Goldsmiths University of London, Art and Politics, Dep. of Politics and International Relations, 2019.
Tijuana, Mexico. November 2018. Draw by Diomenes Bornegas, Tegucigalpa, Honduras 34.
Tijuana, Mexico. November 2018. Draw by Samuel Osorio, Sansonate, El Salvador (20).
Introduction
My parents and grandparents and I are from an area in a southern region of Italy that was once called Magna Grecia. I recently discovered through a DNA test that I am 58% Greek, 26% Italian, and 18% Persian and Middle Eastern. I suspect that my ancestors migrated across the Mediterranean Sea over the course of thousands of years. When I was three years old, my parents moved to Northern Italy for employment reasons. By the time I was 18, we had moved to 12 different cities. We were regarded as the ‘terroni’, which is a derogatory term used to describe southern rednecks within the context of the economic efficiency of Northern Italy. By the age of 20, I had moved to the US to study; two years later, I had moved to the UK, and then to Venezuela, Ghana, and Italy again. At the end of 2001, I moved to Russia, which is where I am currently located until my next move. I perceive myself as a migrant, but my privileged European passport, my race, and my financial status render me an expat. However, I am a migrant. The proliferation of borders and movement control do not simply create geographical and spatial division but produce social, economic and race distinction. As Gschrey noted:
The organisation of movement across border structures shows unequal treatment of different groups of people. Privileged passengers can move easily and swiftly across the globe and may, even in developing countries, remain in secure and familiar environments. The journeys of migrants, who are travelling under dissimilar pretences, are usually 3 exhausting and dangerous. They frequently strand in different places at various stages of their journey – their movement is slowed down or “petrified” (2011, p.201).
Partly because of my origins and personal history, I have always been interested in the issue of migration, maps, and representations of spaces. I have a background in journalism and documentary photography; within the past year, I have engaged in various photographic projects regarding the issue of migration, and particularly migration in the Mediterranean after the ‘Arab Spring’. My challenge has involved reconfiguring my documentary practice to question the mainstream representation of migration and our perceptions of migration as well as challenging the political and social language used to distinguish between the various categories of migrants. Throughout November and December of 2018 (1), I have been travelling within Mexico, the United States, and Germany as part of a new project which attempts to combine multidisciplinary practices to counter-map the purported ‘Global Migration Crisis’, which is too frequently described as ‘a permanent challenge to the 21st-century states and world order’ (Ignatieff et al., 2016). This has resulted in a collection of the portraits of migrant individuals and families whom I met and who agreed to be photographed and to draw and comment on the map of their migratory experience. I attempted to create a participatory representation of individual experiences, to reintroduce the personal narrative, and to counter-map the mainstream depiction of contemporary migration. This paper discusses the elements and methodology of my work; it also explores the theoretical and practical challenges affecting the representation of the ‘refugee and migration crisis’ as well as how the visual regimes of the news and governments participate in global perceptions of the ‘migration crisis’.
1 The project was commissioned by Time Magazine and is planned to be published in a special issue dedicated to the theme of migration at the end of January 2019.
Methodology
To ensure the clarity of the following argumentation, it is essential to briefly describe the method used for this project. Firstly, all of the subjects I photographed have been informed about the intention of my request and were immediately asked both to be portraited and to be available to draw the map and comment on their migratory experiences (fig. 1). Most of them accepted, while some of them refused to draw or comment on their experiences for various reasons (lack of time, inability to draw, personal concerns, etc.). Secondly, in Tijuana (Mexico), I approached the migrants within the proximity of the ‘Migrants’ Caravan’(2) camp or near the wall demarking the border between Mexico and the United States. Regarding the US and Germany, the meeting with the subjects was previously arranged after research conducted by me or a fixer.(3) The final selection of my presentation is an edit of a more extensive collection of images, maps, and recorded commentary presented in the form of a booklet, which is explicative but not comprehensive in terms of the many different individual migration stories. Therefore, the project must be regarded as a work in progress, as part of a broader research which I intend to continue in the near future.
Figure 1: Backstage pictures from Tijuana, Mexico. December 2018. On the left Diogenes Bornegas drawing in his map, on the right Elvis Gonzalez and Isabella Castillo. Photos ©Thea Traff.
2 Thousands of migrants have arrived at the US-Mexico border after travelling more than 4,000km (2,500 miles) from Central America. They say they are fleeing persecution, poverty and violence in their home countries of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Many of them say their goal is to settle in the US despite warnings by US officials that anyone found entering the country illegally will face arrest, prosecution and deportation. (‘What is the migrant caravan heading to US?’, 2018)
3 In journalism the term ‘fixer’ denotes someone who help to arrange interviews and meetings with sources to organize a and produce a story.
Portraiture, Map-Drawing, and Storytelling
1 - Portraiture
[…] typical images of refugees today depict desperation and displacement in the global South. We see a large number of malnourished, powerless individuals in tattered clothing. We see women and children seeking protection from events outside of their control. […] Images are powerful. They not only illustrate the physical or material appearances but also reflect and inform our assumptions about the people and politics. Embedded in this context are our own suspicions and fears, and political forces related to gender, race and class. An image tells us who refugees are and what status they occupy: are they “legitimate” or “threatening,” “in need” or “suspicious?” Images thus shape how we respond to the flow of asylum seekers across international border. (Johnson, 2018, p.244)
The quotation above clarifies the first challenge of the photographic representation of the migration crisis. In the media and in depictions embraced by groups of activists and humanitarian agencies, whether the intent is to communicate a sense of empathy or suspicion, the removal of personal identity and experience is generally prevalent in the images. Migrants are depicted as a mass population facing common threats of desperation rather than as individuals; they are classified into statistics and global phenomena and are often described using non-human metaphors or as if they are equivalent to an environmental disaster (e.g., ‘wave of migrants’). Migrants are often portrayed in dramatic circumstances, arduous or unhealthy environments, wrecked tents, or long lines, as well as near reception or control structures, walls, borders, barbed wires, or anything that can serve 6 as a metaphor for despair and vulnerability. The risks of victimisation and the misuse of tropes in photography have been widely criticised (Sontag, 2005; Barthes, 2010; Benjamin, 2008; Sontag, 2004) and impose a major dilemma for practitioners of photography.
To give expression to the fact that a photographed person’s citizen status is flawed, or even non-existent (as in the case of a refugee, the poor, migrant worker, etc.), or temporarily suspended (citizen struck by disaster, exposed for a limited period of time), whoever seeks to use photography must exploit the photographed individual’s vulnerability. In such situations, photography entails a particular kind of violence: The photograph is liable to exploit the photographed individual, aggravate his or her injury, publicly expose it, and rob the individual of intimacy. This threat of violation always hangs over the photographic act, and this is the precise moment in which the contract between photographer, photographed, and spectator is put to test (Azoulay, 2008, pp.118–119).
With this quotation in mind, I opted for a classical form of portraiture openly inspired by Richard Avedon’s ‘In the American West’. Sitters face the camera directly, and all of them are isolated from their surroundings against a plain white background; all the subjects are identified by their names, age, and provenance. The images are in black and white to avoid any distraction imposed by the colours. These technical strategies have allowed me to communicate a sense of participation and to remove every possible identification with ‘spaces’ which are generally associated with the conditions of migrants or refugees (as described above). This has also allowed me to concentrate the attention of the viewer on the individuality of the subject rather than on the condition he may represent. Strauss noted the following:
To represent is to aestheticize; that is, to transform. It presents a vast field of choice, but it does not include the choice not to transform, not to change or to alter whatever is being 7 represented. It cannot be a pure process, in practice. […] The aesthetic is not objective and is not reducible to quantitative scientific terms. Quantity can only measure physical phenomena and is misapplied in aesthetics which often deal with what is not there, imagining things into existence. To become legible to others, these imaginings must be socially and culturally encoded (2012, p.71).
Since I must adopt an aesthetic choice, I have decided to focus on the individuality of the subject rather than the stereotypes of their temporary status. And since I must ‘frame’ my image, I have sought to avoid frames ‘according to which certain lives are perceived as lives and others fail to assume perceptual form as such’ (Butler, 2009, p.24).
Murfreesboro, US. November 2018. Draw by Yakelyn Contreras. Albertina Contreras and her 11-year-old daughter Yakelyn were reunited at after being split up at the border and detained separately for more than a month.
2 – Re-Drawing the Map and Retelling Stories
This drawing outlines not the “route” (there wasn’t one) but the “log” of their journey on foot –
an outline marked by footprints with regular gaps between them and by pictures of successive
events that took place in the course of the journey (meals, battles, crossing rivers or mountains
etc.): not a “geographical map” but “history book.”
(Certeau, 1984, p.120)
While ancient maps often contained elements of narrative, contemporary scientific maps disengaged from the notion of itinerary; they have lost the fragments of stories embedded in them. ‘The describers have disappeared’. (Certeau, 1984, p.120) ‘Maps, like photographs, are authoritarian images that can reinforce and legitimate the status quo’ (Harley, 1992 in italics the author); they have been used to conquer, control, monitor, and particularly to create borders and delimit spaces. However, in recent years, the ‘appropriation of the map’s methods and techniques of representation can be used as alternatives to the languages and images of power and become a medium of empowerment’ (Peluso, 1995, p.384).
I assert that the maps of individual experiences, as those drawn by the migrants, may be integrated with language and images to become even more powerful. By linking the portraits with the drawing and the voice’s narration, I intend to combine the multiple fragments of migratory experiences. The maps realised for this project are itinerary maps; they represent memories and layers of life, and they sometimes describe fear, accidents, dangers, or, alternatively, joy, nostalgia, and beauty. They are comprised of lines, gaps, descriptions, stops, changes in scale and orientation, and emptiness.
The blank spaces of the itinerary map are empty in a way that the blank spaces of the gridded map are not. […] the blank spaces of the gridded map may be bereft of geographical objects, but they nonetheless speak of the plenitude of Euclidean space. They do not represent the parts of the map’s surface that are left over once the territory has been drawn, but the portions of the cartographic grid that have yet to be filled (Padrón, 2002, p.38).
I contend that hesitation in the drawings (the blank spaces) are generally replete with voices and oral narration and vice versa; blank spaces in the drawings may represent emotional insecurity or gaps in memory that may be better expressed vocally. As De Certeau expressed, within these drawings, the describer is back in the map (1984, p.121). Some maps, like that of Diogenes Bornegas, offer drawings that contain both a ‘bird’s eye view’ and images of the space at ground level. Some of them depict natural and state borders as the memory recalls as well as events not necessarily related to the same place. Other maps employ images, and others use text, such as that of the 11-year-old Yakelyn Contreras when she recalled the morning when she was separated from her mother Albertina for several months after entering the US. They described rights violations, violence, and threats, while others talk of hope, dreams, and aspirations. They described the experience of being a migrant from a different and individual 9 perspective; nevertheless, they discussed the political conditions regarding the migratory policy, borders, and social justice. For example, the upper portion of the drawing by Samuel Orosio, from El Salvador, depicts the morning of November 25th in Tijuana, ‘when the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency fired tear gas in the Mexican soil, when hundreds of migrants ran toward the border crossing that leads into San Diego’ (Averbuch and Malkin, 2018). Samuel’s drawing and tale from the ‘Migrants’ Caravan camp’ serve as a personal testimony of the most recent experience of Donald Trump’s migration policy and of what Agamben defined as the ‘state of exception’ (2005, chap.1). If the application of exceptional measure became the norm along the border, then Samuel’s sketch of the Tijuana-US border become like the visual translation of Agamben’s study on the camp:
…. the space that opens up when the state of exception starts to become the rule. In it, the state of exception, which was essentially a temporal suspension of the state of law, acquires a permanent spatial arrangement that, as such, remains constantly outside the normal state of law. (Agamben cited in Juffer, 2006, p.668)
The experience, or attempt, of border-crossing is clearly a recurrent theme in many of the drawings and stories that have been collected. Whether the crossing was successful or not and even years after some level of integration within the new society, the image of the border and the experience of border crossing remain traumatic memories. As Mezzadra noted, borders are not merely geographical constructs: They are devices for politics to articulate distinctions:
….the proliferation or multiplication of walls and borders of various kinds, not merely to mark the distinction between internal and external spaces, but also within the space and time of global capital and the borders of differential inclusion (2012, p.71).
This state of differential inclusion is testified in the words of Mirey Darwich from Syria, who is now living in Germany with her husband and three kids and running a small restaurant in Anrochte. While she does not depict physical borders in her drawing, she expresses the desires and difficulties related to full integration.
We wanted to make something with love, to create something, something for our future, for our children, but also something for German people…to see at us as successful Syrian people (Darwich to Monteleone, 2018)
The quotation above denotes the relief experienced in reaction to a new opportunity but also conveys a form of anxiety regarding full integration; it confirms Mezzadra’s theory of a racial and cultural divide even in the case of a successful relocation. In conclusion, the maps sketched by Samuel and the others, and arguably the verbal stories linked to them, not only change how maps generally are made; they also change how we read them. (Mekdjian and Moreau, 2016) They alter the reference point, and they become emotional and personal interpretations; nevertheless, they remain documents. They bear witness to the individual memory, and they ‘are tactile, olfactory, sensed objects/subjects mediated by the multiplicity of knowledges we bring to and take from them through our everyday interactions and representational and discursive practices.’ (Del Casino and Hanna, 2006, p.36)
Conclusion
To conclude my arguments and to support my choice of using photography, maps, and individual tales for this project, I would like to briefly trace a parallelism between maps and photography: Both methods of representation, despite their differences in terms of methodology and aesthetics, have previously been misinterpreted as accurate representations of reality. For both disciplines, scholars and critics have primarily proven the opposite.
The steps in making a map—selection, omission, simplification, classification, the creation of hierarchies, and 'symbolization'—are all inherently rhetorical. In their intentions as much as in their applications they signify subjective human purpose […] the map-maker merely omits those features of the world that lie outside the purpose of the immediate discourse. (Harley, 1992 p. na)
In this quote, the word ‘map’ can be replaced with ‘photography’ to encapsulate how this argument applies to both disciplines. Butler appears to support this argument when she writes the following: ‘in framing reality, the photograph has already determined what will count within the frame’ (2009, p.70) Photographs, like maps, are therefore the individual interpretation of the reality rather than the truth; they represent a mediated version of the truth. As discussed above, the portraits do not, cannot, and do not want to exemplify the full range of migrants’ conditions. Instead, they attempt to recognise individual voices of such conditions. The same may be said about the drawings and recordings: They are fragments of emotional experience. Where the lines of the maps break, the words begin to add information, recall the journey, and provide details and emotions. A constellation of elements emerges, resulting in a ‘spatial and visual understanding of things, concepts, conditions, processes, or events in the human world’ (Harley and Woodward, 1987, p.xvi, author’s italic). The portraits, the maps and the commentaries become then together a complementary collection of stories and personal testimonies challenging the dominant narrative about borders and migration.
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