liminal space between reality
and dream. The lament continues evoking an incommensurable sense of
loss, due to the fate of the many young men drowned in the Strait trying to
cross from Morocco into Spain since 1989.

Image 1. On-site installation at the Cartagena’s Harbour, Spain (2008)

References

Giannari, N. & Didi-Huberman, G. (2017). Passer quoi qu’il en coûte. Paris: Minuit.
Kafka, F. (2015). Metamorphosis and other stories. London: Penguin.
Manea, N. (2012) The Fifth Impossibility: Essays on Exile and Language. Yale University Press.
Mondzain, M-J. (2011). Images (à suivre). Paris: Bayard.
Sontag, S. (2003), Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Hamish Hamilton Ltd

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 223-233 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.14 233
 Invisible Affections and Socialization to the Sexuality of Lesbians.
A Case Study in Italy

GIUSEPPE MASULLO
University of Salerno, Italy

Abstract
The article focuses on the process of socialization and sexuality of homosexual people,
examining the specific case of lesbians living in Salerno, a major city in southern Italy.
The essay highlights the path that women go through in maturing their sexual identity,
taking into account those relational contexts in which they find expression of their most
intimate desires and support to deal with the burden of double stigma related to the
condition of women and homosexuals. The analysis will highlight how “becoming sexual”
means above all accessing a universe of symbolic references typical of the L world – in terms
of practices, languages and representations – to which some women often adhere out of
need of acceptance, to get out of invisibility, while others distance themselves from them for
greater self-determination of their sexual conduct.

Keywords: Invisibility, Socialization, Sexuality, Affectivity, Lesbians.

1. Between invisibility and empowerment: being a lesbian in Italy today

Research on the lesbian population starts by considering a central aspect

of their condition, i.e., that they are at the intersection of a double process of
stigmatization, regarding both gender and sexual orientation (Crenshaw
K.W, 1989). Analogously difficult is their placement within the two
movements which most carried their instances: the feminist and the
homosexual. In the former, lesbians could share with other women the
struggle against patriarchy and male domination, but with divisions due to
the persistence, within the movement, of heteronormative orientations and
homophobic feelings (Wittig, 2001). These aspects are reversed in the LGBT
movement, where lesbians, while finding space to express their claims, are
still subordinate and invisible to the predominance of men in the public
space (both real and mediated, see Santostefano, 2008). As women, they

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 235-246 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.15
 Giuseppe Masullo

suffer the same oppressions regarding the persistence of a patriarchal model

that wants them confined to private life: as homosexuals, their invisibility is
stressed by the fact that the social representations of lesbianism are still
characterized by clichés. Indeed, lesbianism is still confused with a
friendship between women, or at most considered an erotic practice among
heterosexual women. Alternatively, it is analysed based on the model of
male homosexuality, which revolves mainly around sexuality (Chetcuti 2013;
Chamberland & Théroux-Séguin, 2009). Faccio & Foffano (2010) ascribe such
invisibility to the subordinate position experienced by women. They
highlight how in the past male homosexuality was stigmatized as
representing “half-men”, whose behaviours, attitudes and mannerisms
disappointed the social expectations of virility and masculinity, while
homosexual women have been spared these sufferings because their
relationships were often clandestine and invisible. Women were not at the
centre of the social scene, nor did they adopt attitudes against conventions,
and their sexuality has always been considered less transgressive, less
scandalous and improper. Therefore, not being forced to contradict society,
lesbians were able to keep themselves private.
This hypothesis aligns well with the studies carried out in Italy on the L-
population and aimed at distinguishing the peculiarities of their
representations and attitudes from those of homosexual men. The
condition of the latter, unlike for the other categories included under the
LGBT umbrella, has been widely studied.
On the context of Campania, theatre of our research, Corbisiero (2010)
took into account various aspects of the sexual identity of homosexual
people, including their practices. The survey belies clichés and highlights
instead that while sexuality was for both a central component of existence,
there were significant differences in their propensity towards stable or
exclusive relationships. 73% of lesbians declared to have a stable sexual
relationship with their partner, compared to 34% of gays, thus confirming
the hypothesis of a greater inclination of lesbians to monogamous and
stable relationships, like that of heterosexual women. The choice for a
stable relationship can be read as the result of social and cultural
conditioning, as it is more frequent among lesbians than among gays in the
north than in the south, in large cities, in middle classes and among non-
practising Catholics, but also among those who consider their

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 235-246 − ISSN: 2499-930X

236 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.15
 Invisible Affections and Socialization to the Sexuality of Lesbians

homosexuality as natural and respectable rather than among those whose

personal acceptance is only partial. Moreover, the more open and tolerant
is the context, the greater the possibility that self-esteem is preserved and
that the most radical choices, such as those of coexistence and parenting,
are visibly made (Faccio & Foffano, 2014).
The difference in how women live the homoerotic relationship is evident
in their preference, compared to men, for side-lining sexuality in favour of
affectivity, an aspect which generates substantial differences in the
narration of the sexual self between women and men. On coming out 1 ,
indeed, Trappolin (2011) documented that women often recount their
experiences and the awareness of their diversity through episodes of falling
in love, and the quality of the relationship with the beloved woman, and
some also include the theme of their subordination to the interests of men.
These data indicate that there are significant differences in behaviour,
concerning certain dimensions of sexuality, between homosexual men and
women, following the current literature on the topic (Barbagli & Colombo,
2007). The search for a stable partner and the relevance attributed to the
affective and relational dimension by women, compared to men, can also
be partly explained in the need to find in the couple, and therefore in the
partner, a model within which to be reflected, in order to affirm their
identity, if and when they experience loneliness as a result of the weight of
the double stigma. We must also remember that the socialization of
sexuality for heterosexual people is made easier on the basis of cultural
models learned from the family and other agencies of socialization (e.g. the
peer group), while more complex is the assumption of homosexual identity
for a teenager who needs models of reference that are not always found in
their context, where references are heteronormative and full of negative
stereotypes about homosexuality (Fidolini, 2015). Therefore, for the subject
to assume a balanced identity of their sexual self, it is fundamental that
they free themselves from those negative connotations, which, if
internalised, strongly affect self-esteem. The confrontation with other
homosexual people, and in particular with one’s partner, is thus the

1 For Trappolin (2011) the stories recounting women’s coming out include two themes:

the closet and the coming out. They can only be distinguished from an analytical point of
view since, in the narrative, they are interwoven by the subject.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 235-246 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.15 237
 Giuseppe Masullo

fundamental path through which the subject acquires sexual identity, since
Rinaldi states (2017:6), “becoming sexual means above all learning beliefs,
representations, preferences, evaluation systems and practices, assuming
specific roles and words within a process of sexual socialization that will
take place throughout our lives”. In the couple, the partner, as “significant
other”, is a reference to begin the process of socialization to sexuality, since,
impersonating the homosexual role, thanks to the presence of an equal
other, she can become an observer of herself, reflect on what she is doing,
self-regulate about the purposes and compare the role that the other
assigns her with her interpretation of this role, in a game of constant
references (Kurder, 1991).
Starting from these premises, the following part will examine the first
results of ongoing research on the processes of socialization to the sexuality
of homosexual people, examining the specific case of lesbians living in
Salerno, a city in southern Italy 2. It examines the relational plots in which
their most intimate desires are expressed, as well as support for dealing
with the double stigma related to their condition of homosexual women. In
addition to the classic channels of socialization, here are also considered
online dating application 3 , with the aim of clarifying how these new
communication tools help in accessing the L-world and its symbolic
references universe – in terms of practices, languages and representations –
but are also an expression of greater self-determination in one’s sexual
conduct.

2. Methodological aspects and findings of the case study

The results presented here refer to 20 self-declared lesbians identified

through a sampling of convenience and residing in the province of

The research was carried out in Salerno, a port city south-east of Naples, in Campania,
2

with a population of about 134.000 inhabitants,

3 The online dating application examined here is Wapa, considered one of the most

popular tools used by lesbian and bisexual women (in the context examined) to find a
partner. For further information on the functionalities of Wapa, please refer to the following
link: http://wapa-app.com/

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 235-246 − ISSN: 2499-930X

238 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.15
 Invisible Affections and Socialization to the Sexuality of Lesbians

Salerno 4. The data were collected mainly through biographical interviews

and directly involving some women since the first drafting of the research
design. In a social scenario where lesbians have little or no say in the
construction of the social meanings that concern them, their direct
involvement has proved to be fundamental to access without stereotypes
the orientations and the maps of education that, at the level of collective
life, guide the L-world of the context examined. After having noted the
socio-biographical characteristics of the women, the areas explored by the
biographical interview were:
– identity: aimed at investigating how women relate to their sexual self,
to their intimate world, to the expression of their desires in a context in
which the visibility of L women is compromised by the double stigma
woman /homosexual;
– relationships: which examines how the friendship and sentimental
bonds are fundamental for the process of socialization to lesbian sexuality
and, therefore, to access the L world and its cultural scenarios;
– space and visibility: which analyses the spaces dedicated to the
expression of LGBT sexuality; within this dimension, we also examined the
resources that the web (social networks, dedicated apps) makes available to
L women, trying to understand how they have helped the exit from
isolation, the construction of emotional and sexual ties with other women;
– of evaluations and opinions: in this section we wanted to explore the
opinions and evaluations that women express about the L world, trying to
understand how heteronormativity, based on male/female, homosexuality/
heterosexuality binarism helps to define both implicitly and explicitly how
women define and live themselves.

2.1. Discovering oneself a Lesbian: between homoerotic desires and relational anchors

My first girlfriend, my first kiss with a woman, was with a classmate of mine. I felt this
strange attachment to her: usually, I am a bit cold, but with her, I always sought a physical

4 For accessing the field of research and identifying the sample has been paramount the
contact with some exponents of gay associations (Arcigay Salerno) and the association
Famiglie Arcobaleno (Rainbow Families). In the identification and selection of the sample, we
tried to balance age, place of residence, occupation and educational qualifications of the
subjects involved.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 235-246 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.15 239
 Giuseppe Masullo

contact, even a hug, something that never happened to me with other people. So there the
first ‘alarm bells’ started, so I thought that maybe I was feeling something different. (F, 27
years old).

The experience recounted by the interviewee is emblematic, to the extent

that most of the interviews collected suggest that the first entry into the L-
world generally occurs by chance, through a friendship, a particular
affinity felt for that particular “person” and not on the basis of a general
homoerotic desire towards people of the same sex. All the stories examined
focus on the “affective”, sentimental dimension as an entrance into a world
of which little is often known, considering that, unlike male homosexuality,
lesbianism in our country, and in particular in the context examined, is
invisible. The difficulty, therefore, is often linked precisely to the absence of
codes and models of conduct through which to direct oneself in the
implementation of one’s sexual self.
The pressures to conform to social expectations regarding gender and
sexual models considered more appropriate for girls than boys can prove
even more oppressive in contexts, such as those examined, where the
families’ control on young women’s emotional and sexual conduct is quite
common and is underpinned by educational models still markedly distinct
by gender, for males and females (Iovine & Masullo, 2016). In the absence
of such models, it is the heteronormative references that guide the first
sentimental experiences of young women (Klinkenberg & Rose, 1994).
These models constitute a point of reference to evaluate not only
themselves but also other women, so the female sexuality is never
expressed directly, explicitly, in a relational game that tries to avoid, even
in the relationship between women, the negative stereotype associated with
those who live their sexuality more freely.

In my opinion, the aim is always that, to sleep with someone, but it is as if the woman
feels less guilty by building this sort of relationship/knowledge (...) among women there is
always this cultural heritage for which, if the woman sleeps with you on the first date, she is
a “whore” (C., 28 years old).

Getting to know other lesbians in this context is not an easy task, since,
as many of the interviewees point out, there are few meeting places for
LGBT people and those mostly in Naples. Other homoerotic spaces emerge,

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 235-246 − ISSN: 2499-930X

240 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.15
 Invisible Affections and Socialization to the Sexuality of Lesbians

especially for women, mostly coinciding with the informal contexts of

friendship networks and sports-related places. These two modes, often
mentioned in the interviews, constitute the prevalent ways to meet other
women in Salerno:

At first, I lied to myself saying: ‘no, well, it’s only with her. I don’t like women!’ Being, at
first, something I didn’t accept. What’s more, not having other friendships like that, I felt a
little lonely, very much so. Then, thanks to women’s football, I met people who are currently
my best friends, even lesbians, people older than me who have helped me a lot, orienting
me. I had, therefore, various experiences ‘so-and-so’, until I had this most important
experience with my ex (F., 27 years old).

As highlighted in the literature, access to the L world generally takes

place precisely from the first relationships established with other women,
that facilitate for the interviewees the process of coming out inside and
outside the LGBT community. The couple shares strategies to “cope” with
the difficulties experienced outside, both with the family and with the
wider society regarding their acceptance of themselves and the social
stigma associated with homosexuality. It is in the centrality assumed by the
affective dimension, and therefore by the relationship, that the ways to
“define oneself” as a lesbian are generally acquired, following new terms
and words detached from previous heteronormative references.

Since we are going into details, I am not ashamed to tell you that I thought I was a whole
other kind of person in bed with a woman, I was really convinced. With her I discovered
that I was the opposite, it took away many sex-related taboos due to my cultural heritage (S.,
23 years old).

Several interviewees refer to little-diversified groups of friendships

between women, characterized by a strong density of exchanges and
relationships, which in the long run entail, as we can see in the following
passage, some critical issues:

I have never met a friend of a friend, nor have I dated a friend of a friend, because I do
not like this kind of business. I don’t like intersections between people, intersecting stories,
where everyone knows everything about everyone else and you are constantly subjected to
other people’s judgment (C., 24 years old).

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 235-246 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.15 241
 Giuseppe Masullo

As we will see further on, for some women the use of new media (such
as dating apps), is not only an alternative way to access the socialization
spaces of the L-world, but often also an escape from little-diversified
friendship networks, made heavier by the social control exerted by the
group and the pressure to conform to the more or less explicit rules. Using
a dating app allows women to avoid other people’s judgment, leading to a
self-determined definition of oneself and unencumbered sexuality, free
from stereotypes.

2.2. Becoming “sexual”: socialization to sexuality and the use of the new media
Since its inception, the web has been an important resource for the L-
people interviewed. Mailing lists, chats, blogs, are the first references of
meaning for some women, through which they face fundamental
discussions to define themselves, to “become sexual”, to overcome
internalized homophobia, to face the stigma resulting from their sexual
diversity, conflicts with families, partners. Such discussions are not
confined to the virtual world but are often the prelude to the formation of
significant friendships and love relationships.

So many words spent, millions of bits and thousands of emails exchanged for a decade
with a thousand women scattered throughout Italy. Ten years of virtual exchanges but not
only that. Almost immediately meetings were organized, one every year, which lasted from
Friday afternoon to Sunday evening. From North to South. A person or a group looked for a
welcoming place and we saw each other together for a full immersion of reflections and
entertainment for some, love encounters and new conquests for others. (G., 52 years old).

The use of anonymity online and in apps such as Wapa, is, for some of
the interviewees, a needed step to enter a world of which little is known, to
come into contact with “sharable” representations of an otherwise
unreachable lesbian culture, either in real life or through the traditional
media. These possibilities are given through websites and applications
promoting meetings between people of the same sex. The interviews also
highlight that this path is common both to the more mature women and to
the younger ones and that the dating apps are suitable for different uses.
Some use them as a channel to explore their sexuality, as first access to
the L-world, and often end their use as soon as they form a stable
relationship. Others continue to use them, and from a necessary channel,

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 235-246 − ISSN: 2499-930X

242 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.15
 Invisible Affections and Socialization to the Sexuality of Lesbians

they become instead a preferential instrument for searching for new sexual
partners.
For some of the younger women who begin to explore their sexuality,
the chats are also a strategic choice for getting in touch with women who
live far away, thus limiting the risks of exposure in their home
environment.

She lived in Catania. But, you know, sometimes the distance is also useful, especially at
the beginning, because it limits the intrusiveness, leads you to discover things as you go,
you get there with more awareness, maybe someone living nearer your hometown would
have been a problem, you would not have chosen her. I travelled there to meet her in person
and somehow, more or less unconsciously, it was comfortable for me, no one knew my
business and I could freely live the story. And then she showed me an environment, in
Catania, completely uninhibited from this point of view (A., 36 years old).

A substantial difference emerges concerning the modes of interaction

and communication between women and men who use such applications.
Women’s interactions on the Wapa dating app are never too explicit or
direct and tend to focus, according to the interviewees, on aspects related to
personality, interests and hobbies, and hardly fall on sexual practices. The
communications are mainly aimed at finding a stable partner – indeed a
greatly emphasized aspect – and sex is rarely disengaged from sentimental
perspectives to the point that an interviewee points out in the interviewer
his lack of perspective:

Your questions are very “masculine”. In fact, you (referring to the interviewer) are
focusing mainly on the sexual sphere, therefore on sex, sexuality and this is not a dominant
aspect. Women are still women, they were still girls and the aspect that prevails most is the
feeling. This, even if it is commonplace, is also and above all truth. Of course, you will find
women in whom the sentimental aspect is more developed than others but the key is that it
is not sex (B., 42 years old).

The stress on the emotional aspects of relationships can also take on

another meaning, as a woman who explicitly seeks sexual adventures is
considered in the online environment as “a bad one”. An interviewee
claims that it is not uncommon to find what is defined “poly-love”,
expressed in the coexistence of multiple relationships, the succession of

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 235-246 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.15 243
 Giuseppe Masullo

multiple monogamous relationships that begin and end in a short time

frame.

2.3. The cultural universe of reference: between heteronormativity and widespread

stereotypes
The social representations of the interviewees are elaborated through
social networks and interactions on the Internet, thus accessing the
orientations and the “educational maps” that guide individuals – at the
level of collective life – in their search for the requisites for carrying out
specific roles within concrete relationships.
There is a widespread negative representation of people who are only
looking for sex, considered as a drift that characterizes, according to older
women, the younger generation. The latter, on the other hand, tend to
emphasize psychological and behavioural aspects that particularly
characterize women met on social networks, frequently mentioning
“pathologizing” terms that frame some women as “psychopathic”,
“obsessive”. Several young women point out that they are not looking for
“lesbian dramas”, i.e., as explained later by the interviewees, particularly
intrusive L-people who frequently contact someone even in the face of an
obvious lack of interest.
Also interesting is the lexicon used on meeting apps, useful for
deciphering the specific language of the L-community and identifying
some of the most common relational practices. The interviewees describe
profiles and conversations on social issues as contexts abounding in
references to one’s character, rather than to their body, using words and
sentences from films, books, or poems that are often the pretext from which
to strike a conversation.
Particularly stigmatized, in both face-to-face and online interactions, are
women who do not conform to the stereotypical model that defines socially
accepted femininity, thus defined by most as “masculine” or a “trucker”.
Deviance can pertain to the various expressions of the paraverbal language,
such as tone of voice, gestures, type of clothing. Even for lesbians,
therefore, the traditional binary genderist male/female model is the element
from which to evaluate the identities that are found both online and offline.
Yet dating applications can also be a place to express a different way of
understanding female sexuality: the virtual allows for more freedom and,

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 235-246 − ISSN: 2499-930X

244 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.15
 Invisible Affections and Socialization to the Sexuality of Lesbians

therefore, subverts stereotypes that see female sexuality as hetero-

determined and framed only in terms of affectivity.

Conclusions

The interviews highlighted some of the aspects of the condition of

women in Salerno, confirming part of the results of previous researches
that examined the condition of lesbians in the broader Italian and regional
context (Barbagli, Colombo, 2007, Corbisiero). The interviews showed that
in an area characterized by few resources and spaces of aggregation for
LGBT people, the homosexual affectivity of women remains mostly
invisible, confined to networks full of sociality among women and the use
of online platforms such as chat and applications specifically devoted to
same-sex relationships.
From the interviews emerge the important role of love and friendship
relationships in shaping and conditioning women’s intimate desires, in
making them practically possible and in acquiring those cultural scenarios
(i.e. representations, typical patterns of behaviour, specific languages) of an
otherwise unknown L-world.
The interviews revealed the important role played by new
communication channels, such as social networks and dating apps. These
channels are suitable for several purposes: for some, they are the first access
to the L world, a “temporary” way (therefore soon abandoned) to discover
themselves and give voice to their desires, contributing to the formation of
friendships and love relationships that are paramount for their socialization
to L-sexuality. For others, these resources are only “parallel” worlds to
broaden the networks of relationships, to diversify knowledge, also
allowing to affirm a more self-determined way of being “sexual”, free from
the widespread stereotypes about lesbians in the reference environment.

References

Barbagli, M. & Colombo, A. (2007). Omosessuali moderni. Gay e lesbiche in Italia. Bologna: Il
Mulino.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 235-246 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.15 245
 Giuseppe Masullo

Chamberland, L. & Théroux-Séguin, J (2009). Sexualité lesbienne et catégories de genre,

Genre, sexualité & société, 1, http://gss.revues.org/772, retrieved 28 September 2019.
Corbisiero F. (ed.). (2010). Certe cose si fanno. Identità, Genere e Sessualità nella popolazione
LGBT. Napoli: Gesco.
Crenshaw K.W., (1989). Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist
Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine. Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.
University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1, pp.139-167
Faccio E., & Foffano, G., (2010). “Il ruolo della coppia saffica e dell’associazione lesbica nel
normalizzare la propria diversità: una ricerca tra donne omosessuali”, in M. Castiglioni
& E. Faccio (eds). Costruttivismi in psicologia clinica. Teorie, metodi, ricerche. Torino: Utet.
Fidolini V. (2015). Idéaux de masculinité et sexualité interdite. Expériences sexuelles au
moment de la transition vers l’âge adulte. Agora – Débats/Jeunesses, 69, pp. 23-35.
Kurder, L.A. (1991). “Sexuality in homosexual and heterosexual couples”. In K. McKinney &
S. Sprecher (eds). Sexuality in close relationships (pp. 177-191). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum,.
Klinkenberg, D. & Rose, S. (1994). Dating Script of gay Men and Lesbians. Journal of
Homosexuality, 26 (4), pp.23-35.
Masullo, G. & Iovine, F. (2016). The dynamics of eros: teenagers and socialization to
sexuality in Italian atypical families. European Journal of Multidiscipliary Studies, 1(4), pp.
200-210.
Rinaldi, C. (2018). Sesso, sé e società. Per una sociologia della sessualità. Milano: Mondadori.
Santostefano, V. (2008). “Voci di donne lesbiche in Arcigay: tra il 1989 e il 1996”. In M.
Dragone et al, Il movimento delle lesbiche in Italia (pp. 79-94). Milano: Il Dito e La Luna..
Trappolin, L. (2011). “Narrare l'orientamento sessuale”. In M. Inghilleri, E. Ruspini (eds.),
Sessualità narrate. Esperienze di intimità a confronto (pp. 143-161). Milano: Franco Angeli.
Wittig L.K., (2001) La Pensée straight. Paris: Balland.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 235-246 − ISSN: 2499-930X

246 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.15
 Review of Picarella, L. & Truda, G. (eds.),
Fundamental Rights, Gender, Inequalities. Vulnerability and
Protection Systems, Gutenberg, Baronissi (SA), 2019

CRISTOBAL PADILLA TEJEDA

Autonomous University of the Caribbean, Colombia

Abstract
Review of the book Fundamental Rights, Gender, Inequalities. Vulnerability and Protection
Systems, Gutenberg, Baronissi (SA), 2019, edited by Lucia Picarella and Giovanna Truda. The
book collects essays of sociologists about several topics related to fundamental rights and
gender issues.

Keywords: Fundamental rights, Sustainable development, Cultural change, Gender issues,

Inequalities.

A cry of hope that goes through the world!

I'm a woman. And a tender warmth warms me when the world hits me.
It is the warmth of the other women, of those who made this sensitive corner of life,
fighter, with soft skin and tender warrior heart.
Alejandra Pizarnik 1955 – 1972.

The political commitment not to "leave anyone behind" in Agenda 2030

for Sustainable Development will be a chimera if it fails to achieve gender
equality and women's empowerment. The book Fundamental Rights,
Gender, Inequalities Vulnerability and protection systems, published by
Gutenberg Edizioni and coordinated by Lucia Picarella and Giovanna
Truda, addresses the 'structural' phenomenon of violence and
discrimination against women, and feeds the political debate from the
theoretical-sociopolitical production of its different configurations. The
book consists of an initial article, The Protection of New Rights in a Kantian
Cosmopolitan Perspective, and two sections - Violence Against Women
and Gender and Equality - with three articles each.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 247-252 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.16
 Cristobal Padilla Tejeda

Specifically, in the first article Alessandra Petrone and Lucia Picarella

analyze in particular the new rights, in a cosmopolitan perspective,
presenting a comparison between the European and Latin American
context. The authors focus on the importance of understanding whether,
and to what extent, in a context of globalisation of politics, law, cultures,
communication networks, the management of large-scale processes should
move from national centralism to supranational governance. In this sense,
cosmopolitanism is presented as the right solution for a solid protection of
rights, in particular new generation rights or solidarity rights enshrined in
different provisions of some international conventions. The first section,
Violence Against Women, highlights the "narrative of violence in its
subterranean currents of gender violence and violence against women
while at the same time pointing out to us the idea that the fight against
violence has to be against its perpetration, and that the success of the same
will be if the fight for equality is carried out in parallel. Stellamarina
Donato focuses on resolution 48/104 of 1993 of the General Assembly of the
United Nations, since the pronouncement of its articles 1 and 2, raises the
debate on the human rights of women and the relevant action of
governments, civil society and social movements, in three macro-
ambits:empowerment, gender equality and violence - distinguishing
between gender-based violence and violence against women. The author
shows us two paradigms to understand violence against women, the first
one refers to what she calls integral understanding of this phenomenon that
is based on male domination and patriarchy over women, which is seen as
an inferior part of society. The second, with a broader social spectrum, with
diverse dimensions and socio-cultural and situational settings based on
extended beliefs, which based on the first paradigm undoubtedly creates
"an adversarial environment that supports rape, sexual assault and violence
against women".It shares with us the idea of creating capacities for women,
considered not only as victims of violence, but also as active subjects of
transformation of their adverse reality. In fact, in this document we
recognize the role of researchers in creating awareness and address this
social problem through the creation of content and language, and further
suggests that we continue to delve rigorously into the modalities chosen by
each level of community, regional and international, to understand the

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 247-252 − ISSN: 2499-930X

248 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.16
 Review of Fundamental Rights, Gender, Inequalities. Vulnerability and Protection Systems

trends of this phenomenon articulated to a global scenario, to scrutinize

reasons and produce political alternatives.
On the other hand, Valeria Tevere instructs us on the categories of
immigrant women as a heterogeneous vulnerable group in different
conditions of vulnerability: refugees and asylum seekers, economic
migrants, migrants for family reunification and, finally, climatic migrants.
In addition to their vulnerability as women, the latter have a vulnerability
related to their status as migrants. The de facto situation that determines
their weakness, or 'impotence', is undoubtedly related to the initial
condition of poverty, to the marginalization connected to the condition of
migrant, to the greater exposure to the risk of violence, both during the
migration process and during the entire period of stay in the destination
State. The author bases this analysis on an interesting normative study of
the general normative frameworks on the international protection of
migrants and the UNHCR practice for the gender approach, as well as on
the protection of migrant women in the European regional space, and the
internal application profiles, leading us between genital mutilation,
domestic violence, forced marriages, trafficking. Hammache Elkaina
focuses on Algeria, where work is being done to eradicate all forms of
discrimination in the workplace, as mandated by international conventions
for the protection of human rights in general and women's rights in
particular, but access to the labour market by the female labour force
remains low. The methodology, based on focus groups with women
entrepreneurs, yields experiences and perceptions, and identifies violence
from sexual harassment as a social problem that they were frequently
confronted with, along with misogyny, marginalization, refusal to obtain
credit in the bank, and so on. The author concludes that it is not enough to
have a legal basis that guarantees total gender equality and equal rights, if
in practice the violence that affects women and the national economy in
general is violated and suffered.
In the second section, Gender and Equality, the authors present three
significant case studies. Chiara d'Auria, outlines us referents on the reality
of women in China, and demonstrates that although with the political and
economic reforms it has been proposed to become a harmonious society, it
still maintains sections of marginalization and subordination of women.
More particularly, in comparison with other developed or emerging

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 247-252 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.16 249
 Cristobal Padilla Tejeda

countries, in the case of the People's Republic of China, launched for more
than forty years to economic and social modernization, a regression of the
condition of women is underway and can lead, in most cases, to a condition
of social precariousness. Daniela Sica, Ornella Malandrino, and Benedetta
Esposito, study the historical evolution of gender equality in Italy, and tell
us that, despite the efforts made, there is still much to be done to promote,
coordinate and supervise initiatives in favour of gender equality. It
highlights the gradual evolution in Italy on equality through the enactment
of laws and creation of bodies to strengthen the social role of women from
the end of the nineteenth century, enshrined in Article 3 of the Constitution
which establishes formal equality between the sexes before the law and in
the workplace, and laid the foundation for then promulgating norms of
gender and social dignity of women, removing all impediments of
economic and social order, autonomy and equality between citizens, to
enable the development of the human person. However, the authors tell us
that with respect to the gender perspective in Italy, there is a disparity
between norms and their concrete implementation, since on the one hand
there is a broad and well articulated legislation on equal opportunities
between men and women, but on the other hand it is reduced in its
implementation by the lack of knowledge of them and also by the absence
of an institutional political will. Consequently, the gender gap continues to
be expressed in all labour market indicators, with employment and female
participation rates among the lowest in Europe.
Cultural change requires full awareness of recognized rights and
existing safeguards. Clotilde Cicatiello, presents a perspective referring to
gender equality and gender studies in research organisations and
highlights the Gender Equality Plan of the University of Salerno, in this
respect she tells us that the European Union has assigned to the universities
a primordial role in the promotion of the cultural change of society towards
a gender equality perspective, but in spite of the firm desire and
commitment, the universities have not fully achieved the objective of
equality, due to the strong under-representation of women in academia.
Italian universities are still far from having made the transition to the
culture of women's leadership, but, nevertheless, the University of Salerno
has managed in the national context to promote gender equality in the field

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 247-252 − ISSN: 2499-930X

250 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.16
 Review of Fundamental Rights, Gender, Inequalities. Vulnerability and Protection Systems

of scientific research and in the socialization of gender consciousness,

subject that achieved greater momentum from 2013.
In seven years, the teaching of women's history and gender studies at
the Department of Humanities (DIPSUM) was established for the first time
in the academic year 2013/14. Progress was made in 2011 with the creation
of the Gender and Equal Opportunities Studies Observatory (OGEPO), an
interdepartmental study centre on gender and equal opportunities studies,
which includes 11 of UNISA's 17 departments. Through OGEPO,
educational activities are carried out to ensure greater dissemination and
awareness of gender issues and equal opportunities. A gender equality
plan was drawn up by the University of Salerno to integrate teaching and
research into the gender perspective, without falling into the exclusivity of
a project for women, but rather a project for women and men that
guarantees equal opportunities, better welfare and makes the University of
Salerno a model of good practice at national and European level.
Finally, I would like to highlight the relevance of this collective book,
which clarifies the panorama of women worldwide in their rights,
inequalities, protection and vulnerability...it leaves the undeniable flavour
that in spite of this, important advances have been made, especially since
the 1995 Beijing conference, a crucial moment from which an awakening of
women's groups is generated, actions are promoted worldwide and in
Latin America that begin to make ruptures with beliefs, customs and
cultural models that victimized women, closed their doors, reified them
and sent them to the deepest world while we watched impassively the
severe impacts of an unequal patriarchal-based system. Today there is a
cultural mandate regarding what it means to be a woman, but we know
that much more is missing, we continue to be unequal, the ferocity of failed
political models, of majorities impoverished by the comulation of elites that
control power and increase inequalities... The women and girls of these
countries assume the greater weight of this systemic crisis of lack of
guarantees and violation of rights. The lack of visibility of the situation of
women increases male violence, gender exclusion and violations of rights
and autonomies. In good time this magnificent research work is a
contribution to clarify the vital realities of girls and women who assume
the challenge every day to face danger, threat, violation and affronts.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 247-252 − ISSN: 2499-930X

DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.16 251
 Cristobal Padilla Tejeda

Finally, I would like to invite the editors and authors of this valuable
work to produce a second publication on this subject, making it possible to
cover, in an even more specific way, all latitudes.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2019, 4(2), 247-252 − ISSN: 2499-930X

252 DOI: 10.26409/2019JMK4.2.16