āYou have come to Greece to make art visible and graciously offered to purchase the participation of invisible exoticized others. Weāre flattered. Your stone is supposed to give us a voice, to speak to our stories. But rocks canāt talk! We can! We have stolen your stone and we will not give it back. Your stone may be languishing without papers in a prison on the island of Samos. Your stone may have drowned and sunk to the bottom of the Mediterranean [ā¦]. Your stone may have been deported to Turkey [ā¦].1 Your stone may be on a flight to Sweden with its new 2,000 euro fake passport. Your stone may be driven to suicide in Moria detention center desperate for freedom. Your stone may be waiting in line outside the offices of Katehaki,2 [ā¦]. Your stone may be selling its body to strangers in Pedion Tou Areos.3 Your stone may be legally recognized as a refugee but sleeping on the street. You have asked us to perform a fake funeral for your stones. Weāve had more than our fair share of funerals. [ā¦]. Governments and NGOs have been pulling our strings, making decisions for us for far too long. But we are cutting the strings, dancing on our own, speaking louder than any stoneā (LGBTQI Refugees GR 2017).
With these words, āLGBTQI Refugees GRā decided to protest against the artistic performance by the Spanish artist Roger Bernat, for the international art exhibition Documenta 14 Athens/Kassel. Bernat constructed a replica of the āoath stoneā, in front of which the trial of Socrates was held in 399 BC (Bernat 2017). This stone would perform a symbolic function: socially excluded groups would carry the stone into the city of Athens in a factitious funeral, before the stoneās scheduled journey to Kassel to be buried at Thingplatz. Through this āritualā, founded, inter alia, on an Orientalist version of the āfreedom of speechā, these āinvisibleā groups would supposedly acquire a temporary visibility. It is exactly for these reasons that this group of migrants decided to āstealā the artwork and release the above statement. Their words are exceptionally penetrative, revealing the superficiality and often hypocrisy of the Western humanist discourse that is usually reproducing the dominant stereotypes about migrants and, consequently, their exploitation .
Since 2015, as an aftermath of the war in Syria , migration has been, more than ever before, at the heart of the EU dominant discourse and politics. As the Documenta event indicates, stones and other artistic creations about migrants may be free to cross the European borders , but migrants themselves are not; on the contrary, they are condemned to remain silent and invisible. And even though we did witness a short period of āopenā borders when refugees were supposedly welcomed in the Western world, a series of highly significant transformations has taken place in European migration politics, during the last few years. The following key events are, among others, quite indicative. In September 2015, Hungary decided to build a fence along its borders with Serbia, rendering illegal border crossing punishable with imprisonment and expulsion; a few days later, a site of Dachau concentration camp in Germany āthe first Nazi concentration camp opened on 22 March 1933,4 whose gate was decorated with the notorious slogan āArbeit macht freiāāwas transformed into detention centre for refugees ; already, during the period 2012ā2014, Greece had built a fence along its borders in Evros, whereas a series of camps and detention centres for migrants was built all over the country. Since most migrants were represented as āillegalā, all these practices were reinforced both politically and financially by the EU , whereas only a few āhumanistā voices in favour of migrantsā human rights were heard all over Europe . Therefore, during the last few years, many fences have been built along the borders of several European countries, the European borders have been closed and the path towards the āEuropean dreamā has been blocked, while thousands of migrants have been restrained in the European periphery, in āneutral zonesā, as well as in Middle Eastern countries. From this perspective, a series of significant questions arises.
In fact, which similarities does the twenty-first-century European map have to a painting by Amedeo Modigliani?5 To what extent have bordersā disposition and function been transformed during the last years, when even the signifier āSchengenizedā (Snyder 2005) has lost its meaning, since exclusion does not refer exclusively to Europeās external borders ? What could actually imply bordersā intensified militarisation , digitisation and diffusion, through a series of novel technoscientific means and practices? Within which historical a priori has the human body been transformed into the par excellence carrier of the border , into the āpasswordā,6 that is going to ensure to someone his/her entrance and integration within contemporary societies of control ? After all, by whomāand, more importantly, for whomāhas the Western world been built? For, even though it is usually represented as a āborderless worldā, it is actually founded on dichotomies, such as between ānativesā and āforeignersā, ālegalā and āillegalā, ārefugees ā and āmigrants ā. And, what is the price that migrants have to pay for their entrance into this āborderless worldā that offers its hospitality exclusively to those bodies that, āin materializing the norm, qualify as bodies that matter ā (Butler 1993: 16)? Within which historical procedures have migrantsā dead bodies in the Mediterranean Sea become a constitutive condition of our reality? Within the frame of biopolitical power, of this āpowerās hold over lifeā (Foucault 2003: 239) that has marked Western societies since the end of the eighteenth century, how could we endure to witnessāonce again, in historyāthese ācorpses without deathā, these ānon-humans whose decease is debased into a matter of serial production ā (Agamben 1999: 72)? All in all, which could be the forms of our critique towards the āhumanist discourse ā that is repeatedly articulated after tragedies, such as the one in Lampedusa in 2013, at the exact same time that new, harsher measures to deal with the āhumanist crisis ā are designed, decided and approved, whereas almost all declarations of human rights do, in reality, address exclusively to the most privileged part of humanity, exempting those not deemed to belong to it? In sum, our purpose is to raise these questions, to understand their significance, and to try to re-read and re-interpret migration control and management during the last few years, so as to highlight the fact that migrants , even though they āshould have incarnated the rights of man par excellenceā, constitute, on the contrary, āthe radical crisis of this concept ā (Agamben 1995: 116).
References
- Agamben, G. 1995. āWe Refugeesā. Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literature, 49(2): 114ā119.
- Agamben, G. 1998. ...