Refugee Crisis: The Borders of Human Mobility

Melina Duarte, Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, Serena Parekh, Annamari Vitikainen, Melina Duarte, Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, Serena Parekh, Annamari Vitikainen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367589653
• eBook ISBN: 9781351207539
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

How should we respond to the worst refugee crisis since the World War II? What are our duties towards refugees, and how should we distribute these duties among those at the receiving end of the refugee flow? What are the relevant political solutions? Are some states more responsible for creating the current refugee situation, and if so, should they also carry a larger burden on solving this situation? Is people smuggling always morally wrong? Are some groups, for example children, owed more than others, and should we thus take active measures to remove them from conflict zones? How are the existing refugee regimes, in Europe, North-America, or Australia, challenged by the current crisis? Are some of their measures more justified than others?

Refugee Crisis: The Borders of Human Mobility discusses the various ethical dilemmas and potential political solutions to the ongoing refugee crisis, providing both theoretical and practical reflections on the current crisis, as well as the ways in which this crisis has been handled in public debate. The contributors to the volume include some of the most prominent political theorists and experts on the current refugee situation, as well as some of the upcoming young scholars working on the theme. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Global Ethics.

No safe passage: ‘the mapping journey project’

Diana Tietjens Meyers

ABSTRACT
This essay examines ‘The Mapping Journey Project’ (2008–2011), an installation artwork by Bouchra Khalili. It consists of eight large video screens and headsets. In each video, a migrant draws a map of her/his journey to and in Europe and narrates her/his route (subtitled in English). In collaboration with Khalili, I argue, these storyteller/draftspersons create a dissident cartography that superimposes their lived geography on the background of legal geography. Thus, ‘The Mapping Journey Project’ is a work of art that is also a work of advocacy and provocation. Rather than advocating particular policies, however, it advocates in the sense of affirming the dignity of the subjects of the videos and their right to speak the truth of their lives. Moreover, it provokes by elucidating the moral stakes of the current political and economic order and by issuing a pointed demand for humane solutions. So long as vast global disparities of wealth and political power persist, it is no wonder that people who are excluded from the elite privilege of belonging to a prosperous society are burning the borders that protect this unjust regime.

For a philosopher, I am going to address the topic of this special issue in a somewhat unorthodox way. I am not going to critically analyze a concept or defend a practical position. Instead, I am going to discuss a pertinent installation artwork that was on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City at the time of writing. I have decided to write about this exhibition for two main reasons. First, my thinking about the refugee crisis – the surge of transnational human movement taking place today – coincides with the artist’s understanding of her project. Second, I believe that an esthetic exploration of an issue can be more compelling, and legitimately so, than an abstract argument.

‘The Mapping Journey Project’ (2008–2011) is the creation of the Moroccan-born, Paris-educated, now Berlin-based artist, Bouchra Khalili. This installation is comprised of eight widely spaced video screens (80″×60″) suspended in MOMA’s Marron Atrium. The color videos playing on the screens emanate zones of luminosity in the cavernous, dimly lit space. Visitors to the exhibition find a bench with several headsets in front of each video screen. Looking at the screens, they see hands holding marking pens making line drawings on maps. Listening through the headsets, they hear voiceover narratives in European, Asian, and African languages (subtitled in English on the screens) that explain the drawings. The videos are short, running from as little as 3 minutes to as long as 12 minutes. Speaking at an event held at MOMA in conjunction with the exhibition, Khalili stated that she aims to pose a question, spark debate, and give people a means to speak for themselves.¹

Each video shows a standardized, static representation of geography – a map. The idiosyncratic, kinetic elements of the videos – the motion of drawing and the spoken narration – bring time into the picture. The storyteller/draftspersons are individuals who have traveled in legally impermissible ways. Their simultaneously oral and visual performances depict their travels. As they tell the stories of their journeys, they draw their trajectories on maps. When they are moving steadily from one city to another, their pens glide along the surfaces of the maps. When they find work somewhere or get stuck somewhere, their pens hover above the maps. Represented only by their hands, a bit of forearm or sleeve, and their voices, they are anonymous. Only the space/time coordinates and a few personal details of their journeys are revealed (Figure 1).

Khalili’s art practice is important.² She does not recruit subjects for her videos using social media or in consultation with NGOs or government agencies serving displaced populations. Her approach is serendipitous and intensely relational. She goes to cities known to be hubs of legally impermissible travel and hangs out:

The encounter occurs from the moment I accept to get lost in a city. It’s a mysterious process, even though it relies on a method.³

https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1627?locale=en.

The people who interest her approach her. They talk about their experience. She asks a few straightforward, informational questions. She never asks why anyone left home.⁴ Mainly she listens. When she thinks an individual is ready to record her or his story, she provides a map and a marking pen, and films the drawing and accompanying testimony in a single take. She does not edit these videos. The subjects speak and draw their piece.

The stories Khalili’s subjects tell are short on autobiographical detail. Although one mentions having been a fishermen, most say nothing about their lives before their journeys began. Their resources vary. One leaves home with seven euros. Another’s mother gives him 1000 euros to pay a smuggler. The timbres of the recorded voices clue auditors as to whether the storyteller is female or male. We get only indirect, if any, information about their ages. Two mention being apprehended by authorities and being treated as unaccompanied minors – one is sent to a Spanish orphanage, and another is held in an Italian facility for migrants under eighteen years of age. Others sound quite young, but accurate assessment is impossible. All of the stories are told matter-of-factly and unemotionally. The voices are steady. Curator Diana Nawi rightly observes that this installation is neither didactic nor sentimental (Nawi 2015).

In ‘The Mapping Journey Project,’ individuals’ lives are framed as processes of traversing natural terrains and politically demarcated territories. Some people cross mountains or deserts. All but one cross the Mediterranean Sea. We are told and shown on the maps where each person started from, the transit points of her or his journey, and where she or he was at the time the video was made. They are from Algeria, Tunisia, Sudan, Somalia, Morocco, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, and the Israeli-occupied West Bank. They end up in France, Italy, Spain, Turkey, and Israeli-claimed East Jerusalem. Most of them go through or stay in additional countries along the way. They often state how long it took to get from one place to another, whether they walked or used some form of transportation, and how long they stayed in this place or that.

Many mention difficulties they encountered – punishing treks across arid deserts or over forbidding mountains, finding a truck to hide in to get shipped with merchandise to Spain, perilous voyages across the Mediterranean in small boats, people who stole from or lied to them, run-ins with law enforcement agents. Some mention help they received – relatives who provide urgently needed funds, a police chief who detains a boy but soon releases him and gives him a job, the workers in a camp who care for a young woman who survived a boat trip from North Africa to Lampedusa, a commercial vessel that stopped to provide food, water, fuel, and directions to the people packed on a little plastic boat that lost its way on the Mediterranean Sea.

All of the stories make the purpose of the journeys clear. Seven of the eight travelers are seeking work. ‘A normal life,’ as one says. They remain wherever they find jobs and move whenever they cannot find work. They are employed in agriculture, restaurants, and shops, at a clothing market, as leafletters. Some state that they sent remittances home. There is one romantic story – a Palestinian guy from Ramallah visiting his girlfriend who lives in East Jerusalem.

Every story is geographically complicated but personally sparse. What do the visual depictions add to the stories?

Scale is a telling feature of the imagery. Maps vary in size, and they can be two- or three-dimensional. The ones in Khalili’s videos reduce geography to a graphic image on a flat surface. Moreover, they condense large, sometimes vast, areas into the space of a plane that is small enough for a single person to handle and take in at a glance. The maps in the videos represent areas as enormous as the continents of Africa and Europe and the Mediterranean between them, and as small as the cities of Ramallah and Jerusalem and the stretch of land between them.

Regardless of the size of the areas represented on the maps, the hands of the draftspersons look gigantic in comparison. Here it is useful to recall the European Renaissance art practice of scaling the size of the figures in a picture to their relative importance. In this tradition, for instance, the Madonna on her throne is always significantly bigger than the wealthy donors who are portrayed kneeling beside or below her. Following the same logic, these videos showing larger-than-life human hands in relation to compact cartographic representations of tremendous geographical expanses suggest that we must regard the persons whose hands these are as all but infinitely more important than the arbitrary political subdivisions of the planet called nation states.

As I noted earlier, the hands in the videos are marking the maps so as to chart the journeys that the storytellers narrate. So the shapes of the drawings are revealing. Two patterns stand out.

Because the routes are often circuitous, many of the drawings contain perplexing streaks and bulges. For example, one man draws his first attempt to travel from Bangladesh in Asia to Italy in Europe going through India, Russia, and Moldavia where he is stopped and sent home; then he draws his successful second attempt going through Mali and Niger in West Africa and Libya on the North African coast. Such divagations are necessary to dodge border controls, and the shapes of the drawings convey the wariness and desperation of the travelers. The drawings on these maps are reminiscent of maps showing shipping lanes before the Suez and Panama Canals were dug. The only passable routes required circumnavigating whole continents. Although the main obstructions Khalili’s travelers confront are artifacts of political and economic power, as opposed to geological formations, they too are compelled to take roundabout routes.

Because the routes frequently involve trying out possibilities and backtracking, many of the drawings contain jutting or zigzagging lines. A man who has made it to Spain draws a journey that goes from Spain to Italy back to Spain then up to the Netherlands and finally back to Spain. Exploited by an uncle in one place, unable to find work in the next place, retreating to work where his uncle exploited him, successful in obtaining work elsewhere, and finally deceived into returning to his starting point, his drawing is an image of tenacity despite disappointment and futility. The related themes of unavailing effort and dispiriting reversal also appear in the drawings. For example, the thickened tracings of switchbacking lines in one drawing bespeak travel thwarted by expulsion orders – Niger to Algeria and back. The drawings on these maps bear a sobering resemblance to maps of airline flight paths in the hub-and-spoke era, for both the drawings and the flight maps expose systems that prioritize the imperatives of public or private institutions over the interests of travelers.

Plainly the drawings express the subjectivities of the videoed draftspersons – their perseverance notwithstanding their agitation and frustration. In so doing, they attach affective meanings to national sovereignty and border policing with which few museumgoers are likely to have firsthand familiarity. Moreover, in recasting earning a living and gaining legal status as interminable, enervating quests, they endow employment and citizenship with meanings that may resonate with some museumgoers but are apt to be unfamiliar to many others. Grasping these poignant subjective meanings is necessary to understanding ‘The Mapping Journey Project,’ but it is no less necessary to register that the drawings also express political meanings. Because the maps schematize bounded political entities, the drawings represent Khalili’s subjects’ engagement with those entities.

One of cartography’s charges is to produce graphic representations of the historical outcomes of the politics of geography. In legal terms, this cartographical project reflects the webs of agreements that are articulated in treaties. Maps showing the jigsaw puzzle of nation states depict moments in ongoing histories of bellicosity and diplomacy. Maps showing transnational economic partnerships – before the mid-twentieth century, the coerced alliances of colonial empires; today, the somewhat more reciprocal alliances of the European Union and regional trade pacts – depict moments in ongoing histories of commerce and wealth. During periods when the politics of geography is in flux, accurate mapping requires constant updating. Such is currently the case in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, for new Israeli settlements and checkpoints crop up and right of ways disappear unpredictably.

In contrast to maps of natural topographies and maps of the ‘heavens,’ the maps in ‘The Mapping Journey Project’ represent political and economic relationships – groups of contiguous nation states and the EU’s single market. As I have mentioned, maps also provide information about shipping lanes and flight paths. Indeed, maps provide information about all sorts of sanctioned itineraries, including trails, roads, railroads, and the like. These maps represent infrastructure and services that comply with government issued safety standards, antitrust laws, and other regulations. Thus, maps of approved transport routes represent intersections between legal authorities, the natural and built environment, and capitalism. It is noteworthy, therefore, that the maps in the videos do not inclu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction – ‘Refugee Crisis: The Borders of Human Mobility’
• 1. No safe passage: ‘the mapping journey project’
• 2. Global displacement and the topography of theory
• 3. Misplaced idealism and incoherent realism in the philosophy of the refugee crisis
• 4. A fair distribution of refugees in the European Union
• 5. A spectre in Germany: refugees, a ‘welcome culture’ and an ‘integration politics’
• 6. Resettling refugees: is private sponsorship a just way forward?
• 7. The ethics of people smuggling
• 8. Who owes what to war refugees
• 9. What do we owe refugees: jus ad bellum, duties to refugees from armed conflict zones and the right to asylum
• 10. Human security and the international refugee crisis
• 11. The duty to bring children living in conflict zones to a safe haven
• Index