Handbook of Art and Global Migration: Theories, Practices, and Challenges 9783110476675, 9783110476002

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Handbook of Art and Global Migration

EDITED BY BURCU DOGRAMACI AND BIRGIT MERSMANN

HANDBOOK OF ART AND GLOBAL MIGRATION Theories, Practices, and Challenges

CONTENT

  9

Burcu Dogramaci and Birgit Mersmann Art and Global Migration. Theories, Practices, and Challenges Editorial Introduction

Migratory Challenges for Art Production and Art History  17

Burcu Dogramaci Toward a Migratory Turn Art History and the Meaning of Flight, Migration and Exile

 38

Nikos Papastergiadis and Daniella Trimboli From Global Turbulences to Spaces of Conviviality The Potentialities of Art in Mobile Worlds

 54

Thomas Nail The Migrant Image

 70

Marco Martiniello Immigrants, Refugees and the Arts A Complex and Multidimensional Relationship

Aesthetics and Art Practices of Migration  79

Mieke Bal Close Encounters Producing Mutual ‘Integration’

102

Sudeep Dasgupta Fuocoammare and the Aesthetic Rendition of the Relational ­Experience of Migration

117

Marie-Hélène Gutberlet Paths Walked Twice

CONTENT

132

Maggie O’Neill Women, Art, Migration and Diaspora

Migratory Networks. Objects and Actors on the Route 145

Birgit Haehnel and Sascha Reichstein On Nomadic Textile Forms – The Aesthetic of Nomadic Textiles

158

Rachel Lee Cosmopolitan Nodes and Vectors Otto Koenigsberger’s Exilic Networks in India

176

Birgit Mersmann Photodocumentaries of Global Migration Visual Narrativizations of Displacement

192

T. J. Demos Climates of Displacement From the Maldives to the Arctic

Places, Spaces, and Boundaries of Migration 217

Silvia Naef From Baghdad to Paris and Back Modernity, Temporary Exile and Abstraction in the Arab World

230

Kathleen James-Chakraborty The Place of Faith Accommodating Religious Minorities in the German and the Irish Cityscape

249

Burcu Dogramaci The Migratory Living Room Dwelling and Furnishing in a Foreign Land

263

Kerstin Pinther Of Inner Cities and Outer Space (African) Futurism and (Utopian) Migration

Histories and Memories of Migration 281 6

Cathrine Bublatzky Memory. Belonging. Engaging. Artistic Production in a Migration Context

CONTENT

298

Monica Juneja Migration, Dispossession, Post-Memorial Recuperations An ‘Undisciplined’ View of the Partition of the Indian Subcontinent

315

Melanie Ulz Migration on Display Curatorial Concepts and Artistic Approaches in France and Germany

331

Francesca Lanz and Christopher Whitehead Exhibiting Voids Displaying Migration and the Role of the Built Environment

Beyond Migration. Post-migratory Concepts and Strategies 351

Sten Pultz Moslund When Migration Turns from the Spectacular to the Ordinary Postmigrant Inflections of Analytical Categories and Concepts of Migration

366

Anne Ring Petersen Migration and Postmigration as New Frameworks for Art Theory Revisiting the Concepts of Identity, Difference and Belonging

385

Erol Yildiz Postmigrant Practices of Living as Resistance

396

Elke Gaugele The Postmigrant Condition in Fashion, Culture and Fashion Theory

411

Image Credits

414

Biographies of the Authors

421

Index

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ART AND GLOBAL MIGRATION. THEORIES, PRACTICES, AND CHALLENGES Editorial Introduction

Among societal movements, migration has the most dramatic and far-reaching consequences. Since not only human beings but objects, opinions, and ideas also migrate, the field deals with complex transfer movements. Migration as both a movement of internal migration and a process of transnationalization has been growing on a global scale since the 1980s. In recent publications, the close interrelations between capitalism, political radicalization, and escape/migration have been highlighted (Žižek 2015; Acemoğlu/Robinson 2012). Migration is closely linked with globalization: the increasingly global concentration and interconnectedness of economic systems through the liberalization of world trade, as well as intensified networking through electronic communication systems and innovative transport technologies, interact with international emigration and immigration movements. In this situation, the routes of highly qualified migrants who leave their homes to work as employees and leaders in multi-national enterprises overlap with those of temporary migrant workers, low-skilled long-term migrants, irregular migrants, and refugees. In addition, the travel routes of tourists and migrants meet, for instance at the neuralgic sites of arrival for refugee movements, such as the Mediterranean islands of Ten­ erife, Lampedusa, and Lesbos. Until now, migration research has primarily been carried out by the social, political, and economic sciences. It focused on socio-economic factors as the main cause of migration movements. Catalyzed by the politically and socially oriented Anglo-Saxon Cultural Studies, explorations of the cultural implications of migration phenomena have also been undertaken by the humanities and the Kulturwissenschaften (studies of culture). This discourse was largely conducted in specialized areas such as Postcolonial Studies, Transatlantic Studies, Diaspora Studies, Gender Studies (women and migration), and Transnational Studies. Over the past 20 years, global migration has been increasingly recognized and reflected in contemporary art; however, art history, European and international, has not yet systematically investigated migration as a category and mover of artistic production against the discursive backdrop of transnationalization and globalization. Solely in media- and culture-oriented image studies has a theoretical and methodological research interest in inter- and transcultural image migrations been crystallizing. The international Handbook of Art and Global Migration. Theories, Practices, and Challenges offers a comprehensive study of the connections between migration, art production, and art theory. It is organized as a thematically structured author anthology. The goal of the publication is to transform the transdisciplinary significance of migration studies into a major research area of art history and launch a migratory turn within the discipline. The Handbook discusses, from

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different medial, sociological, and regional points of view, what the interaction between migration and globalization, as the most significant phenomenon of social transformation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, means for art research, curatorial theory and practice, and artistic production. In what ways do global migrations inscribe themselves onto artistic works? How are artistic identities and identification concepts (social, political, religious, ethnic, sexual, and so on) negotiated transculturally through migration processes? How important were artistic exchanges, the journeys of ideas and concepts, before the 1990s, the proclaimed decade of globalization? How is the exhibition and museum world being changed by globally migrating artists, artworks, and art theories? How is the global art market affected by labor migration? What role do the differences between urban and rural areas play? How does migration reshape visible and invisible urban spaces? How can the cultural remains, imprints, and layerings produced by global migration be decoded or preserved? The current transnational move in art production and art markets shows that the discipline of art history is confronted with major challenges regarding complex historical and contemporary migratory processes. It has to revisit its own parameters and concepts. Which theoretical concepts correspond to the procedural, performative, transnational, and transcultural migration movements and their artistic reflections? How can art history be written by focusing on instability, exchange, and cultural changeability, and not by drawing on national parameters? The contributions to this Handbook provide multifaceted perspectives and interdisciplinary critical reflections on these issues. They deal with a wide range of art fields, media, and practices, engage with a multiplicity of academic approaches, and cover a global diversity of regional foci.1 The first chapter "Migratory Challenges for Art Production and Art History" opens the emerging field of art historical and art theoretical migration studies from a multidisciplinary perspective. It explores exterior connections and internal conceptual relationships between art practice, art history, and global migration from different viewpoints, among them art history, culture and communication studies, sociology, political theory, and philosophy. Recognized in all contributions is the challenge for art, media, and migration studies to deal with mobility as a central component of migratory processes and to confront the disorder of time and space as well as the conceptual turbulences produced by it. Through increased movement, including the global mobility of the digital image, established dualities constructed in our humanistic understanding of culture, media, and society – such as subject-object, object-spectator, origin-destination, original-copy, center-periphery, before-after – are displaced. This destabilization of dual parameters also affects the conventional binary model of migration mobility based upon moving and settling phases. Even the figuration of the migrant is detached from static preconceptions related to being and place and redefined by its movement: its displacement and becoming. In response to this uprooting, the chapter proposes new dynamic approaches, concepts, and methods for the study of art that depart from the primacy of motion. It points to the need for an anti-linear, multi-perspectival, and horizontal reconceptualization and recanonization of art history from a transnational or transcultural perspective (which also would have to include a histo1  To also represent the global diversity and migration of the English language, we have refrained from selecting one standard English model and encouraged the authors to use their preferred variant and spelling of English.

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riography of migration in art); the aim is to assert the primacy of a mobile or migratory aesthetics and a kinetic theory of the migrant image. Another important aspect is the institutionalization of new mobile art spaces of the common by art collectives whose formation is pushed by rise of the digital network society. This move, as well as the migration of artistic practice into urban and community spaces, makes it necessary to rethink the role and systematization of museums and contemporary art institutions. The new ambient context contemporary artists operate in globally requires new explorations into collaborativity and conviviality as meaning-making social relations. The next chapter "Aesthetics and Art Practices of Migration" reflects on the conditions for and characteristics of a migratory reshaping of aesthetics and artistic practice. The introduction of the notion of a migratory aesthetics serves to respond to “the various processes of becoming that are triggered by the movement of people and peoples: experiences in transition as well as the transition of experience itself into new modalities, new art work, new ways of being” (Durrant/Lord 2007, 11 f.). In a narrower sense, migratory aesthetics is related to “sensuous traces of migration as an aesthetic phenomenon” (Bal 2019, 81). This can involve the migration of aesthetic forms and genres as well as the destabilizing, critical, and transformative power of displacement inherent in aesthetic experience. Given the focus on artistic practice, the chapter partly features contributions by culture and media scholars who are themselves active in art production and filmmaking, thus allowing for critical self-reflection. In addition, it takes the aesthetic perspective of migrants as art practitioners into consideration. Participatory arts, participatory action research, and ethno-mimesis are presented as inclusive methodologies to incorporate the voices and images of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers for mobilizing change. By reengaging with Adorno’s aesthetic and social theory, in particular his notion of art as an autonomous and resistant form of non-identity thinking and cultural critique, as well as Rancière’s political aesthetics, the important role of the arts as a means of reimagining and renewing the social worlds is highlighted. Migration theory emphasizes that contemporary global migration has taken on a new networked shape. Characterized as a turbulent or kinetic force, migration is seen to operate along nodes in a complex network of mobility (Papastergiadis 2000). The chapter "Migratory Networks. Objects and Actors on the Route" looks at the different dimensions and functions of these networks: it traces actors, objects, and materials on their route. The concept of migratory networks is applied to social, professional, and interdisciplinary networks of exile/migrant artists and architects, to artistic production, distribution, and sales networks as well as to the new networking of actors and activists in the humanitarian, sociopolitical, and environmental field of migration and refugee policy. The contributions from architectural, textile, and photodocumentary studies demonstrate how experiences of exile, migration, and displacement are interwoven with the aesthetic traditions, production networks, and trade histories of objects and materials. The nomadic property of textiles is revealed as a metaphor for the web of textility (Spivak 1999) that spans the social fabric of migratory actor and product networks. Migration as a translocal or transnational movement of people, their material and immaterial living cultures, dwelling and lifestyles is inconceivable without reflecting on place and space, territories and borders. The chapter "Places, Spaces, and Boundaries of Migration" takes the real and imaginary spatial dimensions of migratory displacements and relocations into considera-

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tion. It presents a variety of interconnected aspects of how migration has affected and changed urban spaces and cityscapes, built environments, imaginary living places, and sites of art production. The creative interchange between local and imported ideas in art, architecture, and interior design is a central feature of how migrants transform the spatial environment of the communities to which they have moved or remigrated. For diaspora communities, virtual environments and outer space take on new meanings as places for reimagination. The art context of African Futurism, for example, shows that the astronaut as a time and space traveler has become a powerful figure for utopian migration. Conceived as a complement to migration as a space-transgressive category of displacement and relocation, the chapter "Histories and Memories of Migration" exposes the time-traveling dimensions of migratory mobility. At its center, it investigates histories, memories, and temporalities of migration in the field of the visual and performing arts, film, exhibition curating, and museum work. Memory, individual and collective, is approached on the basis of its mobile and dynamic transcultural quality (Erll 2011, 11). In analyzing artistic production in migration contexts, the chapter sheds lights on the ways in which personal histories, memories, and traumatic experiences of migration are inscribed onto the artistic work. It discusses how (post‑) memory work in art and film can provide a means to recuperate from the experiences of displacement and dispossession, violence and loss; such work can even operate as a resistant form of sociopolitical engagement in relation to visual regimes and material cultures that are marked by the absence of commemorative practices. The important reflexive role of contemporary art in migration exhibitions and the need for and design of national museums of migration is another focal point of critical debate. With the example of the French immigration museum (Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration), the challenges and potential risks of a state-led “museumization” of migration to construct a unifying national master narrative that ignores the past of colonial history are shown. The chapter "Beyond Migration. Post-migratory Concepts and Strategies" takes the recent academic turn towards a “post-migrant migration research” (Römhild 2015, 39) into account. From different angles, among them art, cultural, fashion, and social theory, it explores the impact of a postmigrant condition of culture and society on a redefinition of concepts and theories in art and migration studies. On the basis of diverse case studies, the individual contributions engage with postmigrant inflections of major concepts from migration studies such as identity, difference, belonging, race, ethnicity, othering, multiculturalism, and hybridity; they also examine postmigrant artistic strategies with a subversive impact deconstructing hegemonic discourses. From a contemporary fashion studies perspective, this includes the examination of how notions of the social and aesthetic postmigrant condition are interrelated with critical discourses of the postmodern, postcolonial, and post-black. All contributing authors share the view that postmigration does not constitute a new discipline; they argue for approaching, studying, and deploying it as a mental attitude, an analytical category, and a resistant counter-practice to usher an epistemological turn in migration studies. In order to surpass the exceptionalization of migration and the figure of the migrant, the demigrantization of migration research should be paralleled and connected with the migrantization of research on society and culture, initiating a process of ‘normalization’. The Handbook is a contribution to a re‑reading of migratory movements from a critical cultural perspective. It challenges established views on migration as spatial practices. In the fig-

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ure of the migrant and the cross-border movements, the past, present and future fall into one, as Ranajit Guha mentions in his reflections on “The Migrant’s Time”: “For, it has the concreteness of a sudden break with continuity, or more appropriately, if figuratively speaking, that of a clinamen which disturbs the laminar flow of time to create a whirlpool for the strangeness of the arrival to turn round and round as a moment of absolute uncertainty, a present without a before or an after, hence beyond understanding” (Guha 2011, 5). The Handbook takes this multidirectional and anachronistic understanding of migration into account, intertwining it with art theories and practices in the age of mobility.

References Acemoğlu, Daron, and James A. Robinson. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. Crown Business, 2012. Bal, Mieke. “Close Encounters: Producing Mutual ‘Integration’.” Handbook of Art and Global Migration. Theories, Practices, and Challenges, edited by Burcu Dogramaci and Birgit Mersmann, DeGruyter, 2019, pp. 79–101. Durrant, Sam, and Catherine M. Lord. “Introduction.” Essays in Migratory Aesthetics. Cultural Practices Between Migration and Art-Making, edited by Sam Durrant and Catherine M. Lord, Rodopi, 2007, pp. 11–19. Erll, Astrid. “Travelling Memory.” Parallax, vol. 17, no. 4, 2011, pp. 4–18, doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2011.605570. Accessed 9 January 2018. Guha, Ranajit. “The Migrant’s Time.” The Migrant’s Time. Rethinking Art History and Diaspora, edited by Saloni Mathur, Yale University Press, 2011, pp. 3–9. Papastergiadis, Nikos. The Turbulence of Migration. Globalization, Deterritorialization and Hybridity. Polity Press, 2000. Römhild, Regina. “Jenseits ethnischer Grenzen. Für eine postmigrantische Kultur- und Gesellschaftsforschung.” Nach der Migration. Postmigrantische Perspektiven jenseits der Parallelgesellschaft, edited by Erol Yildiz and Marc Hill, transcript, 2015, pp. 37–48. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Harvard University Press, 1999. Žižek, Slavoj. Der neue Klassenkampf. Die wahren Gründe für Flucht und Terror. Ullstein, 2015.

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MIGRATORY CHALLENGES FOR ART ­P RODUCTION AND ART HISTORY

BURCU DOGRAMACI

TOWARD A MIGRATORY TURN Art History and the Meaning of Flight, Migration and Exile

Beyond a historiographical order Art history is not only an updating of the history of artistic production and theory in an infinite future but also a continual locating of the present within the past. As Michel de Certeau extensively elaborates in his book The Writing of History, history is composed of the conditions of possibility and production of the present (Certeau 1988, 10 f.) and is thus not an objectively existing res facta. Walter Benjamin had already pointed to this in his reflections On the Concept of History: “History is the object of a construct whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by Now-Time (Jetztzeit)” (Benjamin 1970a, 263).1 History is a reformulation of that which has happened, which always carries with it a certain degree of deviation: the truth of history does not always stay the same (Koselleck 1982, 247; Koselleck 2000, 294). Canonical knowledge and knowledge systems are the results of discourses and as such are also powerful instruments; the ordering of the past is not least of all collected in history-making institutions such as archives (Foucault 2008; see also Martschukat 2002). Historiography is both selective and relational (Pokorny 2011, 21, 65 ff.) as it arises from recipients’ relation to sources or events they have experienced. In this way, the writing of history serves the (ideological) positioning and self-assurance of individuals, groups, and larger entities, and even the legitimization of nations (Langewiesche 2000, 25; Kocka 2001, 83). Historical systems have a stabilizing function, which can even be expressed in objective, distanced language, and a bird’s-eye view of historiographic texts (Enzensberger 2014, 11). The historiography of art is sometimes resistant to criticism, still gets stuck in old patterns, and rejects extensive self-critical deconstruction. This is evident in, among other things, the numerous new editions of surveys of modern art history, which continue to contribute to a history of isms – from Impressionism to Expressionism, Futurism to Surrealism (see Haftmann 1954/2000; Read 1959/2010; Arnason 1968/2012; Hunter/Jacobus 1976/2000; Schapiro 1978/1988). However, the established understanding in critical historical scholarship that historiography is in fact not absolutely objective but is tied to perspectives (Pokorny 2011, 17; Jussen 2000, 58) has, since the 1980s, been questioned in art history, particularly in feminist, postcolonial, and globally oriented research. Teleological concepts based on what appears to be a developmental logic as well as concepts of temporality, which have led to the acceptance of a “belated” modernism, are being reassessed. In particular, the dominance of a truly Western modernism, which excludes the 1  “Die Geschichte ist Gegenstand einer Konstruktion, deren Ort nicht die homogene und leere Zeit sondern die von Jetztzeit erfüllte bildet.” (Benjamin 1991, 701).

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plurality of contemporaneous instances of art production, has been the subject of particular criticism (Hinden 2002; Flood 2007; Watanabe 2013). For the most part, the critical approaches mentioned here all support the expansion of the canon, into which, for example, non-Western and non-Northern art, female artists and their work, as well as new and unorthodox methodologies should be integrated (Salomon 1991; Camille et al. 1996; Pollock 1999; Elkins 2007).2 Ruth E. Iskin has suggested the term “pluriversal canon” to describe an alternative art history that is based on “plurality, heterogeneity, postcolonialism and globalization” (Iskin 2017, 23). Pertinent literature on the connection between art history, migration, and the canon, however, is still lacking, and it would be interesting to observe how such texts would deal with the canon, its inherent organizational categories, and its temporal linearity.3 The question arises of whether transnational mobility4 – as a spatial boundary crossing that transcends the concept of artists’ contacts or that of artists’ journeys – inevitably operates outside of this canon. Based on this, the reason why migration, exile, and flight – as events accompanied by confusion and irregularity – have so far received little attention in the historiography of art can be explained. The canon is ultimately an expression of collective identities and values (Locher 2012, 33). Migrations across borders cannot easily be aligned with canonical systems, periodizations, and a logical chronology, since they embody the foreign in relation to the supposedly autochthonous. Migration is a visitation, the appearance of a Ghost of Disorder, and is perceived as a threat to cohesion and regularity. Nikos Papastergiadis points out that, in relational terms, migration is defined as an alternative concept to sedentism: Human movement was seen as a depletion of energy as well as a threat to the integrity of borders and the stability of social entities. Hence, migration was considered a deviation from the normal conventions of settled life, and migrants (or as Oscar Handlin termed them, the ‘uprooted ones’) were at best seen as victims of external forces or at worst as suspect characters seeking unfair advantage over residents, thus representing a threat to the prevailing social order. (Papastergiadis 2011, 157)

Social structures, concise national history (or histories), language, and the paradigm of a “dominant culture” seem to be the other side of migratory phenomena as an expression of diffusion and contamination. Applied to historiographic parameters, the stasis of timelines, objectifications, categories, and successions stand in opposition to concepts of anachronism, the removal of borders, and plurality. The problems with the art historical treatment of exile and migration can be seen in many facets of the response: the work of exiled artists is often overlooked, suppressed, and forgotten, or the work done in exile is marginalized and classified as a far cry from the artist’s chief works. An example of this is the work of the sculptor Rudolf Belling, who, in the 1910s and 1920s, was a 2  Anna Brzyski points out that canonical positions over the past 30 years have also done virtually nothing to change the narrative of genius, which features predominantly male protagonists and which continues to be widely perpetuated in universities and museums (Brzyski 2007, 2; see also Lange 2008, 239 f.). 3  One important essay on an art history of migration that implicitly calls for a revision of the canon has been presented by Kobena Mercer (Mercer 2008). For recent work on modernity and exile, see also Demos 2017. 4  The term “mobility” is increasingly being used in migration studies in place of “migration,” and “mobile actors” in place of “migrants,” in an effort to release them from the paradigm of national or ethnic assignment (Welz 2014, 103; see also Walke 2017, 2 f.).

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leading proponent of abstraction in sculpture. After arriving in Turkey in 1936, he turned toward a figurative neoclassicism for several years but later returned to an abstract formal language. Yet Belling received hardly any attention in the years following the end of World War II. This was due to a long absence from Germany, and the seizure and destruction of his works during the National Socialist period, but also to his artistic production in Turkey, which critics found suspicious (Dogramaci 2015a, 48–53). In a letter to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, one of the most powerful voices in art criticism in Germany at the time, Will Grohmann, referred to Belling as “passé.”5 The sculptor did not receive an official invitation to return to Germany. Even his late work in the 1950s and 1960s was not acknowledged alongside other non-figurative positions from that decade but instead was excluded from the discourse (Dogramaci 2017, 288). Rudolf Belling’s first major retrospective in Germany was not held until 2017 at the Berlin National Gallery (Rudolf Belling 2017). There is, however, an exception to every rule. In this respect, one can name the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and his popular, now canonical, work in the United States, which has long since become part of American architectural history. In 1947, for example, the exhibition catalogue for a retrospective of the artist’s American work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York makes the following statement: “Mies van der Rohe’s main creative work in America, and the most important of his entire career, is the new campus for Illinois Institute of Technology” (Johnson 1947, 131). With this, the master builder – and this is what differentiates his reception from that of other emigrants – became the “American Mies” (Lambert 2001, 17). However, dealing with artists remains a complicated and complex issue when, for example, they have passed through several countries of exile before reaching their final destination. Their works are often scattered or destroyed; under dictatorships, such as the National Socialist regime, their chief works are also the target of defamation or destruction. Estates are far-flung and the study of them demands considerable endurance and often knowledge of two or more languages. Along with problems of reception, difficulties also arise in attempting to classify and categorize the works into artistic currents or a national art history. Therefore, the work of emigrated artists is sometimes regarded from the perspective of their places of origin: in exile studies, painters such as Gretchen Wohlwill, who lived in Portugal for many years, or Paul Hamann, who spent decades in England, are treated as artists from Hamburg (Bruhns 2001, 177–179; 422–426). However, these are cases of transnationally created œuvres transcending linguistic, cultural, and national boundaries. It becomes even more complex when the parameters of origin or return are unclear. The sculptor Jussuf Abbo was born in the Palestinian city of Safed in Upper Galilee, long a part of the Ottoman Empire. With the collapse of the empire after the end of World War I, he became stateless. Abbo, who first went to Berlin in the 1910s and, after 1933, into exile in England, left behind a heterogeneous body of work. His sculptures, partly expressive, partly objective, and later, imbued with introspectiveness, elude strict categorization or ordering. Abbo left many of his works behind in Berlin or destroyed many of those created during his emigration due to lack of success. With his traces lost in exile in England and disregarded in Germany under National Socialism as well as in the decades after 1945, Abbo was non-existent in art historiography for decades. It was only for a short time in the 1980s and now in recent years that Abbo’s work 5  Will Grohmann to Andrew Ritchie, 9 May 1956, The Museum of Modern Art, Archives, New York, Box 110: Correspondence Institution N, New York/MoMA.

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Fig. 1 | Else Lasker-Schüler, Jussuff Abbu, Berliner Börsen-Courier, vol. 55, no. 327, 15 July 1923, p. 5

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Fig. 2 | Jussuf Abbo, Else Lasker-­ Schüler, 1923, lithography, estate of Jussuf Abbo

has received new attention, initially as a protagonist in an art history of exile (Dogramaci 2015a, 57–62). A bust by Abbo migrated with his former gallerist Herbert von Garvens-Garvensburg to the island of Bornholm, where Garvens-Garvensburg sought refuge from persecution under National Socialism (Vester 1992; Nielsen 1993). As a supporter of modern art, Garvens-Garvensburg has, for some time, also received more recognition.6 However, how should the forgotten, such as Jussuf Abbo and Garvens-Garvensburg’s gallery, be dealt with? Is it enough to rewrite them into modernism, thereby providing them with delayed justice? Or should the circles and routes, the contacts and networks, the preserved and destroyed works and legacies be the starting point from which to understand art history, more clearly than before, as at once a history of gaps, of circular relations, of processes of attraction and rejection, as progress and reversion? A study of art history as a study of migration (and vice versa) must pose new questions (see also Boeckl 2016, 429): To what extent were Abbo’s multiple displacements and his status as a stateless person in Germany in the 1910s and 1920s the reason he neither had nor cultivated any ties to the Free German Cultural Union in London? What aesthetic and existential experiences are shared by Else Lasker-Schüler and Jussuf Abbo, who inspired each other with their work 6  His works were recognized in the exhibition revonnaH: Kunst der Avantgarde in Hannover 1912–1933 (23 September 2017–7 January 2018, Hannover, Sprengel-Museum), to give one example.

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(Dogramaci 2015b), and who, as exiles, were both confronted with experiences of failure (figs. 1 and 2)? What shape did the project of modernism take on its way into exile on a Danish island (Garvens-Garvensburg) or in London, where the gallerist Alfred Flechtheim lived as an émigré? What misunderstandings – including fruitful ones – faced works that had been brought along, exhibited, or produced abroad? Can the “classical modernism” of the 1920s be understood as a prehistory of an artistic modernism en route, which only took on its “global” form on its way, along its passage, through contacts, when faced with existential crisis?

The history of art as a history of migration and interconnection Theories or art historical treatises developed along the paths of migration are often not appreciated until many decades after their conception. Thus, the contributions of the emigrants Naum Gabo, László Moholy-Nagy, and Marcel Breuer to the London manifesto Circle (Gabo et al. 1937) has yet to be examined and classified within a transnational art history, of which migration is an important driving force. The œuvre of the art historian Hanna Levy-Deinhard, who researched art sociology, postcolonial art, and the aesthetics of reception during her years in exile in France, Brazil, and the United States after fleeing Germany in 1930, was long overlooked. Her work can be read as part of a (self‑)critical art history during a period of awakening and upheaval and provided an important impulse for the renovation of the discipline of art history in Germany beginning in the late 1960s (Below 2016). In this respect, Levy-Deinhard’s work while in Brazil in particular anticipated questions and topics associated with a transcultural study of art. At the same time, Levy-Deinhard’s work might never have been created in this way if she had not been forced to emigrate, as the impressions left by each sojourn were preserved in her texts, and the various experiences of relation, interdependence, and their contradictions are what constitutes the textual corpus in the first place. However, in the case of Levy-Deinhard, the challenge lies in subsequently placing this research, which was not collected and annotated in its entirety until 2016 (Below/Dogramaci 2016), within a dialogic configuration; this means not only incorporating it in a linear history but also placing Levy-Deinhard’s work in relation to that which came before it, to contemporaneously published texts by other authors, as well as to future developments in art historical research. History and histories not only reveal what once was but can also point beyond themselves toward what will be. The rediscovered and republished writings of overlooked scholars such as Hanna Levy-Deinhard can, in this way, be repositioned in relation to contemporary authors, just as they can find their way into the historiography of the field. This opens up the possibility of re‑readings and contextualizations, which not only are capable of leading to a rewriting of the art history of the past but can also help shape the future of the discipline. A democratic, horizontal model, as is found in Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the rhizome (Deleuze/Guattari 1977) is conducive to an understanding of an art history (or of art histories) of migration. The connecting, multi-perspectival, and anti-linear concept of the art historian Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas from the early twentieth century (Jussen 2000, 65) could also serve as a starting point, along with Warburg’s anachronistic term “survival” (Nachleben). As an antitype of the chronology and order of a timeline, survival constitutes an unordered temporality  –  far removed from a steady progression  – which follows its own temporal and

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spatial logic. In Warburg’s work, survival (Warburg 1998, 670–673; Warburg 2012, 36) is neither a chronological arrangement of the original and its copy nor death and rebirth. As such, it opposes the idea of an ancient origin or beginning as was established in the canon by the likes of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who operated with concepts of model and copy (Cortjaens 2017, 38). Warburg’s reflections offer alternatives to a teleological art history of becoming and passing-away. In Warburg’s work, ancient remains or traces are shown in unexpected ways in the visual worlds of subsequent eras, and are reinterpreted, distorted, and mixed; as Georges Didi-Huberman formulated in his treatment of Warburg, there might be a “time for phantoms,” considered as a sudden return of images or Nachleben (survival) not subject to the model of Nachahmung (imitation) (see Didi-Huberman 2010, 29). Didi-Huberman emphasizes that the past can resonate as something unfinished or incomplete. However, in order to understand Warburg’s word usage, which expresses an egalitarian and rhizomatic thinking, one can claim that it is the contemporary that first gives contour to the past by remembering, reconstructing and, in doing so, finding and inventing it. The perpetual, continued existence of certain formulas, gestures, and signs leads to questions of why this, specifically, as a performance of memory, can be drawn from the past into the present but not the other. At the same time, Warburg operates with terms related to movement, mobility, and migration, such as in his treatment of tapestries, which he refers to as movable image vehicles (bewegliches Bildervehikel) or textile vehicles (textile Fahrzeuge) (Warburg 1979, 165), or in discussing the printed pictures or block books from the fifteenth century that he calls image vehicles (Bilderfahrzeuge) (Warburg 2012, 14). The aspects of movement, mobility, and processes of circulation (Kreislaufvorgänge), on which Warburg repeatedly reflected in his studies (Warburg 1906, 60), are related to the figure of the whirlpool (Strudel), as a discontinuous time regime (Didi-Huberman 2010, 350), as is also articulated, for example, in Benjamin’s understanding of history. The movement conveyed by the image of the whirlpool expresses an anachronistic understanding of time and history, which is to be understood as lying beyond a continuous development. In this respect, Benjamin replaces the image of the riverbed or a river’s current, which, from its source to the sea, follows a “natural” movement with a beginning and end, with that of circulating or swirling water. In a journal entry from 1931, Benjamin notes: “In such a whirlpool earlier and later events – the prehistory and posthistory of an event, or, better, of a status – swirl around it” (Benjamin 2005, 502).7 Time would thus no longer be a system; in the dangerous movement of a whirlpool, chaos threatens the possibility of gaining an overview. The past, present, and future are swirled together. Seen in this way, migration not only can be seen as a phenomenon that flanks, inspires, or threatens the organization of art historiography. Rather, the varying characteristics of the migratory, the boundless, the circulating, the caesura, trauma and new beginnings, reinterpretation and rewriting, assimilation and insistence, and visitation and the reconstruction of memories can be understood as alternative historiographic models. The migratory turn, however, not only com-

7  “In solchem Strudel kreist das Früher oder Später – die Vor- und Nachgeschichte eines Geschehens oder besser noch eines Status um diesen” (Benjamin 1985, 443). Sigrid Weigel views the whirlpool in the context of a specific understanding of time, as an “image of the interaction of pre- and post-history, of the past and the present, and of eternity and the instant” (Weigel 2015, 426).

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prises the way art history is written but points to other concepts of, approaches to, and topics related to art production, which, in the following, will be discussed through the example of “mapping.”

Mapping art history – mapping as an artistic practice Migration necessitates and produces new art histories that demand altered forms of mapping. Migration overcomes and perforates national borders and, in doing so, inevitably turns the focus onto territories, borders, and maps – for instance, in discussion of migration routes, new border walls, or European border policy. In the introduction to her book Partisan Canons, “Canons and Art History,” Anna Brzyski questions the validity of canonical art history and suggests complementing the linear narrative of canonical art history with a diachronic, anti-hierarchical (digital) mapping system (Brzyski 2007, 18–22). Mapping is not to be viewed, however, simply as an approach to understanding artists, objects, and ideas beyond national boxes and to repositioning them in relation to one another on a blank map of art history. In this process, the temporal structure of historical models is joined by a spatial dimension. At the same time, in the context of migration, mapping is also an aesthetic form of artistic production, referring to the polysemantic nature of maps, to borders, but also to subjective mapping. As Rosi Braidotti explains in her reflections on “nomadic subjects”: “Figurations are not figurative ways of thinking, but rather more materialistic mappings of situated, embedded, and embodied positions. […] A figuration is a living map, a transformative account of the self – it’s no metaphor” (Braidotti 2012, 13 f.). Lexical entries for the word “map” define it as a “diagrammatic representation of an area of land or sea showing physical features, cities, roads, etc.”8 One must distinguish between, among other types, topographical and geological maps; nautical charts, which depict maritime and coastal areas and may include information on currents and tides; natural-historical and ethnographic maps; as well as political maps, which depict national borders: Cartographers make many different types of maps, which can be divided into two broad categories: general reference maps and thematic maps. General reference maps show general geographic information about an area, including the locations of cities, boundaries, roads, mountains, rivers, and coastlines. […] Many are topographic maps, meaning that they show changes in elevation. They show all the hills and valleys in an area. […] Thematic maps display distributions, or patterns, over Earth’s surface. They emphasize one theme, or topic. These themes can include information about people, other organisms, or the land. Examples include production, people’s average income, where different languages are spoken, or average annual rainfall.9

What becomes clear from this definition is that the orientation of a map’s content radically changes its message and how it is read, as mountain ranges, rivers, rocks, and plants know no national borders. Perspective – the point of view from which the world is viewed – as well as a map’s scope also make a specific statement. The first photograph to show Earth from the viewpoint of outer space appeared on the cover of the Whole Earth Catalog by Stewart Brand in 1968 (fig. 3). Oceans and continents are visible but not national boundaries. When the astronaut Alex8  See https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/map. Accessed 2 March 2018. 9  See https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/map/. Accessed 6 March 2018.

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Fig. 3 | Stewart Brand, Whole Earth ­Catalog, 1968, cover

ander Gerst returned to Earth from the International Space Station in 2014, he named the view of the planet as the most impressive of his experiences there: “What you don’t actually see from up there are borders. That’s what’s most impressive up there, because we’re so used to seeing national borders in atlases.”10 Simona Koch refers to the genesis and variability of the courses of European borders through the medium of film. In her animated pencil drawings BORDERS/Europe from 2010 (figs. 4–6), she traces borders on the European continent throughout history. Her sources are historical atlases and maps she found in libraries, on the internet, or at flea markets (see Hug 2015, 194). Her pencil follows the course of the borders dictated there, emphasizing the fact that these are decidedly manmade: just as the pencil, guided by the artist’s hand, manifests as a line on the surface and is erased again and again to make room for new borders, so too have people, through settlement, displacement, armed conflicts, and peace-making or strategic pacts always moved the borders of their territories. Koch technically reflects this historical instability of borders, for one, through the medium of animation, which, with the use of time-lapse, shows the courses of borders endlessly flowing into one another, being erased, and reappearing. Further-

10  “Was man tatsächlich da oben nicht sieht, sind Grenzen. Das ist das, was einen da oben am meisten erstaunt, weil man aus dem Atlas an Ländergrenzen gewöhnt ist.” Alexander Gerst, quoted by Christoph Driessen/dpa, 14 November 2014, http://www.badische-zeitung.de/nachrichten/panorama/raumfahrergerst-hat-noch-nicht-genug-vom-all--94671654.html. Accessed 17 January 2018. Unless otherwise stated, all quotes have been translated from the German by the translator.

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Figs. 4–6 | Simona Koch, BORDERS/Europe, 2010, ­animated pencil drawing, HD film, 4:3, color, mute, 01:40 min/loop

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more, a negative image of the drawing is shown. White lines are drawn on a dark background, while disappearing lines leave a light shadow behind, so that, like a palimpsest, the old and new borders – the depiction does not follow any chronology – remain visible. Like the fading and yet still visible intersecting lines, the historical courses of borders are often only manifested in textual or oral descriptions, publications, or memoirs. The endlessly forming, gossamer threads have an almost ghostly quality.11 As Koch’s work plays on a continuous loop, the drawing and erasing of borders repeats without pause, just as history remains a constant system of reference for political movements. As has been demonstrated by current tendencies in Russia and Turkey, a longing for former borders persists. The topic of changing European borders and the consequences of the Schengen Agreement are the starting point for the multimedia project Nach der Grenze (After the Border, 2008/09) by Silke Markefka and Nikolai Vogel. In accordance with the Schengen Agreement from 1985, the borders between participating member-countries of the European Union – including Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Luxembourg, and Germany – have been open since 1995. This international agreement provided that stationary border controls at borders between Schengen countries would be ended. In doing so, borders could be crossed without the need for identifying documents. At former border crossing points in Germany, Markefka and Vogel created an artistic research project that deals with relics and traces. In this project, they interweave their own memories of crossing the border as children and adolescents (both were born in the 1970s) with current experiences at these now meaningless sites, which once represented national sovereignty. As is explained in a text on their project: Border traffic, border controls, and border crossings are formative impressions from our childhood. Beyond them lay a different country, vacation, often another language or currency. But crossing came with risk: we had to identify ourselves, were inspected, mistrusted. As harmless as it was for West Germans, the border was a childhood adventure, it stimulated the imagination – it was a classic experience. Now, one after the other, they are disappearing, are being reclaimed by nature, or simply left to fall into disrepair – they are becoming ruins. (Markefka/Vogel 2009, 6)

The border crossings were open, but the two wanted to know how these places feel now and what they would find if they visited them today. They often experienced the abandoned borders as strange places with unreal relics from another era as indicators of both liberation and oppression. The artists then created paintings, photographs, and audio recordings along the roads leading across Germany’s borders. Some of Markefka’s paintings are medium size, measuring 60 by 80 centimeters or 70 by 50 centimeters, but others are on large-format canvases, 140 by 140 or 200 by 180 centimeters large (fig. 7). Her application of diluted paint is streaky, not pastose; the brushstrokes are clearly visible. The gray color pallet and visible drip marks evoke melancholy weather, bleak views of a boring place where the buildings are arranged around an empty space. Only a stump of the word “Grenze” (border) remains, as if, out of sheer boredom, the “e” had fallen asleep and out of the picture. Arrows, terms, and pictograms still attest to border traffic to be regulated, now nothing 11  In this way, Koch’s work evokes associations with Christopher Clark’s 2012 book The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (Clark 2012), in which the author traces the way in which the European powers stumbled like sleepwalkers into a disastrous war.

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Fig. 7 | Silke Markefka, Border crossing Nennig on the Moselle river/Remich ­(Réimech) on the Moselle river, border Germany/Luxembourg, from the series Nach der Grenze (After the Border), 2008, acrylic on canvas, 60 × 80 cm

more than a memory. Buildings appear unused, vacant, and somber; they too seem to have forgotten their meaning. A crooked sign in the woods reads “Landesgrenze” (border). Occasionally, the paintings bear national emblems, coats of arms, and eagles, former symbols of the sovereignty of national border demarcation (fig. 8), which now must make way for a European dream of shared external borders. Photographs show Markefka and Vogel waiting, standing at the border crossing point at Bad Bentheim (on the border between Germany and the Netherlands) and at the border crossing at Neuhaus-Bargen (on the border between Germany and Switzerland). In these photographs (taken with a self-timer) the two seem to appropriate the very existence (but lack of functionality) of the border posts and their furnishing. Vogel approached these border crossings from an acoustic perspective. With analog recording devices (fig. 9), specifically tape recorders, dictation devices, and cassette recorders, he recorded sounds at the former border crossings. The devices Vogel used refer to a time when these crossings were still active, when checks and controls were still being carried out, when people were allowed to pass or were turned away. These recording methods have been rendered old-fashioned by the digital revolution in data storage devices – just like the old border crossings, they have been replaced by new ideas and developments. At one time, however, the devices also had a political function. In the film The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen, 2006), which takes place in former East Germany, one of the main characters, a Stasi informant, spends his time in front of his tape recorder, listening in on the life of an actor couple; much of what he hears on the recordings is quotidian, unspectacular, and often even boring. This connection between control and analog technology is also conjured up by Vogel’s devices and their audio recordings (although Vogel and Markefka did not work at the old border between East and West Germany). Based on this project and the resulting analog recordings, a radio drama was created, in which – as a continuation of the exploration of borders – the voices,

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Fig. 8 | Silke Markefka, Border crossing Nennig on the Moselle river/Remich ­(Réimech) on the Moselle river, border Germany/Luxembourg, from the series Nach der Grenze (After the Border), 2008, acrylic on canvas, 60 × 80 cm

atmospheres, and perceptions of these places were examined; it debuted on Bayern 2 under the title Nach der Grenze in 2011. Along with these and other examinations of maps and borders, possible alternative forms of mapping European or global borders, which have less to do with national demarcation and more with areas of human movement, can be considered. In his Berlin Chronicle, Benjamin explores whether life can be translated into the semantic system of a city map: “For a long time – for years, in fact – I have toyed with the idea of representing the space of life – bios [den Raum des Lebens – Bios] – graphically through the form of a map”12 (Benjamin 1970b, 12). In doing so, Benjamin designed a counter-image to a hegemonic, historically impactful charting of spaces. As Karl Schlögel says: “Times of upheaval are times of cartographic revision, of redrawing, are map times in an eminent sense; conversely, historical time in general is time that can be, and is, recorded in maps” (Schlögel 2016, 57). Sabine Folie defines maps as “the ultimate medium of human self-assurance,” as “instruments of domination and exploitation or at least of demonstrating power over territorial claims and of strategies of war” (Folie 1997, 9). But what would maps look like if they did not depict national borders or economic or political conclusions, maps that did not chart any historical changes but, as Benjamin expresses it, are based on an eventful life or on a life in motion? In her series Portraits for the Twenty-First Century (1978–2001), artist Morgan O’Hara created 155 portraits, which can be read as movement records. The drawings trace the stations of people’s lives along their life paths (fig. 10). For her drawings, O’Hara uses the traditional format of the portrait, which is both “the image of a person” and also an “eloquent expression of their current self-image and, to an equal extent, idioms deemed fitting at the time” (Beyer 2002, 15). But in12  The translation was taken from Leland de la Durantaye. Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction. Stanford University Press, 2009, p. 145.

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stead of exploring people’s facial landscapes as an expression of their unique personalities, O’Hara follows their paths as traces of life. For this, the artist lays the same paper over global, country, and city maps and traces the routes they have traveled in pencil. The resulting drawings can be read as artistically translated ‘ego-documents’ that graphically capture movement and rest. While the cosmopolitan Immanuel Kant spent his entire life in Königsberg – in O’Hara’s work, this appears as a single dot – other lives are more heavily shaped by changes in location, cuts, and uncertainties, resulting in expressive movement records. As routes, these specific portraits materialize the mobile existence of the present. In the serial perspective of the work, they address changes of location and home as a constant in contemporary social development (Yildiz 2013, 44). Viewed in this way, the world becomes a network of relationships that links different places through the movement of individuals. As Paolo Bianchi describes in his reflections on

Fig. 9 | Silke Markefka and Nikolai Vogel, Nach der Grenze (After the Border), 2008/09. Above: Sun, 14 Sept, 2008, border crossing Griesen/Ehrwald, border Germany/Austria, painting and recorder. Below: Sat, 27 Dec, 2008, border crossing Baye­ risch Eisenstein/Železná Ruda, border Germany/ Czech Republic, painting and recorder

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artistic cartography, mapping can thus unite “reflections, experiences, and possibilities in a single symbol, without implying congruity and hierarchies” (Bianchi 1997, 19). O’Hara’s drawn movement records illustrate that mobility is not an exception in a sedentary life but can become a constant. As such, rootedness and a sense of being at home are not inevitably the opposites of a transitory existence. Each place creates its own narrative in connection with the traveling subject and always represents a stop along the way, a transitional place. The artist’s work translates the upheavals and shifts resulting from changes in location and emigration. At the same time, O’Hara thematizes routes and maps. In his book The Practice of Everyday Life, Certeau differentiates between the “map,” which formulates that which is seen, the image of something; and the “tour,” which evokes the action, the act of going, and the movement (Certeau 1984, 118 f.). For O’Hara, however, movement and mapping are interwoven. Seen as a whole, her routes come together to form a map that can be decoded as a semantic system – a materialization of the coordinates of these journeys and wanderings. In the biographies of movement that

Fig. 10 | Morgan O’Hara, Portrait of Katherine Linda Esmay, Birthplace: Mason City, Iowa, U. S. A., Birthdate: 25 November, Profession: Educator, San Francisco, April 1982, 1982, conté crayon, graphite, pastel on paper, 152 × 214 cm. Published in the journal Leonardo, vol. 16, no. 4, 1983, p. 269.

O’Hara maps, what is important is not deciding on one country or the other as “home,” not the papers that determine a person’s nationality, not territories with national borders, but movements that cross borders and trace a dynamic existence. In this way, in all of the Portraits for the Twenty-First Century, mobility is understood as a constant throughout an entire century. Yet the principle of migration, specifically, has become the test case for the European Union; consensus cannot be reached on the handling of the flight of refugees and border crossings. On the one hand, borders between European countries were torn down with the Schengen Agreement; with it, it seemed as though the great political task of uniting Europe after the end of World War II had been achieved (Becker 199, 132). On the other hand, with the elimination of border controls within Europe, its outer borders became even more permanent; these external borders, intended to act as a defense against illegal immigrants, have undergone even more intense safeguarding and upgrades, leading to the creation of the border protection agency Frontex

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(Kasparek 2013). The artistic works dealing with the topic of “mapping” introduced here, to which works such as Bouchra Khalili’s video installation The Mapping Journey Project (2008–2011) could be added, illustrate the connection between maps, migration, and artistic production. These works were created against the backdrop of powerful imperial processes of occupying territories and their legitimization through charting and surveying. The works discussed here confront this with fragile borders and subjective modes of mapping.

Time for a turn: looking back and ahead Flight, migration, and exile are forms of mobility that can manifest themselves beyond national borders and, in doing so, contribute to social as well as political paradigm shifts. Angela Merkel’s statement at her annual summer press conference (Sommer-Bundespressekonferenz) on 31 August 2015 – “Germany is a strong country. The motto with which we approach these things has to be: We’ve accomplished so much – we can do it!” – was a commentary on the so‑called “refugee crisis.” “Wir schaffen das” (we can do it) not only became the motto of a new welcoming culture in Germany, receiving its own Wikipedia entry,13 it also polarized Germany and Europe. Some denounced the phrase as an open invitation and a draw for the many people who have come to Germany to escape war, misery, and poverty in Africa, the Arab world, and the Balkans. For others, with this statement, the country – after the devastation of World War II and the Shoah – showed a truly human face.14 If migration, as a basic human need (Bacci 2012, 8), makes history, and if history is unimaginable without migration, then one can pose the question of how historiography approaches phenomena of migration. Does it understand migration as an outlier or exception, or has it always presupposed it as being inscribed in history or art history (and with it, its writing)? Building on this, this essay explores the question of the mark that changes of location across borders and moving actors, objects, and ideas leave on the historiography of art. In doing so, this text discusses the potential of a study of art that takes migration, flight, and exile into account, in order to provide impulses for a disciplinary migratory turn.15 A migratory turn can contribute not least of all to defining a specific migratory art practice and aesthetic and establishing an understanding of its methods. While this was dealt with in more detail in the discussion of “mapping,” future studies can examine other leitmotifs, strategies, methods, and theoretical concepts of migratory art production, which can be outlined only briefly here. These include practices of togetherness, in other words, cooperative and collaborative art forms, which are repeatedly found throughout the history of art in the context of migration and exile, such as in the collaborations of the Surrealists in exile in the South of France around 13  https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wir_schaffen_das. Accessed 15 January 2018. 14  A chronology of the results of and reactions to the national press conference on 31 August 2015 can be found in Tina Hildebrandt and Bernd Ulrich, Angela Merkel: Im Auge des Orkans, 20 September 2015, http://www. zeit.de/2015/38/angela-merkel-fluechtlinge-krisenkanzlerin/komplettansicht. Accessed 15 January 2018. 15  Permanent relocations can be referred to as expatriation, migration, flight, exile, or emigration, whereby the terminological definition is firmly tied to the circumstances of this. While, from a historical perspective, flight resulting from political upheaval can be referred to as “exile” or “emigration,” for current politically caused relocations, the terms “flight” or “asylum” are used. On flight/refugees, see Bade/Oltmer 2005; Inhetveen 2010; Kirsch 2014. On migration, see Bade 2000, pp. 11 f. On the definition of exile/emigration, see Krohn et al. 1998, p. XII.

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1939/40. The collective authorship is already present in the history of Surrealism and is manifested, for example, in the cadaver exquis. However, this shared and existential experience of waiting during wartime in the South of France specifically led to further productive collaborations, including the tarot game Jeu de Marseille (Breton 1996, 233). After many Surrealists successfully fled France across the Atlantic, New York saw a continuation of cooperative art forms. The American artists in the circle of the Surrealist Matta anticipated the idea of automatism – in 1942, Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, and Jackson Pollock composed automatic poems together. In the tradition of artist collaboration, a painting by Baziotes, Pollock, and Gerome Kamrowski was, in fact, also created (1940/41; Mattison 1986, 71). Collaboration through shared authorship was manifested in group portraits of emigrants by Hermann Landshoff and served to establish creative unity among those who had arrived there as immigrants in a time of crisis. Cooperation was also a form of experimentation that brought together ingredients from different artistic proveniences – often with no predetermined outcome. This increased flexibility of production can be read in the context of an unstable existence. However, translations, oral tradition, language changes, or strategies of unreliable narration can also be identified as signifiers of migratory art practices.16 In her work Family Stories (2012), the Berlin artist Jeanno Gaussi’s approach to dealing with family histories was to commission a professional painter to create paintings based on family photographs and engage him in discussions about the stories of her family members, who – to him – were strangers. In doing so, she passed on her family history, which, due to flight, had only been preserved in a few keepsakes, to someone else. Here, transmission as a constant in a family becomes a questionable and fragile construct. In migrant constellations, inter-generationalities can, however, lead to linguistic misunderstandings and impossibilities of translation, as Zineb Sedira explores in her video Mother Tongue (2002) (Fartas 2011).17 Untranslatability, unreliability, and insecurity can be parameters of an art of migration. At the same time, intermedial forms of expression that expand genres as well as digital strategies of recycling or sampling serve as expressions of the polyphony of a migrant narrative. These processes of reuse, of overwriting, of recombining, which question the hierarchical order of original and copy, must also be discussed for a future historiography of art. Only recently was the possibility of not ‘only’ defining migration as a permanent relocation but of recognizing it as part of a digital era in motion addressed in a publication (Friesinger/Schneider 2016, 20–25). In the process, digital migration and mobile actors were considered together, and the crisis rhetoric of flight constructively synthesized with the progressive idea of a technologized, digital world. The challenge now lies in constructively adapting this mobility for an art history that is rooted in horizontal integration, in references to the past and the future, in anachronisms, and in polyphony – and, in doing so, contributing to a migratory turn. Translated by Hayley Haupt. 16  An example of this is Bouchra Khalili’s video installation Speeches – Chapter 1: Mother Tongue (2012), which consists of translating excerpts from cultural-historical or political texts into her mother tongue and reciting them from memory. On this work, see Freiheit! 2014, pp. 64–71. 17  In some works, such as the video Silent Sight (2000) and the photographs in La maison de ma mère (My mother’s house, 2002), Sedira deals with (her) familial constellations. See Why Pictures Now, 2006, p. 161–163.

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References Arnason, H. H., and Elizabeth C. Mansfield. History of Modern Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Photography. Pearson Education, 1968/2012. Bacci, Massimo Livi. A Short History of Migration. Polity, 2012. Bade, Klaus J. Europa in Bewegung. Migration vom späten 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart. Beck, 2000. Bade, Klaus Jürgen, and Jochen Oltmer. “Flucht und Asyl seit 1990”, 15 March 2005, http://www.bpb.de/gesellschaft/migration/dossier-migration/56443/flucht-und-asyl-seit-1990. Accessed 20 January 2018. Becker, Winfried. “Von der Idee ‘Europa’ zur Europäischen Gemeinschaft.” Das gemeinsame Haus Europa. Handbuch zur europäischen Kulturgeschichte, edited by Wulf Köpke and Bernd Schmelz, dtv, 1999, pp. 128–134. Below, Irene. “Hanna Levy-Deinhard, die Studentenbewegung und der Ulmer Verein.” Kunst und Gesellschaft zwischen den Kulturen. Die Kunsthistorikerin Hanna Levy-Deinhard im Exil und ihre Aktualität, edited by Burcu Dogramaci and Irene Below, edition text + kritik, 2016, pp. 297–315. Below, Irene, and Burcu Dogramaci, editors. Kunst und Gesellschaft zwischen den Kulturen. Die Kunsthistorikerin Hanna Levy-Deinhard im Exil und ihre Aktualität. edition text + kritik, 2016. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zorn, Fontana, 1970a. –. Berliner Chronik. Suhrkamp, 1970b. –. Gesammelte Schriften, vol. VI: Fragmente vermischten Inhalts, Autobiographische Schriften. Suhrkamp, 1985. –. “Über den Begriff der Geschichte.” Ibid. Gesammelte Werke, edited by Hermann Schweppenhäuser and Rolf Tiedemann, vol. I/2, Suhrkamp, 1991, pp. 690–708. –. Selected Writings. Vol. 2, 2: 1931–1934, edited by Michael William Jennings and Howard Eiland, Harvard University Press, 2005. Beyer, Andreas. Das Porträt in der Malerei. Hirmer, 2002 Bianchi, Paolo. “Das (Ent)falten der Karte.” Atlas Mapping, exh.-cat. Offenes Kulturhaus Linz, 1997, pp. 14–19. Boeckl, Matthias. “Migrationsforschung über Kunst und Architektur im 20. Jahrhundert. Eine lange Geschichte, die gerade erst begonnen hat.” Vom Weggehen. Zum Exil von Kunst und Wissenschaft, edited by Sandra Wiesinger-Stock et al., Mandelbaum, 2016, pp. 423–429. Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti. Columbia University Press, 2012. Breton, André. Entretiens – Gespräche. Dada, Surrealismus, Politik, edited by Unda Hörner and Wolfram Kiepe. Verlag der Kunst, 1996. Bruhns, Maike. Kunst in der Krise, vol. 2: Künstlerlexikon Hamburg 1933–1945. Dölling und Galitz, 2001. Brzyski, Anna. “Introductions: Canons and Art History.” Partisan Canons, edited by Anna Brzyski, Duke University Press, 2007, pp. 1–25. Camille, Michael, et al. “Rethinking the Canon.” The Art Bulletin, no. 78, 1996, pp. 198–217. Certeau, Michel de. The Writing of History. Columbia University Press, 1988. –. The Practice of Everyday Life. The University of California Press, 1984. Clark, Christopher. The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. Allen Lane, 2012. Cortjaens, Wolfgang. “Von ‘Kanon’ zum ‘Handbuch’: Künste und Kunstgeschichte vor und nach Winckelmann.” Winckelmann – das göttliche Geschlecht, edited by Wolfgang Cortjaens, exh.-cat. Schwules Museum Berlin, 2017, pp. 37–43. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Rhizom (1976). Merve, 1977. Demos, T. J. “Charting a Course. Exile, Diaspora, Nomads, Refugees. A Geneology of Art and Migration.” The Restless Earth, edited by Massimiliano Gioni and Micola Brambilla, exh.-cat. La Triennale di Milano, 2017, pp. 18–26. Didi-Huberman, Georges. Das Nachleben der Bilder. Kunstgeschichte und Phantomzeit nach Aby Warburg. Suhrkamp, 2010. –. The Surviving Image: Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms. Aby Warburg’s History of Art. Translated by Harvey L. Mendelsohn, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017. Dogramaci, Burcu. Deutschland, fremde Heimat. Zur Rückkehr emigrierter Bildhauer nach 1945/Germany, a ­Foreign Land. The Return of Émigré Sculptors after 1945. Schriftenreihe des Kunsthauses Dahlem, 2015a.

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TOWARD A MIGRATORY TURN –. “Jussufs Gedicht für Jussuf Abbo.” Der Blaue Reiter ist gefallen. Else Lasker-Schüler Jubiläumsalmanach, edited by Hajo Jahn, Peter Hammer Verlag, 2015b, pp. 275–277. –. “‘Gegenständlich und naturfern zugleich’. Von Denkmälern und freien Formen: Rudolf Belling in Istanbul und München.” Rudolf Belling: Skulpturen und Architekturen, edited by Dieter Scholz and Christina Thomson, exh.-cat. Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin 2017, pp. 286–303. Elkins, James. “Canon and Globalization in Art History.” Partisan Canons, edited by Anna Brzyski, Duke University Press, 2007, pp. 55–77. Fartas, Nadia. “Mother Tongue, la contradiction performative.” Transposition. Musique et Sciences Sociales, no. 1, 2011: Polyphonie et société, pp. 55–77 Flood, Finbarr Barry. “From the Prophet to postmodernism? New world orders and the end of Islamic Art.” Making Art History. A Changing Discipline and its Institutions, edited by Elizabeth C. Mansfield, Routledge, 2007, pp. 31–53. Folie, Sabine. “Konjekturen über Kartenobsessionen.” Atlas Mapping, exh.-cat. Offenes Kulturhaus Linz 1997, pp. 9–13. Foucault, Michel. L’Archéologie du savoir (1969). Gallimard, 2008. Freiheit! Ai Weiwei, Alexander Apóstol, Johanna Billing, Camp, Haejun Jo, Bouchra Khalili, Nikolaj Bendix & Skyum Larsen, Klara Lidén, Lars Ø. Ramberg, Nedko Solakov, Artur Żmijewski, exh.-cat. Kunstpalais Erlangen, Snoeck, 2014. Gabo, Naum, et al., editors. CIRCLE. International Survey of Constructive Art. Faber, 1937. Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. “L’historie et les histoires, oder: Wie soll man Geschichte(n) schreiben?” Wie soll man Geschichte(n) schreiben? Tübinger Poetik-Dozentur 2013, edited by Dorothee Kimmich and Philipp Alexander Ostrowicz, Swiridoff Verlag, 2014. Haftmann, Werner. Malerei im 20. Jahrhundert. Prestel, 1954/2000. Hinden, Wiebke von. “‘Ethno-Graphie’ in der Kunstgeschichte: Ansätze für eine Integration ‘nicht-westlicher’ Kunst in den kunsthistorischen Kanon. Die Leipziger Konferenz ‘Global Players? Kunstgeschichte und die Gegenwartskunst der Welt’.” Kunst und Politik. Jahrbuch der Guernica-Gesellschaft, vol. 4, 2002: Schwerpunkt Postkolonialismus, pp. 152–154. Hug, Cathérine (with Robert Menasse). Europa. Die Zukunft der Geschichte, exh.-cat. Kunsthaus Zurich, Verlag Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 2015. Hunter, Sam, and John Jacobus. Modern Art from Post-Impressionism to the Present: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture. H. N. Abrams, 1976/2000. Inhetveen, Katharina. “Der Flüchtling.” Diven, Hacker, Spekulanten. Sozialfiguren der Gegenwart, edited by Stephan Moebius and Markus Schroer, edition suhrkamp, 2010, pp. 148–160. Iskin, Ruth E. “Introduction: Re‑Envisioning the canon. Are pluriversal canons possible?” Re-envisioning the Contemporary Art Canon. Perspectives in a Global World, edited by Ruth E. Iskin, Routledge, 2017, pp. 1–41. Johnson, Philip C. Mies van der Rohe, exh.-cat. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1947. Jussen, Bernhard. “Die ‘Geschichte’ der Wissenschaft und die ‘Geschichte’ der Kunst. Was die historischen Wissenschaften von der Kunst lernen können und was nicht.” Das Gedächtnis der Kunst. Geschichte und Erinnerung in der Kunst der Gegenwart, exh.-cat. Historisches Museum, Frankfurt / Main, Hatje Cantz, 2000, pp. 57–70. Kasparek, Bernd. “Die europäische Grenzschutzagentur Frontex.” Grenzlinien. Von Grenzen, Grenzüberschreitungen und Migration, edited by Christine Taxer and Raul Gschrey, gutleut, 2013, pp. 50–54. Kirsch, Thomas G. “Flüchtling.” Das neue Deutschland. Von Migration und Vielfalt, edited by Özkan Ezli, Konstanz University Press, 2014, pp. 84–87. Kocka, Jürgen. Das lange 19. Jahrhundert. Arbeit, Nation und bürgerliche Gesellschaft (Gebhardt, Handbuch der deutschen Geschichte, vol. 13). Klett-Cotta, 2001. Koselleck, Reinhart. “Darstellungsweisen der preußischen Reform: Droysen, Treitschke, Mehring.” Formen der Geschichtsschreibung, edited by Reinhart Koselleck et al., Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1982, pp. 245– 265. –. Zeitschichten. Studien zur Historik. Suhrkamp, 2000.

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Burcu Dogramaci Krohn, Claus-Dieter, et al., editors. Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration 1933–1945. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1998. Lambert, Phyllis. “Introduction.” Mies in America, edited by Phyllis Lambert, exh.-cat. Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal, 2001, pp. 17–22. Lange, Barbara. “Offener Kanon? Erfahrungen aus der Praxis.” Building America. Eine große Erzählung, edited by Anke Köth et al., Thelem, 2008, pp. 238–253. Langewiesche, Dieter. Nation, Nationalismus, Nationalstaat in Deutschland und Europa. Beck, 2000. Locher, Hubert. “The Idea of the Canon and Canon Formation in Art History.” Art History and Visual Studies in Europe. Transnational Discourses and National Frameworks, edited by Matthew Rampley et al., Brill, 2012, pp. 29–40. Markefka, Silke, and Nikolai Vogel. Nach der Grenze 2009. Stipendium für Bildende Kunst 2008, Staatskanzlei Munich, 2009. Martschukat, Jürgen. “Geschichte schreiben mit Foucault – eine Einleitung.” Geschichte schreiben mit Foucault, edited by Jürgen Martschukat, Campus, 2002, pp. 7–26. Mattison, Robert Saltonstall. Robert Motherwell. The Formative Years. UMI, 1986. Mercer, Kobena, editor. Exiles, Diasporas & Strangers. Iniva, 2008. Nielsen, Birgit S. “Herbert von Garvens (1883–1963). Galerist, Kunstsammler.” Ibid. and Willy Dähnhardt. Exil in Dänemark. Deutschsprachige Wissenschaftler, Künstler und Schriftsteller im dänischen Exil nach 1933, Westholsteinische Verlags-Anstalt Boyens, 1993, pp. 363–366. Papastergiadis, Nikos. “Cosmopolitanism Assemblages Art.” The Migrant’s Time. Rethinking Art History and Diaspora, edited by Saloni Mathur, Yale University Press, 2011, pp. 149–173. Pokorny, Lukas. Das Schreiben von Geschichte. Epistemologische Reflexionen. LIT, 2011. Pollock, Griselda. Differencing the Canon. Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories. Routledge, 1999. Read, Herbert. A Concise History of Modern Painting. Thames & Hudson, 1959/2010. Rudolf Belling: Skulpturen und Architekturen, edited by Dieter Scholz and Christina Thomson, exh.-cat. Natio­ nalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin 2017. Salomon, Nanette. “The Art Historical Canon: Sins of Omission.” (En‑)Gendering Knowledge. Feminists in Academe, edited by Joan E. Hartman et al., The University of Tennessee Press, 1991, pp. 222–236. Schapiro, Meyer. Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries: Selected Papers. Braziller/DuMont/Alianza Editorial Sa, 1978/1988. Schlögel, Karl. In Space We Read Time: On the History of Civilization and Geopolitics. Bard Graduate Center, 2016. Schneider, Frank Apunkt and Günther Friesinger. “Digital Migration: Wanderungsbewegungen.” Digital Migration. Konstruktionen – Strategien – Bewegungen, edited by Günther Friesinger et al., edition mono/monochrom, 2016, pp. 15–32. Vester, Katrin. “Herbert von Garvens-Garvensburg: Sammler, Galerist und Förderer der modernen Kunst in Hannover.” Avantgarde und Publikum. Zur Rezeption avantgardistischer Kunst in Deutschland 1905–1933, edited by Henrike Junge, Boehlau, 1992, pp. 73–102. Walke, Anika. “Introduction.” Migration and Mobility in the Modern Age. Refugee, Travelers, and Traffickers in Europe and Eurasia, edited by Anika Walke et al., Indiana University Press, 2017, pp. 1–31. Warburg, Aby. “Dürer und die italienische Antike.” Verhandlungen der 48. Versammlung deutscher Philologen und Schulmänner in Hamburg vom 3. bis 6. Oktober  1905, compiled by Karl Dissel and Gustav Rosenhagen, Teubner, 1906, pp. 55–60. –. Die Erneuerung der heidnischen Antike. Kulturwissenschaftliche Beiträge zur Geschichte der Europäischen Renaissance (1932). Gesammelte Schriften, vol. I, 2, edited by Gertrud Bing and Fritz Rougement, Akademie, 1998. –. “Italienische Kunst und internationale Astrologie im Palazzo Schifanoja zu Ferrara (1912).” Ibid. Nachhall der Antike. Zwei Untersuchungen, presented by Pablo Schneider, Diaphanes, 2012, pp. 11–68. –. “Arbeitende Bauern auf burgundischen Teppichen (1907).” Ibid. Ausgewählte Schriften und Würdigungen, edited by Dieter Wuttke, Koerner, 1979, pp. 165–171. Watanabe, Toshio. “Art Historical Canon and the Transnational.” The Challenge of the Object/Die Herausforderung des Objekts. 33rd Congress of the International Committee of the History of Art. Congress Proceedings – 36

TOWARD A MIGRATORY TURN Part 4, edited by G. Ulrich Großmann et al., Anzeiger des Germanischen Nationalmuseums: Wissenschaftlicher Beiband, 2013, pp. 1505–1506. Weigel, Sigrid. Grammatologie der Bilder. Suhrkamp, 2015. Welz, Gisela. “Mobilität.” Das neue Deutschland. Von Migration und Vielfalt, edited by Özkan Ezli, Konstanz University Press, 2014, pp. 102–104. Why Pictures Now. Fotografie, Film, Video heute, edited by Achim Hochdörfer, exh.-cat. Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna, 2006. Yildiz, Erol. Die weltoffene Stadt. Wie Migration Globalisierung zum urbanen Alltag macht. transcript, 2013.

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FROM GLOBAL TURBULENCES TO SPACES OF CONVIVIALITY The Potentialities of Art in Mobile Worlds

Introduction In 2009, the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) celebrated its tenth year with The China Project: a survey of contemporary Chinese art from the 1980s to the present. Wang Qingsong’s China Red (2009) was one of the 150 works exhibited. This major installation work consisted of hundreds of billboard posters and spanned the entire length of one of GOMA’s gallery walls, floor to ceiling. The work was based on Wang’s (2004) photograph Competition and depicted a range of slogans and brand names used to promote “everything from multinational companies to domestic services” (GOMA 2017). Indicative of the highly collaged form of much contemporary art, the installation of billboard posters was painted by Wang using both felt-tip pen and traditional brush-and-ink. The mixture of English and Chinese text across the wall of billboards further embodied the culturally hybrid element of contemporary art practice. The billboards used in the original photograph consisted of a range of colours, predominantly white; however, for the GOMA installation, Wang used fluorescent pink for all the posters. On the colour wheel, fluorescent pink is analogous to red, which is the most popular colour in marketing. Here, the bright pink colour of the billboards, in combination with the bombardment of slogans across such an expanse of wall, heightened the visual senses almost to the point of over-stimulation. Wang explained that the installation spoke to the anxiety many Chinese people have about China acting as “the factory of the world” (GOMA 2017), and the random mix of posters chosen by the artist pointed to an uneasiness about the world becoming less and less contained. Many of the products promoted by these posters are manufactured in China, although the brand names are not Chinese, and the emphasis on some English words – such as GROSS, EXTRA, THE FUTURE – added to the frenetic, unruly sensibility of the work and the urban China that it referenced. Wang (cited in GOMA 2017) noted that the work referenced the “big character” posters that were plastered on walls during the Cultural Revolution, while simultaneously reflecting on the domination of advertising in streets in urban China today: “The struggle for ad placement in public space in China is not unlike a battlefield strewn with casualties […] Every day, new ads go up, and old ones fall down […] On my gigantic wall, I make the fight for advertising as fierce as a struggle for military power.” When examining pictures of the 2009 installation available online, we were struck by two particular photographs in which members of the public are shown standing in front of the artwork. In the first image, a person is in the foreground, their back to the frame, seemingly taking in the awe-inspiring work. In the second, a person stands in the foreground, though they (he/she) are

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not looking at the work but at something in their hands. It is not definitively clear from the photograph what is in their hands, but given that mobile technologies infiltrate almost all moments of everyday urban life, the immediate assumption is that the person is looking at their mobile phone. This image, unassuming as it may be, prompts critical questions pertaining to cultural engagement in the present day. How is it that a spectator of an artwork that is so bold and saturated with aesthetic stimuli can become not only distracted but – importantly – captivated by another form of media? We might have access to more spaces of engagement, but are we engaging with them or passing by? How do we talk about the value of experience when that experience is fragmented and often fleeting? How much are we tuning out as we move through digital and public space? What are the benefits and costs of this disciplining of the senses? In the Renaissance, with the invention of perspective, art gave rise to a new way of seeing and changed the means by which a witness would organise their perceptions. In modernity, and with the advent of Cubism in particular, the act of witnessing was multiplied and displaced; now, perspective has completely exploded. As the city itself has become a media-saturated environment, and multiple surfaces and architectural skins compete to be visual and informational platforms, art has moved into the age of the ambient. As art participants, we no longer have specific and framed experiences; art is fluid and constant, and we act as story-makers rather than witnesses. Accordingly, the place of art is no longer bounded – participants are inside the world of art, actively contributing to its shape, and this shape is always morphing. The monument of our time is not static: it is in flux, it is temporary. This contemporary situation creates some unique challenges and difficulties pertaining to how people encounter and engage with art and culture. Our task in this chapter is to identify the impact of these artistic and social transformations in relation to public culture. Conventionally, public culture has been aligned with public art institutions. It is seen as what happens when the public experiences art inside a gallery, cinema or theatre. In each of these settings, there is an object or an event that is presented to the public. The way of seeing is linear. There is a narrative, or else there is a fixed object that is examined from a distance and with a detached and critical gaze. Increasingly, modern and contemporary art has experimented with disjunctive narrative and immersive environments that require multi-perspectival approaches. However, when the most prominent encounters with art are no longer confined to an interior space, such as a church or a museum, and are instead situated in an exterior environment that is already super-saturated by media platforms, then the points of focus and the modes of engagement become more splintered and complex. This kind of cultural production and participation is non-linear, and we therefore address it as ambient culture and participation. In the midst of the radical changes in aesthetic experience and social communication there is also a fundamental shift in the way migration and mobility operate in the contemporary world. Migration is no longer a predominantly singular and linear event. There is increasing evidence that migrants are more mobile and circulate in more complex patterns. This predicament has been analysed by the fields of migration, media and communication, and contemporary art, with each field progressing different approaches and concepts (Ong 1999; Morley 2000; Papastergiadis 2000; Nail 2016; Papastergiadis/Trimboli 2017). We argue that the metaphor of turbulence can be used to bridge these insights and better capture the ambient ways in which people experience art and culture in the twenty-first century. With reference to art collectives in the

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Asia-Pacific, the paper ends by proposing that conviviality in mobile art spaces acts as a conduit for creating plural cosmopolitan worlds, worlds on the move, worlds capable of navigating the turbulence of everyday life.

What is art at the end of art? When the avant-garde presented their visual shock tactics to awaken the citizen in us, they were operating in a context of bourgeois normativity and relative visual sparsity. In that context, an oppositional strike tactic made sense. Today, the hegemonic practices of disruption and the hyper-visual culture have sprayed spectatorship into a contest of ironic condescension and sentimental saturation. The need today is not for a radical awakening but for a space for restful contemplation. In this context, the critique of top-down directions by putting forward bottom‑up social inclusion strategies, the blurring of high and low aesthetic categories, and the promotion of participation over instruction is the new dominant. In this networked world of open platforms for consultation and ongoing feedback there is no guarantee that any of the noise will ever become a clear signal. The communications revolution has transformed the way we conduct our personal relations and has extended our capacity to store and access information, but it has also challenged the ways we see and use art and politics. The popularity of new media could be an index of the democratisation of knowledge; alternatively, it could be seen as a slide into bottomless populism. From the outset of modernity, artists, curators and theorists have pursued this issue along one of two diametrically opposing trajectories. On the one hand, there is the claim that the beauty of art has no function other than its pursuit of the autonomous and internal logic of disinterested spectatorial pleasure. On the other hand, there is the equally widely held claim that art acquires beauty through the subordination of form to function, so that it becomes the expression of an externality – such as a pre-existing conceptual parameter or the will inherent in a political ideology. In a recent response to this conundrum, the philosopher Jacques Rancière has offered the contention that “life is the notion that allows us to overcome those contradictions” (2017, 597). This contention is tested through his examination of a surprising combination of sources – the writings of Immanuel Kant and John Ruskin, as well as the visual practices of the Soviet avant-garde. Through these high points in modernist thinking and aesthetic practice, Rancière finds a twist in the conventional definitions of beauty, claiming that it is neither the consequence of mechanical integration nor the outcome of formal resolution. Beauty is measured neither against its resemblance to organic perfection, such as a flower, nor in its adherence to an a priori conceptual form. On the contrary, the function of art arises from its capacity for expanding and intensifying communication. All forms of communication are necessarily oriented outwardly. They point towards the social and are enhanced by collective practices of exchange and translation. Thus, the beauty of art is not defined by internal criteria that are derived from either aesthetic autonomy or political utility, but by the coupling or the socialization that occurs through communication. Art and life are brought together in the unconstrained conjunction of social utility and sensory pleasure. It produces a space that we could call a heterocosmos; that is, one both inviting for the other and affirmative as a “place for life” (Rancière 2017, 597). Rancière is insistent that this is not a form of unification in which art and life dissolve into each

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other, but a concordance that is represented as a “supplementary”, and therefore yields a perpetually open space. Rancière’s formulation of the emancipated spectator stands in relation to the idea of the disinterested spectator that was so influential in early modernity. It must be noted that the use of avant-garde visual techniques to disrupt the normative order and rattle sensory modalities is most effective in a context of relative visual sparsity. Given the condition of hyper-visuality in late modernity, the condition of spectatorship is as much ironic as it is critical. In response to this change, theorists and curators have noted a paradigm shift in the function of art – from spectatorship to usership. Stephen Wright (2013) has referred to artistic practices that are indistinguishable from social activities, where there is no attempt to use art as a representation of society; rather, the social and artistic actions are coterminous with each other, examples of “double ontology”. Wright argues that these practices, such as shared meals, have a “primary ontology as whatever they are, and a secondary ontology as artistic proposition of the same thing” (Wright 2013, 22). This conceptual framing differs from Rancière’s avant-garde. While Rancière stopped with avant-garde’s aim to produce a “concordance” between art and life, many contemporary artists are making “meaning in relationships” through the production of conviviality. For instance, in 1994, the curator Bart De Baere collaborated with artists in an exhibition where the artworks did not simply summon the spectator’s attention but made a space for other works that co‑existed in the same time and space. This complex spatial overlapping and temporal co‑presence opened the field to the importance of relations. De Baere noted that the artists were not just “process artists – but artists with process” (1994, 68).

Mobility studies The concept of mobility has recently proliferated in studies of culture, as scholars grapple to understand how culture is produced and translated in this ambient moment. As Stephan Harrison et al. describe, using mobility as an analytical frame attempts to capture the various relations and rhythms in operation as “things move through the world, or indeed move the world, however mysteriously” (2004, 48). The use of mobility reorganises the way that cultural forms, such as art, and cultural phenomena, such as migration, are approached and understood. Beginning with mobility or movement means that the before/after, origin/destination and spectator/object dualities conventionally used to understand culture are dislocated and made more complicated. Conventionally, art participation involved two discreet elements: the spectator and the art object, with the former witnessing the latter. This binary model and linear perspective also dominated studies of migration. For most of the twentieth century, migration has been predominantly understood as movement between dual sites: the country of origin and the country of destination. Reflecting this conception of mobility as duality, migration has traditionally been studied through the oppositional models of structuralism or voluntarism. Structuralist models study migration according to fluctuations between supply and demand, arguing that migration is dictated by states that manage migrant flows based on economic needs. Migration is thus viewed as a structure dominated by a centre that controls movement to and from a periphery, with little to no consideration for individual preferences, choices and influences. In contrast, the voluntarist model argues that the energy of migration flows is derived from individual prefer-

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ences, usually a person’s choice to pursue economic opportunity. In this model, all of the onus is on the individual, with no space given to the social conditioning, pressure and sometimes force that impels people to move (Papastergiadis 2012, 40–42). Neither of these models capture the entangled manner in which all migrants move and have always moved, namely, with mixed levels of structural pressures and voluntary decisions. The concepts of diaspora and cultural hybridity have gone a long way to help us map in a more complex and nuanced manner the way people are on the move (Papastergiadis 1997; Ang 2001). Hybridity gained purchase in critical theory in the 1980s; however, the concept has long existed in social discourse. The ‘hybrid’, a term originating in horticulture, and defined in its most basic form to be that which emerges when two or more species ‘mix’, has shadowed every organic theory of identity, primarily serving as a metaphor for the negative consequences of racial encounters (Ashcroft et al. 1995, 118; Papastergiadis 1997). Historically, identity formation has been framed by an understanding of shared commonalities, usually genetic, that demarcate one group from another. In the thrust of imperialism, ‘race’ became the core marker for this group demarcation, and, in line with the white-Eurocentric view of the world, the Western, ‘white’ race was positioned as the most superior of distinct racial categories. The mythology of white superiority was premised on purity, exclusivity and alterity: whiteness was deemed the purest, the most exclusive, the least altered. The comforts of ideology, however, rarely constrained the parallel ideology of conquest through sexual penetration, a paradox that ultimately resulted in ‘the hybrid’. As such, the hybrid subject is historically tied to biological concerns of miscegenation, understood as an act deviating from classifications of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Since the hybrid is born out of the transgression of the racialised boundary, it becomes a figure of danger, loss and degeneration. Indeed, in the early colonial encounters the hybrid was blamed for causing bad health; accused of bringing economic inertia, moral decadence and even syphilis to the New World (Papastergiadis 1997). Despite these negative connotations, hybridity, somewhat indicative of its formation as an in‑between or bridging space, was also steeped in ambivalence, with dominant cultures being perplexed about how to ‘manage’ it. There have been three main theoretical approaches to hybridity since its evocation in early colonial encounters. In the first instance, hybridity was closely aligned with the early understandings of race as biological, viewed as genetically constituted and, to some extent, part of the natural process of human evolution. According to this approach, the hybrid emerges from the mixing of two distinct racial identities, internalising foreign elements into its subjectivity in a relatively conservative manner. Here, hybridity is not seen to challenge politically the present cultural context, which is ordered by discrete racial identities. Rather, it adds a new (mixed) racial category to the cultural playing field, albeit a tenuous one. The second approach to hybridity grew out of postcolonial debates in the 1990s, which critically engaged identity politics, ethnic and race studies, and art history. The biological aspect of hybridity was targeted in these debates. Scholars utilised postmodern and poststructuralist theories to unpack ‘race’ as a socially constructed category and subsequently developed a more radical understanding of hybridity as a site of resistance. These scholars, most prominently Homi K. Bhabha (1994) and Stuart Hall (2002), conceptualised cultural translation as that which occurs in a generative manner: as ideas, world-views and material forces interact with each other, they undergo a process of internal reworking until the old ones are displaced. From this perspective,

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hybridity can be seen as operating on two levels: it refers to the constant process of differentiation and exchange between the centre and the periphery, and between different peripheries, as well as serving as a metaphor for the form of identity that is produced from these conjunctions. In this light, the hybrid occupies an ambivalent position, one that is always incomplete – but this incompleteness does not undo its political capacity. Indeed, its politics is derived precisely from its ability to create an excess outside of rigid identity categories, and in its ability to be directed by the flows of continual cultural exchange and communication. Diasporic and indigenous artists actively contributed to the development of this approach to hybridity, harnessing it as a counterpoint to the idealist categories of creativity, which had long been confined to closed forms of tradition or universal forms of abstraction. Their art practice, underscored by a deliberate, and often ironic, interrogation of multiple subjectivities, allowed for a critique of modernism (Gilroy 2006; Marotta 2008; Papastergiadis 2012; Trimboli 2015). Until this time, modernism had represented ‘ethnic’ artists only on the periphery of art history. In the twenty-first century, the movement of people has taken on a denser entanglement of both macro-structuralist and voluntarist elements, forming a new networked shape and exacerbating the ambivalence of the cultural hybrid. Today, migration journeys are neither neat linear trajectories nor series of stable oscillations. Migrants who have remained settled in the one place since their original move frequently describe the ongoing experience of migration as unsettling and difficult, sometimes even traumatic. These experiences occur in spite of, even at the same time as, the many affirmative experiences of migration. In many senses, the experience of migration and settlement remains entangled – migration feels as if it is ongoing and the moment of settling incomplete, and communities exhibit highly diverse demographics, including varying economic and cultural capital and fluctuating attachments to notions of home (Ang 2011; Noble 2011; Yue/Wyatt 2014, 224). The conventional linearity of migration is intercepted and redirected, and the migrant occupies a space of intersecting and fractured reality – the act of migration a constant possibility, and as such, an active part of one’s increasingly global identity. This ‘hyper-diversity’ has seen recent studies of hybridity frequently blur into celebratory notions of cultural difference and cultural diversity, aligning with the cultural policy discourse on multicultural nations and cosmopolitan cities. Although the transgression of rigid cultural boundaries was framed as a societal asset, critical theorists began to raise suspicions at the turn of the century about the deployment of hybridity and cultural diversity in multicultural, postcolonial countries. In particular, they questioned whether racist practices had been abandoned or simply rehoused in the discourses of social types and reconciliation (Ang/St Louis 2005; Ang et al. 2008; Appignanesi 2010; Araeen 2010a, 2010b; Fisher 2010; Lowe 2005). Sudesh Mishra (2006), for example, illustrated how many re‑evaluations of these kinds of models reasserted this binary. We also saw it reasserted in some conceptualisations of the Global South. As Léuli Māzyār Luna‘i Eshrāghi (2015) provocatively asks while highlighting what he defines as an “imposed Asia”: “South of where, for whom?” Such questions led to what can be described as a third approach to hybridity, one which attempts to remain aware of the specific forces of access and exclusion that still plague the ethnic Other. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak first stressed the importance of this awareness in the 1990s, arguing that hybridity theory did not adequately account for the power imbalances inherent in the globalised world. For Spivak, hybridity may work in diasporic First World contexts,

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but it does not have equal purchase in Third World contexts. Subaltern cultures of the Third World have been so severely battered and compromised by colonising notions of democracy and civility that they have been rendered speechless: there is no prior space that can enable a dialogue between the West and the Other. In order to move into the space of translation, the subaltern must become a representative of ‘the subaltern’  – a representation that simultaneously undermines its ability to speak truly from its own context. Alienation becomes the price of every representation. The second approach to hybridity, as outlined above, is therefore in danger of overemphasising the porosity of borders and the capacity of hybridity to dismantle them. As a result of such concerns, the third model of hybridity emphasises the ways in which the value of the hybrid continues to be positioned in relation to purity and along the axes of inclusion and exclusion. It argues that the presence of these power axes can reduce hybridity to the occasional experience of exotic commodities, which are repackaged to sustain the insatiable trade in the Other in new forms of cultural identity. It is also wary of accentuating hybridity’s positive ability to reconcile cultural difference, arguing that doing so blurs, even undermines, the very relational process that hybridity ought to highlight. Hybridity, as a metaphor for identity formation, can function critically only when movement and bridging, displacement and connection, are seen as operating together. In other words, hybridity creates a friction, but this is a productive, two-way friction. Central to this approach is an openness towards contemporary forms of cultural life without the renunciation of previous attachments. In other words, it does not reject material attachments to roots or the presence of power structures, which both contain and omit. Borders are seen to organise every aspect of cultural life. The goal of this critical modality is to create ways for these boundaries to be manipulated from the inside. In this way, the third model of hybridity allows us to recognise the borders of globalisation as something in‑process, materialised in cultural interactions and exchanges, and thus as capable of being harnessed and channelled in different ways (see Papastergiadis/Trimboli 2017). Developing a methodology that will enable this kind of reflexive cultural translation foregrounds the contemporary study of hybridity and its future orientations. Despite the fragmentation and reconstitutions of identity that postmodern critical theory has attended to, old patterns of racism continue to texture daily life. The way forward seems to rest on addressing the disjuncture between an increasingly mobile and interconnected world, and the persistent forms of aggressive nationalism, border security and identity violence associated with cultural difference. For some, such a methodology needs to entail a return to ideology, so as to ensure that the various ways power operates to inform subjectivities is acknowledged (see, for example, Alcoff 2006; Eagleton 2007). For others, the methodology will involve a ‘return’ of a different kind: retaining the discursive aspects of postmodern thinking but returning to the canon of Western modernity so as to add the textural multiplicities it has failed to account for (see, for example, Butt/ Local Time 2016; Cheah 2016; Gilroy 2006; Gunew 2017). Media theorists have incorporated debates about multiculturalism and diasporic flows of people into their studies exploring the way the media infiltrates everyday life. As the placedbased models of identity and recognition began to falter, so too did our understanding of time and space more broadly. Many media theorists and sociologists argued that the rise of digital technologies has caused a dislocation of space and the proliferation of non-places (Augé 1995).

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In extreme cases, Rem Koolhaas argues that the urban city is increasingly littered by “junkspace”, which is evident in the meltdown of the modern built forms and the proliferation of spaces that are more like debris that “pretends to unite but actually splinters” (2002). However, place is still relevant in the digital world, as media theorists Mike Crang (2009), Natalie Fenton (2016), Zizi Papacharissi (2010, 2014) and Rowan Wilken (2011) have all illustrated. Mirca Madianou and Daniel Miller (2012) have examined new forms of familial relationships resulting from migration and new media, demonstrating that homeliness is now multifaceted, constantly re‑mediated by an evolving polymedia context. This context means online interactions happen both from and across place, allowing people to draw on a range of cultural symbols to inform interpretations of self and others. What appears to be common to all these new explorations of mobility, whether they be in art, media or migration studies, is a desire to map identity in a horizontal or spatial way. These explorations resist a top-down model of knowledge, as well as the prerequisite of entering knowledge creation from one particular perspective. Contemporary theories of cultural contamination, planetarity and diasporic intimacies all point to the need to map the space of mobility from a position of alterity and deliberate estrangement from one’s origins. Simultaneously, these theories pay close attention to local, everyday nuances of diasporic life, so as to depart from an understanding of hybridity as existing solely in representation. Diasporic artists will remain important for the development of this methodology. Through experimental forms of art practice, displaced or abject subjects are capable of reimagining place and identity. They move from the unhomely to the homely, but in such a way that place and homeliness are perpetually fluid and forgiving. In that sense, they have helped transform multiculturalism into what Miyase Christensen calls “postnormative cosmopolitanism” (Christensen 2017, 555). Today, our ties are no longer just local or even national, but global, and we increasingly consider ourselves part of the world at large. Of course, the idea of cosmopolitanism has always remained an ideal, because there is no unified global state that can distribute citizenship to all.

Beyond the network model of artistic collaboration If we were to map the activities and aspirations in contemporary art, what would it really look like? It is not hard to draw the lines of movement that plot the sites of origin with the places of work.1 This would produce a familiar map, one not that different from the global flight paths of the major airlines. However, we are equally familiar with the resistance that artists generate when critics and curators categorise them according to regional identities. Can we therefore produce a different mapping of the structures of belonging, one that flows from a sense of place in the world in relation to three scales – our body, a community and the world as a sphere – and then overlap this with civic, national and transnational forms of belonging? This map would surely resemble a wobbly Venn diagram. However, beyond a diagrammatic sense of inter-connectedness, this image also speaks to the complex forms of political solidarity and institutional network1 http://www.internationaleonline.org/research/politics_of_life_and_death/94_data_visualisation_on_ artists_migrations_research_in_progress. Accessed 12 November 2017.

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ing necessary in the art world. Contemporary art now operates in a bundle of social relations and is entangled in a multiplicity of cultural references and artistic media. This has produced a radical challenge to both aesthetic evaluation and normative critique. The good and the worthy are neither equivalent nor impervious to each other. The conventional association is with network. The idea of a network was once seen as a liberating move. It was meant to be a sprawling system that could challenge the authority of a centralised, vertical hierarchy. Given that museums were belated participants in what Ralph Miliband called the “de‑subordination” movement (1978), there was also a slow embrace of the idea that horizontal networks could overturn the traditional vertical hierarchies of cultural authority. For instance, it was only in 2011 that Maria Lind initiated CLUSTER, a network of art organisations located in the suburbs of European cities. As one of its former member noted, “in Cluster the network gave us the opportunity to learn from each other, and the solidarity, as well as the contrast of political contexts, gave us the courage to be a little more brave in our actions”.2 Networks were designed to break up centralised authority structures, enhance peer‑to-peer knowledge exchange and capitalise on the democratic potential of new communication technologies. However, due to the propensity for short-term opportunism that tends to drive network initiatives, and their fragility, Bart De Baere sees it rather as a “description” of the relations that are typical of the neoliberal order.3 De Baere’s fellow critic Pascal Gielen goes further and claims that there is a strong ideological link between the concept of the network and the embedding of precarity. A flat, wet world that looks upon itself as a network presupposes quite specific characteristics and makes certain demands of the people who are floating about in it. In a neutral definition, a network consists of interconnected points. It can only exist because there are connections, as we know from actor-network theory. When the connections are broken, the rhizome evaporates with them. The word ‘evaporate’ clearly indicates the weakness of a network configuration within a wet playing field and evokes the volatile or at least temporary nature of such social connections. What’s more within a liberal network economy these temporary collaborations are controlled by competition. This is why project-like thinking is so dominant in the current order. People only temporarily drift together, to then float collectively while realizing a project, after which their swimming lanes often diverge again. Relationships arise because there is a collective goal for a short while. (Gielen 2013, 22)

Gielen’s negative view of the function of networks and the motivation for joining them follows from his claim that they are nothing more than a series of interconnected points. A network, he argues, comes into existence only because of pragmatic ties and instrumental links; it does not possess any affective bonds or ethical obligations. Therefore, in the realm of social construction and personal demands, the structure of connectivity is loose and ultimately dependent on contingencies of contact. When links fall into disuse, the network also fades. Collaboration in such a network is purely project-driven and goal-oriented. The image of the network emphasises a system of circulation that produces thin relationships rather than thick bonds between substantive actors; it generates a self-oriented perspective that is focused on self-realisation rather than forging an ongoing collective consciousness and a durable social structure. By referring to a 2  Ferran Barenblit, interview with Nikos Papastergiadis, Barcelona, 2017. 3  Bart De Baere, interview with Nikos Papastergiadis, Antwerp 2017.

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formal arrangement of artists or art institutions as a network, there is once again a flattening down of their respective and cumulative value. A network of this sort is no different from any other kind of network, such as alliances amongst rival airlines. Almost a decade after Maria Lind observed the accentuation of collaborative techniques in contemporary artistic practices, she proposed that it is also necessary to rethink the “systematization” of museums and contemporary art institutions (Lind 2017). Given the scope and speed of flows in a globalising world and the entangled complexities of cosmopolitanism, this is a crucial moment to reflect on the utility of the art institution. The capacity to offer a space for contemplation and reflection, as well as engagement and entertainment, has been stretched to a breaking point. However, its privileged status as a platform for deliberation and a destination for “fine art” also runs against the emergent trend of collective, ephemeral and interactive practices in contemporary art. In this context, collaboration is not organised via a vertical command structure, but unfolds through a horizontal process of experimentation. A willingness to play together can proceed only if there is also an ambient process for generating trust. As artists connect their practice to the idea that the city, or in more general terms the urban condition, is the site of production and a zone for contestation, it also prompts double-edged questions about institutional roles and boundaries. On the one hand, it widens the art museum as it embraces agents from outside the institution; on the other, it fractures the evaluative frame as it disperses the event of art into an unbounded zone. In either case, there is no longer a sanctuary for the world in the museum, and the museum is less and less a sanctuary for the history of the city. Across the world, there have been many artistic coalitions, working groups, confederations, collaborative networks and transnational organisations that have not only sought to develop what Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez terms the “mutualization of resources”, but also aimed to provide a new basis for an “ethics of solidarity”. Petrešin-Bachelez (2015) calls this phenomenon a “network revolution”, mapping it out with reference to the influential theory by Bruno Latour (2005). Networks were designed to break up centralised authority structures, enhance peer‑to-peer knowledge exchange and capitalise on the democratic potential of new communication technologies. Thus, networks were not only important tools for dissemination, but also a vital element in a new conceptual framework. Latour’s (2005) Actor-Network-Theory was proposed to highlight the interdependence between individual actions and the system that enables the forces to flow. From this perspective, agency exists insofar as there is a network, and in turn, networks are activated through the actions of individuals.

Mobilising turbulence in the Asia-Pacific region Given the mobility of artists from all over the world, and the plethora of communication technologies, we argue that the presence of the visual and the function of art are now more complex. Circulation in a network is a banal description of this fact, and it hides the bias and blockages that persist in the system. What needs to be made even more visible is the way some elements can accelerate ahead of others or overcome obstacles and walls. Movement in any system is political. National regulative frameworks often underpin global systems, as can be seen in the retention of representative pavilions in biennales. Similarly, national perspectives are dominant in the way

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cosmopolitan narratives are framed. More than a generation has passed since the late 1980s when Rasheed Araeen curated the exhibition The Other Story in order to reveal the inexcusable omissions and blind spots in the Eurocentric canon of modern and contemporary art history. And yet Okwui Enwezor introduces his recent survey of contemporary art, Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic 1945–1965 (Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2016/17), with the same complaint against the “geopolitical bias that has tilted to the advantage of the countries that emerged victorious in the [Second World] war” (Enwezor 2016, 46). The sense of being global is still recounted in a way that can either enhance the competitive status of the national citizen or highlight the contribution of global processes to the national polity (Levitt 2015). Hence, we continue to witness exhibitions that are developed to proclaim that a national citizen is already a citizen of the world; alternatively, cosmopolitan values – understood as humanitarianism and curiosity about cultural difference – are presented as if they are already embedded in the national character.4 Through these strategies, art institutions are complicit in the delusion that one can have one’s national cake and also keep the candle of cosmopolitanism. They do this by claiming that the national citizen has already embodied global capacities and cosmopolitan values. This interpenetration of national and global structures produces what Kwame Anthony Appiah calls a “partial cosmopolitanism” (2006) – a sensibility that downplays the disruptive global disturbances and reassures a narcissist public by suggesting that the national structures of belonging will not only remain intact but even gain strength as they are extended in a globally competitive context. Art collectives in the Asia-Pacific represent a new, cumulative force capable of pushing us beyond the partial cosmopolitanism that art structures continuously collapse into. The Asia-Pacific has been understood as a productive terrain for disrupting the Eurocentric spatial and temporal component frequently drawn on in dominant mobility studies, especially since the 1990s. However, we use the term Asia-Pacific provisionally here. As Gillian Whitlock (2015) correctly asserts, the Asia-Pacific must be thought of as a lens, not a topic. Similarly, Tim Bunnell et al. (2012, 2) define the Asia-Pacific region not as a bounded geography, but a “problematic spatial and historical category”. This lens or category is, as Shanthi Robertson and Elaine Lynn‑Ee Ho (2016) stress, a highly mobile space, and this mobility is increasingly heterogeneous and blurred. Art collectives such as Ketemu Project, Local Time, Undrawing the Line and Ruangrupa reflect both the dynamism of mobilities in the Asia-Pacific and the ambient context that artists now operate in globally. Local Time formed in 2007 after Taranaki leader Te Miringa Hohaia sought a contemporary art component to the Second Parihaka International Peace Festival in Auckland, New Zealand. Comprising Alex Monteith, Jonathan Bywater, Natalie Robertson and Danny Butt, the collective makes interventions that, in Butt’s words, enact a “deliberate inattention to some professional institutional norms [and] […] attempt to reconfigure their lineaments, allowing temporary spaces where dialogues within and across communities or practice can emerge” (2016, 2). Ketemu Project is self-described as an “transnational art collective and social

4  Cosmopolitanism theory gained renewed purchase in the twenty-first century in response to concerns about the negative effects of globalisation, understood as the rampant spread of networks of capital. These concerns have led to critical consideration of Immanuel Kant’s vision of cosmopolitanism as one of universal hospitality and belonging. For overviews of cosmopolitanism studies, see Gunew 2017, Papastergiadis 2012 and Trimboli 2015.

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enterprise hybrid” that operates in an “ever-evolving” manner between Indonesia and Singapore (2017). Ketemu, an Indonesian word meaning “to meet” or “encounter”, brings together artists, cultural managers, designers, educators and curators, who all work together to create artistic interventions in the social conditions of the Asia-Pacific region. Part of this involves a residency programme, which further extends the social encounters – artists in this programme have come from Singapore, the Philippines, the Netherlands, Thailand and Indonesia. Undrawing the Line was formed by four people of refugee and non-refugee backgrounds – Mona Moradveisi, Safdar Ahmed, Zanny Begg, and Murtaza Ali Jafari  – “to challenge the binary between citizen and non-citizen that frames current thinking about borders” (Undrawing the Line 2014). One of its key projects, Under the Shade of the Waq Tree, was a growing modular drawing with anaglyph 3D that overlaid thirteenth-century Islamic maps with illustrations and comics by the four artists and a range of other refugees detained in the Villawood Detention Centre. The work was shown in urban and regional galleries in Australia, and in 2014 found itself on the facade of the Secession in Vienna. The spiralling work was both ‘placed’ and ‘dis-placed’; like the 3D illustration itself, the edges of the work were ragged, loosely framing intricate linework that connected various iterations and expressions, but doing so in an untraceable manner. Finally, Ruangrupa is a Jakarta-based art collective. It organises mini-film festivals, dance parties, collective exhibitions, houses an archive on contemporary visual practice, tours projects to the countryside and always collaborates with the public. These collectives all use the experience of contemporary hybridity to zoom in and out of place, space and time. Indeed, by vacillating between micro and macro interactions, all these collectives seem to explore the question articulated by Danny Butt of Local Time: “If we are not just being but becoming, can we ‘become from’ as well as ‘be from’ a place?” (Butt 2016, 1). In relation to the recent trends towards collective and collaborative practices that are engaged with everyday life, the aim is not to overcome polarisation by making a place that is attractive for the Other, finding in art a place for life, but rather for art to both flee from institutional constraints and to locate itself in the instituting of the common. Where the avant-garde sought to overcome separation by means of a radical supplement, the contemporary assemblages constituted by collectives such as these make the boundaries between art and life redundant, because there is no representation of anything, and at the same, the material conditions of everyday life, which are inevitably bounded, are used as they are – hence, the relationship between art and life operates on a 1:1 scale (Wright 2013). This orientation towards usership, rather than bringing up yet another critique of spectatorship, is important for Wright, and for many of the projects initiated by these collectives, because it marks a break with modernist claims about the function of art, and also speaks to both collective practices that disrupt the institutional expectations of authorship, and the artistic constitution of environments that refuse the museum logic of collection, classification and commodification. Amidst these practices there is no audience; because they do not stand before it, they must be involved in it. They are made of – and contribute to the making of – the spatial-temporal of the project, which is, at one and the same time, the stuff of the artwork. As Naima Morelli (2017) maps in her paper on Cambodian art collecting, the collections are being re‑defined as moving stories that live in intimate spaces, as personal memories and as something that can be “done through exchanges” (Dana Langlois 2017, cited in Morelli 2017).

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Ruangrupa is a particularly striking example of collecting as cumulative practice. Its projects are not seeking to reveal things to the public or critique the order of things. They do not really represent anything but are busy making many things happen. When this happens, the relationship between the aesthetic objective and the rest of the world is ambiguous. On one level, the events, programmes and festivals that they bring forth are already in the world. The artistic project is on a continuum with other forms of social and cultural production; it is of the same stuff as the rest of the world. In that sense, it is hard to see the artistic objectives as objects. As projects, they do not perform the role usually ascribed to art. They are not autonomous objects, and even if the emergent social relation exists as an experience in and of itself, this process does not serve as either a mirror or as a prism to see the world anew. This is a collective that does not make art that aims to be collected. Its value is not determined by the conventional aesthetic logic of spectatorship – seeing the work, comparing it with others, relating it to other parts of your life – but rather, it exists according to a new paradigm of usership. The example of these collectives, Ruangrupa in particular, is profound because it makes us revisit a problem that has vexed theorists throughout modernity: what is the relationship between art, politics and everyday life? This opens up a new way of thinking. Rather than returning to the stultifying polarity whereby art is confined to either a formal, autonomous and disinterested activity, or a mode of engagement where its direction and function is determined by an overriding political agenda, it opens up a space for the interplay of aesthetic action and public interaction, one where an alternate way of being and imagining is constituted there and then. It suggests that art does not find its expression at the point of illumination, or as the guide for future beginnings, but rather comes into being through tangible and sensory interaction with others. It is immediate and continuous with the experience. However, it also produces a “breathing space” amidst everyday life. The events are similar to but also feel slightly slightly askew to the normal flow of things in everyday life. It creates a sense of discrepancy that seeps into and supplements the thought and feeling that another way is open.

Conclusion: Forging cosmopolitanisms through artistic conviviality Of course, these art collectives did not fall from the sky like meteorites. Like the ‘do it yourself’ punk movement, they have sought to make things happen which the mainstream has either ignored or cannot imagine as valid. For instance, the emergence of Ruangrupa can be seen as a response to gaps in the Indonesian arts infrastructure, but also an extrapolation from local festival structures. It can be formally linked to the ideas of relational aesthetics and socially engaged art practice, as well as to the long history of performance and experimental theatre. We can rewind the history of the avant-garde from Dada to the Situationists, or draw on the histories developed from a feminist and postcolonial perspective, in order to identify predecessors. However, this classificatory exercise would miss a vital point. The wider significance lies not just in the ways artists have repeatedly located their practice beyond the museum’s walls, but also in the manner through which this effort makes other worlds possible. The critical reception of these collective practices would require a view of its multiple footprints as one moves with the body of conviviality. It would demand a double perspective: seeing where one has stepped with the intent of not only recalling what happened,

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but also aiming to discern where it is heading. This constant twisting of the body to gain a sideward glance, whereby one must look backwards and project forward, while also being attached to the body, appears rather awkward. However, rather than simply contort the body to accommodate conviviality, we can imagine that conviviality also harbours its own surplus of perspectives. This comes from the delirious dispersal and haphazard multiplication of viewpoints. From this ambient perspective, conviviality is not the dress that goes over the body, a way of dressing up or even hiding the generative parts; rather, we can imagine a conviviality that comes forth from the gathering together and through the encounters with others. Thus, conviviality is no longer imagined as a single body that can be addressed in the form of a reunion of parts that were once together, or dispersed entities that gain strength through unity, but as the multitude that clusters into being. By addressing this conviviality, we are not summoning a body into action, or even awakening dormant parts, but calling forth another kind of nexus between governance and sociality. In this nexus, conviviality is neither harvested nor harnessed, as if it were an already unified entity, and governance is not confined to either an opportunistic exploitation or a pietistic duty towards the other; rather, both are drawn forth from the clustering of multiplicity.

References Alcoff, Linda Martín. Visible Identities: Race, Gender and The Self. Oxford University Press, 2006. Ang, Ien. On Not Speaking Chinese. Routledge, 2001. –. “Ethnicities and Our Precarious Future.” Ethnicities, vol. 11, no. 1, 2011, pp. 27–31. –, and Brett St Louis. “Guest Editorial: The Predicament of Difference.” Ethnicities, vol. 5, no. 3, 2005, pp. 291–304. –, et al. The SBS Story: The Challenge of Cultural Diversity. UNSW Press, 2008. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. W. W. Norton, 2006. Appignanesi, Richard. “Introduction: ‘Whose culture?’ Exposing the Myth of Cultural Diversity.” Beyond Cultural Diversity: The Case for Creativity: A Third Text Report, edited by Richard Appignanesi, Third Text Publications, 2010, pp. 5–15. Araeen, Rasheed. “Cultural Diversity, Creativity and Modernism.” Beyond Cultural Diversity: The Case for Creativity: A Third Text Report, edited by Richard Appignanesi, Third Text Publications, 2010, pp. 17–34. –. “Ethnic minorities, multiculturalism and celebration of the postcolonial other.” Beyond Cultural Diversity: The Case for Creativity: A Third Text Report, edited by Richard Appignanesi, Third Text Publications, 2010, pp. 37–59. Ashcroft, Bill, et al. Key Concepts in Postcolonial Studies. Routledge, 1995. Augé, Marc. Non-Places. Verso, 1995. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994. –. ‘Unsatisfied: notes on vernacular cosmopolitanism’. Text and narration: cross-disciplinary essays on cultural and national identities, edited by L. García-Moreno and P. C. Pfeiffer, Camden House Publishers, 1996, pp. 191–207. Bunnell, Tim, et al. “Introduction: Global Urban Frontiers? Asian Cities in Theory, Practice and Imagination.” Urban Studies, vol. 49, no. 13, 2012, pp. 2785–2793, doi: http://www.jstor.org/stable/26144113. Butt, Danny, and Local Time. “Colonial Hospitality: Rethinking Curatorial and Artistic Responsibility.” Journal of Artistic Research, 2016, https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/228399/228400. Accessed 13 May 2016. Cheah, Pheng. What is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Duke University Press, 2016. Christensen, Miyase. “Postnormative cosmopolitanism: Voice, space and politics.” The International Communication Gazette, vol. 79, no. 67, 2017, pp. 555–563.

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Nikos Papastergiadis and Daniella Trimboli Crang, Mike. “[email protected]:TheSpatialImaginariesofaMediatedWorld.” Mediengeographie: theorie-analyse-diskussion, edited by Jörg Döring and Tristan Thielmann, transcript, 2009, pp. 539–564. De Baere, Bart. “Joining the Present to Now.” Kunst & Museumjournaal, vol. 5, no. 4, 1994. Eagleton, Terry. Ideology: An Introduction. Verso, 2007. Enwezor, Okwui. Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic 1945–1965. Prestel, 2016. Eshrāghi, Léuli Māzyār Luna‘i. “Who Are We Beyond Imperfect, Imposed ‘Asia’?” Peril Magazine, no. 21: Marginasia, 2015, http://peril.com.au/featured/who-are‑we-beyond-imperfect-imposed-asia/. Accessed 30 September 2015. Fenton, Natalie. Digital, Political, Radical. Polity, 2016. Fisher, Jean. “Cultural Diversity and Institutional Policy.” Beyond Cultural Diversity: The Case for Creativity: A Third Text Report, edited by Richard Appignanesi, Third Text Publications, 2010, pp. 61–91. Ganguly-Scrase, Ruchira, and Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt. Rethinking Displacement: Asia Pacific Perspectives. Routledge, 2013. Gilroy, Paul. After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture. Routledge University Press, 2006. GOMA. “Wang Qingsong ‘China Red’ 2008–09”, 21st Century Blog: Art in the First Decade, Queensland Government, 2017, available: http://21cblog.com/wang-qingsong-china-red/. Accessed 2 May 2017. Gunew, Sneja. The World at Home: Post-Multicultural Writers as Neo-Cosmopolitan Mediators. Anthem Press, 2017, http://www.jstor.‌org,/stable/j.ctt1kft8bw.4. Accessed 12 April 2017. Harrison, Stephan, Steve Pile, and Nigel Thrift. “Introduction.” Patterned Ground: Entanglements of Nature and Culture, edited by Stephan Harrison et al., Reaktion Books, 2004, pp. 48–49. Ketemu Project. “About.” 2017, http://ketemu.‌org. Accessed 18 July 2017. Koolhaas, Rem. “Junkspace.” October, vol. 100, Spring, 2002, pp. 175–190. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social. Oxford University Press, 2005. Levitt, Peggy. Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display. University of California Press, 2015. Lind, Maria. “Collaboration: Ten Years Down the Line.” Greater Together, edited by Annika Kristensen, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 2017. Lowe, Lisa.“Insufficient Difference.”Ethnicities, vol. 5, no. 3, 2005, pp. 409–414, doi: 10.1177/146879680500500308. Marotta, Vince. “The hybrid self and the ambivalence of boundaries.” Social Identities, vol. 14, no. 3, 2008, pp. 295–312, doi: 10.1080/13504630802088052. Madianou, Mirca, and Daniel Miller. Migration and New Media: Transnational Families and Polymedia. Routledge, 2012. Miliband, Ralph. “A State of De‑Subordination.” British Journal of Sociology, vol. 29, no. 4., 1978, pp. 399–409. Mishra, Sudesh. Diaspora Criticism. Edinburgh University Press, 2006. Morelli, Naima. “On Their Own Terms: The Personal Act of Collecting art in Cambodia.” Javaarts.‌org, 2017, http://www.naimamorelli.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/ArtRepublik_Collectors_Dec2017.‌pdf. Accessed 29 December 2017. Morley, David. Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity. Routledge, 2000. Nail, Thomas. The Figure of the Migrant. Stanford University Press, 2015. Noble, Greg. “‘Bumping into Alterity’: Transacting Cultural Complexities.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, vol. 25, no. 6, 2011, pp. 827–40. Ong Aihwa. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Duke University Press, 1999. Papacharissi, Zizi. A Private Sphere: Democracy in a Digital Age. Polity, 2010. –. Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics. Oxford University Press, 2014. Papastergiadis, Nikos. “Tracing Hybridity in Theory.” Debating Cultural Hybridity, edited by P. Werbner, Zed Books, 1997. –. The Turbulence of Migration: Globalization, Deterritorialization and Hybridity. Polity Press, 2000. –. Cosmopolitanism and Culture. Polity Press, 2012. –, and Daniella Trimboli. “Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism: The Force of The Fold in Diasporic Intimacy.” The International Communication Gazette, vol. 79, no. 67, 2017, pp. 564–583.

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From Global Turbulences to Spaces of Conviviality Petrešin-Bachelez, Nataša. “Time for a Network Revolution: Coalitions, Working Groups, Confederations.” Journal, 2015, http://curatorsintl.og/research/time-for-revolution-coalitions-working-groups-confederations. Accessed 29 December 2017. Qingsong, Wang. Competition. 2004. –. China Red. Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, 2009. Rancière, Jacques. “Art, Life, Finality: The Metamorphoses of Beauty.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 43, no. 3, Spring, 2017, pp. 597–660. Robertson, Shanthi, and Elaine Lynn‑Ee Ho. “Temporalities, Materialities and Connecting Locales: Migration and Mobility in Asia-Pacific Cities.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, vol. 42, no. 14, 2016, pp. 2263– 2271, doi: 10.1080/1369183X.2016.1205804. Trimboli, Daniella, “Memory magic: cosmopolitanism and The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam.” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, vol. 29, no. 3, 2015, pp. 479–489, doi: 10.1080/10304312.2014.986063. Undrawing the Line. “Undrawing the Line.” Zanny Begg, 2014, https://zannybegg.com/undrawing-the-line/. Accessed 30 March 2016. Whitlock, Gillian. “Salvage”. (paper presented at Locating Lives: The Inaugural Conference for the IABA Asia-Pacific Chapter, Adelaide, 1–3 December 2015) Wilken, Rowan. Teletechnologies, Place, and Community. Routledge, 2011. Wright, Stephen. Toward a Lexicon of Usership. Van Abbemuseum, 2013. Yue, Audrey, and Danielle Wyatt. “New Communities, New Racisms: A Critical Introduction.” Journal of Intercultural Studies, vol. 35, no. 3, 2014, pp. 223–231, doi: 10.1080/07256868.2014.899947.

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THE MIGRANT IMAGE

We live in an age of mobility. More people are on the move today than ever before in history. More images, too, are on the move than ever previously possible. The migrant has become the political figure of our time just as the mobile image has become the aesthetic figure of our time. The migrant and the image are part of the same historical primacy of motion and mobility that defines life in the early twenty-first century. This chapter argues that the fundamental structure of both the migrant and the image must therefore be re‑theorized from the perspective of motion. This is an important new conceptual move because, on the one hand, the migrant has been understood predominantly as a secondary political figure derived from the static basis of states. The migrant is typically defined as the one who moves between pre-established states. Opposed to this, this chapter argues that the migrant is in fact a constitutive figure of social life itself. On the other hand, the aesthetic image has been understood predominantly as something static, either as a representation of an object or as an imagination by the subject. Both of these static conceptions, I argue, should be replaced with a kinetic theory of the ‘migrant image.’ However, by the term 'migrant image' I do not necessarily mean the visual or art images of migrants, art by migrants, or the migration of art images across borders, although these are all important aspects of a migrant turn in art history. I mean something much more general about the material structure of the image and the migrant themselves. The image does not become mobile just because it represents migrants, and the mobility of migrants is not derived merely from our images of them. Rather, the argument I would like to make in this chapter is that the social primacy of the migrant and the aesthetic primacy of the mobile image are two dimensions of the same historical zeitgeist at the turn of the twenty-first century in which everything appears to be characterized by the primacy of motion. Therefore, instead of trying to derive the mobility of one from the other, I would like to show the common conceptual redefinition occurring in both of them with respect to the primacy of mobility in the twenty-first century. In order to do this, I begin first with the social primacy of the figure of the migrant and then move on to consider the kinesthetics of the mobile image. The aim is to demonstrate the sense in which the migrant has become a dominant social image for us today, as well the sense in which the image has become aesthetically migratory and mobile at the same time.

The figure of the migrant We live in the age of the migrant. At the turn of the twenty-first century, there were more regional and international migrants than ever before in recorded history (International Organiza-

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tion for Migration 2015).1 Today, there are more than 1 billion migrants (United Nations Population Fund 2015, 21).2 Each decade, the percentage of migrants as a share of the total population continues to rise. In the next 25 years, the rate of migration is predicted to be higher than over the last twenty-five years (Cole 2000; United Nations Database 2008; US National Intelligence Council 2012, 24).3 More than ever, it has become a necessity for people to migrate due to environmental, economic, and political instability. Climate change, in particular, may even double international migration over the next 40 years.4 Even more, the percentage of total migrants who are non-status or undocumented is further increasing, which poses a serious challenge to democracy and political representation (International Council on Human Rights Policy 2010).5 In other ways, we are all becoming migrants (Bauman 1998, 87; Papastergiadis 2000, 2).6 People today relocate greater distances more frequently than ever before in human history. While many people may not cross a regional or international border in their movement, they tend to change jobs more often, commute longer and farther to work (World Bank’s World Development Indicators 2005), change their residence repeatedly, and tour internationally more than ever before (World Tourism Organization 2013).7 Some of these phenomena are directly related to recent events, such as the impoverishment of middle classes in certain rich countries after the financial crisis of 2008, which include subsequent austerity cuts to social-welfare programs, rising unemployment, the subprime mortgage crisis, which led to the expulsion of millions of people from their homes around the world (9 million in the United States alone since 2008), the eviction of millions of small farmers in poor countries owing to the 540 million acres acquired by foreign investors and governments since 2006, and increasingly destructive mining practices around the world, including hydraulic fracturing and tar sands extraction. This general

1  In total number (1 billion: 1 in 7) and as percentage of total population (about 14 %) according to the International Organization for Migration. http://gmdac.iom.int/global-migration-trends-factsheet. Accessed 15 December 2017. 2  As of 2015, there were 244 million international migrants and 740 million internal migrants according to the UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund), 2015, State of World Population 2015. www.unfpa.org/migration. Accessed 26 October 2017. 3  On the theoretical implications of this phenomenon for liberalism, see Phillip Cole, 2000. 4  Future forecasts vary from 25 million to 1 billion environmental migrants by 2050, moving either within their countries or across borders, on a permanent or temporary basis, with 200 million being the most widely cited estimate. This figure equals the current estimate of international migrants worldwide; International Organization for Migration, http://publications.iom.int/system/files/pdf/mecc_outlook.‌pdf. Accessed 15 December 2017. 5  The International Council on Human Rights Policy estimates that the approximate numbers of global irregular migrants have grown to 30–40 million persons; http://www.ichrp.‌org. Accessed 15 December 2017. 6  With the rise of home foreclosure and unemployment, people today are beginning to have much more in common with migrants than with certain notions of citizenship (grounded in certain social, legal, and political rights). “All people may now be wanderers,” (Bauman 1989). “Migration must be understood in a broad sense,” (Papastergiadis 2000). 7  International tourist arrivals exceeded 1 billion annual tourists globally for the first time in history in 2012. World Tourism Organization, “World Tourism Barometer,” Vol. 11, 2013; http://cf.cdn.unwto.org/sites/all/files/ pdf/unwto_barom13_02_apr_excerpt_0.‌pdf. Accessed 15 December 2017.

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increase in human mobility and expulsion that affects us all is now widely recognized as a defining feature of our epoch (Sassen 2014, 1–2; Blunt 2007).8 However, not all migrants are alike in their movement (Bauman 1998). For some, movement offers opportunity, recreation, and profit with only a temporary expulsion from or deprivation of their territorial, political, juridical, or economic status. For others, movement is dangerous, constrained, and their social expulsions are much more severe and permanent. Today, most people fall somewhere on this migratory spectrum between the two poles of ‘inconvenience’ and ‘incapacitation.’ But at some point, everyone on this spectrum shares the experience that their movement results in a certain degree of expulsion from their territorial, political, juridical, or economic status. Even if the end result of migration is a relative increase in money, power, or enjoyment, the process of migration itself almost always involves a ‘sacrifice’ or ‘cost’ of some kind and duration: the removal of territorial ownership or access, the loss of the political right to vote or to receive social welfare, the loss of legal status to work or drive, or the financial loss associated with transportation or change in residence. The gains of migration are always a risk, while the process itself is always some kind of loss. This is precisely the sense in which Zygmunt Bauman writes that “tourism and vagrancy are two faces of the same coin” of global migration (Bauman 1998, 96). Both the “tourist” (the traveling academic, business professional, or vacationer) and the “vagabond” (migrant worker or refugee), as Bauman calls them, are “bound to move” by the same social conditions, but result in different kinds and degrees of expulsion from the social order (Bauman 1998, 85). Business people are compelled to travel around the world in the “global chase of profit,”“consumers must never be allowed to rest” in the chase of new commodities and desires, and the global poor must move from job to job wherever capital calls (Bauman 1998, 78, 83). For the “tourist,” this social “compulsion, [this] ‘must,’ [this] internalized pressure, [this] impossibility of living one’s life in any other way,” according to Bauman, “reveals itself to them in the disguise of a free exercise of will” (Bauman 1998, 84). The “vagabond” sees it more clearly. The social “compulsion” to move produces certain expulsions for all migrants. Some migrants may ‘decide’ to move, but they may not decide the social conditions of their movement or the degree to which they may be expelled from certain social orders as a consequence. Migration in this sense is neither entirely free nor forced; the two are part of the same regime of social motion. ‘Expulsion’ simply means the degree to which a migrant is deprived or dispossessed of a certain status in this regime. The “tourist” and “vagabond” are always crossing over into each another. “None of the insurance policies of the tourists’ life-style protects against slipping into vagabondage […] most jobs are temporary, shares may go down as well as up, skills, the assets one is proud of and cherishes now become obsolete in no time” (Bauman 1998, 97). Migration is the spectrum between these two poles, and the figure of the migrant is the one who moves on this spectrum. In this way, migratory figures often change their status as mobile social positions and not fixed identities. One is not born a migrant but becomes one. However, there are two central problems to overcome in order to develop a movement-oriented theory of the migrant. 8  I use the word 'expulsion' here in the same sense in which Saskia Sassen uses it to indicate a general dispossession or deprivation of social status. Many scholars have noted a similar trend. For an excellent review of the “mobilities” literature on migration, see Alison Blunt.

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Two problems The first problem is that the migrant has been predominantly understood from the perspective of stasis. The result is that the migrant has been perceived as a secondary or derivative figure with respect to place-bound membership. Place-bound membership in a society is posited first. Then the migrant is defined as the movement back and forth between social points. The emigrant is the name given to the migrant as the former member or citizen, and the immigrant as the would‑be member or citizen. In both cases, a static place and membership is conceived first, and the migrant is the one who lacks both. This is the case because more than any other political figure (citizen, foreigner, sovereign, etc.), the migrant is the one who is least defined by its being and place, but rather by its becoming and displacement: by its movement. Therefore, if we want to develop a political theory that begins with the migrant, we need to reinterpret the migrant first and foremost according to its own defining feature: its movement. Thus, we should develop a theoretical framework that begins with movement instead of stasis, following in the tradition of those thinkers who have granted theoretical primacy to movement and flow: Lucretius, Marx, Henri Bergson, and others.9 However, beginning from the theoretical primacy of movement does not mean that one should uncritically celebrate it. Movement is not always good, nor is movement always the same or uniform. Movement is always distributed in different social formations or circulations (Merriman 2012, 1–20).10 Thus, the migrant turn is neither a valorization of movement nor an ontology of movement in general. Rather, it is a historical ontology of the subject of our time: the migrant. It seeks to understand the historical conditions under which something like the migrant has come to exist for us today. In this way, we need not only a theory of the migrant, but also a theory of the social motions by which migration takes place. Society is always in motion. From border security and city traffic controls to personal technologies and work schedules, human movement is socially directed. Societies are not static places with fixed characteristics and persons (Urry 2000). Societies are dynamic processes engaged in continuously directing and circulating social life. In a movement-oriented framework there is no social stasis, only regimes of social circulation. Thus, if we want to understand the figure of the migrant, whose defining social feature is its movement, we must also understand society itself according to movement (Hannam et al. 2006, 1–22; Cresswell 2012; Kaufmann 2002; Urry 2007; Cresswell/Uteng 2008; Bærenholdt 2004; Thrift 1996).11 The second problem that needs to be overcome is that the migrant has been predominantly understood from the perspective of states. And since history is all too often written by the state, the result is that the migrant has often been understood as a figure without its own history and social force. “In world history,” as Hegel says, “we are concerned only with those peoples that have formed states [because] all the value that human beings possess, all of their spiritual reality, they have through the State alone” (Hegel 1998, 41–42). This is not to say that migrants are always stateless, but that the history of migrant social organizations has tended to be subsumed or

9  For a full literature review of the history and thinkers of the ontology of motion, see Thomas Nail, Being and Motion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 10  For a review of the criticisms against the philosophy of movement, see Merriman 2012. 11  In this sense, this chapter can also be placed in the context of what is now being called the “new mobilities paradigm” or “mobility turn” in the social sciences.

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eradicated by state histories. Often, it is the most dispossessed migrants who have created some of the most interesting non-state social organizations. In response to this problem, we need a counter-history of several important migrant social organizations that have been marginalized by states. The migrant is not only the figure whose movement results in a certain degree of social expulsion; the migrant also has its own type of movement that is quite different from the types that define its expulsion. Accordingly, migrants have created very different forms of social organization, as can clearly be seen in the ‘minor history’ of the raids, revolts, rebellions, and resistances of some of the most socially marginalized migrants. This is a challenging history to write because many of these social organizations were not written down, or if they were, they were systematically destroyed by those in power. It is not a natural fact that the history of migrants has become ahistorical, as Hegel argues; it is the violence of states that has rendered the migrant ahistorical. The consequences There are three important consequences of developing a political theory of the migrant in this way. First, it will allow us to conceptualize the emergence of the historical conditions that gave rise to the types of social expulsion that define the migrant. These forms of social expulsion linked to migrant motion did not emerge out of nowhere in the twenty-first century; they emerged historically. At different points in history, migratory movement resulted in different types and degrees of social expulsion (territorial, political, juridical, and economic) due in part to the presupposed ontological primacy of stasis. Once a new form of social organization becomes historically dominant (i. e. villages, states, feudal lands, markets, etc.), we begin to see an explosion in new techniques for expelling migrants from their territorial, political, legal, or economic status. Once these techniques emerge historically, they are differentially repeated again later on. Today, we find the contemporary migrant at the intersection of all four forms of social expulsion, albeit to varying degrees. The aim of such a project should also be historical: to provide an analysis of the major techniques for expelling migrants during their period of historical dominance and to provide a conceptual, movement-based, definition of the migratory figures associated with these expulsions (Castles 1992).12 The second consequence of the theory of the migrant is that it will allow us to analyze contemporary migration. This is possible because the history of migration is not a linear or progressive history of distinct ‘ages.’ Rather, it is a history of co‑existing and overlapping social forces of expulsion. The same techniques of territorial, political, juridical, and economic expulsion of the migrants that have emerged and repeated themselves in history are still at work today. For example, territorial expulsion (the dispossession of land)13 does not only occur once against the nomadic peoples in the Neolithic period. Once this technique of expulsion emerges in the Neo-

12  Stephen Castles has also argued that the figure of the migrant needs to be defined in relation to its other overlapping historical figures, such as indentured laborer, refugee and exile. 13  Here I am using the word “territory” simply to mean “delimited land” (following the OED) and not in a strictly historical way since, as Stuart Elden (2013) argues, the usage of the word 'territory' varies significantly throughout history and cannot be used in a univocal way.

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lithic period, it is taken up again and mobilized in various ways throughout history up to the present. The first territorial expulsions created historical nomadic peoples, but they also defined a conceptual type of migrant subjectivity characterized by territorial expulsion that also defines other territorially displaced peoples. This is the sense in which migrants may be ‘nomadic’ without being the same as historical nomads. As an example, in the ancient world, migrants were expelled from their territories by war and kidnapping; in the medieval world, they were expelled by enclosure and the removal of customary laws that bound them to the land; and in the modern world, they were expelled by the capitalist accumulation of private property. In each case, these events, like a festival, paradoxically repeat an “unrepeatable.”“They do not add a second and a third time to the first, but carry the first time to the ‘nth’ power” (Deleuze 2001, 1). Contemporary migration is part of this legacy.14 Migrant farm workers expelled by industrial agriculture, indigenous peoples expelled from their native lands by war and forced into the mountains, forests, or waste lands, and island peoples expelled from their territory by the rising tides of climate change are all often popularly described as “nomads” (Cresswell 2010). In a certain sense, this is true. All these migrants share those similar social conditions of territorial expulsion that first produced historical nomads. The analysis of contemporary migration I am arguing for here is not one of total causal explanation of push-pull factors, psychological volunteerism, neoclassical or structural economism, and so on. Rather, it offers a descriptive kinetic analysis. The aim is not to explain the causes of all migration, but to offer better descriptions of the conditions, forces, and trajectories of its historical emergence and co‑existence in the present from the perspective of motion. The third consequence of a theory of the migrant is that it will allow us to diagnose the capacity of the migrant to create an alternative to the social expulsion of the migrant. The figure of the migrant is not merely an effect of different regimes of social expulsion. The migrant also has its own forms of social motion in the form of riots, revolts, rebellions, and resistance. Just as the analysis of the historical techniques for the expulsion of the migrant can be used to understand contemporary migration, so too, can the historical techniques of migrant social organizations be used to diagnose the capacity of contemporary migrants to pose an alternative to the present social logic of expulsion that continues to dominate our world. Today, the figure of the migrant exposes an important truth: that social expansion has always been predicated on the social expulsion of migrants. The twenty-first century will be the century of the migrant not only because of the record number of migrants today, but because this is the century in which all the previous forms of social expulsion and migratory resistance have re‑emerged and become more active than ever before. These two events also reveal, however, a certain historical and conceptual continuity of migratory struggles for an alternative to social expulsion. The same historical conditions at the beginning of the twenty-first century that give rise to the primacy of the migrant also give rise to a primacy of the mobile image.

14  As Tim Cresswell writes, “We cannot understand new mobilities, without understanding old mobilities” (Cresswell 2010, 25).

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The mobile image We also live in the age of the image. Just before the turn of the twenty-first century a host of digital media technologies (computers, the Internet, video games, mobile devices, and many others) unleashed the largest flow of digitally reproduced words, images, and sounds the world has ever witnessed. No other aesthetic medium can possibly compete with what digital media has done to human sensation in the last twenty years. All that was solid has melted into the electromagnetic field. The digital image has mobilized sensory and aesthetic experience in more ways than ever before in history. While the effect of television and radio on sensation was significant, they still restricted sensation to relatively centralized, homogenized, and unidirectional programming. The new interactive and bidirectional nature of digital media today has expanded the mobility and mutability of the image in a way that analog media never could. With the popularization of the Internet and mobile devices at the turn of the twenty-first century  –  cell phones, smartphones, tablets, and laptops – digitalized images have become not only dominant but increasingly portable (Internet World Stats).15 As of 2014, there were more active mobile devices than there are people on the planet. The mobile phone is probably the single fastest-growing human sensory technology ever developed, growing from zero to 7.2 billion in a mere three decades. The mobility of the digital image has incited a revolution in publishing, journalism, entertainment, education, commerce and politics. It has both overthrown and wholly integrated analog media, giving rise to whole new digitalized industries in the process. Industrial factories and workers are increasingly replaced by internet servers and automated checkout software. It is plainly obvious to everyone that we have now entered a new aesthetic regime; we are now in the age of the digital image. Today, it is possible for anyone to communicate by voice or text with anyone else; to listen to almost every sound ever recorded; to view almost any image ever made; and to read almost any text ever written from a single device and from almost any location on Earth. All of this is now available on the move and is itself in movement in the form of electrical flows. The image will never be the same. The contemporary mobility of the image and its sensation, made possible by the advent and now dominance of digital media, is not just a quantitative increase in reproduced images. Digital media and digital images have transformed the very conditions of sensation itself. Anything can now be digitized, mobilized, and browsed non-linearly through a single portable device. The whole of art history can now be made responsive and interactive with the viewer through the use of digital software and a continuous flow of electrical current. None of the senses have remained unchanged by digital media; even taste and smell can now be synthesized using computer software (Turin 2007). Something is always lost in transit as the continuous is converted into the digitally discrete, but the affect moves on regardless, sweeping us all along with it.

15  Today 77 percent of developed countries and 40 percent of the entire world use the Internet. It has become the single-largest mechanism for the production, mobilization, and consumption of sensory media. Internet World Stats, 15 December 2017, http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.‌htm. Accessed 15 December 2017.

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More than ever before, the fact that the image is up in the air and on the move requires a serious rethinking of the nature of art and affect from the perspective of the present, from the age of the mobile image. Something fundamental about our world changed around the turn of the twenty-first century: not just an empirical change introduced by new technologies, but a new and fundamentally kinetic set of relations in aesthetics have begun to appear. The exceptions to the rules of the previous historical paradigms have now themselves become the rules in a whole new game. Mobile digital devices are no longer luxury items for the privileged few but have transformed every aspect of daily life around the world, including the very structure of human experience, thought, and sensation. If everything looks like a crisis today  –  the migration crisis, the digital media crisis, the measurement crisis in the quantum sciences – it is because we are still looking at our present through the eyes of the past. As long as these kinds of critical events continue to appear as secondary or derivative, as long as motion and mobility appear to be deviations from stasis, we have no hope of understanding some of the greatest events of our time. Migrant aesthetics The mobile image and the centrality of the migrant mark a new period in aesthetics. The digital image is not only mobile by virtue of its form but by the mobility of its content and author. Some of the most shared and viewed images of the past few years have been digital images of migrants, refugees, and the conditions of their travels, and even their death. The image of Alan Kurdi, the dead Syrian 3-year-old is now one of the most influential images of all time.16 The popular media has been saturated with migrant images and has thus been confronted in a new and dramatic way with the visible lives and deaths of migrants. Furthermore, the widespread access to cell phones with digital cameras has also made it possible for migrants and refugees themselves to generate more images of their own movement and experience than ever before. The itinerant, grainy, handheld, and “poor” images of migrant cell phone cameras have become their own film genera: the “wretched of the screen” (Steyerl 2013). In these videos migrants are not silent victims but creators of new aesthetic forms, “an imperfect cinema” (Espinosa 1979) as demonstrated in Elke Sasse’s 2016 film #MyEscape. Cell phones have also become literal lifelines for migrants to obtain travel information in isolated areas, to share videos, sounds and images with friends, family, and authorities. The digital visual and sonic images produced by migrants have become the material basis of the aesthetic threads that hold together numerous committees across borders, not just refugees. Although it is most obvious in the case of refugees, these are the same aesthetic lifelines that make possible sustained social and informational communities around the world. The migrancy of the digital image is what allows for community in a world of global migration, continuous mobility, and displacement. What would global migration look like without without the migrancy of the image and the images of the migrant?

16  Farida Vis and Olga Goriunova, editors, 2015, The Iconic Image on Social Media: A Rapid Research Response to the Death of Aylan Kurdi. https://research.gold.ac.uk/14624/1/KURDI%20REPORT.‌pdf. Accessed 17 December 2017.

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The migrant image thus marks the limits of the previous century and the outline of a new one defined by the mobility and migration of the image. This requires a new approach both to the politics of migration and the aesthetics of the image. However, the advent of the present is never limited to the present alone. Now that our present has emerged, it has become possible in a way it was not before to inquire into the conditions of its emergence and discover something new about the nature and history of art. In other words, the present reveals something new about the nature of sensation and what it must at least be like so as to be capable of being defined by the primacy of motion and mobility as it is. At no point in history has the image ever been anywhere near as mobile as it is today in the digital image. So, what does this say about the nature of the image such that it is capable of this mobility? If the image is defined by the primacy of mobility today yet existing theories of it are not, then we need a new conceptual framework. We need to produce such a new conceptual framework based on the primacy of motion to better understand contemporary sensation and aesthetics, as well as the historical events from which it emerges. In short, the rise of the mobile digital image draws our attention not so much to its radical novelty, but to a previously hidden dimension of all previous images throughout art history that can only now be seen (Hansen 2004; Hansen 2006; Manning 2012; Massumi 2007; Naukkarinen 2005; O’Sullivan 2001; Gregg/Seigworth 2010). The research program proposed by this chapter is therefore neither a theory of the migrant image that applies strictly to the novelty of the digital image nor an ahistorical theory of the image that applies forever and all time to all images and media. I am not proposing a naive realism in which the discovery of the contemporary primacy of motion gives us pure access to unchanging essence of the image. Instead, I am proposing a realism of the minimal affective conditions of the emergence of the present itself. That is, a critical or minimal realism in the sense in which the image is interpreted only with respect to that aspect of the image that must at least be the case for our present ‘to have been possible,’ i. e., actual. Therefore, the method proposed here is neither realist or constructivist in their traditional senses, but rather minimally or critically realist. The question is not what the conditions of the human mind must be for the image to be what it is, but rather what the image itself must at least be like such that the present has come to be defined by the primacy of a mobile or migratory aesthetics. Without a doubt, contemporary reality is shaped by multiple human structures, but these structures are in turn conditioned by other real, non-anthropic, affective, and aesthetic structures. This chapter proposes that we locate the real conditions necessary for the emergence of the contemporary mobility of the image and of global migration. The type of global migration we are witnessing today would not be possible without the unique material and aesthetic structure of the digital image. Once these twin conditions are elaborated, however, it is always possible for a new present to emerge and in turn reveal yet another previously unseen dimension of the past, and so on in an additive, yet historically realist fashion. However, there are two central problems to overcome in order to develop such a migrant theory of the image. Two problems The kinetic theory of the image encounters two problems related directly to the problems encountered by the figure of the migrant. Both have been treated as static and ahistorical. The fate of the image and the fate of the migrant are thus related to the problem of stasis.

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First problem: stasis The first problem to be overcome is that the image has been traditionally subordinated to something static. This subordination has taken two complementary formulations: an objective one and a subjective one. Objective stasis. On the one hand, the image has been subordinated to a static object or unchanging essence. The image, in other words, has been treated as a copy or representation of an original, just as the migrant has been treated as a failed citizen. The difference between the object and the image of the object becomes the degree of movement or change in the image itself with respect to its unchanging original. This is the classical model/copy relation famously dramatized by Plato in the Timaeus. The original or model object remains static and unmoved while subsequent images aim to work like mobile snapshots to accurately represent the original object in all its immobile perfection and essential form. As Plato writes, “Now the nature of the ideal being was everlasting, but to bestow this attribute in its fullness upon a creature was impossible. Wherefore he resolved to have a moving image of eternity, and when he set in order the heaven, he made this image eternal but moving according to number, while eternity itself rests in unity” (Plato, Timaeus, 37c‑e). There can be no higher exhalation of eternity and denigration of the image than this. For Plato, the image is nothing but illusion, appearance, and likeness organized according to discrete numerical quantities. The object is thus fixed in its essence and the image is fixed by its discrete number. These discrete numerical images fail to represent the object precisely because of the mobility of the image. Motion and mobility thus become the conceptual names for the failure of the image to represent the object. Similarly, images of migrant suffering become exceptions to the “normal functioning” of nation states. All definitions of art as representation are defined by some version or degree of this static model/copy/resemblance relation. Not only is the object immobilized in the model to be copied but the image of the model itself remains nothing more than a failed numerical attempt to reproduce this same static condition. Between the two stands a gulf of movement and turbulence that ensures their incommensurability. In this way the only real or true sensation occurs in the object itself – all images of the object are mere appearances or modified snapshots of the original. It is therefore no coincidence that art history and museum culture tend to privilege the most static of the arts, i. e. the visual and plastic arts. The obsession with art preservation, authorial authenticity, and connoisseurship too are historically linked to this classical idea of stasis and mimesis. It is also no coincidence that images of migrants and refugees tend to be treated as victim-images, as if the process of their production was not still ongoing. Subjective stasis. On the other hand, the image has also been subordinated to the relatively static mental states of the subject. In this theory, perceptual images are only given conceptual and aesthetic coherence and reality in the faculties of the perceiver. Versions of this theory are closer to the more modern aesthetics developed by Kant in his Critique of Judgment (1790). In this theory what remains static, fixed, and universal is not the object being represented but the concept of beauty itself found in the mental structure of the subject. Fluctuating images occur in the body of perceiver but it is only in the concept of beauty that they are given fixed and universal form. It is thus human mental and perceptual structures and not sensual images themselves that lie at the firm foundations of truth and beauty.

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Again, for Kant, it is the movement of the image in the mobile and affected body that marks the inferiority and subordination of the image. The nature of the object in itself remains unknown because the body and its perceptual images are moved and mobile. The senses are thus led to misrepresent reality to the mind. The senses of the body cannot be trusted in knowledge or in beauty. Our experience of beauty, therefore, is not the beauty of nature or even of the beauty of the images, but rather the beauty of our own idea, experience, or faculty of representing these images to ourselves. Nature is only the prompt for us to discover the beauty of our own aesthetic and phenomenological faculties.17 This is the inverse of the classical idea of the model/copy relation. Instead of defining the image by its subordination to the static essence of the object; it is defined by its subordination to the static aesthetic structures of judgment in the mind of the experiencing or intentional subject. This subjective form is most dramatic in Kant and post-Kantian aesthetics, but a similar model is also at work in other anthropic constructivisms as well, including social, anthropological, linguistic, economic, and other non-psychological versions. All these different constructivisms share the reduction of the image not to the Kantian ego, but to other anthropic structures. In contrast to Kant, some of these anthropic constructivisms can even be transformed to some extent by moving images. However, even in those cases the movement of the image still remains tied to the relatively static anthropic structures that produce and consume those images. Since numerous full-length works have recently been devoted to making this argument, including my own, and since this is not the primary focus of this chapter, I must simply refer the interested reader to those works at this point.18 Both the objective and subjective/constructivist theories of the image thus subordinate it to something relatively static. Furthermore, they both treat the movement of images as something discrete, either in number (Plato) or in the body (Kant). In both cases movement is what makes the image inferior but also what secures the difference between the object and subject in the first place. For Plato, the object remains different from the inferior images of it precisely because the object does not move. For Kant, the same is true of the transcendental subject. For constructivists, images remain extensions, projections, or reflections of more primary human structures. In both cases the object and subject are separated by a kinetic gulf of fluctuating images. The political connection here is that it is the figure of the migrant that relies most deeply on this subordinated aspect of the image’s mobility. The use of images is not just a luxury of fixed citizens but a defining feature of survival for migrants. Their own mobility is thus tied to the mobility, and often hybrid and shaky mobility, of the image in a way that it is not for others. There are two kinetic paradoxes here. The first is that the movement of the image is both necessary to ensure the division between subject and object but also necessary to ensure the region of transport that connects them as distinct. The model transports its image to the senses. 17  We can see a later expression of a similar idea in Aby Warburg’s interesting, but also socially and anthropocentrically limited, idea of the “pathos of images” and in Bredekamp’s theory of the Image-act, in which images have agency, but only for human reaction, will, desire, and perception. “The ‘I’ becomes stronger when it relativizes itself against the activity of the image” (Bredekamp 2013, 328). 18  See Tom Sparrow, The End of Phenomenology; Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway; Ian Hodder, Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things; Manuel DeLanda, Assemblage Theory; Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, editors, New Materialisms; and Thomas Nail, Being and Motion.

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The subject then receives these images on the surface of its sensitive mobile body. Without this zone of transport between the object and subject, nothing transpires – sensation fails. And yet, precisely because of this mobility representation is undermined. The mobility of the image, just like the mobility of the migrant, is thus both the condition of possibility for the object and subject and the condition of their impossible convergence in perfect aesthetic and political representation. Hence the related second paradox that the image is treated as necessarily mobile in its transport but fixed and limited by number and body. The image, in the subjective and objective accounts, must move but only as a frozen mobility, a snapshot, or particle of sensation. The mobility of the image is thus described as secondary to the fixed object or subject when it is in fact the mobile substratum within which regions of relative immobility emerge. The citizen and the snapshot are thus crystallizations of the mobile migrant image. Therefore, if we want to develop a theory of the migrant image that does not fall into these paradoxes we need to begin from its most primary and defining feature, its mobility, and not try and deduce this mobility from something static or statist. This requires, however, a whole new theory based on the motion of the image. The division between the object and subject of sensation is not a primary ontological determination but rather the effect of a more primary kinetic process of kinetic images themselves. This is the novelty of the kinetic approach: It reinterprets the structure and history of sensation from the perspective of the primacy of the migrant and mobile image. Second problem: history The second problem the kinetic theory of the migrant image aims to overcome is the supposedly ahistorical nature of the image, just like the ahistorical treatment of the migrant. There are three formulations of this ahistorical thesis: an objective, a subjective, and an ontological one. Objective. On the one hand, if the image is subordinated to a static model object then it can have no history, or its history is a mere illusion. History presupposes the real movement and transformation of matter, but if objective essences do not move, then they can have no history, and their images can have no real history either. The state treats the migrant in the same manner. Subjective. Second, if the image is subordinated to the static conceptual or constructivist structure of human subjects then a similar problem occurs. If subjective structures are universal, as Kant and much of post-Kantian phenomenology argues,19 then they do not change (or change only within a fixed domain) over time, and if subjective structures themselves (not just their contents) do not change over time then they have no real history. Perceptual images may change within this structure, but the aesthetic conditions of making sense of these images and ordering them have always been the same – and thus the image too, as subordinate to the

19  Merleau-Ponty’s late essay “Eye and Mind” (1961), for example, makes great strides toward overcoming the anthropocentrism and constructivism of earlier phenomenology, including his own. In Eye and Mind, Merleau-Ponty aims to give back historicity to the image itself as a continuous fold, fabric, or pleat in being: “the world is made of the same stuff as the body” because it is “visible and mobile: a thing among things” (163). While the emphasis of the text remains largely on the human body, it also aims to break down the division between image and body.

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structure, remains ahistorical. A notable exception to this post-Kantian ahistoricism is the tradition of Marxist aesthetics, including the Frankfurt School.20 Ontological. The third formulation of this problem is ontological. In order for the object to be copied by an image, the object must appear in sensuous reality and thus must be, in some sense, affected by the conditions of its appearance. Similarly, in order for the subject to schematize and conceptualize its perceptions, it must in some sense be affected or receptive to the sensory images of its body. The affective nature of the image is therefore continuous with the whole process of becoming in which the object and subject both transform and are transformed through their appearance as images. In this way, the ontology of the affective image liberates the image from its twin subordination. It does so, however, only at the risk of reintroducing its own form of ahistoricity. If the affective image comes to be understood as ontologically ‘autonomous’ with respect to the objects and subjects it produces or distributes then its constant change becomes something relatively changeless: pure becoming (Massumi 2007). If all images are reduced to their lowest common denominator, affect, becoming and ontological change, then the particularity of historical and regional images risks being submerged entirely into a pure ontological flux. Pure change becomes pure stasis. The ontology of becoming is ahistorical. The ontological rejection of history in favor of becoming has been put forward by a number of recent process ontologists (Massumi 2007; Manning 2012; Bennett 2010; Connolly 2011; Whitehead 2014, 73). The process ontology of the affective image treats the image as if it were possible to describe its structure for ever and all time and from no position in particular. The ontological image, in this way, risks becoming something like its own kind of ‘autonomous’ substance or pure ‘force’  – adding nothing to the historical description of the image but a generic ontological language applied to new phenomena (see Nail, forthcoming). In response to the problem of ahistoricity, this chapter proposes not only a theory of the image and aesthetics grounded in the migrant present, but also offers a history of this present and the material conditions of its emergence. In short, it does not offer an ontology of the image. It is precisely because the image is mobile that it has a history, and therefore that sensation must be theorized historically, and not ontologically. Furthermore, because the image has a history it also has a whole typology of distributions that organize the world of subjective and objective structures. All these structures have to be accounted for, starting from the historical mobility of the migrant image. It is precisely because of the dual historical migrancy of the image and aesthetics of the migrant that this type of inquiry is now possible and crucial. Just as it is impossible to understand our contemporary world without understanding the primacy of the migrant, so it is impossible to understand it without the migrancy of the image itself and its global network of affective lifelines, which socially and aesthetically support a world‑in-migration. The migrant image The migrant image is not a copy. It is not even a copy of a copy without an original (Baudrillard 2010). There is no mimesis whatsoever. If we are looking for a new and more fruitful definition of 20  While they remain anthropocentric humanists they also allow for radical historical changes in existing social and aesthetic structures. See Adorno, History and Freedom: Lectures 1964–1965: Theodor W. Adorno.

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the migrant image, we need look no further than within the same Latin root of the word itself. The word 'image', from the Latin word imago, means “reflection, duplication, or echo” (Glare 2010). These definitions imply precisely the opposite of what we typically think of as a copy. A copy must be something other than its model or, by definition, it cannot be a copy of a model. Reflection, however, from the Latin word flex, means to bend or curve. A reflection is a re‑curving or re‑bending that folds something back over itself. Duplication, from the Latin word pli, meaning 'fold', and the example of an echo, given in the Oxford Latin Dictionary, make this meaning quite apparent. The image is not a distinct or separate copy but the process by which matter curves, bends, folds, and bounces back and forth. The image is therefore the mobile process by which matter twists, folds, and reflects itself into various structures of sensation. The migrant too is defined by its flows, folds, and circulations – always in transit and caught between worlds. There are not first static objects, subjects, and states and then second a movement or transfer of images or migrants between them. Rather, there is first matter in motion and then a folding, composition, and duplication that generates larger sensuous matters such as objects and subjects that then further reflect and duplicate the flows of matter between them. A folded image is not a copy because a fold is not something separate from the matter that is folded. The fold is a completely continuous kinetic and topological structure. There is not one part of the fold which would be an original and another that would be a copy. This is the sense in which Henri Bergson writes that the image is “more than that which the idealist calls a representation, but less than that which the realist calls a thing – an existence placed halfway between the ‘thing’ and the ‘representation’” (Bergson 2005, 9). It is more than a representation because it is not a copy of something else, and it is less than a thing because it is already the material of which things are composed and as such is irreducible to our empirical sensations of them. Images, in our view, are an aggregate of “matters.”21

Conclusion The migratory turn in aesthetics and art history is not just a turn toward the prevalence of images of migrants, the emergence and importance of migrant art works, but also the mobile and migratory nature of the image itself. There is thus a becoming migrant of the image and a becoming image of the migrant at the same time. Because of the current historical conjuncture, it is impossible to extract them from each other. Therefore, the two must be thought together as the migrant image. This chapter, however, has only laid out the problem conceptually and suggested some possible methods and trajectories for a much larger research project that would look more closely at the images of migrants, by migrants, and the mobility of images themselves as migrant.22

21  An inversion of Bergson’s claim that “Matter, in our view, is an aggregate of images.” (Bergson 2005, 9–10). 22  See Thomas Nail, Theory of the Image (manuscript) for a full development of this research program.

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References Adorno, Theodor W. History and Freedom: Lectures 1964–1965. Translated by Rolf Tiedemann, Wiley, 2014. Bærenholdt, Jørgen Ole, and Kirsten Simonsen. Space Odysseys: Spatiality and Social Relations in the 21st Century. Routledge, 2017. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press, 2007. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. University of Michigan Press, 1994. Bauman, Zygmunt. Globalization: The Human Consequences. Columbia University Press, 1998. Blunt, Alison. “Cultural Geographies of Migration: Mobility, Transnationality and Diaspora.” Progress in Human Geography, vol. 31, no. 5, 2007, pp. 684–694. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, 2009. Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer, Zone Books, 2005. Bredekamp, Horst. Theorie des Bildakts [Theory of the Image-Act]. Suhrkamp, 2013. Castles, Stephen. Mistaken Identity: Multiculturalism and the Demise of Nationalism in Australia. Pluto Press (UK), 1988. Cole, Phillip. Philosophies of Exclusion: Liberal Political Theory and Immigration. Edinburgh University Press, 2000. Connolly, William E. A World of Becoming. Duke University Press, 2011. Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Duke University Press, 2010. Cresswell, Tim. On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World. Taylor & Francis, 2006. –. “Towards a Politics of Mobility.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 28, no. 1, 2010, pp. 17–31. –, and Tanu Priya Uteng. Gendered Mobilities. Routledge, 2008. DeLanda, Manuel. Assemblage Theory. Edinburgh University Press, 2016. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Columbia University Press, 1994. –, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Bloomsbury Publishing, 1988. Espinosa, Julio García. “For an imperfect cinema.” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, no. 20, 1979, pp. 24–26. Glare, Peter G. W. Oxford Latin Dictionary. Clarendon Press, 2010. Gregg, Melissa, and Gregory J. Seigworth, editors. The Affect Theory Reader. Duke University Press, 2010. Hannam, Kevin, et al. “Editorial: Mobilities, Immobilities and Moorings.” Mobilities, vol. 1, no. 1, 2006, pp. 1–22. Hansen, Mark B. N. Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media. Routledge, 2012. –. New Philosophy for New Media. MIT Press, 2004. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Introduction to the Philosophy of History: with Selections from the Philosophy of Right. Translated by Leo Rauch, Hackett Publishing, 1988. Hodder, Ian. Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things. Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. International Council on Human Rights Policy. Irregular Migration, Migrant Smuggling and Human Rights: Towards Coherence. International Council on Human Rights Policy, 2010, http://www.ichrp.org/files/summaries/41/122_pb_en.‌pdf. Accessed 15 December 2017. International Organization for Migration. “Overcoming Barriers: Human Mobility and Development.” National Institute on Aging, 2005, http://oppenheimer.mcgill.ca/IMG/pdf/HDR_2009_EN_Complete.‌pdf. Accessed 15 December 2017. Kaufmann, Vincent. Re-thinking Mobility: Contemporary Sociology. Routledge, 2017. Manning, Erin. Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy. MIT Press, 2009. Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke University Press, 2002. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, and James M. Edie. The Primacy of Perception: And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics. Northwestern University Press, 2015. Merriman, Peter. Mobility, Space and Culture. Routledge, 2012.

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The Migrant Image Nail, Thomas. Being and Motion. Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2018. –. Theory of the Image. Oxford University Press, forthcoming. Naukkarinen, Ossi. “Aesthetics and Mobility‑A Short Introduction to a Moving Field.” Contemporary Aesthetics, special vol., no. 1, 2005. O’Sullivan, Simon. “The Aesthetics of Affect: Thinking Art Beyond Representation.” Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities, vol. 6, no. 3, 2001, pp. 125–135. Papastergiadis, Nikos. The Turbulence of Migration: Globalization, Deterritorialization and Hybridity. Polity Press, 2000. Plato. Timaeus. Translated by Peter Kalkavage, 2nd ed., Focus, 2016. Sassen, Saskia. Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Harvard University Press, 2014. Sparrow, Tom. The End of Phenomenology: Metaphysics and the New Realism. Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Steyerl, Hito. The Wretched of the Screen. Sternberg Press, 2013. Thrift, Nigel. Spatial Formations. Sage, 1996. Turin, Luca. The Secret of Scent: Adventures in Perfume and the Science of Smell. Harper Collins, 2007. United Nations Database. “Trends in International Migrant Stock: the 2008 Revision.” Eighth Coordination Meeting on International Migration. 2009, http://esa.un.org/migration. Accessed 15 December 2017. United Nations Human Development Report. The Future of Migration: Building Capacities for Change. IOM, International Organization for Migration, 2010, http://www.iom.int/files/live/sites/iom/files/Newsrelease/docs/WM2010_FINAL_23_11_2010.‌pdf. Accessed 15 December 2017. Urry, John. Mobilities. Polity, 2007. –. Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century. Routledge, 2012. US Intelligence National Council. “Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds.” 2012, http://globaltrends2030.files. wordpress.com/2012/11/global-trends-2030-november2012.‌pdf. Accessed 15 December 2017. Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. Macmillan, Free Press, 2014. World Bank’s World Development Indicators 2005: Section 3 Environment, Table 3.11, http://www.worldmapper.org/display.‌php?selected=​141. Accessed 15 December 2017.

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IMMIGRANTS, REFUGEES AND THE ARTS A Complex and Multidimensional Relationship

The academic literature on immigrant integration and incorporation is huge both in Europe and America. It has exploded in Europe and the USA since the 1980s (Martiniello/Rath 2010; 2012; 2014) to cover a wide range of issues linked to the economic, social, political and cultural incorporation of immigrants and their offspring. However, there are two important problems in this literature: the weakness of transatlantic academic dialogue; and the relative neglect of some topics and issues – for example, the relationship between the various types and styles of art (fine art, music, visual arts, theatre, literature, installation, performing arts, and so on) and the incorporation of migrants and their descendants. First, European migration and ethnic studies undoubtedly developed originally by importing concepts and theories from America, but the idea that the American and European experiences of migration were too different to be compared hindered a strong transatlantic academic dialogue. Things have changed in the past 20 years. It seems clearer today that there are also similarities between the USA and Europe in terms of migration, ethnicity and race. The historical distinction between traditional countries of immigration and nations that existed as such prior to migration is becoming increasingly blurred. America and Europe are both de facto regions affected by international migration. On both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, immigration and incorporation are hot political, policy and public issues. Old immigration policies and old patterns of integration and assimilation seem in part obsolete. This makes comparison through dialogue a valuable tool to make sense of how migration affects the two parts of the industrial and post-industrial world differently, but also of the similarities in the incorporation processes that can be observed on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean (Lafleur/Martiniello 2010). Second, it is remarkable that the first book to examine comprehensively the importance of art in the lives of immigrants in the USA was published as late as 2010 (DiMaggio/Fernandez-Kelly 2010). More recently, Philip Kasinitz (2014) has examined how the US‑born daughters and sons of immigrants are shaping and renewing the artistic scene of New York in domains such as music, cinema and theatre. He puts forward the hypothesis of the “second-generation advantage” (263). In his view, the offspring of immigrants can rely both on cultural resources coming from their parents’ heritage and from the society in which they have been socialized in order to stimulate their artistic creativity and enter the mainstream artistic scene. In Europe, two special issues of journals dedicated to the links between immigrants, ethnicized minorities and the arts appeared in 2008 (Martiniello/Lafleur 2008) and 2009 (Martiniello et al. 2009), and a third was published in 2014 (Martiniello 2014a). Despite these noticeable collective efforts, developed within the European research network International Migration, Integration and Social Co-

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hesion,1 the importance of arts and popular culture in the incorporation of immigrants and ethnicized minorities remains a relatively underexplored subject in the sociological and political science literature on migration and incorporation and a sort of monopoly of cultural and media studies. What is the reason for this relative neglect by some disciplines of the social and political sciences? On both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, immigrants and their offspring have for a long time been exclusively considered workers, as a mere means of production in the industrial economy or in the post-industrial service economy. Just as they were not supposed to be politically active, they were also not supposed to be interested in culture and arts, as consumers or – especially  – producers and artists. With the emergence of subsequent generations in the public space, artistic expressions of migrant-origin populations and ethnicized minorities started to draw some attention, especially in cultural studies, anthropology and to a lesser extent sociology. In the debates about multiculturalism, the ways in which the artistic expressions of immigrants and members of ethnicized minorities – music, film, theatre and literature, for example – were changing the mainstream culture became a relevant topic. One approach was to show to what extent migrant and ethnicized minorities’ artistic productions inspired by their experience of migration and/or discrimination were changing and enriching local cultures through processes such as artistic metissage, fusion and invention. Many examples can be given here: the emergence of the Algerian rai music in France in the 1980s; the development of a specific literature based on the various migrant experiences in Europe and in the USA; the invention of Tex-Mex (or Tejano) music in Texas, in which Spanish, German, Czechoslovakian and Mexican musical idioms were fused to create a specific musical form combining local musical instruments and instruments imported by immigrants, such as the accordion. Another approach was to detect ethnic and racial domination in the domain of arts as well. For example, the progressive incorporation of jazz in mainstream American popular culture was analysed in terms of white confiscation and as an additional proof of white domination in the artistic sphere, which was racially fragmented like all the other spheres of society. The evolution of the blues is another interesting example. Over the past 70 years, it has changed from a music played mainly by uneducated, middle-aged and elderly blacks or African Americans from the South, many of whom emigrated to northern industrial cities, where they modernized and urbanized their art, to a music mainly played by educated, young and middle-aged whites or European Americans from the North, but also from many countries around the world. This social and racial change has also been seen as a kind of appropriation of the black cultural and artistic heritage by the white majority. In one way or another, popular culture and the arts have clearly been seen as involved in majority-minority relations by specialists in cultural studies and anthropology. Studying the artistic production of racialized and ethnicized minorities – studying African American music, Anglo-Pakistani cinema or post-colonial literature in France – has certainly been part of a process of minority identity claim-making, but most cultural studies approaches have developed simplistic views about the social and potential relevance of minority cultural and artistic forms of expression in the post-migration city.

1  http://www.imiscoe.‌org. Accessed 10 June 2018.

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Against this background, this article aims to show the necessity of better understanding the relevance of the arts in theoretical and policy debates about immigrant incorporation and diversity in migration and post-migration cities, and also in the present phase of ethnicized and racialized social and economic relations. To do so, five domains can be considered which, taken together, constitute a general framework in which more theoretically grounded empirical research should develop: local culture; social relations and interactions; local cultural and incorporation policies; local politics; and local economics. At the cultural level, it is important to examine how artistic production by immigrants and members of ethnicized and racialized minorities changes the mainstream local and even national artistic scene. For example, how do immigrants’ musical expressions, inspired by their experience of migration and/or discrimination, change and enrich local cultures through processes such as cultural metissage, fusion and invention? We mentioned above the examples of Tex-Mex music in the USA and rai music in France. We could certainly give many other examples that illustrate the mixing that occurs when musical traditions imported by immigrants and musical traditions established in a country together produce new musical idioms, which can then be associated with the identities of a particular place. South Louisiana French and Creole music such as Cajun and zydeco is a case in point. What is now seen as a distinctive feature of that state’s culture and identity is the result of decades of musical mixing in a racially divided social and political environment. Similarly, in Europe, the emergence of the British reggae scene in the 1970s and 1980s in the context of the struggles for racial equality also relied on the mixing of a West Indian musical tradition with a British urban culture in which the second generation of West Indian immigrants played a central role, with an artist such as Linton Kwesi Johnson emerging as one of the most emblematic of that period in the UK. In France, the Rai’n’B musical genre illustrates the complexity of music mixing in post-migration social settings. The genre appeared in France in the 2000s as a combination of Algerian rai music and French R’n’B, which is clearly imported from the USA, and sometimes of rap and zouglou music from Ivory Coast. Very popular among black and North African-origin French youth, this hybrid dance music has travelled to other French-speaking countries, such as Belgium. Examples can also be found in other artistic forms. In literature, for example, the work of Hanif Kureishi has contributed to transforming contemporary British literature. In cinema, the work of Fatih Akin has in a similar way redefined German cinema. All these examples indicate that immigrants and their offspring, as well as other ethnicized and racialized minorities, do not simply assimilate in local arts; they transform the local artistic landscape and create new artistic styles and genres, which need to be better studied than they have been so far. At the social level, the idea that artistic expressions can help build bridges to facilitate encounters between populations of different ethnic origins sharing the same city or the same neighbourhood needs to be explored and contextualized. An interesting question would be to explore to what extent and under which conditions popular music can become a means of communication and dialogue between different members of different groups, building some form of shared local citizenship or co‑inclusion in the local community. Like sport, the arts can gather people but also divide people along socio-economic, political, ethnic and racial lines. In many cities, there is a tension between ethnic fragmentation and separation, on the one hand, and ethnic mixing and dialogue, on the other. This tension also characterizes the artistic scene

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(Martiniello 2014b, 2). In this context, it is particularly interesting to look at how some artistic disciplines linked to hip-hop culture (rap, dance, etc.) form the social cement between urban youth from different social, ethnic and racial backgrounds from a perspective of everyday multiculturalism (Harris 2013). While parts of the urban youth are attracted to identity closure in an imagined ethnic, racial or religious group, other parts experience a post-ethnic, post-racial and post-religious condition in their normal daily activities. To them, being part of the same artistic project with other youngsters of both genders from different social and ethnic backgrounds or skin colours is simply normal. In my ongoing research on the social and political relevance of music in multicultural urban settings in Belgium, I have met hip-hop dance crews that are totally mixed socially, ethnically, racially and in terms of religious affiliation. Young men from the third generation of Moroccan working-class immigrants and young Flemish women from the suburban white middle class work daily together on the same artistic project. To them, the theoretical debates about post-multiculturalism, post-ethnicity or neo-assimilation make no sense at all. To them, ethnic, racial or religious identities are almost totally irrelevant. The only thing that matters is the common artistic project and the cooperation necessary to make it succeed. In that sense, their everyday experiences are more advanced than many theorizations about the super-diverse society. It would be very interesting to further document these new modes of social cross-ethnic and cross-racial interactions and lifestyles, in which artistic communalities seem to play a crucial role. Another important issue is the potential policy relevance of arts in migration and post-migration cities. The first idea is to explore the issue of the representation of diversity in national, subnational and local cultural policies. Do official cultural institutions support immigrant artists? Are local cultural policies becoming multicultural? How do migrant and ethnicized artists mobilize in order to change cultural policies? It also seems important to examine to what extent arts are used and could be a useful tool in local incorporation and social cohesion policies. These issues probably do not have the same relevance on both sides of the Atlantic. In many European countries and cities, the state intervenes in culture and arts through complex patterns of cultural and artistic policies, whereas in the USA, the forces of the markets are more important. However, the questions address the issue of the incorporation of migrants from an uncommon perspective that also informs the process by which newcomers become – or do not become – full members of a society. At the political level, arts can be the basis for forming collective identities and can play an important role in social and political mobilization (Martiniello/Lafleur 2008; Mattern 1998). We need to better understand how arts play a role in the negotiation and assertion of various conceptions of local (ethnic, trans-ethnic, etc.) identities. We should also examine how artistic expressions today can serve as a means of protest against the local social and political order and also how they express support for the established local order and its values. Finally, more research is needed on how local electoral campaigns might use immigrant and ethnic artistic talents and forms of expression, and also on how the artists negotiate their support for politicians. In our research (Lafleur/Martiniello 2010), we examined the 2008 presidential campaign in the USA. Although artists have historically been involved in US electoral campaigns, the election of 2008 seems to have given a new dimension to the presence of musicians in the electoral process – be it recorded financial contributions made by the artists themselves, songs composed

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in honour of the candidates, or evidence of explicit support in the press or cultural events. We focused on the role that Latino artists played in Barack Obama’s campaign by using different Latino music genres (from mariachi music to corrido, salsa and reggaeton) to attract specific subsections of the Latino electorate (Lafleur/Martiniello 2010). In Europe, the involvement of artists in the electoral process is less anchored in the political culture. However, the use of music clips in electoral campaigns is increasingly common. In a small city near Liege, Belgium, candidates for a small extreme left-wing party, Parti du Travail de Belgique, gained 15 % of the vote at the 2010 local elections with a rap clip featuring youngsters, most of them of immigrant descent, who were running for office.2 In the south of Italy, a group of irregular migrant workers in agriculture formed a music band called Kalifoo Ground after the killing of six of them by the Camorra, the Neapolitan organized crime organization, in 2008.3 The band toured Italy to mobilize irregular migrants and to seek support in Italian society. These examples show that artistic expressions can play an important role in the mobilization of politically marginal groups such as immigrant and ethnicized minorities. They therefore deserve serious research attention. Finally, at the economic level, the issue of the impact of immigrant and ethnic artistic expressions on the local economy through ethnic tourism (Rath 2006) and festivals, and also the development of a local immigrant and ethnic artistic life deserve specific study. Some cities efficiently market their ethnic, artistic and cultural diversity, seeing this as an asset to attract global visitors and consumers and boost their economic development. Members of immigrant and ethnicized groups find opportunities for cultural recognition and also for economic integration and empowerment by seizing the opportunities supplied by the market of diversity. The local economic impact of the growing industry of artistic diversity is thus another area of research that needs further development. To conclude this overview of the five levels at which the links between immigration, ethnicity, race, music and the arts in general should develop, it is important to underline the added value of comparative research. Such research helps us to understand the specificities of each context and to propose generalizations about the role that arts play in the incorporation processes of immigrants and of ethnicized and racialized minorities. Finally, besides the economic and social contribution of immigrants and ethnicized minorities, it is also crucial to take into account their cultural and artistic contributions; these, unfortunately, often tend to be forgotten in the current era of economic crisis and/or transition in which culture and arts are often unfairly neglected. This is an updated version of an article published by Routledge, Taylor & Francis in Ethnic and Racial Studies on 19 January 2015, available online, doi: 10.1080/01419870.2015.998694.

2  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=​JREG07gYbf4. Accessed 10 June 2010. 3  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=​Szqw0yMHP‑E. Accessed 10 June 2010.

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References DiMaggio, Paul, and Patricia Fernandez-Kelly, editors. Art in the Lives of Immigrant Communities in the United States. Rutgers University Press, 2010. Harris, Anita. Young People and Everyday Multiculturalism. Routledge, 2013. Kasinitz, Philip. “Immigrants, the Arts, and the ‘Second-Generation Advantage in New-York.’” In New York and Amsterdam. Immigration and the New Urban Landscape, edited by Nancy Foner et al., New York University Press, 2014, pp. 263–286. Lafleur, Jean-Michel, and Marco Martiniello. “Si se puede! Music, Musicians and the Latino Vote at the 2008 US Presidential Election.” Special issue, Migrações. Journal of the Portuguese Migration Observatory, no. 7, 2010, pp. 213–231. –, editors. The Transnational Political Participation of Immigrants: A Transatlantic Perspective. Routledge, 2009. Martiniello, Marco, editor. “Artistic Separation versus Artistic Mixing in European Multicultural Cities.” Special issue, Identities. Global Studies in Culture and Power, vol. 21, no. 1, 2014a, pp. 1–9. –, editor. Multiculturalism and the Arts in European Cities. Routledge, 2014b. Martiniello, Marco, and Jean-Michel Lafleur. “‘Ethnic Minorities’ Cultural and Artistic Practices as Forms of Political Expression: A Review of the Literature and a Theoretical Discussion on Music.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, vol. 34, no. 8, 2008, pp. 1191–1215. Martiniello, Marco, and Jan Rath, editors. Selected Studies in International Migration and Immigrant Incorporation. Amsterdam University Press, 2010. –, editors. An Introduction to International Migration Studies. European Perspectives. Amsterdam University Press, 2012. –, editors. An Introduction to Immigrant Incorporation Studies. European Perspectives. Amsterdam University Press, 2014. Martiniello, Marco, et al., editors. “Création en migrations. Parcours, déplacements, racinements [Creation in Migration].” Special issue, Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales [Journeys, Travels and Rootings], vol. 25, no. 2, 2009. Mattern, Mark. Acting in Concert. Music, Community, and Political Action. Rutgers University Press, 1998. Rath, Jan, editor. Tourism, Ethnic Diversity and the City. Routledge, 2006. Vertovec, Steven. Conceiving and Researching Diversity. Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, MMG Working Paper 09–01, 2009.

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AESTHETICS AND ART PRACTICES OF MIGRATION

MIEKE BAL

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS Producing Mutual ‘Integration’

Introduction My contribution is not about migration, but about the migratory; specifically, about what the art practices of video can contribute to insights into and improvement of the ‘migratory culture’ we all share. The title of this section, “Aesthetics and Art Practices of Migration”, is productively ambiguous. The preposition of can be possessive, an equivalent of about or concerning, but can also intervene in the culture of migration, as I propose for this chapter, where the practices perform in the cultural domain. First, video is the tool for migrants to send images of their new situation home. It is, secondly, also the medium in which migrants and their situations are frequently represented; migration and video meet in the making of video documentaries. Thirdly, the medium can also mediate; this is what I am interested in here. In this chapter, I look at videos I made myself, as an inhabitant of one of the so‑called host countries but with no direct, personal experience of migration. Yet I do have experience of the culture in which migration is an ordinary, everyday aspect; we all do. I confront these videos with a standard view of documentary. Despite the now widespread awareness that representation is opaque, for most viewers, in documentary the assumption of a direct, transparent relationship between representation and event still compels an ethics of truthfulness. Any evidence of what is considered ‘deception’  – such as staging and rehearsing – tends to be resented, and often occasions a scandal on some scale.1 According to this line of thinking, my films are truthful; they do not contain lies. But their ethical integrity does not consist in the production of narratives, and they are not transparent. The very familiarity of narrative renders events familiar, thus lessening their affective impact, and promoting the lie that we can find out, then know, what other people go through. In other words, it is the form that lies. For those who do not have such experiences first hand, migration is first of all an experience of others. We can get information about their experiences, but the very notion that documentaries in classical form give information obscures the lack of access to the affective level of those experiences, which are mostly stored or re‑made in memories. This lack of access severely limits the contribution such films can make to the cultures they serve. Therefore, it is crucial to experiment with the form, to overcome the easy, smoothing narrative impulse, so that this experience can accede to visibility and become primary. For this it must find expression in an intimate encounter. That encounter is performative; it is the performance where migration is no longer anchored in otherness. Such encounters, which can positively affect the social fabric, become possible less by knowledge than by empathy, as provoked by an aesthetic. 1  For an excellent critical study of documentaries about migration, see Demos 2013.

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The form of linear narrative seemed unsuitable for stories composed of the bits and pieces, the fragmentary strands that constitute memories. I attempted alternative forms in some of the documentaries I made between 2002 and 2009. These concern large and small issues, from the struggle with language, the difficulty of travelling through constantly closed borders, the break‑up of families, the changes in social space through small eating habits, growing up between different cultures, and the traumatic events that compel migration even a generation later. These films have in common an open form that bows before the need to express what can barely be brought to awareness, let alone explicitly said. The encounters constitute the ground of an experience in the here-and-now that I have termed ‘migratory aesthetics’. I developed this concept in the context of a travelling video exhibition, called 2MOVE, that I curated together with a Spanish colleague, Miguel Á. Hernández Navarro, in 2007–2008. The idea was to focus the discussion on several issues at once: on migration, on the aesthetic impact of the social process; on the ways in which migratory processes enrich the host cultures; on how they enrich the notion of aesthetics in the process – and all this because movement is a much more typical state of aesthetic objects and processes than, say, stillness. The ‘migratory’ in the concept indicates a culture where migration is the rule rather than the exception, a culture where older residents and newcomers mix and merge. But what of the ‘aesthetic’ part?2 From the beginning of aesthetics as a philosophical discipline, a misconstrued Kantian perspective has prevailed over the founding view of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, despite his strong influence on Kant. For Baumgarten, aesthetics is based on an experience of binding through the senses in public space. The verb to bind contains a promise of connectivity. With a critical view of the integration demanded of immigrants, I consider that connectivity a mutual integration; not of ‘others’ coming into a fixed social world, determined by traditions, but instead of an event of getting acquainted, affectively, in the present. The role of the senses alludes to the pleasurable, intense, and reflection-inducing quality of the aesthetic – the feeling that one has enjoyed, learned from, been enriched by an experience. And the public space is where the encounters happen. This is necessary if the social world is to be able to continue to be ‘in becoming’, as Deleuzian ontology would have it, instead of stultifying and reifying in an oppressive yet illusory feeling of familiarity as monocultural.3

GLUB (Hearts): binding through the senses in public space In this Baumgartian vein, let me begin with public space. I began by asking why cities have looked more aesthetically pleasing  –  livelier, more ‘colourful’  – in recent years. This look can also be termed ‘interesting’, provided this word means genuine interest, ‘engaged,’ as in making us inter-

2  For an extensive analysis of the concept and the practice, see the catalogue of 2MOVE (Bal/Hernández Navarro 2008). For an overview, see Hernández Navarro 2014. 3  Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten published his Aesthetica in 1750. There is still no accessible English translation of this influential treatise. I use the German edition from 2007. See Hlobil for an informative review (2009). Deleuze uses the concept-word ‘becoming’ in much of his work. See, for example, his essays published in 1997, and also Deleuze/Guattari 1986. See Biehl/Locke 2010 for an interpretation.

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ested in sense-based binding, in opposition to a wrongly interpreted Kant-derived ‘disinterestedness’. Kantian disinterestedness does not mean indifference. It means leaving behind self-evident and self-centered interests so that one can become sensitive to the environment, including ‘things’ that happen there, such as art events. Since Shaftesbury and Kant, ‘disinterestedness’ has been a key word in aesthetics, even if many since then have challenged that idea. The word links a British tradition with a German one. In the former, in a wording we cannot view without historical irony today, ‘disinterestedness’ implies being ‘vacant and unemployed’. This disinterestedness is alleged to be a precondition for aesthetic experience. In the latter, the German tradition, and, by extension, the continental one, contemplation outside of practical specifics leads to the paradoxical universality of aesthetic judgment (Fenner 1998). Allowing for an aesthetics of disinterestedness can also, however, address the isolation of the experience of catastrophe, poverty, and statelessness in a realm that retains only the possibility for contemplation. The reason for this isolation is not disinterestedness, but interestingness. Fighting indifference requires both disinterestedness and interest based on the interestingness of the artwork that represents, or otherwise presents, the catastrophic lives of people living among us all. In this specific sense, where contemplation has nothing to do with beauty or pleasure, catastrophe – the catastrophe that happens to others – might, by definition, be aesthetic, or at least, share the defining feature of the aesthetic.4 A city’s ‘look’ is hard to pin down, let alone document and analyze. This recognition brought me to consider a different form of analysis, a mode that would, to follow anthropologist Johannes Fabian (1990), perform the analysis not about but with the people concerned. This made narrative an uneasy mode, and description based on statistics both too meagre and, given the pace of academic publication, always belated in relation to the constant transformation of becoming. The closest I was able to come to a different mode of analysis was a combination of direct contact and video, which is a tool for making visible that look which is there for everyone to see but remains unseen because it does not have a form that stands out. This is why I have embarked on filmmaking as a way of exploring the way things look – as distinct from defining that look or explaining why it has come into being. My most look-oriented video is also my most synesthetic one, a work in which all the five senses participate: GLUB (Hearts) (2004).5 This project consisting of a 30‑minutes video and an installation gives an image of “migratory aesthetics”, and thereby proposes that concept. “Migratory Aesthetics” refers to the sensuous traces of migration as an aesthetic phenomenon, in this case in the contemporary urban environment. Conceived as primarily performative, the installation integrates media and sense experiences. It presents the eating of humble seeds as a socially integrative phenomenon. The desired result of a viewing is self-reflection in two ways: recognizing oneself in the joyful participation in the world where Glub is social glue; and reflecting on one’s own attitude towards such changes in the look of public space.

4  This is a very brief account. I have made a more extensive argument for a revision of our interpretation of Kantian aesthetics in an earlier paper (2006). See more sources there. 5  GLUB (Hearts), 2004, by Mieke Bal and Shahram Entekhabi, film, 30 minutes, seven-channel installation, variable length. On this work, see Aydemir 2008 and Cohen 2014. For my own more extensive presentation, see Bal 2005.

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Figs. 1–2 | Mieke Bal, Shahram Entekhabi, GLUB (Hearts), installation at Case Western Studio Gallery, 2004

Glub is the Arabic word for hearts, and a word used for edible roasted and salted seeds, a low-cost appetizer. Taking as a starting point the many meanings of the seeds – sunflower and pumpkin, for example – traditionally eaten in many non-European societies but mostly associated with the Arabic world, the installation uses video not only to offer an image of ‘the migratory’ in culture, but to encourage and enable visitors to construct such an image for themselves and immerse themselves in it. Literally, that is: in the installation, visitors are offered the choice of hearing in any sequence they prefer, and at their own pace, a number of audio tapes that each develop one of the many meanings and connotations of seeds, and the implementation of ‘migratory aesthetics’ in the Berlin urban landscape and attendant art scene. Walking and sitting within the world

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of seeds, enveloped by the smell of seeds being roasted, each visitor can shape his or her own interiorized ‘film’ out of the narrative materials suggested by the audio tapes (fig. 1). The installation consists of a very large screen projection of the film, accompanied by a generous offering of sunflower and other seeds to the visiting public. The idea is that visitors get a taste – again, literally – of the multi-sensory aspect by eating, smelling, feeling, and hearing the crunching sounds of the shells under their feet. Facing visitors, and at an angle from this projection, are seven pedestals that put the monitors on eye level. These show portraits of individuals eating seeds, with the cracking sounds that accompany this activity. The viewer, caught in the middle, has the choice of watching the film with these individuals, joining in with the cheerful pastime of eating seeds, or of confronting them and interacting with the persons, each of whom looks straight into the lens, so looking the visitor in the eyes. Moreover, each column is equipped with a CD player that provides the narratives, which are grouped around seven different topics. The look is that of an urban public space, like a square or street. The installation draws attention to, and honours, the changing, becoming look of the city. The presentation makes that new look attractive, exciting, and conducive to the desire to participate in a culture that is mixed, in terms of both the senses and people. It is an artwork that proposes, makes visible, and entices us into that mutual integration mentioned above; it is an embodied concretization of the migratory turn this volume is dedicated to suggesting (fig. 2). Moreover, the topic of food, even in these tiny minimalist seeds, brings up one of the most frequent motivations for migration: the need to eat. If that eating, then, enlivens street life, since the seed eating mostly happens outside, and results in a different everyday sociality, it proposes an entire ‘theory’ of migratory culture. This is why, for me, making video art is not a different line in my work, but simply a continuation and intensification of my theoretical and analytical academic work in cultural analysis.6

A form that lies: from linearity to movement Narrativity is inevitable in a time-based medium such as video, and it is indispensable for any account of, or engagement with, becoming. But narrative as a genre is not suitable for close encounters. Narrative commonly implies the presence of or search for linearity – of a fabula inferred from whatever form is presented. My ongoing interest in the manipulative power of narrative and my struggle to disrupt or disable narrative linearity converge in the attempt to show becoming as such. No subject embodies becoming more directly, of course, than a young child. This convergence between cultural and individual becoming is the topic of the 54‑minute video Becoming Vera – titled after that Deleuzian conception of human existence that rejects the possibility of stable identity.7 6  Cultural analysis is the basis of the ASCA research institute at the University of Amsterdam. For a quick survey of the principles, see the short video https://vimeo.com/165822613 (accessed 27 September 2017). Cultural analysis is a ‘close’ approach and in this, and in many other aspects, differs from cultural studies. See the collective volume (Bal 1999), and for a series of reflections on method in cultural analysis, Bal 2002. 7  Becoming Vera, 2008, by Mieke Bal, Alexandra Loumpet-Galitzine, and Michelle Williams Gamaker, 54 minutes. For an analysis of this film, see Klumpen 2011. On the manipulative power of narrative, see my Narratology (Bal 2017 [1985]).

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Whether or not one has a permanent or temporary visa, or a passport declaring national citizenship, as inhabitants of the migratory culture we are all equally cultural citizens. This film about a three-year old girl explores the meaning of cultural citizenship, of belonging, and the limits of the categories we tend to use to understand that belonging, such as ‘identity’. And while it rejects stability in favor of narrativity, the film form eschews the narrative genre’s standard linearity. Nor does it have an Aristotelian beginning and ending. Little Vera Loumpet-Galitzine is not a migrant. A French citizen, she goes to school in France, and hence, she is being shaped by that forceful school system, even if she spends much of her summer holidays in Cameroon, her father’s country. Her mother descends from the aristocratic Russian Galitzine family. These forms of Frenchness are, therefore, subject to some qualifications, but then again, these are ‘minor’ (in the Deleuzian sense).8 Similarly, within Cameroon, the little girl is not simply or not only Cameroonian in standard terms; she is not a Cameroonian citizen. Vera is a descendant of a prince (nji) of the kingdom of Bamun, a tradition-bound nation within the Republic of Cameroon. The case of a young child, still unaware of the pressure of cultural identity that our time exerts on its citizens, lends itself quite well to an inquiry into her becoming a cultural citizen. Future-oriented as it is, thanks to narrativity, ‘becoming’ also recalls a past that cannot be erased without imposing a narrative form. An entrance into this analysis is provided by a reflection from Vera’s father, when he says that ‘contact’, as colonization is euphemistically called, only strengthened the culture of Bamun. He says: since the confrontation with Europe very specific mechanisms … of resistance and survival thanks to which the kingdom of Bamun survives the major political elements of the history of the 20th century9

Resistance and survival: resistance for survival has clearly saved the kingdom from demise. The colonizer, in this case France, has thus strengthened instead of weakening the cultural citizenship of the Bamun people. Vera’s father is himself a case in point: having been educated, first, in the colonial French school system, then in a Parisian university, he takes his daughter’s position as a link in the Bamun royal lineage seriously: of the ancient organisation always based on lineage, a political idea … as long as the njis survive and the transmission continues the kingdom of Bamun survives, hence she is called to … … ensure the continuity

8  On this idea of ‘minor’ instead of the qualifying ‘minoritarian’, see Deleuze/Guattari 1986: “A minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language” (16). 9  Here and in the rest of this essay, quoted lines from the video reflect the line breaks of the subtitles. To foreground the oral character of the speeches, which are not voice-over in the traditional sense, the subtitles have no punctuation.

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Thus, we can see the entire organization of the ritual around Vera’s enthronement, a substantial part of the video, as a French-driven assertion of Bamun cultural citizenship. Bamun is also a political entity without political citizenship in the form of passports, since the kingdom is part of the Republic of Cameroon. Vera grows up in a modest apartment in Paris – as French. She goes to nursery school, where we see her in her class, a situation echoing her father’s explanation of the Frenchness of his own education, where he sang songs about the threat to French civilization posed by the ‘barbarians’  – the savage hordes of ‘Germanics’. She goes to ballet class, where the traditional ballet costumes reinforce another aspect of her identity, her ‘girliness’. Vera’s most important toy and teacher is her imagination. Many of her self-made songs and stories echo what she has learned in school, at home, as well as in Cameroon and Russia. Of her highly charged intercultural inheritance she is unaware. But her parents would inevitably transmit to her some of what they had transmitted to them, fragments of cultures other than that of Paris, from which, at first, she can pick and choose elements that suit her own play. We sought to capture that change in the film. In the absence of events that could be strung together into a narrative, we tried to replace narrative with a portrayal of becoming. Between three and four years old, Vera traverses many landscapes, exploring where she comes from, to come into her own. Hence the film’s title, which questions cultural citizenship as stable and nation-specific. The project emerged from within a fairly typical ethnographic situation, when my daughter and I, guests of the Loumpet family, witnessed and participated in the initiation of Vera, barely three years old, as nji mongu, the oldest daughter of the nji (prince), in the capital Fumban. The ceremony took two days, coinciding with the bi‑annual festival Nguon for the king. Vera’s father looks upon his daughter’s status in the Bamun tradition with a double gaze. He seems not wholeheartedly convinced of the ethnographic ‘truth’ of it all: she must naturally play her role even without knowing it I asked the other njis don’t you think she’s very good? and they answered “no it’s not she who acts”

Perhaps Vera’s cultural citizenship of Bamun, which complements her Frenchness and her more remote but not absent Russianness, will be influenced by this striking integration of commitment with the scepticism of anthropological canniness, a canniness the father learnt at university in France, through the lens of French higher education. A similar double allegiance shines through Vera’s behaviour during the ritual (figs. 3, 4). As her father proudly comments as her being “good”, which the elders consider her ritual possession by the ancestors’ spirits, Vera sits still for hours while the women and men of her father’s people dance around her. But just when the images suggest a small girl made the object of an incomprehensible ritual, her self-absorbed face suddenly lights up in a smile directed at someone outside the frame. Clearly, she is both inside the situation and distanced from it when it suits her, thus exceeding the ethnographic situation holding her captive. The older view of identity would inevitably lead to a view of Vera’s identity as ‘fragmented’ or, as American discourse used to have

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Figs. 3–4 | Vera acting? During initiation ritual. Fumban, December 2006, video stills from Mieke Bal, Alexandra Loumpet-Galitzine and Michelle Williams Gamaker, Becoming Vera, 2008

it, ‘hyphenated’. She would be French-Cameroonian-Russian – a bit heavy as a term, and wrong in its accumulative logic. Vera’s mother, also an anthropologist and art historian, takes Vera to Russia to encounter that side of where she comes from. In Russia, in Moscow and surroundings, she visits the estates of her mother’s ancestors, who were exiled during the Revolution. A hospital, a railway station, a town, and a palace, all sharing her mother’s name, cannot but astonish the little girl. Thus, as in Fumban, it is also her class identity that is mirrored to her. And this is as much in tension with her everyday situation in Paris as is her status as the oldest daughter of the ngi in Bamun. Her Frenchness is bound to a class ‘normality’ from which the two other aspects of her background set her apart. Clearly, for Vera these visually engaging landscapes seem easily integrated into her rich fantasy world. Equally clearly, and in contrast to the vision of the elders in Fumban, she takes bits of her becoming into her own hands. In Russia, she looks at paintings and sculptures in the stately homes her mother shows her, but onto these pieces of fiction she projects her imagined stories. These, in turn, are clearly influenced by her cultural surroundings. For example, as if practicing the teaching of African-American artist Fred Wilson, in a painting of Cleopatra she points out the black servant in the background – a staple of Western painting. During this project, we discovered the strange chance encounter between Vera and Russia’s founding poet, Pushkin, probably of Cameroonian origin (Gnammankou 1997). The most amusing embodiment of this encounter is the little girl’s response to Pushkin’s bust in Viaziomy, now the Pushkin museum. The bust is bright white, while the portrait has African features. Vera is not fooled by the colour of the marble. Pointing to her own hair, then to the bust, she suggests that, unlike hers, Pushkin’s hair had not been done like her own recently acquired stylish bunches. She identifies enough with the white marble figure to compare notes on hairdos. This awareness of her hair – a recurring motif in the film – indicates not only an awareness of her African roots but also of her femininity, as well as of her age – growing up, becoming Vera (fig. 5).

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Creating a space of possibility outside the frame is what Vera does most typically through her address to creatures of her choice and creation. Vera’s mother recounts how her great-grandmother barred the young Alexander Pushkin from courting her daughters. In this context, she mentions the possibility that slavery formed the background to Pushkin’s great-grandfather Gannibal’s arrival in Russia: by the way, they say that Pushkin who was a … descendant of a young Cameroonian who was probably taken in slavery to the court of Peter the Great was courting the young Galitzine girls hence my great-great grandmother had refused him access to Viaziomy house

Vera covers her eyes as if horrified by the story of slavery. When her mother continues to suggest the probable racism and/or classism lying behind her great-grandmother’s ban, Vera sits on the stairs making indignant faces. Of course, this image is the result of editorial intervention, and goes to prove that documentary and fiction are not absolutely distinct – as Vera was constantly teaching us.

Fig. 5 | Vera criticizes Pushkin’s hairdo, Viaziomy, Russia, March 2007, video still from Mieke Bal, Alexandra Loumpet-Galitzine and Michelle Williams Gamaker, Becoming Vera, 2008.

A second connection is less incidental. Pushkin scholar Caryl Emerson (1998) claims that the poet was especially creative when living in confinement – in exile, for example. Confinement is poetic liberation. Vera, confined by her dependent age and between cultural pressures, is also an impressively creative person; she turns all her experiences into fantasies. For example, Vera talks to stone, china, and bronze animals. Some of those experiments involve her cultural citizenship. Paris is where she has the opportunity to watch movies on DVD. Hence, in Paris she watches her favourite Indian-dancer movie while her parents are busy with the film about her. Right after watching this film, which supplements her cultural baggage with both stereotypical Indianness and stereotypical femininity, dressed up in her princess costume, she hums the melody of the Bollywood film while rocking her doll. She later recognizes the (in fact, an) Indian dancer in Moscow on an advertisement.

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At the end of the film, in a conversation with imaginary bandits, she becomes a writer of sorts. We hear this trialogue: bandits, what’s come over you? I tell you to stop it! Alexandra: to whom are you speaking? Vera: (to Alexandra) I’m talking to the two gentlemen (to the bandits) yes yes but … (to the others in the room) when I am on the phone one doesn’t make noise! (to the bandits) yes, I’m fine but what are you doing near Buka’s street? no, we are NOT in Paris we are in Moscow! no, not at all! no, we are not in Fumban after this we go to Paris

In this stunning play with fantasy, reality becomes more than ever an ingredient for the imagination. And importantly, undermining generic narrative, the addressee is the anchor of both domains. The international figures of bandits, obviously, enter Vera’s imagination from books and television. In shifting addressees, Vera also changes discourses, with a fine sense of what is becoming in a certain situation. The “yes I’m fine” is a learned phrase of politeness, matched by her tone. The role-playing in the bossy request for silence is entirely different in tone. These shifts also show that she is not simply absorbed in her imaginary world. She also uses it to respond to the reality in which she finds herself. That reality is an ingredient for fantasy is clear when Vera mentions in this conversation the three place names between which her life evolves: Paris, Moscow, and Fumban. She knows very well where she is, and where she is going next. Yet Buka’s street – which is in Paris – has been absorbed into Moscow; Buka belongs to the Russian side of her cultural experience. Vera knows she is fantasizing and does so with gusto. This insight gives her the mastery over reality that warrants her commanding tone to the people around her. It also prevents her from being subsumed into her cultural citizenship and becoming a rigid identity. Another instance of that canniness makes this clear. According to a Russian custom she is unaware of, she is taken to visit her grandfather’s grave at the Russian cemetery near Paris. There, Vera conjures up a ghost. But how seriously does she believe in it? where did he pass? I have seen him! I see him, right behind the poppies a big phantom! he is very white and he comes from Paris and I was scared and I hid near my mum on her back

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Vera is not frightened, even if the impolite ghost answers her polite welcome with a threat to eat her. Reality intervenes again. The ghost comes from Paris and is “very white”. Politely she asked the phantom how he was doing, but sadly, her good manners were answered with a deadly threat. Vera, here, is the master of her story. Vera shows that the imagination is only productive when kept firmly bounded by reality, as well as vice versa. Her canny look at the camera places her somewhere between actress and poet. The intimacy with the camera operator and the swift shifts in roles she performs demonstrate that her identity is neither whole nor unified, let alone stable, and this reflects on her cultural citizenship. This look at the camera and the story-telling tone mixed with excitement demonstrate that she is well aware she is making a story up and, in the process, claiming superior knowledge over the operator, the addressee being informed.

“Did he get a job, and are they still together?” These are questions I invariably get asked when I show Mille et un jours (A Thousand and One Days). They express a total lack of separation between the world of the film and that of the people seeing it. Naive and indiscreet as these questions seem to be, they prove the success of the film’s endeavour. This film, my first full-length documentary, appears to be a narrative, as it concerns a series of events. But the genre is put under pressure by the potential of trauma – a possibility gleaned from bits and pieces of conversations and facial expressions, such as faces shutting down. Modesty precludes finding out, let alone revealing further details. Even before this need for modesty became an issue, from the filmmakers’ perspective, the film was so closely situated in inseparably overlapping cultures that it seemed impossible to let it be spoken in a single voice – to attribute the narrative to a single speaker. Instead, the story demanded to be multi-voiced. The counterpoint is the commonplace that every narrative is ‘uttered’ by a voice belonging to an explicit or implicit narrator. Having participated in the making of this film, I considered this tension between the single-voice hypothesis and the de‑facto multiplicity of voices a relevant and challenging contradiction.10 According to narrative theory, every speech act, including visual or mixed media speech acts, is the doing of a ‘speaker’. Moreover, the question of voice involves narrative responsibility. Film can also be assumed to have a narrative subject. I therefore look at the common concept of voice in order to de‑naturalise it. Mille et un jours is a film on migration. Hence, thematically as well

10  For this film we formed the collective Cinema Suitcase. In alphabetic order, it consisted at the time of Mieke Bal, Zen Marie, Thomas Sykora, Gary Ward and Michelle Williams Gamaker. Currently, only Williams Gamaker and Bal remain.

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as structurally, it is situated in a space not reducible to one specific culture. Consequently, the film resists unquestioned concepts from the Western tradition, such as voice.11 In line with the possibility of trauma, the structure of the documentary became dramatic and non-linear. In Mille et un jours we celebrate the outcome of a long and intricate journey, of the anguish, struggle, loneliness, and financial constraints of Tarek, a young sans-papiers in Paris. The joyful three-day celebration of his wedding establishes the here-and-now. But within that same event, pockets of history weigh in with darker times and tougher spaces. Bound to the present of the festive moment in which the film is set, the people in the film descend into memories of fear and uncertainty, only to bounce back again and rejoice in the outcome. This temporal structure alerted us to the possibility of trauma, and compelled us to respect the two ethical guidelines of modesty and intimacy: being with the people, without probing. Tarek’s is a complex story, one which cannot be offered as a coherent or full narrative in the film: he cannot ‘master’ it. Nor does a unifying, identifiable subject or ‘voice’ mediate the content. Instead, the film narrates through the voices of the people involved, who, by definition, are diegetically embedded. Through a great intimacy with the men and women in front of the camera, the film invites the viewer to become acquainted with the ins and outs of their situation – to be a guest at the wedding. The film’s viewers cannot easily step out of the diegesis. The multiplication of voices extends across time as well as across different worlds. With the wedding celebrations in full swing, we witness how different generations of Tunisian immigrants give shape, each in their own way, to the predicament of migration and the different opportunities and hardships they have encountered. The intimacy clashes with politics, however. The politics of immigration never cease to haunt the present. But not all generations talk about this constantly present and pressing theme. Consequently, there is no unified or collective narrative voice that tells this story.12 For example, against the backdrop of political machinations, the film offers a consideration of what could easily be dismissed as an arranged marriage. This is presented through the voices of the bride and her parents, the groom and his future brother‑in-law, in a mixture of denial, endorsement, and doubt. Importantly, the issue, while frequently foregrounded in the present, is never voiced. Instead, the topic suggests itself in the many concerns for the bride’s future life. Traditional Western viewers, considering arranged marriages a token of cultural foreignness, might have expected an explicit discussion – and perhaps would have demanded political clarity, a position for or against. But it is the very ‘naturalized’ status of arranged marriages in the culture from which the parents migrated which precludes a clear voice that addresses this issue. Hence, using a narratorial voice would violate what is most culturally obvious to the couple and their guests. In addition to the politics of immigration and arranged marriages, a third politically influenced theme that is highly present but not voiced is time. This awakens our awareness of the cultural differences in temporality, what I have called “heterochrony” (Bal/Hernández Navarro

11  This assumption is still common, with the early exception of Ann Banfield (1982). For a discussion, see Bal 2008. 12  Migration is an issue where (institutional) politics and the (everyday, lived) political clash, as the film shows several times. See Mouffe 2005 for the distinction between politics and the political.

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2008). Cast against the shadow of his father’s failure as an earlier immigrant to cope with capitalist time, never earning enough quickly enough, Tarek seems obsessed with time’s frightening speed. The unliveable nature of Western time comes to the fore with the insistence borne by repetition. Thus, migratory aesthetics partly emerges from the failure of ‘voice’, while voice, in turn, foregrounds aspects of migratory aesthetics that might otherwise remain invisible. Therefore, voice is here a concept under siege, one that fiercely defends itself. From an indication of the speaker in multi-layered narrative, it turns to, or better, absorbs, an awareness of the need to speak when the culture tends to silence some of its members.13

Fig. 6 | Parents talking with Tarek’s uncle about the possible marriage, video still from Cinema Suitcase, A Thousand and One Days, 2004

Meanwhile, other elements of the film do appear to solicit more straightforward identificatory viewings (fig. 6). For example, an insight into the social fabric of immigrant life is given, as well as a tender portrait of a young woman and her friends reflecting on the transformation of one of them from schoolgirl into adult woman. The profound grief of loving parents about to see their eldest child leave home and move to Paris alternates with the joyful anticipation of and preparations for a wedding that gives expression to their love for and pride in their daughter. Rife with bureaucratic violence but also with the characters’ vitality, determination, honesty, and intelligence in outsmarting the system, the film’s content and aesthetics together constitute a plea for a world without borders. Affect and voice are strongly connected in the film, whereas narration as such is dispersed. A strong moment of the bond between affect and voice occurs when the bride’s mother, Chamkha, expresses her total shock at the police intervention, simply saying “Nous, on ne connaît pas ça du tout” (“We don’t know this at all”). At that moment her face, in extreme close‑up, embodies the Deleuzian affection image. This keeps us aware of the rhythmic bond between voice and the movement of the body. It affects more than decipherable language. The perception image is the result of the viewer’s selection from the visible world of those images that might be useful for 13  The concept of voice, here, is subject to the kind of analysis I have proposed in my book on travelling concepts (Bal 2002).

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her. The action image presents possibilities to act upon what is seen. In‑between, the affection image compels the viewer – who is affected by the perception – to consider action (Cinema 1).14 A key example of the ongoing relevance of voice, in spite of its untenability, resides in the fact that most people in the film speak in a second language, which constantly manifests their efforts at translation. This intensifies their body language while slowing down their speech, both physically and through the deployment of metaphors that are unusual in French. In the editing and subtitling we attempted to espouse that peculiar rhythm, in order to preserve and convey the mixed temporality of the resulting narrativity. But this narrativity cannot be assigned to the characters, who showed no sign of being aware of the mixed rhythm of their story-telling. It is precisely to the extent that we preserved this mixture as much as possible that the film is documentary. When making Mille et un jours, three difficulties became the guidelines for our work. First, we aimed to make a documentary based on the culmination of a story full of trauma and shock, the memories of which impinged on the joyful outcome – the wedding celebration. But how do you document the inner truths of memory when memory is foreclosed? (A question of voice.) Second, in line with traumatic recall in the present, how do you represent past and present at the same time? (A question of trauma.) Third, on the level of emotion and the medium’s work with affect (affect as a medium), how do you render joy and grief, relief and anxiety, trust and mistrust, on the threshold between private and public, as well as, again, within the same moment? (A question of modesty.) These three challenges constitute the ambiguity of migratory documentary as a genre – that is, its mission of trying to reduce the heterogeneity between the language of film and the world it signifies, symbolizes, and necessarily betrays. In the cracks between these, the tension between modesty and intimacy plays itself out. Voice-over, therefore, the primary tool of documentary, had to be avoided. For, if truth can lie, it is on this affective level that it does so most readily. It is all too easy to flatten out emotions (‘objectivity’) or, by contrast, to arouse them unwarrantedly through sentimentality (‘tear-jerking’). Hence, it is in the form of a narrative voiceover that the deceit in documentary lies. Linear narrative and its explanatory voice-over seemed an unsuitable form for our film, composed as it had to be of bits and pieces, the fragmentary strands that constitute both accessible memories and the inaccessible memories of trauma. Reportage alternated with testimony, while the witnesses, all too aware of the public nature of the culturally specific things, customs and events which they support, such as what Westerners would call an arranged marriage, are emotionally restrained. As a result, the grief and anxiety, the impact of the small violence as well as the more positive emotions of relief, love, and happiness, barely surface. Through this avoidance of sentimentality on the part of the interviewees, the small tips of icebergs are more affectively powerful. One such moment can be glimpsed when Tarek, instead of complaining, simply mentions the phone call that called off the wedding at 4pm the day before, and immediately compelled him to go into hiding. When asked if she was afraid, the bride Ilhem first says that she was surprised. While putting on lipstick, her mother says that Ilhem became more determined when 14  For the term “affect image”, my terminological but not conceptual modification of Deleuze’s “affection image”, see Deleuze 1986 (100–103) and for a lucid explanation of Deleuze’s cinema books, Marrati 2008.

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the prohibition on the wedding came. Instead of a story of collective emotion, as a voice-over would have had to tell it, then, these tiny intimate moments, dispersed through the sequence and interrupted by other events, constitute a formless, underground network – an emotional rhizome.15 A second reason to avoid voice-over is the absence of a clear political position. Mille et un jours is not a one-issue film, nor is there a single answer to any of the questions that come up. First of all, narratologically speaking, there is no one issue through which, and no one position from which, the story is being told. For example, there is no loud-and-clear indictment of the French police. This is not because we wished to make an apolitical film. On the contrary: in a situation where ambiguity and tension are more ‘normal’ than clear-cut right and wrong, and where such values are contingent upon the power of those who do the speaking, a de‑fetishization of right-and-wrong decisions seemed more politically activating.

Fig. 7 | Explaining the police search for Tarek, video still from Cinema Suitcase, A Thousand and One Days, 2004

This issue came up around the police intervention lying at the heart of the story. This intervention was both quite modest, in that no physical violence was used, and hurtful, in that it violated the safety of the domestic sphere, it potentially set up trusting people against one another, it nearly ruined both the marriage and the groom’s ticket to legal residency, and it terrified a young boy who was home alone when the police came to search the apartment. At the same time, no one was beaten up and no one was jailed. In fact, the police’s powerlessness to act, due to their lack of insight into the culture they were assaulting, was pathetic, and even, at times, comical. For these reasons combined we refrained from interviewing the police. This was our own act of silence (fig. 7). If a film of migratory aesthetics is to avoid the usual exteriorized, even eroticized othering, a constant negotiation between outside and inside perspectives is needed. One aspect that the concept of migratory aesthetics clarifies is the intimacy of the film, with a consistent situating of the filming inside the group of people concerned. It is from the inside that it becomes possible 15  For this term, see Deleuze/Guattari 1976.

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to bear witness to what I call, for want of a better term, the ‘hybridity-within’ that characterizes migrant situations. The outside world comes inside the home and family life, and installs itself there. More important than having police officers say they had a job to do, it seemed to us important to show the bride’s father’s doubt about the groom, the direct consequence of the police intervention. Shifting from the bride’s father to the groom, anxiety over his status was subsumed by his visible grief over the absence of his beloved mother and uncle. But this grief could only be perceived against the backdrop of that anxiety.16

Figs. 8–9 | “Discussion” between a Maghrebian woman and a French man, video stills from Cinema Suitcase, A Thousand and One Days, 2004

But the film is not an attempt to do justice to the perspective of the ‘insiders’, the people concerned. To a significant extent, they make the film and decide what to say and do. They are not passive victims. For, conversely, it is through interviews with two wedding guests, each of whom attempted to play a part in getting the marriage approved, that we can see how the outside world of politics is being manipulated from inside the party. First of all – to the dismay of those with binary expectations – a Maghrebi woman defends the French state with arguments appealing to its republican, democratic values and to sentimental talk of ‘love’ – spoken, suddenly, in the administrative plural ‘we’. And it is a French man who speaks up against the state, sensitive as he is to the real, albeit non-physical, violence committed in the name of the law. This reversal of expected positions alone makes for a kind of political ‘messiness’ that seems best suited to generate fresh discussions. One of the tools to keep that messiness in view is the suspension of the unifying voice (figs. 8, 9). The Arabic tradition, as embodied in A Thousand and One Nights, is called upon to establish genre. It helps to insert into the film the discourse of the fairy-tale (the happy ending), and the 16  Hybridity remains a problematic term that I use here for lack of a better one. See Young 1990 for an incisive critique.

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string narrative and the loosely connected collections of stories into which so much of ancient world literature is organised. This discourse is literally an ‘inter-discourse’, a discourse to which the film relates, in the strong sense of relating in interaction, as in ‘relationality’. It can be seen as an interlocutor, not as a speaker but as a discursive partner. Nevertheless, the question of voice, far from being futile, is absolutely central in the classical Arabic tradition. The diegetic thread that keeps the stories together, such as there is, consists of the fabulous gift for story-telling Scheherazade possesses, which saves her life. The life-saving quality of voice in the universe of Mille et un jours resides, in contrast, in voice’s multiplicity. For here, the facilitation of intercultural encounter helps further such encounters for all those who give shape to the European public domain, cultural citizens usually called either ‘Western’ or ‘Arabic’, but which I prefer to consider the migratory culture we all share, so that no groups can be separated from one another. This is staged most radically in the immersive installation discussed in the final section.17

A migratory turn: Nothing is Missing The space is a gallery that looks like a living room, where visiting is like making a social call (fig. 10). The image is a portrait of a woman speaking to someone else. In some cases, we hear the voice of the interlocutor; in others, we hear nothing but the women speaking. Every once in a while, one of them falls silent, as if she were listening to the others, or to the visitor’s response. The women are from various countries. They all live in their home countries and have all seen a child leave for Western Europe or the USA. They are speaking to someone close to them; the context is personal. If we are to understand migration, we must first of all realize how drastic are the consequences involved and the changes in the souls of individuals taking this step. We must wonder why people think they must leave behind their affective ties, relatives, friends, and habits – in short, everything we take as constituting everyday life.18 Nothing is Missing is an attempt to reflect on this severance and its consequences. Through this installation, I attempt to shift two common, universal definitions of humanity: the notion of individual autonomy (Descartes), and that of a passivity derived from the principle of Berkeley’s “to be is to be perceived”. The former idea has done damage in ruling out the participation of the body and the emotions in rational thought. The latter has sometimes over-extended a sense of passivity and coerciveness into a denial of political agency, and hence responsibility.19 I try to shift these views in favor of an intercultural, ‘relational’ aesthetic based on a performance of contact. I have conceived this installation around the bond between speech and face – embodied in the act of facing. Literally, facing is looking someone else in the face. It is also coming to terms with something that is difficult to live down, by looking it in the face, instead of denying or repressing it. Thirdly, it is making contact, placing the emphasis on the second person, and acknowledging the need for that contact in order, simply, to be able to sustain life. Facing,

17  For a brilliant analysis of A Thousand and One Nights, see Khanna 2007. 18  Mieke Bal, Nothing is Missing. Multiple-channel video installation, 25–35 minutes (looped), 2006–2011. Multi-lingual with English subtitles. 19  Descartes’ philosophy of the subject has generally been misconstrued in popular thought. See my film on the subject at http://www.miekebal.org/artworks/films/reasonable-doubt/(accessed 27 September 2017).

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Fig. 10 | Mieke Bal, Nothing is Missing, Enkhuizen, Zuiderzee­museum, 2007

in these three meanings, is my proposal for a performance of contact across divisions that avoids the two traps of universalist exclusion and relativist condescendence. We cannot exist without others – in the eye of the other as much as in sustenance of others. Against this background, the face, with all the potential this concept/image possesses, seemed an excellent place to start. But to deploy the face for this purpose requires one more negative act, the elimination of an oppressive sentimentalist humanism that has appropriated the face for universalist claims in three ways: as the window of the soul; as the key to identity translated into individuality; and as the site of policing. Today, with many displaying high anxiety over the invisibility of the Islamic veiled face, we cannot overestimate the importance of the ideology of the face for the construction of contemporary socio-political divides – with the identity photo as backdrop.20 20  On the face in close‑up, see Doane 2003. On the face in digital media, see Hansen 2003. For Deleuze, the face is an affection image. Samuel Beckett’s only film, entitled Film, explores the relationship of disharmony between the three types of images Deleuze distinguishes throughout Cinema 1, briefly mentioned above. The perception-image is the result of the viewer’s selection from the visible world of those images that might be useful for him or her. The action-image presents possibilities to act upon what is seen. Between these two, the affection-image compels the viewer – who is affected by the perception – to consider action. The relationality for which this essay pleads is an action in this sense. Stuck in (negative) affect when he is the object of someone else’s perception, the protagonist of Film, played by the aging Buster Keaton, flees from the notion of perceived-ness in the film’s ‘action images’.

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This installation aims to fully integrate performative and documentary aesthetics. The women in this work are, of course, real and individual. But in the installation, they speak ‘together’ from within a cultural-political position that makes them absolutely distinct and absolutely connected at once. This is one meaning of the silences that suggests they are listening to one another, even if in reality they have never met. The situation of speech is framed as both hyper-personal and utterly staged. I filmed the migrants’ mothers talking about their motivation to support or try to keep back their children who wished to leave and about their own grief in seeing them go. The mothers talk about this crucial moment in their lives to a person close to them – a grandchild, a daughter‑in-law, the emigrated child him- or herself. The filming itself is implicated in this theoretical move. It is, in one sense, perfectly, perhaps excessively documentary. I staged the women, asked their interlocutors to sit down behind the camera, set the shot, turned the camera on, and left the scene. This method is hyperbolically ‘documentary’. To underline this aspect, I refrained from editing these half-hour long shots. Aesthetically, the women are filmed in consistent close‑up, as portraits. The relentless focus on their faces compels viewers to look these women in the face, and to listen to what they have to say, in a language that is foreign, sometimes using expressions that seem strange, but in a discourse to which we can affectively relate. We move from an expressionism to a performativity of the face. Intercultural relationality posits the face, as an interlocutor whose discourse is not predictably similar to that of the viewer. These women speak to ‘us’, across a gap, as they speak to their own relatives, across a gap. The people to whom the women tell their stories are close to them, yet distanced by the gap made by the migration of the loved child.21 These women state their acceptance of the separation as a fact of the present. Moreover, the installation positions the co‑presence of the mothers with the viewer visiting. Here lies one function of the acoustic gaps, the silences in the films. When she does not speak, it seems, the viewer’s turn has come to speak back to her – to the mother who now just looks the viewer in the face. The images have a temporal density that is inhabited by the past and the future, integrated with affect, especially the affect produced by the close‑up. If we take this presence to the realm of the social, we can no longer deny responsibility for the (consequences of the) injustices of the past, even if we cannot be blamed for them. Spinoza has already told us that.22 How are these dialogic monologues performative qua video? To give just one example (fig. 11), one of the mothers filmed, called Massaouda, offers a striking instance of a culturally specific restraint that cautions us against psychologizing or psychoanalyzing her. As I was able to see first-hand, Massaouda and her newly acquired daughter‑in-law, Ilhem Ben-Ali Mehdi, get along famously. But in their relationship remains the stubborn gap immigration policy has dug. When Ilhem married Massaouda’s youngest son, Tarek, the mother was not allowed to attend the wedding: the authorities had denied her a visa. Hence, not only had Massaouda not been in a position to witness who Ilhem was, but even more obviously, she had not been able to fulfil her motherly role as her culture prescribes it, which is to help her son choose his bride. At some

21  On the affective effects of the face, see Hansen 2003. 22  For the relevance of Spinoza – a migrant himself – for migratory culture, see Gatens/Lloyd 1999, a lucid and accessible book that brings Spinoza’s ideas to bear on the present.

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Fig. 11 | Massaouda’s acceptance, which gave the project its title, video still from Mieke Bal, Nothing is Missing, 2008

point, Ilhem ends up asking with some insistence what Massaouda had thought of her when she first saw her – after the fact of the wedding, and hence in a kind of powerlessness.23 First, Massaouda does not answer, which makes Ilhem anxious enough to insist, and to ask: Did you find me ugly, plain? The older woman looks away at this point. The young woman insists. We will never know what Massaouda and Ilhem ‘really’ felt, but the power that the filming bestows on her, as if in compensation for her earlier dis-empowerment, is to either withhold or give her approval. She does the latter, but only after some teasing. When I saw the tape, and understood the speech, I was convinced Ilhem would never have been able to ask this question if she was not being filmed, and thus vent her anxiety. As for the mother, she was given, and performed the power she had been denied, and she used it to first mark the gap, and then to be kind, to help her somewhat insecure daughter‑in-law. This interaction is thoroughly social, performative, and bound to the medium of video – to the making of the film. It does not allow, say, a psychoanalytic or a psychological interpretation. Neither did I as the filmmaker have any influence on this occurrence – it was not my ‘intention’. Nor can we construe it as a realistic, documentary moment where an ‘occasion’ was recorded – absolutely nothing is recorded other than the moment itself. It would never have happened outside of the video-making situation. There would never have been an external reality the film could have documented. It is a moment, in other words, that was staged, yet real, thus challenging that distinction. For this to happen there was a need for a culturally specific relationship between two women related by marriage and separated by the gaps of migration, and for a relationship to the medium that allowed the women to step over cultural boundaries. The performative moment is the product of an act of filmmaking that required the absence of the filmmaker. It also required the acceptance by the two women of the apparatus standing between them. This surrender facilitated a cultural transgression – to ask, and insist on, a question

23  Massaouda is the mother of Tarek, the main character of Mille et un jours, whose absence at his wedding triggered this installation project.

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that in the culture of origin would be unaskable. This ‘accent’ of migratory culture emblematizes the productive, innovative, and enriching potential of intercultural life. Video binds the image we see to the sound we hear. That sound is, in this case, the human voice and the spoken words it utters. The centrality of the spoken word impinges on the visual form, the close‑up: it is also in order to foreground the privileging of the voice of the mothers that the films consist of single, unedited shots of their face as they speak and listen. The translations also embody the close bond between linguistic and visual aspects of the images – the bond between face and speech. Placed, visually, above their faces, the language is both made important and presented as somewhat of a burden. English as the universal entrance port is used as well as de‑naturalized, both by this visual foregrounding and by the translations themselves. Finally, it is impossible to separate sound from vision, as the mouths move with the rhythm of the sounds. This becomes a self-reflective statement about the medium that re‑integrates what the predominance of English as universal language had severed. The face and its acts thus becomes the emblematic instance of video’s power to transgress boundaries of a variety of kinds. In Nothing is Missing, the focus on the face embodies the act of facing in its three meanings, all three staged here as acts of mutuality facilitating contact. The emphasis on activity reflects back on the face itself. No longer the site of representation and expression, the face has become an agent of action: what faces can do, rather than how to do things with faces.

Migratory aesthetics The four video projects I have presented here all contribute an element to the ongoing search for what a migratory aesthetic can be and do without falling back into stereotyping, generalizing, or condescending. In GLUB (Hearts), all five senses participate in an intercultural encounter in public space, based on the smallest, humblest old (and new) habit. In Becoming Vera, the linearity of narrative is broken up into a fragmentation that allows becoming, as a process of ‘coming into her own’ within the real and the imagined worlds together, to come to fruition. Here, the basis is the imagination. In Mille et un jours, the question of voice, as the other side of that expected linearity, is explored in a situation where the one-utterance/one-speaker hypothesis cannot be sustained, if only because traumatic situations impede clear utterance. But also because a single voice would unify the political situation instead of activating viewers to reflect on it. And in Nothing is Missing, the encounter takes on an entirely personal aspect, without falling back into an individualizing, sentimentalizing habit that would make particular people deserving of our compassion, rather than making us face what we have in common as well as how circumstances make us differ. These are only four aspects of migratory aesthetics, all important but not exhaustive, each with their own form of appearance. They contribute to an aesthetic that sensitizes us to what matters beyond the ongoing divide between ‘us’ and ‘them’. While also having wider applications, in these examples the term ‘migratory aesthetics’ concerns the utterly small yet significant aspects of everyday culture as well as academic thought, which are – or were – ‘foreign’ in origin. These aspects carry visible and audible traces of ‘foreignness’, which are sometimes called ‘accents’. But because these traces strike us on such a mundane level of everyday life, they make everyone feel they have an ‘accent’ – older residents and newcomers, English speakers as well as

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other-speakers. This makes any concept that unifies and grants authority impossible to use in a straightforward way. What appears as the narratological ‘messiness’ of Mille et un jours and the cacophony of voices and languages in Nothing is Missing, the hopping between worlds in Becoming Vera and the various multi-sensorial untidiness in Glub (Hearts) is precisely where the classical Western tradition of narrative intersects and interacts with the profound hybridity of the migratory aesthetics through which migrants’ home and host cultures mutually enrich each other.

References Aydemir, Murat. “Piecemeal Translation.” About Mieke Bal, edited by Deborah Cherry, Wiley-Blackwell, 2008, pp. 7–25. Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. University of Toronto Press, 2017 [1985]. –. “Phantom Sentences.” Phantom Sentences: Essays in Linguistics and Literature Presented to Ann Banfield, edited by Robert S. Kawashima et al., Peter Lang, 2008, pp. 17–42. –. “Aestheticizing Catastrophe.” Reading Charlotte Salomon, edited by Michael P. Steinberg and Monica BohmDuchen, Cornell University Press, 2006, pp. 167–193. –. “Food, Form, and Visibility: GLUB and the Aesthetics of Everyday Life.” Postcolonial Studies, vol. 8, no. 1, 2005, pp. 51–77. –. Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide. University of Toronto Press, 2002. –. Double Exposures: The Subject of Cultural Analysis. Routledge, 1996. Bal, Mieke, editor. The Practice of Cultural Analysis: Exposing Interdisciplinary Interpretation. Stanford University Press, 1999. –, and Miguel Ángel Hernández Navarro. 2MOVE: Video, Art, Migration. Cendeac, 2008. Banfield, Ann. Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982. Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb. Ästhetik. Latin-German edition. Translated, preface, notes, indexes by Dagmar Mirbach, 2 vols. (vol. 1, pp. LXXX, 1–595; vol. 2, pp. IX, 596–1305), Felix Meiner Verlag, 2007. Biehl, João, and Peter Locke. “Deleuze and the Anthropology of Becoming.” Current Anthropology, vol. 51, no. 3, 2010, pp. 317–351. Cohen, Brianne. “Burning Cars, Caricatures and Glub. Negotiating Photofilmic Images in New Europe.” Third Text, vol. 28, no. 2, 2014, pp. 190–202. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, Athlone Press, 1986. –. Essays critical and clinical. Translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, University of Minnesota Press, 1997. –, and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Translated by Dana Polan, University of Minnesota Press, 1986. –, and Félix Guattari. Rhizome: Introduction. Editions de Minuit, 1976. Demos, T. J. The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis. Duke University Press, 2013. Doane, Mary Ann. “The Close‑Up: Scale and Detail in the Cinema.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, 2003, pp. 89–111. Emerson, Caryl. “Pushkin, Literary Criticism and Creativity in Closed Spaces.” New Literary History, vol. 29, no. 4, 1998, pp. 653–672. Fabian, Johannes. Power and Performance: Ethnographic Explorations through Proverbial Wisdom and Theater in Shaba, Zaire. University of Wisconsin Press, 1990. Fenner, David E. W. “Aesthetic Attitude.” Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, vol. 1, edited by Michael Kelly, Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 150–153.

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FUOCOAMMARE AND THE AESTHETIC ­R ENDITION OF THE RELATIONAL ­E XPERIENCE OF MIGRATION Introduction Contemporary migration provokes political, intellectual and social challenges for understandings of the contemporary global order. The movements of people triggered by the spate of wars unleashed since the late 1980s have resulted in discourses of cultural crises, wars of civilization and religious conflicts. Political discourses of the xenophobic variety have sought to construct walls, reinforce boundaries and mark out clear territorial separations, thereby reinforcing the ideas of threat and collapse purportedly fuelled by refugees fleeing wars in search of safe havens.1 The 2017 European arrangement with Turkey to stem the tide of refugees seeking to reach European shores is one example of the very real effects of this discourse of danger, cultural threat, economic drain and religious fundamentalism. All such discourses seek to stabilize the map of the world in terms of clear-cut boundaries, identifiable borders, and separate and separable cultures. Migrants, however, cannot be described as stable bodies trespassing across equally stable territorial, cultural and social borders. Instead, the contemporary forms of globalization reveal that bodies produce spaces of coexistence rather than trespass into spaces which separate the globe. While the seemingly clear language of political discourse seeks to ‘communicate’ a reality of threat and danger posed by the refugee crisis to clearly separable spaces, it represses the far more entangled common histories, evolving cultures and transforming societies which mark the world. This language represses a relational understanding of the world as a space of the co‑presence of peoples. Art and aesthetic theory, I argue, have the potential for giving form to the repressed side of instrumental reason which seeks to dominate and order the complexities triggered by the refugee crisis. The aesthetic experiences furnished by artworks can provide a sensorially intense and intellectually fruitful apprehension of a less oppressive, more inclusive, relational and dynamic understanding of the movements of people in the contemporary world. The dynamic, shape-shifting, aesthetic experience of migration afforded by art can alter the fixed meanings ascribed to spaces by opening up spaces to bodies, realities and histories that are entangled together through processes of displacement. Postcolonial critique informed the now (in)famous documenta 11 in Kassel (2002). Yael Bartana’s And Europe will be stunned (2011) and recent exhibits at the 2017 Venice Biennale, including the Dutch Pavilion and the pioneering works of Indian artist Nalini Malani, all deploy the power 1  See Brown (2010) for a review of this development in response to migration. The term ‘crisis’ in relation to refugees is used in this essay to refer emphatically to the humanitarian crisis for refugees rather than refugees as a crisis for the nation state and Europe.

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of artistic expression to further an understanding of a contemporary world marked by migration, refugees and the after-effects of colonialism. In this essay, I will argue that displacement, transformation and relationality are intrinsic aspects of both art and aesthetic theory, as well as of contemporary forms of migration, particularly the refugee crisis. I will develop an understanding of aesthetics, and of aesthetic experience as intrinsically destabilizing, critical and transformative, in the first section. The intrinsically destabilizing potential of aesthetic experience resides in its power to interrupt and interrogate the sort of clear-cut divisions of space that political discourses like those mentioned above seek to communicate. The productive power of this form of disruptive and destabilizing transformation in aesthetic experience will then be related to Fuocoammare (2016), a documentary film by Gianfranco Rosi. The film (Fire at Sea in English) eschews the instrumental, dominating and clear-cut political discourses of xenophobia by constructing an aesthetic experience which provokes a sensorially intense, interrogative and relational understanding of the world in the midst of the refugee crisis. In particular, the film figures Lampedusa through the apprehension of the co‑presence of bodies, entangled histories and multiple trajectories which flesh out its spatial dimensions. The temporality of viewing is marked by a phenomenological apprehension of spatial complexity, a complexity repressed by the straightforward, communicative understanding of territories, cultures and civilizations. In particular, the sensorial power of images is deployed to combat the reduction of filmic images to illustrations meant to furnish simplistic explanations of the complexity of the contemporary world. The island of Lampedusa has come to stand for a space of crisis, where refugees, primarily from Africa, seek to reach Europe through Italy. Lampedusa functions in media reports and political discourse as one place where the continent (and culture) of Europe is seen to come under threat from refugees. By approaching the island of Lampedusa obliquely, artistically and relationally, the film exemplifies the power of aesthetic experience to counter the separatist, discriminatory and exclusivist understandings of culture which underpin discourses on refugees today. The film provides an aesthetic experience of the island through a meditative rendition of a relational space where the intertwined stories of its inhabitants reframe the island, less as a one-dimensional space of threat and invasion than as an opportunity to re‑think the relations between different peoples whose pasts and futures intersect in a cohabited present. The images and sounds, the stillness and movement, and the spaces and times experienced through the film provide a form of aesthetic experience which bears witness to the complexities of a world marked by the often fraught and painful migrations of people. One of the central contentions of this essay is the potential of aesthetic experience to deflect the instrumental and seemingly transparent communication of meaning. The legitimacy of a social order where everyone is assigned their ‘proper’ place in territorial and social space is called into question by art, and by aesthetic experiences of a counter-world, where spaces (such as Lampedusa), and the people in them, are not assigned fixed, separate, clear identities. Aesthetic experience draws its power from the changing relationship between sensorial perception and conceptual comprehension. The sensory dimensions of aesthetic experience further understanding without reducing understanding to pure conceptual thought. For example, images have the power not to simply illustrate an argument, often through sequential arrangement and the causal construction of a plot, but also to provide the occasion for registering complex realities without simplification.

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Aesthetic experience and the power of displacement The disruption effected by art and aesthetic experience has been conceptualized by many critics, and taken many forms, often in relation to the determining and some would say, reductive operations of logical thinking founded on an unshakeable belief in the power of rationality. Art, in other words, has been seen to complement, disrupt or even split off from a faith in the power of reason to further knowledge of the world. Aesthetic experience provides a complex form of sensuous and cognitive knowledge of the world, which is different from, and often antagonistic to, the power of reason. Put differently, one could say that comprehension, meaning, clear-cut story-telling and rational understanding often fails to deliver a truer, fuller and more complex understanding of the world. In one approach articulated by Theodor Adorno, “Art is rationality that criticizes rationality without withdrawing from it” (Adorno 1998, 55). Sensory experience, and its potential to free the subject from the tight grip of rationality reduced to conceptual thought, is crucial in Adorno’s understanding of aesthetics. And, I will argue, the function of the image as pure form and pathos, as pure sensory intensity, which liberates the image from the drive to tell stories, is crucial to understanding how the sensory dimensions of aesthetic experience can critique rationality without abandoning it. J. M. Bernstein argues that for Critical Theory “reason without sense is deformed and deforming (irrational in itself and thereby nihilistic), sensory matters belong intrinsically to reason. The domain of art (or, more widely, culture) is the social repository for the repressed claims of sensuousness, society’s sensory/libidinal unconscious” (2004, 141). Paraphrasing Adorno, Bernstein argues that “a part of reason – nature controlling, instrumental reasoning – is taken as the whole of reason […] [but] this pure, autonomous, a priori constituted reason in fact has material and sensory conditions of possibility that it does not and cannot adequately acknowledge” (145). The sensory dimension of aesthetic experience is not absolutely divorced from reason, but is related to reason. In other words, one knows through both concepts and through the senses, through thinking and through feeling, sensing, seeing and hearing. Even more importantly, since rationality can be deformed by denying the power of the sensuous, the sensory dimensions of aesthetic experience can thwart, disrupt and perhaps set rationality free from its reduction of all knowledge to conceptual apprehension, its “nature controlling, instrumental” drive. The sensory apprehension of form can thwart the drive to reduce knowledge of the world to clearly constructed stories. Aesthetic experience can interrupt “the rationalization of reason itself” in “which the sensory, the contingent, the contextual, the particular […] is first dominated and then repudiated” (144, emphasis in original). The status, and the potential of the image, is an obvious place to begin understanding how the sensory and the conceptual, the senses and sense-making, are related to each other, particularly in the experience of moving images, such as cinema. Jacques Rancière argues that images have two functions: “On the one hand […] the image is valuable as a liberating power, pure form and pure pathos, dismantling the classical order of fictional action, of stories. On the other, it is valuable as the factor in a connection that constructs the figure of a common history” (2007, 34, emphasis in original). The functional value of the image as pure presence sans reason and meaning converts the image into a destabilizing force by interfering with the image’s function as a motor for telling stories and constructing plots. This specifically aesthetic dimension of the im-

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age, divided by two functions, or having one function superimposed or accompanying the other, makes aesthetic experience potentially disruptive and mobile. One way of understanding this argument is by understanding one function of image as a running interference against another function. This interruptive double function introduces a dynamism to the sensorial experience of images in cinema. It displaces the drive for sense-making by introducing the sensory registration of form as an integral part of aesthetic experience. In the short entry “Picturebook without Pictures” in Minima Moralia, Adorno posits such a paradoxical book precisely because in such books, images only illustrate – they offer perception but no percept. The pictures tell and explain rather than accompany and interrupt: “What was once called intellect is superseded by illustrations […] One is supposed, schooled by countless precedents, to see what is ‘going on’ more quickly than the moments of significance in the situation can unfold” (2001, 141). When pictures function only as illustrations, aesthetic experience is reduced to information transfer and communication. The potential of images to disrupt meaning-making, “to see what is going on” by the power of their presence, is repressed when pictures only illustrate. Adorno’s counter-reading of the picture as an image introduces a gap internal to the image that simultaneously opens another gap between it and the subject of aesthetic experience. He and Max Horkheimer argue that the “perceptual image does indeed contain concepts and judgements. [But] Between the actual object and the individual sense datum, between inner and outer, yawns an abyss which the subject must bridge at its own peril” (2002, 155). The image complicates the desire to see it communicate fully because the object that the image seeks to communicate through perception is not reducible only to concepts and judgements, that is, rational thought. The spectator can be ‘led astray’ by the sensory power of image as pure presence, or form, despite the desire, and expectation, that a film, for example, will be about something, that is, tell a story, or represent a situation to be conceptually understood. This potential in aesthetic experience for being led astray from the path of fixing meaning can be brought into relation with another statement by Rancière, made in another context. In Short Voyages to the Land of the People, Rancière states “the core political experience of our generation may well have been to go on […] a voyage, discovering for ourselves [a] recognizable foreignness, this shimmering of life” (2003, 2). The disruptive and mobile dimensions to be found in the potential of aesthetic experience, where the sensory and the rational interrupt each other, can be related to the experience of travelling, of encountering “foreignness”, and the place of this experience within a politics elaborated on by Rancière above. If political experience means encountering the unexpected and the foreign, then aesthetic experience bears some relation to politics, precisely because the double function of the image harbours the potential for disrupting our desire to understand through clearly constructed stories. The liberation from story-telling which an image can provide can disrupt the spectator’s desire to only recognize the expected, clearly articulated story, and can set one on a journey, voyaging and discovering that which was not expected – the foreign. Reading Fuocoammare will involve precisely reading for the sensory and the particular, to show how it makes a conceptual comprehension of the refugee crisis, and its attendant experiences of displacement, violence and death, inseparable from an understanding of aesthetic experience as the dynamic of displacement, where the drive for clear meanings is disrupted by the power of the sensory and the particular. Attention to detail, and to the sensory experience of the

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film, involves reading for form, and the way in which formal analysis and a sensory focus thwarts, and sets in motion, a desire to stabilize, fix and comprehensively grasp the meaning of migration, located through the word ‘Lampedusa’, the name of an Italian island in the Mediterranean, which has come to stand, rather rigidly, as a symbol for the threat posed for Europe by refugees from across the sea. Instead the film produces a sensory perception of Lampedusa as a relational space where multiple stories, divergent histories and an array of images cohabitate. By deploying the affective power of images without arranging them sequentially to produce a clear argument, the film weaves an aesthetic experience of the island of Lampedusa and the people on it without constructing a clear-cut argument about the meaning of the space. Rancière writes: When Deleuze speaks to us of the work that tears the percept from the perception, and the affect from affection, he is expressing, in his own way, the original formula of aesthetic discourse […] encapsulated by the Kantian analytic of the beautiful: aesthetic experience is of a sensory weave (un sensible) that is itself doubly disconnected. It is disconnected with respect to the law of understanding which subordinates sensory perception to its own categories [of understanding], and also with respect to the law of desire, which subordinates our affections to the search for a good. (2008, 173)

Fuocoammare constructs precisely such a sensory weave through which we can approach the realities of forced migration and refugees without reducing these realities to simplistic arguments graspable by instrumental reason and the laws of understanding. Migrants and refugees,2 embodied both in the bodies on boats that cross the Mediterranean, and in the discourse around walls, borders and detention centres, are hegemonically constructed as threats to Europe, as both territory and as idea (civilization). The often inhumane discourses around refugees, articulated by right-wing populists in a xenophobic discourse of separation (them from us), threat (they are against us) and expulsion (we need to rid us of them) are countered by the aesthetic experience of the film, whose sensitization for us of the refugee crisis, is approached obliquely, relationally and often silently. The question of aesthetic form and the fractured reality of the contemporary world are related to each other. If the world of migration today is marked by torn societies, displaced peoples and the experience of alienation, expulsion and exile, this fractured social reality can be productively articulated precisely through the broken form of artworks, including film. The relationship between the form of an artwork and the social reality it constructs has been crucial to aesthetic theories, particularly in the context of forced displacement and war on the European continent. From György Lukács’ Theory of the Novel (1915) to Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis (1953) and Edward Said’s On Late Style (2007), the contradictions engendered by modernity’s displacing dynamic have been identifiable in the formal construction of artistic works. Lukács, for example, argued that “All the fissures and rents which are inherent in the historical situation must be drawn into the form-giving process and cannot nor should be disguised by compositional means” (1971, 30). Today’s historical situation of forced

2  These two terms are not reducible to each other. Refugees form a specific subset of migrants who are fleeing situations of violence, exploitation and persecution in their home countries. The Refugee Convention of 1951 and the 1967 Protocol establish the legal definition of the category. Migrants are a much broader category and would include those engaging in voluntary movement for the purpose of work, education etc.

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migration and the intensification of social contradictions are being increasingly figured precisely through formal strategies of fragmentation, unresolved contradictions and dissonance in art. Formal composition bears witness through its fragmented character to the reality of social contradictions, of which the present refugee crisis is one of the most powerful indicators. The noncausal arrangement of sequences of images in the film, which eschews any clear-cut narrative, and deploys images as both pure presence and as illustrations, exemplifies Lukács’ argument of how fractured form can display the reality of a world broken by displacement through migration.

Fuocoammare: the aesthetic rendition of migration Fuocoammare opens deceptively. On a dark blank screen, a text appears which provides details of the island of Lampedusa – 20 square kilometres in area, 70 kilometres from Africa, 120 from Sicily. In the last 20 years, 15,000 migrants have drowned off its shores trying to reach it (fig. 1). Why is this opening deceptive? By providing these stark and horrifying facts, the opening of the film suggests that the images which follow will provide a story of this history – that is, of migration, death, boats and drownings. However, if this opening functions as a frame for what the film is about, the images that immediately follow these stark details do not illustrate the textual description provided.

Fig. 1 | Gianfranco Rosi, Fuocoammare, 2016, opening screen with text, film still

No bodies, no boats, no coast guard ships follow after these words. Instead, in pure silence, we see an image of a small boy, Samuele, looking at a tree, then slowing climbing it, in an almost static camera shot (fig. 2). The silence, the absence of commentary through a voice-over, and the beauty of the landscape intensifies the disjunction between the textual information provided at the start and the ‘silent’ image of the boy, as he climbs the tree looking for birds. The silence amplifies the power of the image by not reducing it to an immediate elaboration of the words

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Fig. 2 | Gianfranco Rosi, Fuocoammare, 2016, the little boy Samuele, film still

which preceded it. The text that opens the film is not followed by spoken words or illustrative images which flesh out the situation of migration or of drowning. The images immediately follow the text but do not further a comprehension of migration – instead they shift spectatorial attention to a scene marked by silence, by sensorial apprehension of form (the silhouette of a tree, a wide, empty landscape, a boy, no boat). The sequence of text followed by image is an example of a break, or a gap, between the expectation of an audiovisual rendition of a story, marked by a causal link between sequences of images and words. In Adorno’s terms, the images deflect a conceptual understanding of migration invited by the text preceding it, by providing the occasion for a sensorial apprehension of forms in an almost complete silence which has nothing explicitly to do with refugees or migration. The image as pure form (shape, light, movement) interrupts a desire to know a story about migration. A desire to know is displaced. The opening sequence is marked by a non-causal relation between text and image, a relational non-causality which spreads through the whole film. That is, the film is composed of sections, or fragments, where different stories and images coexist on the same plane – that of the film text – without being arranged into a motivated, causal sequence which tells the story of migrants in and around Lampedusa. Rather, this fragmented arrangement of different sections, woven into one another, fleshes out a sensorially intense apprehension of a space, the island-space of Lampedusa. Despite the almost traditional, and slightly pedagogic textual framing of the film, the unconnected fragments which comprise the film provide a spectatorial experience through which Lampedusa is approached as the space of different stories, multiple images, and disconnected words and songs. The film moves between different inhabitants of Lampedusa  – Samuele, his father and grandmother, his aunt Maria and uncle, a diver, a local radio DJ Pippo and Dr. Pietro Bartolo. Only one of these, the doctor, is connected to both Samuele and to the refugees arriving on Lampe-

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dusa. The film portrays their daily life, which includes Maria preparing a meal, the father and son looking at photographs, an eye examination for Samuele, who often plays around the island with a friend, the diver descending down a spectacular cliff into the blue-black sea, the radio DJ receiving calls and playing song requests. All of these events are woven into one another without any guiding narrative thread. More importantly, besides the doctor, they are not connected directly with the plight of the migrants, whose horrifying journeys will come to a diegetic end in the film when they are rescued. The fragmented construction of the film, which includes many characters not directly connected with migrants, is a surprising strategy given the initial textual framing of the film. Precisely because of this oblique and relational way of approaching the crisis spelled out in the opening text, the aesthetic experience of the film is one of displacement. Except for the doctor, none of these characters have any direct relationship to the migrants. Furthermore, this seeming deflection from the topic of migration becomes the occasion for exposing the viewer to powerful images, often rendered in silence without commentary, and these images flesh out an apprehension of Lampedusa that is far more than just a place of drowning, rescue and death.

Deflections and relations In one sense, that of narrative consistency and causal connections, the images and their arrangement deflect away from the textual opening of the film, which is about the stark reality of death. It is not only about the migrants arriving at Lampedusa. Any expectation of an immediate engagement through image and sound with a story about the migrants is thwarted, and instead the viewer is confronted with often stunningly beautiful images of the island, the sea, the trees and rocks. The first apprehension of the migrants in the film accentuates this deflec-

Fig. 3 | Gianfranco Rosi, Fuocoammare, 2016, film still

Sudeep Dasgupta

tion through a peculiar combination of sound and image. Against a static shot of a dark blackblue sky and a rotating radar, voices are heard asking repeatedly, “How many people?”, answered faintly with “Please, we beg you”, to which the reply is another question: “Your position? Your position?” (fig. 3). The urgency of the situation captured in these words stands in sharp contrast to the silence and the relaxed images of Samuele playing among the trees. A visual presence without words (Samuele) is followed by a beautiful image of the darkened sky and words marked by urgency and despair (a rescue operation). We hear the migrants on their sinking boat but we do not see them. The voices are literally disembodied. Instead our attention is drawn to the pure form of light and darkness, and the outlines of a radar rotating against the sky. Like the presence of silence, here the absence of images of migrants produces a sensorial experience, the intensity of which derives from giving rein to the spectatorial imagination. Who are they? Where are they? What does the person crying out in desperation look like? None of these questions can be answered by images, but only the sounds of words being transmitted by radio. The image becomes the site for the exhibition of form (the sky, the clouds) while explicitly absenting bodies. A desire to see is deflected, and instead words are woven into images which do not flesh out or illustrate the situation from which the words are spoken. The images stand curiously disconnected from the words. This sequence is followed by a few more fragments, of Pippo, the DJ in his studio, of aunt Maria cooking, and Samuele playing with his friend, before the thematic content of the plight of the migrants is approached again. The abrupt jump from the disturbing scene of an image whose power derives from words spoken by absent bodies to the everyday scenes of work, play and cooking exemplify the fractured, almost broken construction of the fragments which make up the film. This broken construction of disconnected images and sounds can be seen as a deflection, a mode of thwarting spectatorial expectations by refusing to construct a clear, linear plot about the migrants. Instead, images without words, often of natural beauty, proliferate throughout the film. These images provide moments where the narrative desire to simplify by clearly seeing what is going on is deflected by attention to the form of the images. The film intermittently constructs oblique pathways toward an audiovisual apprehension of the refugees by countering the spectatorial desire to learn more about their situation, deflecting attention to other film fragments. This obliqueness is rendered in the first image of the migrants. They are shown on a boat, but mediated by the screen in a helicopter cockpit on which they appear (fig. 4). This doubly mediated visual presence of the migrants in a boat, on a screen within a screen, is immediately followed by a conversation between Samuele and his father, who is recounting his experiences working on a ship at sea as they look at photographs of the boat he worked on. One boat is related to another visually – the two boats occupy the same time/space of viewing – yet there is no relationality established between them. The two sequences, of the migrant boat bobbing on the sea on a helicopter screen, and of the photographs being looked at and explained by Samuele’s father deflect the spectator’s attention from one boat to another, connecting them without relating them causally to each other. The two sequences comprise a scene where a sensory relation is set up without a causal link being established. Emotions, the imagination and stories are woven into one another in this scene, which comprises two sequences. In Rancière’s terms, the relation between two sequences

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Fig. 4 | Gianfranco Rosi, Fuocoammare, 2016, migrants in a boat, film still

is not meant to illustrate ‘an idea’, that is, to represent an explanation or furnish a description of the situation of migrants. Rancière argues: The scene is not the illustration of an idea. It is a small optical machine which shows us thought as it weaves (tisser) connections between perceptions, affects, names and ideas, to constitute a sensible community which weaves these relations and an intellectual community which makes this (sensorial) fabric thinkable. (Rancière 2013, 12)

The sequential conjunction of these two episodes produce connections which weave together thoughts, stories, names and symbols (‘the migrant’), helping to constitute two things: first, Lampedusa as a space where multiple stories by different people intersect; and second, a relational understanding of ‘community’ where those with starkly different histories and circumstances cohabit the same space – not just the space of the island, but of a global condition marked by the movements of people. The power of the images resides in their sensorial intensity (the vast horizons of the sea and island, the plunging cliffs, the deep blue waters) without being subsumed into causal sequences of narrative comprehension. As one reviewer accurately describes it, the film “compels you to infer a big picture from a series of extended, intimate scenes. At the end, you understand something about the texture and organization of life in Lampedusa, and about the effect that migration has had on the island, though it may be hard to put that understanding into words” (Scott 2016, n. p., emphasis added). The stand-alone quality of the images, intensified further by the absence of a guiding voice-over explaining their meaning or how they are connected, produces an aesthetic experience whose sensorial intensity escapes the drive to read images as illustrations of an idea or audiovisual renditions of a concept. That is why the situations on the island can only be inferred - because the film does not seek to explain. As stated in the previous section, it is precisely this drive for clarity and communicative transparency which underpins the simplistic and often xenophobic understandings of migration and

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refugees. The film, however, deploys images within a networked array of fragments whose relations are not spelled out. Images are offered to the spectator as the occasion for contemplation, interrogation and imagination.

Conjunctions and separations The island of Lampedusa emerges as a place where all of the disparate events connected in the film take place. Lampedusa becomes less a space confronting threats from the outside than a space constructed by the film which emerges through the relations between images without narrative emplotment. Fuocoammare captures, in the single word of its title, separate realities and histories, and produces a relational apprehension of the space of the island. In one episode shot from within the home of Samuele’s grandmother, we see him starting as the sound of thunder breaks outside the curtained window. She recounts how her husband went out to sea every morning, and returned from fishing in the evening, when she met him with bread. Her husband, Samuele’s grandfather, was afraid, as were the other fishermen, of staying on the water at night, when warships appeared and shot off light flares into the sky to illuminate the sea. In the wartime periods, she recounts, the light flares from the warships produced “fire on the water”. The word “fuocoammare” emerges from this scene with connotations of conjugal love, work, the danger at sea and the violence of war. The spectator is taken to an earlier time when the water signified danger in the context of war. The grandmother’s recollection of wartime danger adds a layer of meaning over the meanings the waters of the Mediterranean have produced in recent years. Separate realities and different histories meet. Later in the film, Maria calls Pippo, the radio DJ, to request the song “Fuocoammare” for her son, Nello, who is out fishing at sea. The weather is turning bad, and she requests the song for him, hoping for his safe return. Here, the title of the film is connected to a song, with connotations of care, safety and danger expressed by mother for son. Unlike the wartime “fire on water”, this sequence brings the spectator into the present. The water now emerges as a threat to fishermen because of bad weather. This same water, now, is also a threat to the migrants. The film does not explicitly juxtapose these threats, or construct an opposition between the relatively less urgent fears of Maria and the horrors experienced by migrants. In other words, the film does not juxtapose two realities of danger in order to use comparison pedagogically to highlight privilege or emphasize suffering. Instead, this gentle expression of love (the song request) is placed side by side, adjacent to, the reality of the migrants. There is no heavy-handed drumming of a message home to the spectator through the use of contrasts. Rather, the multiple meanings of “fire on water” flow out of this presentation of adjacent meanings. This sequence also converts the air around Lampedusa into a medium of conjunction between two realities. The same airwaves through which the cries for help and the rescue mission circulated are those through which songs symbolizing familial love and concern travel. The touching pathos of Maria’s request, the urgency and fear marked in the voices of the rescue mission, the gentle notes of the song “Fuocoammare”, all inhabit the same ether. Lampedusa becomes the space, and the air, of all these affects, of all these disparate realities. Even later in the film, fire on water takes on a deadlier meaning. The doctor is looking at images on his computer while describing the horrific wounds and deaths he encounters while

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treating the migrants arriving in Lampedusa. Many who arrive on these boats suffer from burns when they pour fuel into the engine. The fuel, mixing with seawater, soaks them, causing burns which can kill them. On his computer screen, a young boy of 14 or 15 years can be seen badly injured and hooked up to saline on a boat deck. The boats migrants travel on injure and kill them by burning them as they cross the waters of the Mediterranean towards Lampedusa, another sort of “fire on the water”. Here the words conjure images of painful deaths, horrific injury and the desperation of the journeys of migrants. The title of the film, Fuocoammare, pithily combines in one word these separate realities and histories of war, migration, love and caring. These different realities are produced by the film through images set in fragments that suggest understanding them relationally and together, all at once. The sequences, their images and the words fill out a kaleidoscopic sensorial experience of everyday and not‑so-everyday events occurring on the island. These events remain largely unconnected, though they condense around the word “fuocoammare”. The emotional power of the film is not harnessed to a simplistic message about one group, migrants, but stretches out and involves us in the stories of many different lives. Yet the film does not shy away from exposing, powerfully and sometimes brutally, the situation these refugees find themselves in when they get to the island. This brutal exposure, however, is curiously oblique. The absence of a voice-over directing spectatorial attention makes the images of the migrants, often in close‑up, extremely powerful precisely through their muteness. They are often shot huddled together, covered in the glittering gold of the thermal sheets that keep them warm (fig. 5). The intense glitter of the gold and the rustle of the metallic sheets in the wind lend a power to the images exactly because these images are not then used to tell a story. There is no commentary, no voice-over. The bodies of the migrants are seen and heard, but they are not explained – the images not used to illustrate anything specific about them. At one point

Fig. 5 | Gianfranco Rosi, Fuoccamare, 2016. Close‑up of a migrant, film still

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in a rescue operation, the lifeless bodies of dead and unconscious migrants are hauled off a boat onto a rescue ship. A few minutes later, a stationary shot presents bodies in sealed bags on the deck, against the beautiful blue of the sea in the background. The silence accompanying the image, combined with the absence of any spoken words, produces a deep sensation of horror. This horror produced through the images as pure presence rather than as illustrations is combined at some points with starkly different images which have no causal or explanatory connection to the lives of these migrants. For example, a series of stationary shots inside the hull of the moving boat show the corpses of those who have died from thirst and hunger on the voyage. This macabre scene of bodies lying next to and on top of one another is not immediately recognizable since there is no voice-over or preceding image to frame what is coming. As recognition arises (one sees bodies but no clear faces of the dead), however, hitting the spectator powerfully, the sequence of stationary shots is immediately followed by another sequence of stationary shots – the blue-black sea, the radar of a ship, the eclipsed sun appearing and disappearing behind moving clouds. The spectator is confronted with unbearable scenes, then shuttled away into beautiful images of the water, the sky, the sun and the clouds. It is as if the film is playing a game, approaching the situation of migrants hesitantly sometimes, obliquely at others, and often completely silently, while suddenly displacing attention to other images which are unrelated to the recounting of any story about the migrants. This sequence stands out in stark contrast to the preceding sequences and beautiful images of the deep blue sea that the diver explores, and the touching images of Samuele at the dinner table with his father and grandmother. As the director, Rosi, stresses, “There’s no interaction [between migrants and residents]. Zero. So I wanted to use this as a metaphor for Europe. They’re aliens to each other” (Diamond 2017, n. p.). Yet all of these fragments, depicting horror and violence, love and intimacy, beauty and ugliness, inhabit the world of the film together. The images, sequences and silences produce a composite world of coexistence without reducing them to a simple narrative or one-dimensional description of what the word ‘Lampedusa’ might mean. As one commentator astutely remarked, the film “is a somewhat muted, meditative work, full of extended periods without dialogue. In the end, viewers won’t come away with clear answers, but they’ll likely feel awe for Rosi’s absorbing depiction of both the routine of the rescue and the magnitude of the emergency” (ibid.).

Conclusion Fuocoammare puts into motion a depiction of migration by producing a dynamic and relational apprehension of a stable space, the island of Lampedusa. This dynamism is partly rendered by the cinematic deployment of the camera, which puts forms in movement onto the screen. As Rancière argues, “Cinema is not the art of the camera, it is the art of forms in movement, the art of movement inscribed (écrit) in black and white forms on a surface” (Rancière 2013, 229). From stunning images of water, horizon, trees, clouds and sun, the film sets into motion a series of images. Furthermore, these images (and sounds) are not deployed instrumentally in order to construct a clear and communicable description of the crises of migration. The images traverse across multiple spaces (rocks, water, sky, trees, boats) and link multiple protagonists (Samuele, Maria, the doctor, the migrants). The camera does not identify a privileged subject – the migrant.

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Instead it serves to set the spectator on a voyage between multiple small stories and across different situations, ranging from the mundane to the fatal. Each image is coextensive with the others, rather than building upon them linearly. The camera is not a tool for description, and images are not rendered simply as illustrations. The technology of the camera and the artistic expression through the medium of cinema produce a sensorial experience which is intertwined with moments of story-telling. This intertwining of senses and sense-making is produced through the double function of the image as pure form and agent of telling stories. The film produces a dynamic experience within documentary cinema, switching between ‘looking at’ images for their sensorial intensity and ‘looking through’ images for the lineaments of a narrative or story (Corner 2003, 96 f.). The absence of authorial presence through voice-over detaches images from a pedagogic and illustrative function, emphasizing the apprehension of pure form – including the rise and fall of blue water against a horizon, the curves of a pine tree silhouetted against the sky, the black rocks that shine under the water. The images further construct a temporal sequence which is unmotivated – there is no causal connection between a fragment comprising images of refugees and the everyday goings‑on of Samuele or his aunt Maria. This non-connection in the sequence of images gives the film a broken form, and Fuocoammare emerges as a network of separate fragments. These together comprise a kaleidoscopic form through which the space of Lampedusa and the experience of migration is approached. The stories of the migrants are woven together into a sensory weave where multiple histories and realities coexist. And this sensory weave is experienced through “an intermittent aesthetics” which registers both pure form, “the qualities of the depiction itself with that of certain visual properties of the things depicted (their shapes, colours, proportions and spatial relations – as in landscapes, buildings, objects)”, and an intellectual engagement with the stories told through “a relative transparency of depiction” (ibid., 96). This relational, non-causal and visually intense structure of the film explicitly refuses an explanatory paradigm for describing the crisis for refugees today. This paradigm, which maps the world in terms of invasion and threat, incursion and expulsion, boundaries and walls, is powerfully but gently displaced by the fragmented and networked visual kaleidoscope the film provides. The film sets the experience of migration in motion, by depicting movement as a relational, dynamic and partly inscrutable process. It exemplifies the displacing power of aesthetic experience to figure sensorially the displacement of peoples in a global order marked by migration.

References Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor, University of Minnesota Press, 1998. –. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. Translated by Edmund Jephcott, Verso, 2001. –, and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Translated by Edmund Jephcott, Stanford University Press, 2002. Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Thought. Translated by Willard R. Trask, Princeton University Press, 1953. Bernstein, Jay M. “‘The dead speaking of stones and stars’: Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory.” The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory, edited by Fred Rush, Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 139–164.

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Sudeep Dasgupta Brown, Wendy. Walled States, Waning Sovereignty. MIT Press, 2010. Corner, John. “Television, documentary and the category of the aesthetic.” Screen, vol. 44, no. 1, Spring 2003, pp. 92–100. Diamond, Anna. “In Fire at Sea, Tragedy and Normalcy live side by side.” The Atlantic, www.theatlantic.com/ entertainment/archive/2017/02/fire‑at-sea-documentary-review/517359/. Accessed 13 May 2017. Lukács, György. The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. Translated by Anna Bostock, MIT Press, 1971 [1915]. Rancière, Jacques. Short Voyages to the Land of the People. Translated by James Swenson, Stanford University Press, 2003. –. The Future of the Image. Translated by Gregory Elliot, Verso, 2007. –. “Aesthetics Against Incarnation: An Interview with Anne Marie Oliver.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 35, no. 1, Autumn 2008, pp. 172–190. –. Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art. Translated by Zakir Paul, Verso, 2013. Said, Edward. On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain. Vintage, 2007. Scott, Anthony Oliver. “‘Fire at Sea’ is not the documentary you’d expect about the migrant crisis. It’s better.” The New York Times, www.nytimes.com/2016/10/21/movies/fire‑at-sea-review.‌html?referrer=​google_ kp&_r=​0. Accessed 13 May 2017.

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PATHS WALKED T WICE

No, objected Samba Diallo. I am not a distinct country of the Diallobé facing a distinct Occident, and appreciating with a cool head what I must take from it and what I must leave with it by way of counterbalance. I have become two. There is not a clear mind deciding between two factors of a choice. There is a strange nature, in distress over not being two. (Kane 1961/1972, 150 f.)

Since Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s novel Ambiguous Adventure (1961/1972),1 which describes meticulously the implications of French education in the transitional process of colonisation, “becoming two” has become a significant catchword for what colonialism and migration imply: the implosion of the notion of a self-contained identity and becoming acquainted with and assembling frictional cultures in one’s own individuality, which informs a kind of baseline of a scattered and fragile diasporic and modern experience, all which is interesting to think of in regard to art, art history and aesthetic methodologies. For what I have in mind, “becoming two” is a first entry point to a line of thinking which I hope to create with this text. I want to speak about the procedure of becoming, which is a crucial if not fundamental drive in what migration does, and building on this, a paradigm for theoretical and critical thoughts to come into being. As a scholar with a background in philosophy, history of art and film studies, and through my work as a curator and researcher, I found myself meandering between different sets of knowledge production addressing figurations of migration and (post)colonialism. Urging a becoming which is not yet defined, I am looking for ways of overcoming the dichotomising logic in Kane’s “becoming two”. Becoming, a becoming more, or becoming something not yet defined - which Édouard Glissant called “l’imprévisible”, the “unforeseeable” in the process of “transversal Becomings” (see Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2015, 81 ff.) – first responds to the longing for a drive into a space for new things to happen, and second, acknowledges potential ways of becoming that I cannot understand fully, for there are far too many of them being practised by artists, filmmakers, editors, archivists, academics, thinkers, designers, etc. Of course, in writing and thinking for example, we begin to navigate these territories from somewhere and with tools that have been produced and tested before. Practices always speak of an experience relating to earlier practical experiences, and in them resonates an abstract formula which follows earlier schemes and concepts. The ‘diasporic paradigm’, as much as the ‘migratory paradigm’, no 1  Kane’s prize-winning novel is a popular book, figuring in philology, theatre and contemporary filmmaking – for example, in the films by French-Senegalese director Alain Gomis Tourbillons (1999) and L’Afrance (2001).

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longer addresses literal diasporas and migrations alone; it speaks of repetitions, and to a simultaneously situated and floating common life condition made up of impossible departures and arrivals, in/visibilities, complicated origins and being on the run or en route. Things and people are on the move. Everything (including humans) turns towards the material. Person and persona, I and they, us and them, each describing a moving entity in a geography of “situated knowledges” (see Haraway 1988, 583) and “partial knowledge” (Mitchell 2004, 16). So am I, as are artists and their art, scholars and audiences. I try, in writing, to speak to the movement of becoming as a self-reflexive practice and as a movement for understanding contemporary art practices. At times I will divagate, certainly for the pleasure and freedom of getting off the road, but also because things can have a strong attraction, and because it is necessary to follow possible movements and directions without knowing how far I may go with them. My contribution is about art practice and aesthetics as an unfinished process; the precondition is that ‘migration’ informs all material and matter. To write ‘migration’ (and not to repeat blindly the ideas and concepts developed already) in that sense means to speak to a line of a thought on its way to another line; it asks for a readjustment of the meaning of aesthetic and social categories (their relation to one another and not to the extension of their denotative space). For me, writing in ellipses has become an adequate way of tracing and mirroring other practices that contain and teach ways of navigating the space in which art and theory happen. I am not at all like a judge in a match or a voice of good (the type of omniscient documentary voice-over); I would rather prefer to be and to move in the middle of matters and learn from artistic practice and its theoretical impact.

I follow you Brigitta Kuster, in dialogue with Angela Melitopoulos, discusses the notion of othering in the construction of films on migration as a dead end. She argues that the term ‘migration films’ suggests a perspective on the subject which contains all the conflicts inherent to the fabrication of such a genre. She writes: “Many films are informed by a sort of double anthropology of the gaze, particularly those concerning the history of migrants: often male filmmakers and spectators or feminists being part of the social majority” (Kuster/Melitopoulos 2017, 75; translation of this and the following quotes by the author.) Her analysis debunks a symptomatic paradox: […] what the majority calls ‘migration film’ has to be a film which deals with migration in an obvious way and which somehow suits the majority-owned politics and discourses of migration; moreover, this film will have to represent these politics and at the same time has to raise what you [Angela Melitopoulos] call a voicing and framing in the process of migration; I would add – a cinematic language in progress. (ibid.)

Kuster and Melitopoulos, both in their writing and in their film and art practice, imagine ways out of the normative codes – in the words of Melitopoulos, through “the becoming of a line, a path, a narrative seen from within the movement, which includes a constantly transforming relation between micro- and macro-structures of space and language”. The “becoming of a line” offers a strategy for avoiding the overall dichotomising scheme and the position of surveillance attributed to a filmmaking author; it is actually a strategic gesture of turning away (instead of being confrontational, of fighting or subverting the adversary, which would affirm the power of the

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scheme). We should be stimulated by this approach as a method and mode which differs considerably from a theoretical and practical landscape structured by exclusive and/or inclusive oppositions, and instead engage with the becoming of a line. Becoming draws “a trace of corporeal presence and bodily action”, writes Ruth Burgon, describing here Richard Long’s 1967 work “A Line Made by Walking” (Burgon 2012, n.p.). Melitopoulos’ notion of a transformation of the relationship to space and language (a cinematic or artistic language) formed by the physical experience very much resonates in Richard Long’s own depiction of his sculpture (the line he made by walking in the grass), as he notes: I too wanted to make nature the subject of my work, but in new ways. I started working outside using natural materials like grass and water, and this evolved into the idea of making a sculpture by walking […] My first work made by walking, in 1967, was a straight line in a grass field, which was also my own path, going ‘nowhere’. In the subsequent early map works, recording very simple but precise walks on Exmoor and Dartmoor, my intention was to make a new art which was also a new way of walking: walking as art. (Long cit. in Burgon 2012, ibid.)

In an earlier essay from the publication for the exhibition Shoe Shop (Johannesburg 2012), an anthology of essays and images, entitled “On Walking”, I argued that “[w]alking as an idea allows us to turn the way we think about migration around and set it down on its feet […] If we look at the shoes and the feet […] we can make out a parallactic shift in the narrative of flight and migration, which marks a change in the act of viewing and in the act of being viewed” (Gutberlet 2012, 13). Walking can be a significant activity in the becoming of a line and in developing an alternative entry point to the understanding of migration. It also transforms the meaning of the landscape or terrain – Melitopoulos’ attention to space – as a space being traversed (and not an occupied or owned territory). Other movements relating to the physical movement of walking then generate a huge reservoir of images, speech and sounds attributed to physical movement – like filming someone walking, walking while filming (i. e. ‘tracking shot’), taking photographs while walking, or taking pictures of someone walking, speaking while in movement or speaking about movement, making noises while in movement, etc. Language and speech here lead to the question of how we record or describe movement literally and theoretically, and how we speak about it and to it. Image, sound and language cultures, as we can observe from ourselves, take place at different cognitive levels and speeds; they have their own rules and grammars, and they speak to different individually and collectively developed sensitivities and skills. It is difficult to establish a new element in the discourse in a language which still perpetuates ways of thinking we have hoped to overcome, whether the language be visual, sonic, gestural or verbal. Once the language becomes able to transcend its own normative scheme, it finds ways to move along its field differently; it finds a line to navigate its space – it becomes a line in progress. This said, I should add that, unfortunately, discursive achievements only work satisfactorily within the boundaries of their own set‑up – each is in need of its own discursive challenge – although stimulations can create a feeling that something is missing, can be contagious or urge one to question one’s own practical and theoretical parameters. The German film critique, essayist and translator Frieda Grafe, whose writings helped greatly to establish a discourse on international auteur cinema in Germany, addresses these stimulations emerging from films. She was very much concerned about the cinematic experience as a vehicle

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Figs. 1–2 | Tamara Grcic, Falten N. Y. C., 1997

for transforming how we sense and speak differently about reality and society from within a cinematic perspective. The fifth volume of her writings came out in 2004 with the title Film/ Geschichte (Film/History) and the subtitle Wie Film Geschichte anders schreibt (How film writes history differently) (Grafe 2004). I often come back to this elegant phrase as it assumes that film is able to speak, i. e. to write history, to write a history, in a way impossible for written history. Who writes this other history, if it is already written in the film? How can we learn to read this other history in films which speak literally and physically through the traces of corporeal presences? If film is able to write history differently, then it already contains a method to engage differently with movements through time and space that can be distilled and written down. I come back to Grafe’s question, walk along her sentence (as I walk along Long’s line documented in his photograph). I follow her. She invites me to think with her words, she shows me how, and this how alters into something new. I am attentive, then branch off. I detour. I leave her line and find another. She retires, but remains in sight at a distance, while I go my way. What she said no longer sounds the same, as I continue. I go along with someone’s thoughts – I read, I watch a film, I go along with the narrative. I follow someone’s path, the progress fashions a display that is far from being really and completely available, tangible and translatable. Something stays back and refigures itself in relation to the attention I attribute to it. Something always stays back, I try to grasp it, acknowledge and hope to understand. It is in the air, it envelops me, it is disquieting as much as it is captivating. It does not belong to me, neither is it not mine. I become part of the line, the line becomes part of me, part of my advancement. Édouard Glissant’s notion of “opacity” (Glissant 2004, 252 ff.), Kwame Anthony Appiah’s concept of “cosmopolitanism” (2006), Mary Louise Pratt’s idea of “arts in the contact zone” (Pratt 1991, 33 ff.), Homi Bhabha’s “third space” (Rutherford 1990, 207 ff.) – to name only a few – are familiar with the process-based situation, in which reading, looking at, hearing, smelling and sensing belong to intimate gestures that simultaneously trigger a sense of knowing and not knowing, a visibility of an invisible, an understanding/not understanding, an attraction and a repulsion towards unfolding ideas which subvert the powers of representation and the solidity of positions. Following becomes a temporary situational practice.

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Follow me For years, I have kept notes, lists and scribbles about film titles and works by artists. I maintain a sort of chaotic collection. I had called a page “follow me” (after the ‘Follow Me’ cars that guide pilots to the airstrip). Now I wonder whether one of those ‘Follow Me’ cars figures in Airports (1994) by Peter Fischli and David Weiss, whose work breathes a touch of sadness; a print hung in the large staircase (a bizarre site for a picture of an airport) leading down to the bathroom in the restaurant of the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt just opposite the house I have lived in for years. I realise now that I miss the image, since the tenant has changed, and the picture has disappeared. I had kept my follow me bits with others. I sometimes look at them, when I try to tidy up boxes with papers, cards, notes, quotations and other things for which I never really find a space in the system I give exhibition and research projects and writing. Follow me is among those loose sheets with a few names, titles of works and films, a door, another starting point into an idea for a possible exhibition or a piece of writing. Now, as the writing process unfolds, it comes to me as a methodological miniature. It mentions Tamara Grcic, the Frankfurt-based conceptual artist, alongside Malick Sidibé – I assume the most popular Malian studio photographer – for their stunning portraits of persons from behind; videos by Guy Woueté, who came to study at the Rijksakademie van beeldenden Kunsten in Amsterdam and moves between Belgium and Cameroon, alongside Santiago Sierra with his highly provocative work on labour; Francis Alÿs’ walking performances in Mexico City; Kemang Wa Lehulere’s artistic research practice; a few film titles – D’Est by Chantal Akerman (1993), Loin by André Téchiné (2001), Nine Muses by John Akomfrah (2010), Skin by Afraa Batous (2015); and finally half a line, “final scene: person walking away”. These people would hardly be able to meet, physically, as they come from different temporal, geographical and cultural contexts. They are artists, photographers, filmmakers, young and older; some are no longer alive; some are African, European, Middle-Eastern or of mixed backgrounds; in their work all kinds of temperatures prevail; the art is black and white or in colour, still or moving; some would be well-known in Europe, others in Africa, some in the arts, others in cinema. With their respective approaches they nevertheless enter a common ground while presenting back-views that attract the viewers into the picture and invite them in and move forward. Together, they inform a lateral spatial arrangement. Tamara Grcic in her series Falten N. Y. C. [folds] (figs. 1 and 2), photographed in New York 1997, analyses found surfaces as if they were sculptures (see Günther-Peill-Stiftung Düren 2006, 71); I follow her as she takes photographs of the back of people in public space, her being attracted by a detail of their physical imprint in pleats. She guides my attention to an intimate proximity, fabric, skin, hairs, scarves and coat rims, shirts and knitted material; a detail of the back (or hip) of these strangers becomes a picture of its own, its own entity. I almost touch the fabric, the skin, and experience a moment of intimacy. I imagine her standing with the camera on her chest, hiding her gaze, as she enters a packed subway not daring to look straight into people’s faces. Grcic wants to look. The picture contains the moment of her appropriation. She is so much in the picture; her camera eye holds the moment, passes it on to me, invites me to see and appropriate it once again, differently, sensing the intimacy anew between her and her motif, and between her and me. The image articulates a triangular space in which intimacy and proximity can be looked at from a distance (from the angle of a stranger looking at a stranger’s gaze), the

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Figs. 3–4 | Guy Woueté, Ville-Visage, Bamako 2009, series of photographs, colour

same story, with each viewer, told differently. I am literally drawn or waved into the image field and the beauty of its formalism. Looking at Grcic’s photographs of pleats with a corporeal presence hidden under the surface transforms me into an intruder. As I cannot follow deeper into the picture’s abstract structure, I somehow detour into another artificial space behind the surface, a mimetic space in which the ambiguous sensation of coming very close mirrors the attraction of the motif and my own restlessness. The back eventually opens to someone else’s movement towards an objective, which develops in progress or maybe – as Long put it – is going “nowhere”. As a viewer following someone walking before us, we encounter at least three things: the person defining the space before us; the space being transited; and ourselves looking at the transient figure in space. Guy Woueté in an early series of colour photographs shot in Bamako during a residency (2009; figs. 3 and 4) goes after figures in movement – a theme he has continuously examined since (Woueté 2012; Küster 2013). He follows young women through the city on their way to sell things or get water. They have come from the countryside to work in better-off families so they can amass a dowry. Woueté in his work does not expose the social circumstances of their lives. His images invite us to follow, creating a shared space with them, witnessing their

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movements and the context of their perception as seen from their back. The route of their movement through the city appears as a line walked twice, by the girls and by Woueté, then by Woueté and us (viewers and visitors of his installation). In his work, affect and analysis intertwine and appear as modes allowing each other to exist and develop. In Woueté’s work, the back becomes a space for proximity and of protection from identification, and the image space a container for the contradiction of at once being close and keeping a certain distance. Looking at someone’s back while following develops its own dynamics. Does the drive come from the artist tracing someone, or from the person going ahead and who decides not to return the look? All these dimensions complicate the situation as all positions progress and create shifting configurations, keeping the relations between actor, viewer and being viewed in suspense.2 Another notion of suspense appears in Homeless Song 5 (2017), a video work by Kemang Wa Lehulere, part of a larger body of research and artistic experiment created in connection to the work of Gladys Mgudlandlu (1917–1979). Their work has been shown side by side in an exhibition 2  In that regard, see also the work by Michel Klöfkorn, All My Phone Numbers Drowned in Makoko (2015), shown at Kai Middendorff Gallery, Frankfurt am Main, December 2015.

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entitled Bird Song (in Bloemfontein 2015 and Berlin 2017). In Homeless Song 5, Wa Lehulere combines different approaches and formats of solo to split- and double screen; he combines calm cinemascope landscape images with moving takes while wandering around and following someone into the overgrown area, the walls that he has scored a regular pattern on, the remains of houses. He inserts sequences filmed of himself, as he leans against a dark blue wall, with characters in American sign language projected on his bare back (fig. 5). Wa Lehulere’s voice introduces another layer to the location sounds as he reads fragments of texts and letters, pointing at dots on a mental map connecting Cape Town and Gugulethu to New York; he is searching for traces of the painter Gladys Mgudlandlu, called “Bird Lady”, who lived and worked in Gugulethu, a township near Cape Town during high apartheid. He is not the first to look her up, as Elza Miles (2003) and Nontobeko Ntombela (2014) had done considerable research and curatorial work on her earlier. But Wa Lehulere enters a different, physically twisted space. The cursor is blinking on his back, measuring time passing; something will happen soon. Projecting characters onto his own body, inscribing signs into his personal narrative, slows down the act of reading and the sense of movement. It becomes obvious that knowledge production and its transmission is connected to the physicality of the body, its presence, weight and voice; it takes time to get into the viewer and the reader to follow research lines and walks. The knowledge Wa Lehulere speaks about in his work is fragile to the point that it seems unfixed, not collected and safeguarded in archives and libraries. It is a knowledge that hardly materialises; it is in mid-air at risk of disappearing, once the line of corporeal transmission has been deliberately interrupted by political forces. Wa Lehulere speaks about the act of being able to see the knowledge buried in the landscape physically. The landscape does not forget the past3 – people do, with expropriation and forced resettlement and their knowledge and experience being evacuated from transmission processes, as happened to Gladys Mgudlandlu. Research, as Kemang Wa Lehulere understands the task, is about following, picking up resonances and becoming in going back to the physical space, introducing himself into it, affecting the space with his own physical presence and being affected by it. Affects and care become the driving force transformed into a mental process leading to a new body of art work which materialises as a body of its own.

Facing a wall Santiago Sierra, in his series of highly contested performative works, transforms space into a stage; individuals and groups of people are placed in a line to be measured and tattooed or facing a wall or a corner, thwarts the viewer in that there is a literal block on movement. Sierra himself documents the events; his black and white photographs not only record the performances but also aim at an autonomous artistic approach. He maintains a website to present and archive all his activities, performances and exhibitions, and a wide range of catalogues and secondary literature has been published on them (see, for our context, Mackert/Matt 2002; Martinez/Palacio 2003; Schreiber/Luckow 2013; Sileo/Henke 2017). The becoming a line was intended to open up a space directed towards a possible future, something to be taken and 3  See in that regard works by Thabiso Sekgala, Jo Ractliffe, Santu Mofokeng, Abrie Fourie and others.

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brought forward into transition. In Sierra’s work, however, the movement comes to a point of stagnation, as it literally ends at the wall of a museum or gallery. In “Group of Persons Facing a Wall and Person Facing a Corner” (2002) (figs. 6–7), Sierra invokes a reflection on the exclusivity of art institutions, their inherent power structure, expressed in the division between persons looking, art customers and persons being selected, displayed, exposed and looked at. They turn their backs to an audience who pays to be confronted with a reality they would not want to meet outside the walls of an art space. In Sierra’s scenography, everyone – performers and audience – perform and become part of the exhibition. Their individuality, their features, clothes and the discipline it takes to stand still for hours to be looked at, to be seen while looking, serves, according to Sierra, to depict what is usually invisible in an art institution – the display of authority structures. As Sierra said in an interview: “the audience has to produce the meaning of what you don’t see” (Sierra 2008). We do not see their faces, their chests or hands. Everything that we read in them comes from our imagination, our prejudices or our knowledge. We compare them, analyse their features, distance ourselves from them. The display turns the performance into an identity parade, the analy- sis of the setting into a crime investigation. The display reminds me of Seloua Luste Boulbina’s attempt to read Franz Kafka’s short story “In der Strafkolonie” (1919) (In the Penal Colony) as a tableau of colonialism’s cruelties (Luste Boulbina 2008). Sierra’s performance fabricates a sort of magnetic field which intensifies the power relations and mirrors them back into the art world. People being exposed (paid to stay), people watching (paying to stay) and the artist (paid to create this constellation) become players and partners of the same economy, thus dissolving the idea of the artist as the singular producer of an autonomous knowledge, as much as of the audience being reduced to contemplation and impressible passivity. What if art is ready to become a transient space for in‑betweenness opposing the representative framework of the institution in which it is supposed to take place? Sierra exhibits a violence which informs systemically and latently all layers of the political, social and cultural world (which he is likewise part of ). The possibilities for art to speak in any other terms but those of inclusion and exclusion (i. e. of homeless people, veterans, junkies, people with no valid identification papers, sex workers – the people Sierra works with – plus the audience) in a privileged space like a museum or a gallery represents for now an impasse, as (following Michel Foucault) there is no space outside the one we live in. Turning their backs on the audience is an averted confrontational gesture. It questions the dichotomising concept of otherness and of folklore, bringing back the notion of intimacy in relation to visibility. The process of becoming (i. e. transgression and in‑betweenness) is hardly visible – it is internalised, waiting.

Things that quicken the heart Back to my notes and lists and scribbles: “heimweh/fernweh” [homesickness/wanderlust] features on a piece of paper with a few names, [Claire] Denis, [Abderrahmane] Sissako, [Otar] Iosseliani; I scribbled “things that fly” on another; “elephants”; “tendergender”; “difference in indifference”; “Sans Soleil, list”. Some words are incidentally noted down, others written in reverse (to see how the characters look through the paper). Using words as icons or shapes rather than as signifiers is sometimes very liberating. In Sans Soleil (1983) Chris Marker, one of the most influ-

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Fig. 5 | Kemang Wa Lehulere, Homeless Song 5, 2017 (video, 9 min.), still

ential essayistic filmmakers of the 20th century, creates an immense cinematic terrain vague, a decentred geographic space that links the Isle de France to Tokyo, Iceland, Bissau and many other places, history to the present, and the question of things that transport or contain cultural expressions being under constant virtual reshaping (Alter 2006; Lupton 2004; Chris Marker 2014). Each moment of this film is significant, each phrase or sequence articulates a transient line and mediates between different notions of reality. One particular interval, set between two street parade scenes – a sequence showing the carnival in Bissau shortly after independence featuring material shot by Guinean filmmaker Sana Na N’Hada in the early 1970s,4 and a street parade in a Tokyo neighbourhood – has always stayed with me. A gentle voice speaks of Japan in the eleventh century, about lists and the idea of Japanese poetry, while rockets and aircrafts fly across a blue sky; the picture has been reworked and enlarged and the resolution becomes visible in dots and smears. I wonder if Marker structured the editing of his film by assembling sequences as if he had been transposing moving images into lists of things he had collected. The voice goes: He spoke to me of Sei Shōnagon, a lady in waiting to Princess Sadako at the beginning of the 11th century, in the Heian period. Do we ever know where history is really made? Rulers ruled and used complicated strategies to fight one another. Real power was in the hands of a family of hereditary

4  See Filipa César’s artistic research “From Boé to Berlin; A mobile lab on the film history of Guinea-Bissau”, as part of the project “Visionary Archive” at Arsenal Berlin. http://www.arsenal-berlin.de/en/living-archive/ projects/visionary-archive/from-boe‑to-berlin.html. Accessed 15 December 2017. See also Luta ca caba inda. Time Place Matter Voice. 1967-2017, edited by Filipa César, Tobias Hering and Carolina Rito (2007).

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Figs. 6–7 | Santiago Sierra, Group of People Facing a Wall and Person Facing into a Corner, perfomance at the Lisson Gallery, London, October 2002 regents; the emperor’s court had become nothing more than a place of intrigues and intellectual games. But by learning to draw a sort of melancholy comfort from the contemplation of the tiniest things this small group of idlers left a mark on Japanese sensibility much deeper than the mediocre thundering of the politicians. Shōnagon had a passion for lists: the list of ‘elegant things,’ ‘distressing things,’ or even of ‘things not worth doing.’ One day she got the idea of drawing up a list of ‘things that quicken the heart.’ Not a bad criterion I realize when I’m filming […]. (Sans Soleil, 7'56” to 8'48”) (Marker 1983, text list)

I have been writing lines. I walked and followed, shaping a movement towards something that moves before us, and that we follow for some time. It is a reduced description of the cognitive process of reading a book, watching a film, looking at a picture or examining a map – as in Bouchra Khalili’s work Mapping Journey #1 (2008; see Khalili 2010) – and figuring out how to navigate the space in front of us. We follow a movement, we go along with it, or with someone, and we become part of what is moving within a space. To go along with or to accompany someone or something speaks of different subjects acknowledging each other, being together while they move and focus their attention in the same direction, possibly seeing the same things, maybe differently, or seeing other things but from a shared position, and seeing themselves as possible positions within a larger terrain. Abstractly speaking, we find connections and dissimilitudes in that very space before us. A next line guides us to a new one – we connect dots and create meaning out of the material, out of ‘found footage’. Someone always did it before us. We recombine, mix and draw lines. Someone wrote a sentence, someone made a picture, someone turned his back on us while continuing to walk. Someone made a film and mentioned the Japanese court lady Sei Shōnagon. An abstract concept of movements contracted to threads draws a line between before and after, and spans over dots in a shifting geography of human relations. Lists are organised differently; they display and organise a vertical or horizontal coexistence; they interrupt the flow of becoming a line. The becoming a line, entangling and snarling in a three-dimensional space is cut and becomes matter to be edited. The list adds to the line a sense

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of proximity, friction and compassion, a ‘jump-cut’, a flight in a rocket between two scenes at ground level. Each entry stands for its own, but, like a line, is human-made. There are to‑do-lists and do‑not-lists, simple lists of words beginning with the same character, lists of names, or words on the same page. Lists are oriented towards terms, words, syllables, characters, figures and icons, while lines are spatial. A considerable number of artists made lists. Lists are an artistic approach – conceptual lists, sketches instead of formulating whole sentences or forming a complete work. Lists have their very own triviality, concreteness or poetry, their own rhythm and sound, with words standing one below the other, or side by side, autonomous entities, cheek to cheek, some of them connected through invisible strings. A sense of juxtaposed pragmatism and radicalness, of share and coexistence informs the texture of a list. In a list, one plus one is not two (or more), but one plus one. One of my notes says “R. Serra, Verb List (1967–68) –”. I like this very much – it describes artistic procedures, but it also reads like concrete poetry or a manifesto. And it shows Serra’s handwriting, the curves, their regularity, the pressure put on paper. I looked it up again. The second row of four goes: to curve to lift to inlay to impress to fire to flood to smear to rotate to swirl to support to hook to suspend to spread to hang to collect of tension of gravity of entropy of nature of grouping of layering of felting to grasp to tighten to heap to gather

The last verb in the fourth row says “to continue”, converting the end into a new start (see Serra 1967-1968). Artists responded to Serra’s list, creating their lists and inscribing themselves in a

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line of references and annotations (see Kolb 2013). This is what art history is about – seeing the reference lines for there is no new work without a predecessor. Acknowledging the contagion and the transformations taking place and making new autonomous positions possible. The line bridging Santiago Sierra to Richard Serra over a sober formalism is evident, and the cynicism in Sierra’s work is a self-evident response to the current cynical cultural economics.

To be continued Conversion is a key dimension of Brigitta Kuster, Angela Melitopoulos, Tamara Grcic, Guy Woueté and Kemang Wa Lehulere’s decision to pay attention to the facets of experiences and perspectives that are not simply translatable into a common language and then arrive in the world of acknowledgement and representation; they speak instead of acknowledgement as artistic gesture and the source of a movement through which voids and juxtapositions become visible. In a variety of modes, their work informs traces of enactment and possibilities to be visible in the world. Wa Lehulere in his video Homeless Song 5 literally reconstructs Gladys Mgudlandlu’s gestural approach, which again is a gestural approach to movements that have happened in the past and in a particular South African landscape (with the populations, the houses, the birds, the feathers and the leaves). Their work has been displayed side by side, some literally at a 45° angle to each other. This setting not only makes their relationship visible (see Wa Lehulere 2017), but re‑introduces Mgudlandlu’s work in the contemporary South African art discourse anew as much as it positions Wa Lehulere’s art practice in terms of a hardly needed historiography that would bridge some 50 years of oblivion in the international perception. His artistic research reveals a blind spot in contemporary art history, and with it, the many blind spots we do not know exist – with a care for developing a referential vocabulary that is capable of acknowledging relational iconographical connections between past and present on an international, intercontinental and transcultural scale, as a becoming a line.

References Akerman, Chantal. D’Est/From the East (1993). Documentary film. 35 mm, colour, 110 min. Akomfrah, John. Nine Muses (2010). Essay film. 35 mm, colour and b&w, 96 min. Alter, Nora M. Chris Marker. University of Illinois Press, 2006. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism. Ethics in a World of Strangers. W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. Batous, Afraa. Skin (2015). Documentary film. Digital file, colour, 85 min. Burgon, Ruth. “Richard Long. A Line Made by Walking.” Tate Modern London, January 2002, http://www.tate. org.uk/art/artworks/long‑a-line-made‑by-walking-ar00142. Accessed 30 April 2017. César, Filipa, et al., editors. Luta ca caba inda. Time Place Matter Voice. 1967–2017. Archive Books, 2017. Chris Marker: A Grin Without a Cat, exh.-cat. Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 2014. Glissant, Édouard. “For Opacity.” Over Here: International Perspectives on Art and Culture, edited by Gerardo Mosquera and Jean Fisher, MIT Press, 2004, pp. 252–257. Gomis, Alain. Tourbillons/Whirlwinds (1999). Short essay film. 35 mm, colour, 13 min. Gomis, Alain. L’Afrance (2001). Fiction film. 35 mm, colour, 90 min. Grafe, Frieda. Film/Geschichte. Wie Film Geschichte anders schreibt. Brinkmann & Bose, 2004.

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Marie-Hélène Gutberlet Grcic, Tamara. 46 Farben. Institute for Art in Public Space Styria/Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2015. Günther-Peill-Stiftung Düren, editor. Tamara Grcic. Revolver/Archiv für aktuelle Kunst, 2007. Gutberlet, Marie-Hélène. “On Walking.” Shoe Shop, edited by Marie-Hélène Gutberlet and Cara Snyman, ­Jacana Media/Fanele, 2012, pp. 13–21. Gutberlet, Marie-Hélène, and Cara Snyman. “On Film in/on/and Movement – Vom Film in/über/und Bewegung.” Frauen und Film, vol. 67 (special issue Migration), 2017, pp. 137–142. Gutiérrez Rodríguez, Encarnación. “Archipelago Europe: On Creolizing Conviviality.” Creolizing Europe: Legacies and Transformations, edited by Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez and Shirley Anne Tate, Liverpool University Press, 2015, pp. 80–99. Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, 1988, pp. 575–599. Kämper, Birgit, and Thomas Thode, editors. Chris Marker, Filmessayist. Institut Français de Munich/CICIM, 1997. Kane, Cheikh Hamidou. Ambiguous Adventure. Translated by Katherine Woods, Heinemann African Writers Series, 1972. Khalili, Bouchra. Story Mapping, edited by the Bureau des compétences et désirs. Les presses du réel, 2010. Kolb, Lucie. “Vom Schreiben künstlerischer Praxis. Verb List Compilations 1967–1968 & 2010.” In Transition – Darstellungsformate im Wandel, edited by Plattform Z+ ZHdK, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013, pp. 50–54. Küster, Bärbel. “Guy Woueté.” The Space Between Us, edited by Marie-Hélène Gutberlet, Kerber 2013, pp. 28–29. Kuster, Brigitta, and Angela Melitopoulos. “Denkt euch doch selbst was aus! Ein Gespräch zwischen Brigitta Kuster und Angela Melitopoulos über Film und Migration.” Frauen und Film, vol. 67 (special issue Migration), 2017, pp. 73–92. Lupton, Catherine. Chris Marker: The Geography of Memory: Memories of the Future. Reaktion Books, 2004. Luste Boulbina, Seloua. Le singe de Kafka et autres propos sur la colonie. Paragon, 2008. Mackert, Gabriele, and Gerald Matt, editors. Santiago Sierra. Kunsthalle Wien, 2002. Marker, Chris. Sans Soleil (1983). Essay film. 35 mm, colour, 100 min. Marker, Chris. Sans Soleil (1983). Text list at http://www.markertext.com/sans_soleil.htm. Accessed 30 April 2017. Martinez, Rosa, and Ana Palacio, editors. Santiago Sierra: 50th Venice Biennale. Turner, 2003. Miles, Elza. Nomfanekizo, Who Paints at Night: The Art of Gladys Mgudlandlu. Fernwood Press, 2003. Mitchell, W. J. T. “Migrating Images. Totemism, Fetishism, Idolatry.” Migrating Images, edited by Petra Stegmann and Peter C. Seel, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2004, pp. 14–24. Ntombela, Nontobeko Mabongi. A Fragile Archive: Refiguring, Rethinking, Reimagining, Re‑presenting Gladys Mgudlandlu. Thesis in Fine Arts, Wits University, Johannesburg, 2012, http://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10539/13730/Ntombela_%20A%20Fragile%20Archive%20_%20MA%20Thesis%20.‌pdf?sequence=​2. Accessed 20 December 2017. Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession, 1991, pp. 33–40. Rutherford, Jonathan. “The Third Space. Interview with Homi Bhabha.” Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, edited by Jonathan Rutherford, Lawrence and Wishart, 1990, pp. 207–221. Sans Soleil, text list at http://www.markertext.com/sans_soleil.‌htm. Accessed 30 April 2017. Schreiber, Daniel J., and Dirk Luckow, editors. Santiago Sierra: Skulptur, Fotografie, Film/Santiago Sierra: Sculpture, Photography, Film, exh.-cat. Kunsthalle Tübingen, Snoeck, 2013. Serra, Richard. “Verb List”. 1967–1968, graphite on paper, 2 sheets each 10 × 8’. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, https://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2011/10/20/to-collect/. Accessed 30 April 2017. Sierra, Santiago. Website of the artist, http://www.santiago-sierra.com/index_1024.‌php. Accessed 30 April 2017. –. Performance. Tate Modern, 21 April 2008. TateShorts, documentary by Mina Angela Ighnatova, 2018, 5'52”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=​naoYNgnDUl8 (uploaded 30 July 2008). Accessed 30 April 2017. Sileo, Diego, and Lutz Henke, editors. Santiago Sierra: Mea Culpa. Silvana 2017. Téchiné, André. Loin (2001). Fiction film. 35 mm, colour, 120 min.

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Paths Walked T wice von Herz, Juliane, and Steffi Schrauff, editors. Tamara Grcic “outside-here”. Kerber 2012. Wa Lehulere, Kemang. Bird Song. “Artist of the Year” 2017, edited by Deutsche Bank. Hatje Cantz, 2017. Woueté, Guy. “Lines of Wind & Next Time”. Shoe Shop, edited by Marie-Hélène Gutberlet and Cara Snyman, Jacana Media/Fanele, 2012, pp. 68–71.

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MAGGIE O’NEILL

WOMEN, ART, MIGRATION AND DIASPORA

“The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass.” (Adorno 1978, 50)

Introduction and context This paper contributes to the development of ‘migration studies’ as an area of art history and to the ‘migratory turn’ within the discipline. Committed since my undergraduate days to the transformative role of art and the importance of working with artists to conduct ethnographic research as critical theory in practice (O’Neill et al. 2002; O’Neill/Tobolewska 2002; O’Neill 2011), I have developed a way of discussing and reflecting upon this combination of art and ethnography that uses the theory and concept of ‘ethno-mimesis’. In my work, ethno-mimesis is the combination of ethnographic, often biographical research and art/performance. The space of hyphen between ethnography (ethno) and arts-based practice (mimesis) becomes a ‘potential space’ for transformative possibilities (O’Neill et al. 2002; O’Neill 2008). An example of ethno-mimesis is research conducted with a Bosnian community in the East Midlands. Working in the space between art and ethnography in 1999 with artists Bea Tobolewska and Maggy Milner and a Bosnian refugee community, we developed a participatory arts and action research project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board, which sought to tell the story of the Bosnians in Nottingham, through a combination of life history work and photography/image-making. We asked how arts-based and ethnography/life history research might represent women’s stories and foster social justice. This chapter shares and explores this question, drawing upon the critical theory of Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin; it focuses upon two examples of artsbased research undertaken with women migrants and asylum seekers in two ethno-mimetic research projects funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board, called ‘Global Refugees’ and ‘Making the Connections: exile, displacement and diaspora’, and also an example of autobio­ graphical performance by the artist Natasha Davis.

Global Refugees: exile, displacement and belonging (1999–2002)1 We worked with a Bosnian community in the East Midlands and a community arts organisation, dividing the project into four stages: getting to know the community members and discussing 1  Fig. 1 is taken from the exhibition booklet. With thanks to Bea Tobolewska, Maggy Milner, Karen Fraser and Fahira Hasedic.

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Fig. 1 | Good Neighbour. Image: Fahira ­Hasedic and Karen Fraser

ideas for the project and the project design with them; conducting life story interviews; developing arts workshops, facilitated by the artists collaborating on the project, to re‑present life experiences in artistic form; and sharing the work with wider audiences, through exhibitions and festivals, reports and articles in collaboration with community members. The image (Good Neighbour), created by Fahira, expressed thanks to a ‘good neighbour’ who helped the family stay alive when soldiers were looking for Muslims. It was developed as an installation and digitally photographed with the support of artist Karen Fraser (fig. 1). The following text accompanies the image and is situated next to the key. The 28 families in my block of flats held a meeting and decided to protect the three non-orthodox families. To protect my family my elderly neighbour gave me a key to her house. I needed this for three years. Every time soldiers came to find us, we would hide in her flat and she would say to the soldiers: ‘There are no Muslims, they have gone long ago.’

The woman who made this image wrote that her neighbours saved her life by hiding her and her husband in this way. When she had access to resources and flour, she baked the bread pictured in the image to thank her neighbours. Working in partnership and collaboration with artists and migrants, three major themes emerged across our ethno-mimetic work with women migrants: first, the importance of stories and storytelling in life story/biographical research; second, the importance of re‑presenting life stories in visual/artistic form; and third, the importance of working with people as subjects through participatory methodologies (such as participatory action research and participatory arts). The arts have a major role in processes of social inclusion and are vitally important in helping to create spaces for creativity, dialogue and inclusion (Gould 2005). Adorno and Benjamin are useful guides here because of the value they placed upon the arts in keeping critical analysis alive, not only in working through the past, expressed here by the importance placed upon biographical and life story work in our research, but also by producing knowledge through art-making, by telling stories that offer resistance and a challenge to identity

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thinking. Some years ago, I explored the extent to which the work of Adorno could be used by feminists as an aid (not a guide) to the development of feminist thought, arguing that three inter-related concepts were helpful for feminist methods and feminist epistemology: negative dialectics or non-identity thinking; unintentional truth; and Kulturkritik (O’Neill 1999). These three concepts are helpful for thinking through the ‘migratory turn’ in art history and for developing an analysis of ethno-mimetic arts practice on women, art, migration and diaspora, combining stories, visual, performative and poetic representations and working collaboratively, in participatory ways with communities, individuals and groups, so that they can tell their own stories.

Negative dialectics or non-identity thinking Pioneering research by Susan Buck-Morss (1977) and Gillian Rose (1978) highlighted the relevance of Adorno’s work for a generation of scholars, specifically the counter-hegemonic role of non-identity thinking. Negative dialectics involves dialectical thinking as a method to critically analyse society, specifically the prevalent norms and values of society: these have come to legitimize a society which does not correspond to them – they have become lies. Adorno’s aim (influenced by György Lukács and Friedrich Nietzsche) was to address reification in society and culture, for concepts as ordinarily used can mask the truth. The task of the philosopher is to uncover identity thinking and perceive the non-identical (Held 1980). For Adorno, what constitutes the truth is what hides behind appearances. We can approach the truth through the critical oppositional thinking involved in negative dialectical thinking: “Language becomes a measure of the truth only when we are conscious of the non-identity of an expression with what we mean” (Adorno 1973, 375). Reification is for Adorno a social category; it does not originate in consciousness, and so ideology is rooted in the object or the social, not in individual consciousness. The onus for Adorno is on the structure of society, not individual consciousness, though he does not deny the tension between subject and object. The object, not the subject, holds the ‘truth’. Adorno establishes the priority of the object and the mediation of the subject-object; change can be brought about socially only by changing society and art, and critical theory provides the change-causing gesture. Non-identity thinking confronts the partial truth of an object with its potential truth and can ‘rob’ the present of its ideological justification, which prevents true knowledge of societal processes. In previous work, I suggested that Trinh Minh-ha’s film work was an example of negative dialectics in operation. Films such as Surname Viet, Given Name Nam (USA, 1989) uncover identity thinking, celebrate the fragmentary, question the passive acceptance of the status quo and the power of history over the present to engage in feminist non-identity thinking and making (O’Neill 1999, 28).

Kulturkritik Adorno famously stated, “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (Adorno 1995, 34); paraphrasing Bertolt Brecht, he also wrote that the mansion of culture “is built of dog-shit” (Adorno 1973, 366). In his critique of the culture industry, Adorno stressed the mediating role that art and aesthetics play in negating the effects of this industry. It was important to say the unsayable, to

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undercut cultural criticism with dialectical criticism. The culture industry was equated, for Adorno, with the entertainment industry; it demands little in the way of effort, underpinning capitalism as an administered society. In contrast to Brecht and Benjamin, he argued against ‘committed art’ and for ‘autonomous art’ – for example, in the way that Mother Courage demands a change of attitude, whereas autonomous art (such as Picasso’s Guernica and Kafka’s Metamorphosis) compels a change of attitude. A related concept, that of the ‘unintentional’ is important here. For Adorno, art should not be politically committed; rather, it should, through form, present the sedimented truth of society, as unintentional truth – knowledge as non-conceptual objects unfolds in the autonomous work of art (Adorno 1980; Lopez 1999).

Unintentional truth Only by saying the unintentional, the unsayable, that outside language and the mimetic can we approach a ‘politics’ which undercuts identity thinking, criss-crosses binary thinking and remains unappropriated. The artwork is therefore the cipher of the social; art is a product of a society formed through the objective demands of the material, historically given techniques of production, and the subjective playfulness and experience of the artist, and is, for Adorno, at the same time an independent force in society. For Adorno, the function of aesthetics is to reveal the unintentional truths of the social world, to uncover the meaning of objects and preserve independent thinking; analysis of art works is undertaken through a process of immersion (giving oneself over to the work), objectification and dissociation (followed by a critical distancing – neither too close nor too far). This is also, I have argued, a good description of the research process. Society, social issues and social relations are mediated through aesthetic form as content and expressed through the tension between mimesis (Hegelian), on the one hand, and constructive rationality (Kantian), on the other (Osborne 1989; Nicholsen 1997; O’Neill 1999). Buck-Morss describes Adorno’s works as negative anthropology with the aim to “keep criticism alive” (1977, 186). In order to engage with Adorno’s social theory, we need to engage with his aesthetic theory. As I argued in 1999, in order to free up the totalizing power he places on the concept of reification and the concomitant de‑substantialisation of art, which drove him into a ‘one way street’ where only ‘autonomous’ art has transformative, or change-causing potential, we need to rethink the relationship between ideology/knowledge and power; question the totalizing power of reification and look at the myriad ways in which reification operates in social relations alongside power and difference (O’Neill 1999). This would also mean loosening the strictures he places on popular and autonomous art, such that examples of such art will have transformative possibilities and be transgressive and useful in challenging and even compelling social change around sexual and social inequalities. For example, Matthias Kispert’s film No More Beyond is a politically committed documentary film,2 performed across three scenes, focused upon the Melilla fence in northern Morocco, a Spanish enclave where “11.5 km of heavily patrolled triple wire fence separate EU territory from migrants who are trying to enter”. The film is made up of video footage, interviews with migrants, social analysis and commentary. It is an assemblage, possibly a constellation. “One’s sense of self is always mediated by the image one has of the other.” It is an example 2  The film can be seen on Vimeo at https://vimeo.com/131399936.

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of politically committed art that compels a change of attitude, that challenges identity thinking. It is disturbing and hard to watch. An important dimension is the role of the imagination. Nicholsen (1997) calls this “exact imagination” (the combination or integration of “knowledge, experience and aesthetic form”). She talks about how Adorno never gave up hope of social transformation, even though this might only be expressed in art as a non-discursive form of truth. This also means looking at the role of the subject and subjective experience, particularly the imaginary and the imagination. Nicholsen acknowledges Benjamin’s role in this, especially his concepts of mimesis, aura and constellation (Benjamin 1992, 1985). Much of my work with artists and migrant or refugee communities has been concerned with the interrelationship and the mediation between the micrology of lived experience, producing insights into broader structures of power, domination and violence within the context of postmodern times, detraditionalization, the glocalisation (Bauman 2004) of experience and what Stejpan Meštrović (1997) calls “postemotionalism” or compassion fatigue. Meštrović uses Adorno’s thesis about the growth and power of the culture industry, which helps to create and sustain an almost totally administered society; importantly too, places to think and feel are diminishing. In response to suffering we switch off our TVs or turn the page of the newspaper. The sociologist C. Wright Mills argues that the promise and challenge of sociology is to understand the relationship between “personal troubles”, “public issues of the social structure” and the “intersections of biography and history within society” (Mills 2000, 7 f.). In 1999, Kushner and Knox (1999, 417) stated that Britain was “becoming a country committed to asylum without the possibility of entry” and of being a “haven for the oppressed without the presence of refugees”. In 2018 the situation has changed very little: asylum seekers are still ‘outsiders’ with few rights. Indeed, Benhabib (2004) called for an acknowledgement of the lack of the right to have rights, for despite the right to seek asylum being a human right, the right to grant asylum is “jealously guarded by nation states as a sovereign principle” (Benhabib 2004, 68). Denied citizenship, often living in an in‑between space, whilst the asylum claim is being processed or being granted leave to remain for up to five years, asylum seekers must cope with racism, poor living conditions, poverty, the problems of communicating in a new language (for some) and the sorrow and pain that is a part of the experience of seeking exile, the sense of being neither here nor there. One aspect of this pain is the loss of kinship. Many people from Bosnia who made it to Red Cross camps and who were then sent to ‘safety’ in Europe and the USA were separated from family members during this process of removal and relocation. From the community of Bosnians in the Midlands, we found the following examples. An elderly man sent his wife to her sisters in Croatia when war broke out. He later survived the journey to a UN camp in Croatia but was not allowed to stay in Croatia because he did not have the necessary papers. From the safety of the refugee camp in Croatia, he was offered a choice of the USA or the UK. He chose the latter, but he never saw his wife again: she died while the Red Cross in the UK were arranging papers for her to join him. A mother was allowed to go to Sweden because her sister was there, but from the same Red Cross camp in Croatia, her daughter was given the choice of the USA or the UK. She chose latter to be nearer to Bosnia, to be near to where she thought her teenage son was. She had helped her daughter and son leave Banja Luka. Her son was 16 years at the time and he

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travelled alone. They were fearful of what would happen to him, given the atrocities around them. She was eventually reunited with her son in England after three years, and after some time she visited her daughter in Norway and met her grandchildren for the first time. She said: With every war you can only expect the worse. Every war is bringing only unhappiness, killing, destroying, dead innocent people […]. All the families are separated, not one family is living together now […] but now we are not longing for what we had in the past, possessions, houses and belongings. We are longing now for the families that are now in three or four different countries. (O’Neill 2004, 75)

The image Good Neighbours (fig. 1) tells a profound story in visual form, and shares something of the non-conceptual sense of the lived experience of being un‑homed; it also expresses the relational support offered during the early war years before she and her husband could escape into exile and make their migratory journey to the UK. The critique contained in the combination of story and image raises awareness about the process of exile, displacement and belonging, and poses a challenge to identity thinking and reification, whilst helping to produce knowledge and understanding that might lead to social justice outcomes – a better understanding of the complex stories during the war in Bosnia, going beyond binary thinking. Natasha Davis is an artist who has used autobiographical methods in her work. Her performances Rupture, Asphyxia, Suspended and Internal Terrains draw upon her biography of profound displacement – she left Sarajevo on the last possible train during the war – and her travels in exile in Greece, Syria and the UK. Her performances weave and are deeply connected to her bodily memory of displacement, journeys, belongings and becomings. As she writes, “I started developing the material which was later shaped into Rupture, the first part of the trilogy about identity, migration, body and memory – in the summer of 2008 as I was recovering from cancer” (Davis et al. 2013). She goes on to associate the decay of the land where she was born and grew up, the former Yugoslavia, with the decay in her body, the “delicate balance between wellness and unwellness, and what relationship this may have with trauma accumulated through civil unrest, political turmoil, war and displacement” (ibid.). She writes: The Past The past has a taste And a feel in the upper stomach It smells of a large corridor With leather shoes Combined with green dusty Mediterranean rain Sto Morava Mutna Tece plays in the past Apart from that The past is silence And a blue movement In the right hand The past is female It’s a woman, 35 years old With soft dark hair (excerpt from Rupture, Davis et al. 2013, 37)

I have argued that methodologies that incorporate the voices and images of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers through ethno-mimesis and participatory, collaborative research can not only raise awareness about the issues for women but might also produce critical texts that help

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to mobilise change. Ethno-mimesis is founded upon principles of mutual recognition and seeks to speak in empathic ways with new arrivals through narrative and visual texts which counter valorising discourses and the reduction of the ‘Other’ (the stranger) to a cipher of the oppressed, the marginalised and the exploited. Moreover, the arts and culture are profoundly important in processes of inclusion, including the creative regeneration of identities, communities and subjectivities. They are also integral in facilitating cultural citizenship in terms of the right to presence and visibility – not marginalisation; the right to dignity and maintenance of lifestyle – not assimilation to the dominant culture; and the right to dignifying representation – not stigmatisation (Pakulski 1977). Of course, research has also shown how the arts are co‑opted by governments and corporations for instrumental or ‘pragmatic benefits’, for example around social cohesion or to mobilize the arts in redevelopment and for regeneration purposes (Ruane 2018; Becker 1982). A combination of ethnographic research and art-making can help to express or re‑imagine the complexity of loss, exile and dislocation, as well as re‑construction as a dialectical, constellational and relational process and one that looks to creativity and the social role of art as one means of re‑imagining and renewing our social worlds – towards a vision of social justice that upholds human dignity and counters processes of humiliation, instrumental reason and identity thinking. Conducting arts-based research in participatory ways can help to make people’s experiences visible. This kind of creative, cultural, participatory research and arts-based work is inherently linked to discursive, relational and reflexive conceptions of social justice (Hudson 2006). The work described in this chapter illustrates the important role of the arts in processes of inclusion. Developing new forms of consolidation and solidarity and the combination of Participatory Action Research and Participatory Arts as ethno-mimesis is a useful process and practice to argue for the importance of the arts in conducting research on migration, but also in producing knowledge and understanding – art as non-identity thinking, as Kulturkritik and as unintentional truth. The chapter opened with three themes: the importance of stories and storytelling; the importance of re‑presenting life stories in visual/artistic form; and the importance of working with people as subjects through participatory methodologies. A related project illustrates these for a second time. As part of the Making the Connections project funded by the Art and Humanities Research Council (2004–2006), we worked with four community arts projects in four towns and cities in the East Midlands and four groups of asylum seekers/refugees, including women and young people. The project was launched by participants, living in Derby, Nottingham, Loughborough and Leicester, taking a walk simultaneosly in these towns/cities, following a route or map of a favourite walk taken in their home town with another person from the research project – a policy maker, citizen or another artist. The photographer John Perivolaris walked with Jeffer M‑Garib. He describes his walk, starting at Jeffer’s accommodation in Nottingham, stating that “glimpsing Nottingham through Jeffer’s eyes and memories, my view of the city was changed forever” (O’Neill 2015, 81). The walk became a holding space, following the route marked out by Jeffer, for fragments of his biography and memories to emerge in the space facilitated by the walk and the relationship of intersubjective mutual recognition that emerged between the two men. The trees they walk under near his flat

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Fig. 2 | Home Away From Home. Image: Aria Ahmed

remind him of the trees in his grandfather’s village, a wall along the way reminds him of an incident he had witnessed, the murder of a boy and the temporary wall that was made for his execution, a reminder to all witnessing, that this is what would happen if they resisted Saddam Hussein’s rule. In Derby a group of women and men worked with Dr Jamie Bird, a lecturer in Art Therapy (2012), creating an installation that would represent some of their experiences of their journey to the UK, when they were tightly packed into lorries transporting various products. The structure of the installation was covered in fragments of cloth, with images and words, photographs and memories sewn into it. The group named it Home Away From Home (fig. 2). In the exhibition space, people were encouraged to look closely at the covering, enter the structure and imagine this as a route to safety. Some text accompanied the installation said the textile pieces were literally created from peoples’ stories; inside it, the senses were further engaged with the sounds of ports, stations and engines, mixed with narratives of those who had taken this route. A child’s jumper, discarded chocolate wrappers and empty water bottle were placed inside. When I experienced this installation, a quotation from De la Fuente came to mind: Art entails objects (or situations) that have the capacity to draw upon ‘social-psychological associations’ which are heavily compressed and give that object (or situation) an air of ‘transcendence’. Art transcends mundane and routine perception, by compressing experience in the following manner: the magic of art is in the way complex social and psychological stimuli are made to conjoin, a kind of lash up of sensualities. (De la Fuente 2007, 419)

In Nottingham, a group of women, supported by the artists Heather Connelly, Rosie Hobbs and Alma Cunliffe, created a woven map of the places where they were from and their journeys, telling stories using textiles: a key focus of their stories was ‘home’ and ‘belonging’. The textiles,

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Fig. 3 | Homemade. Image: Aria Ahmed

food, recipes and transitional objects had meaning for the women in relation to ‘home’ and led to the emergence of sensuous knowing in the ethno-mimetic process, linked to the images, creativity and home-making woven into the work – Homemade (fig. 3). A sense of home was created and shared in this work. The structure comprised a silk-covered gazebo where people could enter, sit on hand-made cushions placed around the map and listen to fragments of women’s stories being played on a loop. Heather Connelly produced ‘postcards’ with the women, who shared quotations, recipes and images created in the arts/research workshops. The women wanted to create a sensory space to express their senses of belonging and what ‘home’ meant to them. The following quotations from the conversations are printed onto the cards, alongside images made by the women. “I came to this county alone” “Eritrean food and customs make me feel at home. I like to have coffee with my friends […] the ceremony takes time and we like to sit and chat” “I feel at home when I can talk to friends in my own language” “I haven’t seen my Mum for 8 years, she is elderly now. I miss her […] now I have my papers I hope to go and visit her” “At home children are free and neighbours are like family, they take care of children, here we don’t know neighbours” “I have one son who is thirteen in the Cameroon and two younger children with me in England. I miss him every day […] it is too much”

A support worker was also interviewed as part of this project and this was also part of the narratives played as part of Homemade: Women are isolated at home with their children, they are not allowed to work, most women in this group have been through extremely traumatic situations before they came to this country so they are trying to deal with that whilst living in a hostile country […] you can treat people with respect, can’t you?

The printed invitation to the exhibition, in which Home Away From Home and Homemade formed but two of the works made during our project, stated:

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Women, Art, Migration and Diaspora Beyond Borders: Making Connections This trajectory of work builds upon the strong regional work of many artists, community arts organizations, voluntary and statutory sector agencies and researchers working with new arrivals, community groups and the regional making connections network. Our partnership work seeks to better understand the experiences of exile and displacement as well as facilitate processes and practices of inclusion and belonging with new arrivals by encouraging collaboration and exchange of ideas among artists, practitioners, academics, policy makers and new arrivals in the East Midlands. We also examine how the arts – defined in their broadest sense – might help mediate and represent the experience of arriving in a new country and what it means to feel a sense of belonging as well as deliver cultural, social, and economic benefits to new arrivals in the East Midlands region. This includes developing a web site and a data base of exhibiting artists to connect with each another as well as to programmers, schools and regional community and participatory arts organisations seeking artists for their projects and programmes in schools and community settings. Thus highlighting the impact of arts and cultural activity for social policy agendas in participation with new arrivals. ‘A Sense of Belonging’ was launched with a series of guided walks in June 2008 (inspired by and based on a model developed by artist and educator Misha Myers with refugees and asylum seekers in Plymouth between 2002–2006) followed by a series of arts/research workshops led by City Arts, Charnwood Arts, Long Journey Home, Charnwood Arts and Soft Touch. Post walk workshop discussions led to the connecting themes for the development of the arts practice. The arts practice tells of what belonging means to those participating through their experiences and meanings about home, place making, emplacement, friendship, communities, what it is like to live in Nottingham, Derby, Leicester and Loughborough and the perilous journeys people make to seek freedom and safety, the emotional and physical impact of these journey’s, and the experiences of ‘double consciousness’ being ‘hone away from home’. The exhibition also represents the rich cultural contribution migrants bring to the region’s cities, culture and communities.

It is hoped that the arts-based research presented in this contribution through ethno-mimetic texts exemplifies the importance of the ‘migratory turn’ in art practice and art history. The subjective-reflexive feeling (Witkin 1974) compressed in the works represent lived experience through the story-telling capacities of art and art-making, especially so through the ethno-mimetic process that facilitated these works. The representation and production of sensuous knowing through arts-based research (biography, narrativity and art) can raise awareness of the issues that migrants experience and both demand and compel change through performative praxis. The ‘migratory turn’ in art can have powerful consequences for understanding women’s experiences, for a gender-specific analysis of the asylum-migration nexus that supports social justice for migrant women. The combination of art and ethnography might serve to make useful interventions in art, politics and policy by challenging myths and stereotypes (identity thinking) through Kulturkritik and by creating space for unintentional truths to emerge and, in so doing, envision social justice through a “radical democratic imaginary” (Smith 1998). Our work together valued the role of art as a space claimed for voice, for sharing complex stories, as critical theory in practice – in the transformative gesture of art and art-making.

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References Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor, University of Minnesota Press, 1997. –. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E. B. Ashton, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973. Bauman, Zygmunt. Wasted Lives. Modernity and Its Outcasts. Polity, 2004. Becker, Howard S. Art Worlds. University of California Press, 1982. Benhabib, Seyla. The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens. Cambridge University Press, 2004. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Fontana Press, 1992. –. One-Way Street and Other Writings. Translated by E. Jephcott and K. Shorter, Verso, 1985. Bird, Jamie. “Towards Babel: Language and Translation in Art Therapy.” Art Therapy and Postmodernism. Creative Healing through a Prism, edited by Helene Burt, Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2012, pp. 265–294. Davis, Natasha, et al., editors. Performance, Film and Installation. Natasha Productions, 2013. De la Fuente, Eduardo. “The ‘New Sociology of Art’: Putting Art Back into Social Sciences.” Cultural Sociology, vol. 1, no. 3, 2007, pp. 409–425. Gould, Helen. A Sense of Belonging. Creative Exchange, 2005. Held, David. Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas. University of California Press, 1980. Hudson, Barbara. Justice in the Risk Society. Sage, 2001. Kushner, Tony, and Katharine Knox. Refugees in an Age of Genocide. Frank Cass, 1999. Lopez, Silvia. “The Encoding of History: Thinking Art in Constellations.” Adorno, Culture and Feminisms, edited by Maggie O’Neill, Sage Press, 1999, pp. 66–74. Mills, Charles Wright. The Sociological Imagination. Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1970. Nicholsen, Shierry Weber. Exact Imagination, Late Work. On Adorno’s Aesthetics. MIT Press, 1997. O’Neill, Maggie. Adorno, Culture and Feminism. Sage, 1999. –. “Global Refugees: Citizenship, Power and the Law.” Law, Justice, and Power. Between Reason and Will, edited by Sinkwan Cheng, Stanford University Press, 2004, pp. 70–96. –. “Ethno-mimesis, Feminist Praxis and the Visual Turn.” Cultural Theory, edited by Tim Edwards, Sage Press, 2007, pp. 211–230. –. “Transnational Refugees: The Transformative Role of Art?” Performative Social Science, special issue of Forum for Qualitative Social Research, vol. 9, no. 2, May 2008, http://www.qualitative-research. net/index.php/ fqs/article/view/403/873. Accessed 28 May 2018. –. Asylum, Migration and Community. Policy Press, 2010. –. “Participatory Methods and Critical Models: Arts, Migration and Diaspora.” Crossings: Journal of Media and Culture, vol. 2, 2011, pp. 13–37. –, and Bea Tobolewska. Towards a Cultural Strategy for Working with Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the East Midlands. City Arts and Staffordshire University Press, 2002. –, in association with Sarah Giddens, et al. “Renewed Methodologies for Social Research: Ethno-Mimesis as Performative Praxis.” The Sociological Review, vol. 50, no. 1, 2002, pp. 69–88. Osborne, Peter. “Adorno and the Metaphysics of Modernism: The Problem of a ‘Postmodern Art’. ”The Problems of Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin, edited by Andrew Benjamin, Routledge, 1989, pp. 23–48. Pakulski, Jan. “Cultural Citizenship.” Citizenship Studies, vol. 1, 1977, pp. 73–86. Ruane, Joseph. W. Mobilization of the Arts, no date, http://faculty.frostburg.edu/soci/rmoore/Article2.‌htm. Accessed 13 January 2018. Smith, Anna Marie. Laclau and Mouffe. The Radical Democratic Imaginary. Routledge, 1998. Witkin, Robert W. The Intelligence of Feeling. Heineman, 1974. Wolff, Janet. The Social Production of Art. Macmillan, 1981.

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BIRGIT HAEHNEL AND SASCHA REICHSTEIN

ON NOMADIC TEXTILE FORMS – THE AESTHETIC OF NOMADIC TEXTILES

This text focuses on textiles as a medium for nomadic, visual, and haptic language. The artist Sascha Reichstein and the art and textile scientist Birgit Haehnel discuss aspects of textile production and circulation, their patterns, and their many connections. The dialog format was chosen to make the authors’ respective positions clear. Three different works of art by Sascha Reichstein (Daily Production, Guiding Patterns and Textil/e/xile) form the basis for a comprehensive examination of textiles in the context of exodus, migration, and production. How do local and global links interact through the movement of patterns, bodies, and materials which make the interconnection of the world visible? How do local forms of knowledge communicate with global relationships of modern-day textile production? How do patterns, fabrics, and their uses change through movements and connections around the globe? Birgit Haehnel (B. H.): ‘Nomadic’ refers to the mobility of people, their things, and their ideas. It is also an inherent property of textile materials themselves. This is what makes the term so interesting in our discussions. In their theories of nomadology, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari discuss the rhizomatic structures of fabrics. Fabric is bound within its borders, but it can still extend infinitely far either upwards and downwards. Panels of fabric flow in different directions based on their pliability, draping over the body in folds, then spreading out once more over flat surfaces, until they hang, sink down, and are finally rolled up and taken somewhere else. The framework of a woven structure can have holes and breaks – sink marks for the dissolution and re‑organization of totally different kinds of constructions. Deleuze and Guattari deliberately emphasize the play of metaphors surrounding textiles. They stand for a flexible, multi-approach way of thinking, one which differs from the conventional binary and rigid schools of thought in the European tradition (Deleuze/Guattari 1992). Using its many analogical possibilities, textiles could be defined as a cross-over medium. Its strong, bond-creating power outright demands an interdisciplinary approach to the most diverse content-related, practical, and technical connection points. This rhizomatic, or nomadic, material property means that the textile is predestined, as an artistic material, to formulate statements about the many interrelations of the migration process. Textiles are a central part of material daily life for all people, although their roles can differ. A flexible perception of textiles’ qualities and patterns of meaning helps us to understand complex relationships and to overcome assessments that are Euro-centric and gender-discriminatory. For example, needlework has long been, and in the European perspective still is, devalued as a female and pre-modern task. This perspective values that which is defined as men’s art, and portrays industrial developments, particularly in contrast to former colonies, as more progressive (Gardner Troy 2006).

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Daily production Sascha Reichstein (S. R.): These gender norms and hierarchies, however, are not the same across all cultural contexts. There are many cultures in which men weave and sew – for example, in Morocco. The perception of textiles as a medium associated only with women is a Western construction. Now, to get to the nomadic aspect of textiles, I would like to elaborate on my work Daily Production (2008). This uses films, photographs, and installations to explore the production processes and overlapping paths of, on the one hand, lederhosen produced in Sri Lanka for Southern Germany, and, on the other, embroidered fabric produced in Vorarlberg for Nigeria. The materials used in both production processes come from different countries altogether. The industrial production of these regional textiles spans almost the entire world. That movement, as one could call it, thus becomes part of these fabrics. Daily Production is composed of different building blocks and is displayed in different configurations for different contexts. The work itself has no fixed form but is made up of different components and takes a different shape for every exhibition. I see the format of the installation itself as nomadic, meaning it is not fixed, but changes over time. My artwork adjusts to the requirements of each new location and changes its appearance to suit it. B. H.: One component of Daily Production is made up of two video loops, which draw a parallel between the industrially organized embroidery of lederhosen in Sri Lanka, and the machine production of African fabric in Vorarlberg (fig. 1). The softness of the leather as it passes through the hands is placed next to a taut piece of fabric being pulled through a rattling sewing machine – a contrast that dissolves in the close‑up. The camera focuses on hands, machines, and material during the course of production, such as stitched threads, colorful patterns, and fabric surfaces. The video vividly portrays the sharp poke of the needle and the fluid motions of the fingers while they sew, cut, and arrange fabric. The aesthetics of manual work intersects with the aesthetics of technology through a haptic perspective. The uniformity of the workers, who are all dressed in red, and the pace of their individual tasks correspond to the fast rhythm of the machinery and the fabric that jerks up and down through it. Both videos show the production of so‑called traditional textiles for far-away markets. The lederhosen intended for the central European Alps are outsourced to a Sri Lanka Leather Fashion Ltd. factory in Katunayake, Sri Lanka.

Fig. 1 | Sascha Reichstein, Daily Production, 2010/2013, still from the double projection, two HD video loops with sound

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On Nomadic Textile Forms – The Aesthetic of Nomadic Textiles

The sewing machine belongs to the commercial company K. Riedesser G. m. b. H. in Lustenau, Vorarlberg, where so‑called traditional lace is machine-made for Nigeria. From raw material extraction to manufacturing, sales, and consumption, textiles are moved around to keep production costs as low as possible. As they travel, they not only move from low-wage countries to the rich North, but also from the North to the global South. Supposedly traditional clothing native to a particular region turns out to be a product which can be found in different places and which changes under different circumstances. Romanticized ideas of national crafts and exotic, clothed fantasies from foreign lands are contradicted across the board. In this context, the writer and scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak comes to mind. She uses textiles as a central metaphor to reflect on the connections, within both time and space, that exist between textile production and the texture of a society. She sees a relationship between the discursive meaning and textile production, noting that in many texts, metaphors are derived from relevant textile histories. Through colonial expansion, both texts and textile techniques and forms are spread, leading to changes in social structures. The “web of text-tility” (Spivak 1999, 337) which she describes is spun equally from ethnic and gender-specific terms and from the reality of the clothing industry. Recognizing this opens up the power-structuring texture of transnational societies in fashion and design discourse. Spivak names as an example the ambivalent relationships between the elaborate self-styling of wealthy sections of the US‑American population, who visit museums and maintain a critical consciousness, and the exploited workers who produce their clothing (Spivak 1999, 338–347). Linking these two very different spaces allows for new understandings of the axioms of global capital, which are differentiated in gender-specific ways. The feminization of poverty in low-wage countries corresponds to the spaces of womanhood in Europe, which are “closely related to the feminization of consumption and the increase of female workforces in the textile sales and production sector since the 18th century” (Mentges 2004, 571). B. H.: Another video in your installation shows a factory in which both women and men work. How does your work relate to the connections between gender, textiles, and globalization, which Spivak also discusses? S. R.: Daily Production also includes a board, which I found in the Sri Lankan lederhosen factory, and which was the inspiration for the title, that describes work conditions in the global industry as well as the background described above (fig. 2). The board indicates the daily production of each production chain and displays individual performances. Those who produce the most are paid a bonus. This brings in speed, quantity, earnings, and profit. Since the individuals continuously repeat the same motions, they are seen more so as machines performing work that is not (yet) completely industrialized, rather than as craftspeople within a complete manufacturing process. The finished product can never truly be seen as their own work. The activities they perform day in and day out remain mechanical and monotonous, precisely defined and limited within a section of a larger production process. The lederhosen are mass-produced and imported to a Western, industrialized nation, which simultaneously exports traditional African textiles. The production locations are based on the respective requirements of the manufacturing processes. Embroidering more or less the entire surface of a fabric requires an industrial embroidery machine, which requires certain conditions for efficient production: unlimited electricity; a relatively dust-free environment; and precise mechanisms and programming. The workers who

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Figs. 2–3 | Photographs from the series Daily Production, 2010, pigment print on Fine Art Baryta, 34 × 50 cm, framed

maintain the embroidery machines in Austria, and who refine the fabric, are mostly of Turkish origins and/or migrants. They are people who have barely anything to do with what they are producing and may not be able to ever imagine themselves wearing these articles of clothing. Both the lederhosen and the African lace travel a great distance before arriving at the place where they will finally be worn. In the meantime, ‘traditional’ garments now express both local idiosyncrasies and worldwide – one could say nomadic – relationships, reflecting today’s globalized production processes. In this case, it means that the leather for the lederhosen comes from Pakistan or Korea, the threads used to stitch the leather together comes from Germany, while the matching staghorn buttons and the cotton fabric for the Nigerian embroidery come from India. The fabric is dyed either in Turkey or in Vorarlberg. The thread for the embroidery comes from Thailand or China and is dyed in Turkey or Italy. The customers buying the lederhosen can also be described in such global terms. People from Asia or Africa buy them, to dress up for Oktoberfest, for example, and momentarily become part of another culture’s traditions, which were formed and passed down over time through a mature structure with a specific aesthetic. Then they return to their everyday, conventional iden-

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tities (see Neubauer 2010; Egger 2008). Through globalized production, the use of lederhosen has therefore become global, and/or nomadic, blurring the lines between specific regional identities and dress codes. Today, we find ourselves questioning the meaning of tradition. How have we perceived traditions until now? How are traditions constructed, especially as they relate to textiles and/or clothing, and on what basis? B. H.: At this point, we must examine the terms themselves and their history. When we talk about traditions in Europe, we imply that modernity developed through industrialization and colonization. The establishment of a culture of white dominance and its hegemonic gaze is supported by the binary contrast between fashion, and tradition and/or folklore. This cannot be ignored. During colonization, the European power and knowledge apparatus significantly changed the social and cultural systems of the occupied cultures in different ways, making a return to a pre-colonial past, which is expressed in textiles, impossible (Castro Varela/Dhawan 2015, 202). So‑called traditional garments, which include lederhosen but also the supposedly African fabrics, must be re-/viewed according to their discursive functions. In this context, Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger speak of contrived traditions (Hobsbawm/Ranger 1983). As an example, I would like to refer to the exhibition Textile Inspiration. Tribal Art in Dialog with Contemporary Textile Art (2014), curated by Peter Bichler, chairman of the Society for Textile-Art-Research. African and Asian ‘indigenous’, ‘functional’, and ‘ritual’ textiles from the past 300 years were contrasted with Western European contemporary art, which had no intended function (Bichler 2014). This strict separation between art and functional textiles evokes the 19th-century phrase ‘l’art pour l’art’, which elevates artistic creation over the functionality of traditional handicrafts. According to Wolfgang Ullrich, the first use of the term dates back to French art theory under Napoléon Bonaparte. His 1798 campaign in Egypt contributed heavily to the construction of Orientalism. The well-known colonial-political background makes it clear that ‘l’art pour l’art’ also defined France’s supremacy over colonized societies (Ullrich 2005, 124–143). The accompanying self-ethnicization of the European as a superior, ‘white civilization’ is always latent in these productions of meaning. It is problematic that nearly 200 years later, this colonial-era cultural perspective is still in use. S. R.: One aspect that I found interesting in my project was understanding the word ‘tradition’ and its meaning across each different cultural context. Questions about changing traditions within a culture, such as through globally overlapping formal and organizational language, seem unmistakable in today’s tangle of production conditions and connections. Europe’s white gaze loses its power when we take a closer look at ideas of tradition in other continents. What do people in other places understand and experience as ‘tradition’? We could ask, for example, what the relationship between the ideas of tradition and fashion is in Nigeria. What values are tied to these words, values which differ from those in Europe? According to Kerstin Bauer, tradition and fashion have a different relationship with each other in West Africa than they do in Europe (Bauer 2007, 129–204). The rise of Mercedes stars and heating coils as ornaments for these traditional fabrics is not just a question of fashion, but rather the intertwining of tradition and fashion (fig. 3). They are not simply copied; instead, they are removed from their original context and reproduced as ornamental motifs. Mercedes stars are suddenly part of the garishly colored ornamental design language of textiles, rather than enthroned in silver atop the famous cars. The material properties have also changed: the star is no longer made of metal, but of soft, colorful fabric. The shape therefore migrated; it moved into a

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different context, where it took on a new and different form of legibility (see Plankensteiner/ Adediran 2010). In Nigeria, textiles are an important status symbol. Tradition and fashion are not necessarily seen as opposing forces. It is considered traditional to dress a group or party in the same fabric. The cut of the clothing, however – unlike our own understanding of traditional clothing – is left up to individual preference. This means that so‑called traditional fabrics can be combined with a Western-style cut, and still be considered traditional. The patterns on these fabrics themselves are constantly changing. Colors and motifs both vary; a dress might only be worn for a single occasion, and the next event will require new fabric to make a new dress. Change is part of Nigeria’s understanding of tradition. B. H.: The Production of Tradition, the title of another of your videos, which follows on from Daily Production, gets to the very heart of this conceptual reflection on fashion and tradition. By placing these opposing positions on a temporal level, does this video not debunk their evolutionary connection as being European ideology? S. R.: In The Production of Tradition, I once again use video to investigate the production of traditional lederhosen, which was moved to Sri Lanka in the 1980s. Nineteen sequences of still images, presented one next to the other, depict the industrial production of these garments. From the cutting to the final quality control, we watch the dissolution of former local practices, and/or regional characteristics, forms, and systems of workmanship (fig. 4). The organization of the workers in their repetitive, routine activities, as well as the organization of the materials, contradict European ideas of national, artisanal clothing traditions.

Fig. 4 | Sascha Reichstein, The Production of Tradition, view of the video installation at the exhibition Wow! Woven? Entering the (sub)Textiles, Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst und Medien, Graz, 2015

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Guiding patterns S. R.: There are forms, however, which most likely arose independently in different locations, but still very much resemble each other. Most of these are basic shapes that are created by a particular technique or have a geometric basis. I followed these (basic) shapes as a starting point in Guiding Patterns (fig. 5). But I did not explicitly seek out the pattern; rather, it came up to me in

Fig. 5 | Sascha Reichstein, Guiding Patterns, 2013, collage, design for an exhibition

different archival contexts. The starting point for Guiding Patterns was a pattern created by Noémi Raymond for the American company Knoll Textiles in the 1950s. Interestingly, I stumbled upon a very similar pattern on a textile from Peru (ca. 11th century), and another one in a pattern book with Indian fabrics from 1860 (figs. 6–8). The patterns I have brought together here are very similar to each other in structure, but most likely never had anything to do with each other. I base this assumption on the long distances, the different temporal contexts, and the different techniques (probably tie-dye, batik, and screen-print) that separate them. This coincidental creation of similar design languages at different times and in different places, and the resulting connection between their histories, historicizations, and museumizations, are of particular interest to me. Only now, because they have been placed in different collections, can they be put in relation with each other. Using unifying, formal aesthetics as a basis, I researched the backgrounds behind these textiles to historically re‑contextualize the fabrics. In this context, I found special significance in the development of particular displays relating to the temporal and social backgrounds of each textile. For example, using the American fabric by Noémi Raymond as a starting point, I designed and printed my own fabric. From this fabric, inspired by Hans Arp’s decoupages (after 1945), I created a cutting pattern for an object which would question the expansive physicality of textiles. Furthermore, the reference to Arp brings up questions about the place of textile mediums within modern visual arts (Hüben/Scotti 2007).

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B. H.: The meaning of textiles for the development of modern art in the 20th century only recently started being discussed from a cultural-historical perspective (Brüderlin et al. 2013; Meschede/Huelsewig-Johnen 2013; Frank/Watson 2015).1 In numerous exhibitions, it became clear that ornaments on drapery, clothing, and carpets from the former European colonies served as inspiration for classical modernity, as it developed towards abstraction (Hufnagel 2013). The artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, of the Brücke movement, had his tapestry designs woven by Erna Schilling, using batik fabrics as a model for his primitivist design language. Batik fabrics originated in Indonesia, but under European colonialism, they were produced and commercialized by Dutch merchants, especially in trade with West Africa. West African soldiers in the colonial army stationed in Indonesia also brought this textile technology home with them. From then on, they were considered a typical African fabric (cf. Gardner Troy 2006, 65, fig. 37). This kind of influence also took place in reverse. Thus, textiles and/or textile technologies from Europe served as a source of inspiration for the development of modernity in Senegal (LaGamma/Giuntini 2008). In the 1950s and 1960s, alongside the Dakar Art School (École de Dakar 1960–1974), in 1965 Léopold Sédar Senghor founded the Manufacture Sénégalaises des Arts Décoratifs in Thiès (70 km east of Dakar), within the context of the Négritude movement. The artist Papa Ibra Tall took on its leadership, following the French framework. He received an art education in Paris, and brought home tapestry techniques, especially that of Gobelin stitching, as well as looms from the renowned manufacturers Aubusson and Beauvais. The tapestries made in Thiès expressed a new, pan-African consciousness. One well-known example is the wall hanging Couple Royal.2 With his semi-abstract style, Ibra Tall follows the abstraction of Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Fernand Léger, Pablo Picasso, and Le Corbusier. They also had tapestries with expressive motifs made in Aubusson. Tall was interested in the monumental aspect of the old Gobelin traditions, and the motifs of aristocratic imagery as a politically powerful means of representation, as well as the fine-tuned weaving and embroidery techniques which he carried into the African context (Harney 2004). This is a relationship of mutual exchange. In Guiding Pattern, however, you examine basic textile patterns that are in fact developed in different places, independently of each other. So far, we have primarily been discussing the nomadization of shapes and ideas in textiles, and their adaptation and transformation in new contexts of meaning. Sometimes this can be seen even when wandering through European archives. S. R.: Yes, I agree. Archives can be seen as places of exile for collected objects, which are removed from their contexts and set in a different context through archiving. This results in new connections, and textiles can start to stand in as points of connection for people in exile. With regards to the textile pattern in the albums of the Textile Manufacturers of India (1866), I came across the history of the India Museum, which was planned but never completed in 1  See also the research project “Networks: Textile Arts and Textility in a Transcultural Perspective (4th to 17th cent.)” at Humboldt University and “An Iconology of the Textile in Art and Architecture” at the University of Zurich. Trendsetting project series include Total Global at the Museum of Contemporary Art Basel (2000), the exhibition Ornament and Abstraction at the Beyeler Foundation Basel (2001), and The Power of Ornaments (2009) in Vienna. 2  Papa Ibra Tall: Couple Royal, 1966, wool carpet, 222 × 155 cm, Thiès, Collections manufactures sénégalaises des arts décoratifs.

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Fig. 6 | Photography of a Nazca ­textile, 2013, chromogenic print, 18 × 25 cm

Fig. 7 | Photography of a textile by Noémi Raymond, 2013, chromo­genic print, 60 × 90 cm, collection of MoMA, New York (gift of the designer)

Fig. 8 | Photography of a textile pattern from the album Textile Ma­nufacturers of India, compiled by John Forbes Watson, published by the India Office 1866 in London, 2013

London. Through collages, I bring this imagined museum into the urban space. The collage is presented on a display which is based on museum presentation formats of the 1860s, and “openbook” which ensured that as much as possible could be shown within the museum. Today, archives allow us to discover and explore things from other times and cultures, which could have disappeared without an archive. Most of them, however, are greatly lacking in information about the items’ original applications, meanings, and creation. I find the question of the original reason behind why a thing or object ended up the archive, and what the basis for its selection was, to be an interesting starting point for further research. B. H.: During the time of European modernism, for example, costumes and/or clothing from the former colonies were archived and/or placed into museums and traditionalized with conservative values. This process was intended as a bulwark against the rapid social changes taking place in industrialized countries, changes which were also considered progressive at the time. In the third of the three of your works we are discussing here, you examine exodus. Why do you use textiles to approach this topic?

Textil/e/xile S. R.: I worked with refugees who came to Austria from Nigeria, Iran, Afghanistan, and Syria to reconstruct their routes on a world map (fig. 10). Together, we transmitted their routes, and the means of travel they used, into a kind of symbolic language, and transferred it onto a surface as an abstract pattern. The surface is a folding screen made of the many fabric-covered elements that can be found in a room. One part of their story is thus translated into a visual language, which can overcome communication problems and ideological barriers. Each shape which we developed together represents a means of transport (e. g. a truck) and therefore refers to movement. Instability and displacement are represented by the use of the folding screens. In the

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screen’s function as a boundary, it corresponds to escape routes and the state of being on the move. The refugees not only cross countless borders, but also experience the destabilization of boundaries in the private realm. Often, their clothing is the only thing that still offers them protection during their flight. The project Textil/e/xile poses questions on several levels about experiences of exile and exodus and their structural impacts on work, life, and material. In a nomadic sense, textiles represent protection, when all else falls away, or are the only thing brought along when everything else must be left behind. This is tied to textiles’ property of not remaining confined to one particular shape, but adapting to different circumstances through flexible use, whether on the body or on the ground, as needed. A headscarf, for example, can also be used as a blanket or a tent, then serve as a shawl, before being used once again as a headscarf. B. H.: In the project Textil/e/xile, textiles, bodies, and rooms communicate in order to start other forms of dialog during the migration process. Visual perception processes are linked to sensory processes. The surfaces and borders of the mobile textile architectures in the room can be touched. Heidi Helmhold speaks about affect politics in this context. Textiles are related to bodies and promote encounters and approaches (Helmhold 2012). You use the affect politics of textiles to develop a visually readable form of writing that can be experienced haptically and is applied to several folding panels covered in earth-toned fabric (fig. 9). Using a colorful, abstract language, individual fates and individual stories are universalized into an escape route with similar patterns. Instead of horror, fear, and uncertainty, only a single story of departure and arrival is told. Basic shapes such as ovals, diamonds, stars, and squares line up along a black line, which snakes along the room dividers. For one thing, this approach eliminates specific contexts and differences, such as the reasons for the exodus, politics, and hierarchies. It also removes the discriminatory prejudices or stereotypes that have been heavily conveyed by the press. The topic is literally present in the room, and thanks to the bright colors, it demands dialog between the variously affected groups. S. R.: Reconstructing the routes with each group stirred up emotions, but the participants all spoke freely and openly about them. At the end, they were all proud to see part of their story represented in a positive way. When the exhibition opened in Pischelsdorf (Steiermark), there was a reception with the local population, the mayor, and the new arrivals. This offered a constructive platform for residents to meet their new neighbors without resentment. B. H.: The potential for affect politics lies in sensory, tactile perception. In a sense, it is a strategy of re‑territorialization, of re‑appropriating space through communication. The translation of uncertainty, risks, and dangers into a textile writing system allows experiences to be experienced gently, dispels hard stances, and paves the way for greater security in a world that is still foreign for refugees. Michael Polanyi suggests that artistic work with textiles is based on “tacit knowing” (Polanyi 1966, 17). It accompanies any intellectual perception by always incorporating the environment. The spatial media cause a spatial exchange through the emotions triggered in the body. Heidi Helmhold explains: Clothing modifies the space taken up by the body, carpets raise up furniture and choreograph rooms, wall hangings correspond with parts of walls […] flags and ribbons create wind- and air spaces through acoustics. These spatial capabilities mean textiles can be defined as blatant, ephemeral architecture, which are not intended to be permanent. (Helmhold 2012, 19)

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Fig. 9 | Documentation photo of Textil/e/xile, two paravents, 2016, collaborative work with refugees arriving from Iran, Afghanistan, Syria and Nigeria in Pischelsdorf, Austria

Fig. 10 | Photograph documenting the collaboration with refugees in Pischelsdorf, Austria, in summer 2016

Textiles are “part of emotional spatial strategies” (Helmhold 2012, 20). They communicate intensively with bodies, creating corporal knowledge. Through deliberate reflection, this corporal knowledge can be used for the express purpose of appropriating architecture and space in dialog. This corporal intelligence, however, is rarely considered in the production of knowledge. Textil/e/xile purposely connects writing symbols and materiality as the language of mediation. Unlike the printed word, the abstract symbols are based in textiles. The haptics of the textile symbols correspond to a “somatic marker” (Damásio 2010, 16), which supports communication. Unlike with immovable stone architectures, mobile voices can be created in the room through the shifting folding screens, which can be seen as tangible movement scores (Helmhold 2012, 28). Thus, the installation creates another dialog on migration, and therefore also a new form of knowledge. S. R.: I think “tangible movement scores” is a nice way to describe the project, since it expresses exactly what the folding screens, as well as the textiles, represent as materials. The project brings together the multi-dimensionality of the stories represented and of the folding screens themselves, as well as the idea of materials being imbued with that nomadic property. Nomadic in the sense that the folding screens themselves are collapsible and movable and can be taken anywhere we ourselves move to. Unlike textiles, a house made of stone is static, tied to its location, and must be left behind when it can no longer be inhabited. Architecture made of bricks or concrete serves as a stable shelter, provides safety, and protects.3 Textiles are used within the living space’s interior. However, for many, reality is different. Not for the first time in human history, many people find themselves moving elsewhere, and the nomadic principle, the principle of being in motion, in its various manifestations, is once again broadly impactful. The tent cities

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of people in exile are now found not only in Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, or Africa, far removed from us. They have reached us and become a reality we can see from our own doorways. B. H.: This reminds me of the Bauhaus artist Anni Albers, who fled to America during the Nazi regime. In the 1950s, she described the nomadic aesthetics of textiles in contrast to rigid, fixed, and location-bound stone architecture: “They can be lifted, folded, carried, stored away and exchanged easily; thus, they bring a refreshing element of change into the now immobile house. The very fact of mobility makes them the carrier of extra aesthetic values” (Albers 1957, n. p.). Your folding screens speak to this nomadic quality, since they are resonant bodies that can be folded away, or a movement-responsive medium (Helmhold 2012, 9–32). The removal of rigid spatial structures and static loads can stimulate the motion of the body and soul. Textiles transmit haptic interior security. The essentially structural principles that relate the work of building and weaving could form the basis of a new understanding between the architect and the inventive weaver. New uses of fabrics and new fabrics could result from a collaboration, and textiles, so often no more than an afterthought in planning, might take a place again as a contributing idea (Albers 1957, n. p.). In this sense, your work also shows the productive collaboration of textiles with architectonic elements as a corporal form of communication. S. R.: The path, the escape from one place to another, is also a phase in the plan, a step in a transformation. This sense of the unfinished, full of uncertainty but also of possibility, predestines textiles to be a symbol and metaphor for the mobility of people, with their nomadic relationships, in the sense of diverse and complex connections. It points to a globally intertwined world on many levels, with different consequences depending on geopolitical relationships. Maybe textiles are currently of particular interest in art because the world now finds itself in a phase of extreme instability. In my work, I am particularly interested in how these connections between aesthetics, cultural overlaps, and the intertwining of the local and the global relate to the field of textiles.

References Albers, Anni. “The Pliable Plane: textiles in Architecture – Perspecta.” The Yale Architectural Journal, vol. 4, 1957. Abridged and reprinted as “Fabric. The Pliable Plane.” Craft Horizons, vol. 18, July-August 1958, no page numbers, http://www.albersfoundation.org/teaching/anni-albers/texts/#tab4. Accessed 20  January 2018. Appadurai, Arjun. The Social Life of Things. Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge University Press, 1986. Bauer, Kerstin. Kleider und Kleidungspraktiken im Norden der Côte d’Ivoire. Geschichte und Dynamiken des Wandels vom Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zur Gegenwart. Beiträge zur Afrikaforschung. LIT Verlag, 2007. Bichler, Peter. Interview on the exhibition Inspiration Textil. Tribal Art im Dialog mit zeitgenössischer Textilkunst in the Künstlerhaus, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=​jwXrRCNzYMk. Accessed 16 April 2017. Brüderlin, Markus, et al., editors. Kunst & Textil. Stoff als Idee und Material in der Moderne von Klimt bis heute, exh.-cat. Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2013. Castro Varela, María do Mar, and Nikita Dhawan, editors. Postkoloniale Theorie: Eine kritische Einführung. transcript, 2015. Damásio, António R. Descartes’ Irrtum. Fühlen, Denken und das menschliche Gehirn. List Taschenbuch, 2010. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Tausend Plateaus. Kapitalismus und Schizophrenie. Merve, 1992.

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On Nomadic Textile Forms – The Aesthetic of Nomadic Textiles Egger, Simone. Phänomen Wiesntracht. Identitätspraxen einer urbanen Gesellschaft. Dirndl und Lederhosen, München und das Oktoberfest. Utz, 2008. Frank, Rike, and Grant Watson, editors. TEXTILES: OPEN LETTER – Abstraktionen, Textilien, Kunst, exh.-cat. Museum Abteiberg, Sternberg Press, 2015. Gardner Troy, Virginia. The Modernist Textile. Europe and America 1890–1940. Lund Humphries, 2006. Harney, Elizabeth. In Senghor’s Shadow: Art, Politics, and the Avant-garde in Senegal, 1960–1995. Duke University Press, 2004. Helfrich, Kurt G. F., and William Whitaker. Crafting a Modern World: The Architecture and Design of Antonin and Noémi Raymond. Princeton Architectural Press, 2006. Helmhold, Heidi. Affektpolitik und Raum. Zu einer Architektur des Textilen. Walter König, 2012. Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, editors. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge University Press, 1983. Hüben, Rainer, and Roland Scotti, editors. Hans Arp – Poupées. Steidl, 2007. Hufnagel, Florian, editor. Marokkanische Teppiche und die Kunst der Moderne, exh.-cat. Pinakothek der Moderne, Neue Sammlung – The International Design Museum Munich, Arnoldsche Art Publishers, 2013. Jefferies, Janis. “Midnight’s Children: Salman Rushdie and the Translations of Hybridity in the Artworks of Zarina Bhimji, Hew Locke and Yinka Shonibare.” Postcolonialism and Creativity. Reinventing Textiles, edited by Paul Sharrad and Anne Collett, vol. 3, Telos, 2004, pp. 1–14. LaGamma, Alisa, and Christine Giuntini, editors. The Essential Art of African Textiles – Design Without End, exh.cat. Metropolitan Museum of Art New York, Yale University Press, 2008. Mentges, Gabriele. “Mode. Modellierung und Medialisierung der Geschlechterkörper in der Kleidung.” Handbuch Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung. Theorie, Methoden, Empirie, edited by Ruth Becker and Beate Kortendiek, Springer, 2004, pp. 570–576. Meschede, Friedrich, and Jutta Huelsewig-Johnen, editors. To Open Eyes: Kunst und Textil vom Bauhaus bis heute, exh.-cat. Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Kerber, 2013. Neubauer, Andreas. Wiesenleut. Bavarian & Others. Eigenverlag, 2010. Plankensteiner, Barbara, and Nath Mayo Adediran, editors. African Lace: eine Geschichte des Handels, der Kreativität und der Mode in Nigeria, exh.-cat. Museum für Völkerkunde Wien, Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien and National Commission for Museums and Monuments, Nigeria mit Unterstützung der österreichischen Stickereiwirtschaft, Snoeck Publishers, 2010. Polanyi, Michael. The Tacit Dimension. Garden City, 1966. Reichstein, Sascha. Daily Production. Tradition als Remake. Edition Angewandte, De Gruyter, 2015. –. Be my Guest. Fotohof Edition, 2006. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of a Vanishing Present. Harvard University Press, 1999. Ullrich, Wolfgang. “L’art pour l’art. Die Verführungskraft eines ästhetischen Rigorismus.” Was war Kunst? Biographien eines Begriffs, edited by Wolfgang Ullrich, Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, 2005, pp. 124–143.

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COSMOPOLITAN NODES AND VECTORS Otto Koenigsberger’s Exilic Networks in India

Introduction This chapter considers Otto Koenigsberger’s unusually successful exilic career in India, investigating how an exiled architect with little professional experience before arriving in the then-colonised country became Federal Director of Housing of the newly independent nation only nine years later. Building on studies of exiled artists that have revealed networks to be an essential contributing factor to professional achievement (Dogramaci/Wimmer 2011, 15), Koenigsberger’s career serves as a case study of artistic exile and networks. As well as demonstrating that networks were crucial to his success, this chapter also investigates the locations where the exilic networks were built. It explores how the networks gained traction, arguing that, much more than his individual talent, it was the specific constellation of people and places he was connected to that was decisive in his rise. Not only does this shed light on the workings of exile, it also draws attention to Bangalore, and by extension the princely state of Mysore, as a key factor in Koenigsberger’s career. By examining Mysore State through the very specific lens of Koenigsberger’s reconstructed exilic networks, the marginalised position of the princely states in the subcontinent’s historiography is revised. While it is not possible to make generalisations or develop theories from a single case study, Koenigsberger’s example shows that his active and sustained engagement with a variety of figures in Bangalore enabled him to develop diverse networks that transcended disciplinary and geographical boundaries. Rather than impacting his architectural approach, although some may have done this to a lesser extent, the networks opened doors to commissions locally, regionally and eventually nationally. Otto Koenigsberger (1908–1999), a polymath trained in architecture and town planning at the Technische Hochschule Berlin by Hans Poelzig and Bruno Taut, is widely respected for his progressive work on architecture, housing, planning and education in the ‘Global South’. Based in London from 1951, Koenigsberger was a cofounder of the Department of Tropical Architecture at the Architectural Association, becoming its director in 1957. Later he was director and professor of the Development Planning Unit at University College London and an adviser to the United Nations, the World Bank and national governments. His Manual of Tropical Housing and Building Design: Climatic Design, which he co-authored with T. G. Ingersoll, Alan Mayhew and Steven Vajk Szokolay in 1974, is still ubiquitous in many architecture schools around the world. Committed to trying to improve the living standards of the urban poor, Koenigsberger made significant contributions to the field of low-cost housing, such as the “roof loan scheme” in Ghana, which was based on the principle of aided self-help, as well as the legalisation and upgrading of squatter settlements and ‘slums’. His groundbreaking approach to urban planning, best summed up in the “action plan-

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Fig. 1 | Otto Koenigsberger (centre) with his team at the Public Works Department, 1948

ning” concept that he articulated in 1964 (Koenigsberger 1964), was among the first to provide an alternative to the static master plan model in the rapidly growing cities of the developing world. While this list of Koenigsberger’s professional achievements is impressive and demonstrates his work’s global reach, it excludes the formative part of his career, which was spent in exile from National Socialist Germany in Egypt, Switzerland and India from 1933 to 1951. His time in exile in India, during which he engaged deeply with the country’s built environment through numerous architecture and town planning projects, as well as teaching and publishing, substantially prepared him for his later roles. Through the projects he undertook and the networks he constructed, Koenigsberger became a key figure in the post-Independence Indian architectural scene, one that latterly intersected with developing global networks in architecture and planning, such as the UN (fig. 1). In contrast with many migration histories, Koenigsberger’s exile in India is a narrative of success: 15 years after being forced to leave his native Germany by the political, racial, cultural and economic persecution enacted by the fascist government, in 1948 Koenigsberger was appointed Director of Housing of the Federal Republic of India – the highest governmental position for an architect or town planner in the country – by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. As Regina Göckede points out, in many cases architectural historians have regarded periods of exile in ar-

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chitects’ careers as anomalies. Often contained in subordinate clauses or banished to footnotes, only rarely have whole paragraphs or chapters been dedicated to an architect’s work in exile (Göckede 2005). One reason for this is that the exiled architects were often unable to maintain the success of their pre-migration careers and were forced to completely reorient themselves abroad. Conversely, Koenigsberger established his career in exile in India, building up a foundation of diverse expertise that would prove crucial when he returned to Europe in 1951. Unlike the three Bauhaus stars Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer, whose international standing enabled them to continue their stellar career trajectories while in exile, Koenigsberger initially had little reputation to capitalise on. Although his fledgling career in Germany had shown promise, the six years of rupture that began with his “dismissal as a Jew”1 from his position in Prussian government service as an architect in the University Building Department in 1933 did little to consolidate it.2 It was only after his arrival in Bangalore that he was able to begin building a professional base from which he could develop a career. Koenigsberger’s career in exile is certainly not typical; however, it is precisely this unorthodoxy that makes it a valuable case study (fig. 2).

Fig. 2 | Otto Koenigsberger (centre), Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru (centre), Minister of Health Rajkumari Amrit Kaur (right), discussing prefabricated housing for ­refugees at the Government Housing Factory, New Delhi, 1950 1  Otto Koenigsberger to Julius Posener, 5 February 1991 (Baukunst Archiv der Akademie der Künste, Berlin). 2  During this time Koenigsberger worked as an assistant to the archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt, first in Cairo, and later in Switzerland, where he spent 18 months recovering from tuberculosis. Based on his research in Egypt he completed his doctorate at the Technische Hochschule Berlin with a dissertation entitled Die Konstruktion der Ägyptischen Tür [The Construction of the Egyptian Door]. In a precarious financial and professional situation, he also undertook small-scale freelance projects as an architect and provided the illustrations for a physics textbook.

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Fig. 3 | The Gneisenau ship that took Koenigsberger from Europe to India

On 12 April 1939, Koenigsberger arrived in Bangalore (now Bengaluru) on a train from Madras (now Chennai). He had travelled from Germany through Switzerland to the United Kingdom, where he had sailed from Southampton to Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) on the Gneisenau, a German ship that flew the swastika and segregated the passengers (fig. 3) – a group of mainly Jewish refugees, including Koenigsberger, en route to Colombo and Shanghai, and a group of Nazi writers on their way to Japan.3 After six years of attempting to establish a safe and sustainable living for himself in exile in Europe and North Africa, the journey to India marked a definitive break, and for Koenigsberger the accompanying conditions underlined that. To his mother, who was about to embark on a similar passage, albeit one to the USA, he wrote: “I wanted to ‘gently prepare you’ that the swastika flag under which you will cross the Atlantic will not be just a formality. Perhaps it is even good to be given one final vivid demonstration of why one has emigrated.”4 After a short stay in Colombo he took another ship to India, and finally the train to Bangalore, where he was met at the station by two rather disparate figures: the Public Works Department

3  Otto Koenigsberger to Käthe Koenigsberger, 7 April 1939 (Koenigsberger Papers/Jewish Museum Berlin). 4  Otto Koenigsberger to Käthe Koenigsberger, 7 April 1939 (Koenigsberger Papers/Jewish Museum Berlin). English translation by the author. The German original reads: “ich wollte Dich nur ‘schonend darauf vorbereiten’, dass die Hakenkreuzflagge, unter der Du über den Atlantik fahren wirst, nicht nur eine Äusserlichkeit sein wird. Vielleicht ist es sogar ganz gut, auf diese Weise noch ein letztes Mal eindringlich vorgeführt zu bekommen, warum man ausgewandert ist.”

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(PWD) assistant architect Venkoba Rao and Lady Raman – wife of C. V. Raman (1888–1970), Nobel-prize winning physicist, former director of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore and friend of Koenigsberger’s maternal uncle Max Born.5 The convergence of a refugee architect from Berlin, a mid-level civil servant at the PWD, and the wife of India’s most esteemed scientist on a railway platform in Bangalore, the administrative capital of the princely state of Mysore, serves as a pertinent example of the specific case of Koenigsberger’s exile. For an ambitious young architect such as Otto Koenigsberger, it was a fortuitous place to be.

A location of transnational modernity: The princely state of Mysore In Baumgartner’s Bombay, Anita Desai describes a scene in the late 1930s where the main character, Hugo Baumgartner, has just explained to a Jewish woman in a café in Venice that he is leaving Europe for India: “‘India!’ It had the expected effect. The newspaper was lowered, her face appeared, looking suspicious. ‘But whoever goes to India? If you are not a sailor?’” (Desai 2012, 62). Koenigsberger had also had reservations about migrating to India; he was concerned about the effects of the climate on his health and the terms of the contract he had been offered were not as good as they might have been: The starting salary is 34 £. St. (English £), slowly increasing to 64 £. St. The outward journey – 2nd class – is paid for (with 1st class train travel in India). A little over a month of holidays per year, which means a three-month trip to Europe every third year. That is not much. What is important is that I would have the right to build for private clients. What attracts me to the Indian job is not the conditions but the possibility to work on large architectural projects.6

Koenigsberger was aware that Mysore State, and Bangalore in particular, were growing rapidly, and that there had recently been a spate of constructing public buildings. In India he saw a chance to practice architecture, and Mysore State would be his proving ground. Because of its particular governance model – it was a princely state – and its industrial, educational and administrative ambitions, Mysore State was especially fertile in professional opportunities. These would not have been available to Koenigsberger in other parts of India. Through their determined focus on British India, studies of colonial and modern South Asia have substantially neglected the role of the princely states in the history of the region’s emergent states and societies – even though such states covered over 40 % of the land and governed around 35 % of the population. Moreover, in contrast to Bengal, which has long been historically canonised as a site of indigenous economic, cultural and political modernism, the princely states, each ruled by a local monarch and with a degree of independence from the British Government of India, have been portrayed as backward (Copland 2002; Ikegame 2013). The princely state of Mysore provides a compelling case against this. I propose that Mysore was a pioneering location 5  Otto Koenigsberger to Käthe Koenigsberger, 12 April 1939 (Koenigsberger Papers/Jewish Museum Berlin). 6  Otto Koenigsberger to Ludwig Borchardt, 13 December 1937 (Swiss Institute Archive). English translation by the author. The German original reads: “Das Anfangsgehalt ist 34 £. St. (engl. £) mit langsamer Steigerung bis auf 64 £. St. Hinreise 2.Kl. bezahlt (mit 1.Kl. Eisenbahn in Indien). Urlaub etwas über ein Monat pro Jahr, d. i. praktisch, jedes dritte Jahr ein dreimonatiger Europaurlaub. Das ist wenig. Wichtig ist, dass ich das Recht hätte, privat zu bauen. Was mich an der indischen Sache locken würde, wären nicht diese Bedingungen, sondern die Möglichkeit, an grössere Bauaufgaben heranzukommen.”

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Fig. 4 | The princely states (white) accounted for over 40 % of Indian territory. Mysore State is located in southern India

of modernity, its interstitial political position enabling spaces of transnational negotiation and local cooperation to emerge. These spaces proved crucial to the exilic career of Otto Koenigsberger as they supported the development of networks that led to architectural and urban planning commissions on local, regional and national scales (fig. 4). During the 18th century, Mysore was “arguably the strongest antagonist of the British” on the Indian subcontinent (Ramusack 2003, 67). It was also a site of proto-industrialisation, flourishing as a weaving, silk-dyeing and military centre, boasting international trade relations, commercial crops and increased state control at a local level with trends towards military centralisation and administrative modernisation before the final Anglo-Mysore War in 1799. Under British rule, Mysore State emerged as a model for industrial, administrative and economic development with hydroelectric stations, steel plants and diverse factories. It was the first state in India to introduce a representative assembly, provide electric power to rural areas and establish a compulsory education programme. Many of these developments took place following the 1881 restitution of power to the Wodeyar dynasty, with appointed dewans, or first ministers, effectively running the state government. Under the centralised power of successive ruling dewans, Mysore State earned a reputation as a model for good governance, and was the only princely state to which princes were sent

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Fig. 5 | Dewan Mirza Ismail (second from left), C. V. Raman (centre) and Max Born (second from right) with colleagues at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, 1936

for administrative training (Manor 1975). This administrative success, combined with a commitment to progress through industrialisation and education, earned Mysore increased independence from the British: although it was within the British Resident’s remit to issue Mysore State official ‘advice’ that had to be obeyed, in 1920 the British in effect stopped interfering in the running of the state (ibid.). The early to mid-twentieth century in Mysore State was dominated by the rules of two likeminded dewans: Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya (1861–1962) and Mirza Ismail (1883–1959). During his tenure in the Mysore government, from 1912 to 1919, Visvesvaraya, an engineer, was instrumental in setting the state on the industrialisation-based modernisation course that came to characterise it. Under the motto “industrialise or perish”, he instigated large-scale industrial projects in rural areas7 and encouraged private investment in the state (Ramusack 2003, 200). He also spearheaded the ‘Mysore for Mysoreans’ or Swadeshi campaign that encouraged the local production and consumption of goods, products and services. Visvesvaraya’s aim was “to lay a firm foundation for future progress and to introduce a civilised life of the modern type among our people” (Visvesvaraya 1960, 79). More so than his mentor Visvesvaraya, Dewan Mirza Ismail enjoyed “almost autocratic powers” during his tenure from 1926 to 19418 and enthusiastically continued Visvesvaraya’s Swadeshi drive. His vision of a strong, autonomous Mysore State did not prevent him from identifying with the Indian independence movement (fig. 5). Indeed, Ismail, who was in favour of a decentralised, free India of federal states (Hettne 1978, 55), maintained ties with the Congress Party, the leading organisation in India’s independence movement, and was a supporter of Mohandas Gandhi, who visited Mysore in 1927, 1934 and 1936.

7  These include the Krishna Raja Sagara Dam across the Cauvery River and the Mysore Iron and Steel Works in Bhadravati, as well as industry-fostering institutional infrastructure that included the State Bank of Mysore (1913), the Mysore Chamber of Commerce (1916) and Mysore University (1916). 8  Lieutenant Colonel J. H. Gordon, Resident in Mysore, to Sir Kenneth Fitze, Secretary to his Excellency the Crown Representative, Simla, 1 January 1941 (British Library, Indian Office Records, IOR/R/2/42/393).

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Constructing interdisciplinary networks to establish a career When Koenigsberger arrived in Bangalore and took up his position at the Public Works Department, Ismail was his supervisor, and Koenigsberger was clearly worried about the extent of his influence: “The dewan seems to be a little dictator. Everything revolves around him, every little thing passes through his hands. Building is his special love. I will only find out later if the enthusiasm that everyone here has for him is real.”9 However, a respectful, though challenging and intense, relationship developed between Koenigsberger and Ismail, who became a key node in Koenigsberger’s networks in India. Rather than arriving to an uncertain situation, from the outset Koenigsberger had a professional position in Bangalore that granted him access to a diverse range of social spheres. He was able to target his networking to further his career in ways that had not previously been possible. Before Koenigsberger arrived in Mysore State, familial networks had played a powerful role in negotiating his exile. It was his maternal uncle Max Born and the family friend Ernst Maas who helped secure Koenigsberger his position with the archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt in Egypt, while the Rubensohn family helped him escape from Berlin to Switzerland before he travelled to India. Indeed, it was a family connection too that led to Koenigsberger’s appointment as Government Architect of Mysore State. In late March 1936, when working with Borchardt in Egypt, Koenigsberger met Max Born at the Suez Canal for a day. Born was returning from a six-month stay in Bangalore, where he had been teaching at the IISc, then under Raman’s directorship. Ambivalent about returning to Europe, he had been so impressed by the “beautiful” (Greenspan 2005, 207) time he had experienced in Bangalore that, when the dewan of Mysore asked Born about a non-English architect to help with an extensive building programme for the state, he recommended Koenigsberger (ibid.). Undoubtedly, Max Born’s friendship with the Ramans led to Lady Raman coming to meet Koenigsberger at the railway station. However, as he settled into Bangalore, Koenigsberger actively began building up his own networks. He made visits and attended parties with the aim of establishing himself within the Bangalore social circuit: “Cocktail parties are practical – they only last an hour from 7 till 8, one stands around, drinks, eats delicious appetisers and gets to know a lot of people.”10 Beyond cocktail parties – and the convivial afternoon teas – Koenigsberger also made a point of joining professional organisations and clubs in order to expand his network and get to know people who might prove useful in his goals of building up a private practice and helping others escape Germany:

9  Otto Koenigsberger to Käthe Koenigsberger, 24 May 1939 (Koenigsberger Papers/Jewish Museum Berlin). English translation by the author. The German original reads: “Der Dewan scheint hier ein kleiner Diktator zu sein. Alles dreht sich um ihn, jede Kleinigkeit geht durch seine Hände. Der Bauerei gilt seine besondere Liebe. Ob die Begeisterung, die alle für ihn zeigen, echt ist, werde ich wohl erst später merken.” 10  Otto Koenigsberger to Käthe Koenigsberger, 24 April 1939 (Koenigsberger Papers/Jewish Museum Berlin). English translation by the author. The German original reads: “Cocktailparties sind praktisch, dauern nur eine Stunde von 7 bis 8, man steht herum, trinkt, isst kleine Leckerbissen und lernt viele Menschen kennen.”

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By attending national events, such as the All India Economic Conference, which was held in Bangalore in 1940, Koenigsberger was able to make contacts beyond the boundaries of Mysore State: “the place is full of interesting people who are worth meeting,” he wrote, adding that he hoped that Bangalore would host more such conferences.12 A tour of North India, paid for by Mysore State government, introduced him to established European architects such as Henry Medd, George Goldstraw and Claude Batley, as well as other intellectual, political and cultural figures – for example, the art historian Stella Kramrisch, the poet Rabindranath Tagore, the political secretary V. Narahari Rao and Dewan Bahadur K. Ramaswamy. In addition, Koenigsberger’s position as a non-British foreign expert within Mysore State government gave him access to all sorts of social realms (classical Indian dance through Bissano Ram Gopal, for example). The public-private partnerships that funded many of the building projects in Bangalore and Mysore also introduced him to Mysore State’s moneyed elite, which included figures such as M. N. Krishna Rao (Mysore State’s finance minister and acting Dewan). Among his friends were Lady and C. V. Raman, Louise Ouwerkerk (a university professor in Travancore), Shanti Rangarao (the director of the Central College for Women, Nagpur), the Van Ingen family (taxidermists), Robert Heilig (a doctor employed by Mysore State), Philip Spratt (a journalist), Peter Wright (a social activist and educator) and Vikram Sarabhai (a physicist at the IISc). Koenigsberger was able to undertake his socialising from the comfort of a familiar domestic environment. Until 1946, he shared a home with the Brinitzers – a family of exiled Jewish doctors from Hamburg (the mother a gynecologist, the father a dermatologist and the son a general practitioner). Walter Brinitzer, who was a similar age, became a very close friend. Far from sealing Koenigsberger into an expatriate microcosm of German Jewish culture, their bungalow provided him with a secure base from which to negotiate the challenging terrain of working in a foreign culture. After a day spent inspecting building sites across Bangalore, delegating tasks to colleagues at the PWD, meeting prospective clients and disputing architectural details with the dewan, Koenigsberger was able to return to the confines of a familiar cultural sphere in which he could vent his frustrations and discuss his problems in his native language, and receive sympathy and advice from people in similar positions, while listening to Bach and eating homemade sauerkraut on a shady veranda.13 Thus Koenigsberger’s life was actively contrapuntal, in the Saidian

11  Otto Koenigsberger to Käthe Koenigsberger, 8 July 1939 (Koenigsberger Papers/Jewish Museum Berlin). English translation by the author. The German original reads: “Ausserdem bin ich Mitglied des Mysore-Sportclubs geworden und werde binnen kurzem Mitglied der Mysore Engineers Association und des Bangalore United Service Club sein. Alle diese snobbistischen Angelegenheiten und intensiven gesellschaftlichen Bemühungen sollen dazu dienen, Beziehungen anzubahnen a) für ein Private Practice und b) zur Hilfe für andere. Mit beiden sieht es aber trotzdem faul aus.” 12  Otto Koenigsberger to Käthe Koenigsberger, 1 January 1941 (Koenigsberger Papers/Jewish Museum Berlin). 13  Otto Koenigsberger to Käthe Koenigsberger, 8 February 1941 (Koenigsberger Papers/Jewish Museum Berlin).

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sense (Said 2000, 186): rather than oscillating between memories of his past cultural life and the visceral reality of an unfamiliar present, both were actual in Koenigsberger’s exile. Apart from the Brinitzers, of the other Germans based in Bangalore Gustav Krumbiegel appears to have been Koenigsberger’s most important contact in the initial phase of his Indian exile. Unlike Koenigsberger and the Brinitzers, Krumbiegel was not a refugee. He had come to India to work in the princely state of Baroda after studying horticulture at Kew Gardens, London. Koenigsberger quickly got to know him: Krummbiegel [sic], a nice old man with paunch and cigar, who, despite his English wife, still speaks Saxon just as he did 43 years ago when he came here. He is actually a gardener but worked for decades here as an architect, at times with several ministries beneath him. He is still building (at almost 70) [he was actually 74], sometimes for the Maharaja himself. What he does is old-fashioned, but not bad. He is on very friendly terms with the dewan and an important man here in every respect.14

Through his substantial experience of the field, Krumbiegel was able to help Koenigsberger establish himself in his new working environment, and also collaborated with him on some landscaping projects (see Lee 2016). At the outbreak of the Second World War, Koenigsberger, Krumbiegel and the Brinitzers, along with all the other German and Austrian nationals in the region, were interned in an “Enemy Alien” camp near Ahmednagar for several weeks. While some of the detainees were Nazi sympathisers, the majority, according to Koenigsberger, were Jewish doctors: “This internment is of course like a great congress of Jewish doctors in India. Specially the number of dermatologists is great.”15 Koenigsberger kept in contact with some of the people he met in Ahmednagar, and later in his career, when he was considering leaving Bangalore for the north of the country, his relationship with Robert Heilig proved crucial. Heilig, an Austrian doctor, gave Koenigsberger’s name to B. Shiva Rao, a government official charged with finding an expert on housing issues. Shortly after contact had been made, Koenigsberger attended a meeting in Delhi convened by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and was engaged almost immediately.

Scaling up through scientific networking Beyond important associations with fellow Germans and local elites, Bangalore provided Koenigsberger with internationally relevant connections through the intersections of science and education, a critical arena in the development of modern India. These links were particularly important in furthering Koenigsberger’s career on a national level, and again, are embedded in the historical development of specific places and institutions in Bangalore. 14  Otto Koenigsberger to Käthe Koenigsberger, 24 April 1939 (Koenigsberger Papers/Jewish Museum Berlin). English translation by the author. The German original reads: “Krummbiegel [sic], ein netter alter Mann mit Bäuchlein und Zigarre, der trotz englischer Frau heute noch genauso sächsisch spricht wie vor 43 Jahren, als er herkam. Er ist eigentlich Gaertner, hat aber hier jahrzehntelang als Architekt gewirkt, zeitweise mehrere Ministerien unter sich gehabt. Er baut auch jetzt noch (mit annähernd 70), einige Sachen für den Maharadja persönlich. Was er macht ist altmodisch, aber nicht schlecht. Er ist mit dem Dewan sehr befreundet und ein in jeder Hinsicht wichtiger Mann hier.” 15  Otto Koenigsberger to Käthe Koenigsberger, 10 October 1939 (Koenigsberger Papers/Jewish Museum Berlin).

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The historian Gyan Prakash has argued that the “emergence and existence of India is inseparable from the authority of science and its functioning as the name for freedom and enlightenment, power and progress” (Prakash 1999, 3). By introducing and institutionalising Western science in India as part of their ‘civilising mission’, the British Government of India facilitated both the indigenization of science and the formation of the Western-educated elite at the borderlines between cultures. Educated in Western-style institutions and employed in colonial administration and modern professions, this elite stood on the interstices of Western science and Indian traditions, embodying and undertaking the reformulation of culture in their reach for hegemony. (Prakash 1999, 8)

Mysore State was a key site in the indigenisation of science in India. Ambitious projects were implemented that surpassed British models and crucially contributed to the infrastructure of independent India. These projects had wide-reaching impacts, attracting the attention of progressive figures, including pioneering industrialists, scientists, educators, and cultural actors from other parts of India, and indeed other parts of the world, making Mysore State, and Bangalore in particular, a locus of trans-regional and transnational experimentation from which Koenigsberger greatly profited. A pertinent example of this is Bangalore’s IISc, a landmark postgraduate teaching and research institute that was established during the first decade of the twentieth century. The Maharaja of Mysore donated the land – the campus is located on former palace grounds in Mathikere, north of Malleswaram, now in central Bangalore – and funding for the research institute came from Mysore State, the Government of India and the Tata family. However, it was the pioneering industrialist J. N. Tata who instigated the groundbreaking project as part of his drive towards the “better-

Fig. 6 | The Dining Hall/Auditorium at the Indian Institute of Science, designed by Koenigsberger and the acoustics ­engineer N. B. Bhatt, 1946

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Fig. 7 | Homi Bhabha at Central College Bangalore, ca. early 1940s

ment of India” (Harris 1958, 116).16 Initially staffed mostly by British scientists, by the 1930s the IISc boasted physics, chemistry and electro-technics departments and, with the Nobel laureate C. V. Raman as its first Indian director, had developed an international reputation impressive enough to attract figures such as the physicists Max Born, Homi J. Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai. According to Born, the IISc was a focus of national attention: “visited daily by politicians, journalists, etc. [it] plays a great role in the public.”17 It was very much on the radar of the emergent Indian nation. Much more than in its influential governance structures, Mysore State, through institutions such as the IISc, was opening up cosmopolitan spaces of encounter and exchange that would benefit interstitial figures such as Koenigsberger (fig. 6). The IISc was crucial in the development of the relationship between Koenigsberger and Homi J. Bhabha (1909–1966), arguably his most important acquaintance in Bangalore. Bhabha was a mathematical physicist whose research on electron cascade showers at Cambridge University had secured him an international reputation (Anderson 2010). While Bhabha was professionally acquainted with Max Born through working at Cambridge and participating in international conferences, Koenigsberger’s uncle had little to do with the friendship that emerged. Exceptionally well educated, with a wide range of shared 16  For a detailed account of the history of the IISc in this regard, see Lee 2012. 17  Quoted from Max Born to Francis Simon, 10 November 1935 (Royal Society of London, Francis Simon Papers, see Greenspan 2005, 205).

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Fig. 8 | Excerpt from the Jamshedpur Development Plan, showing Koenigsberger’s attempt to separate industry and housing, and to arrange the housing as neighbourhood units

interests that encompassed architecture, science, art, literature, music and dance, the two men clearly had a lot in common, including similar political viewpoints.18 Moreover, they were both in exile in Bangalore – Bhabha was stranded in India due to the war, working at the IISc. Although their professional interests coincided in several spheres, they found their footing at the IISc (fig. 7). In terms of networking, Bhabha was a very fortuitous connection for Koenigsberger. He came from a family that was deeply rooted in a prosperous Parsi (Zoroastrian) community and very close to another wealthy and highly influential Bombay [now Mumbai] Parsi family – the Tatas. As a school pupil, Bhabha had spent his lunch breaks with his paternal aunt Meherbai, the wife of Dorab Tata, in the ancestral home of the Tata dynasty. There he was exposed to nationalist politicians, business magnates, Bombay’s cultural elite and houseguests such as Mohandas Gandhi (Anderson 2010). Through his family and the Parsi community, Homi Bhabha was incredibly well connected. As Robert Anderson puts it, “Homi Bhabha was part of its [the Parsi community’s]

18  Homi Bhabha was a socialist (see Deshmukh 2010, 12, 20). In Cambridge, he had had communist leanings (see Anderson 2010, 99).

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Fig. 9 | Title page of the first ­edition of MARG magazine, ­October 1946

own tiny cosmopolitan elite, comprising a small though influential fraction of the elite of India” (Anderson 2010, 126). Bhabha’s contacts to the Tata family, especially J. R. D. ​Tata, the then chairman of Tata Sons, were crucial to establishing Koenigsberger’s private practice. Through Homi Bhabha, and his brother Jamshed, Koenigsberger was able to acquire town planning work with Tata & Sons – first at the Swadeshi Mills in Kurla, Bombay, and later on a much larger scale at Jamshedpur. Through these commissions – Jamshedpur in particular because Koenigsberger’s report was published as a book – Koenigsberger’s reputation as an urban planner began to extend far beyond the borders of Mysore State (fig. 8). Major architectural projects at the IISc itself, such as the Aeronautics Department, the Metallurgy Department, the Hydrogen Plant, and the Dining Hall and Auditorium (featured in Architectural Forum in 1946 as an example of a contemporary building in the modern idiom), were undoubtedly also secured with the help of Bhabha’s influence. Bhabha, who moved to Bombay in 1945 to found the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, very likely also played a role in introducing Koenigsberger to the Bombay-based network of artists, architects, and intellectual and cultural figures who, with Koenigsberger, contributed to the founding of the Tata-funded MARG magazine – India’s first quarterly publication dedicated to architecture and the arts (fig. 9).19 19  For more on MARG, see Lee/James-Chakraborty 2013.

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These included, among many others, the writer Mulk Raj Anand, the architects Minoo Mistry and J. P. J. ​Billimoria, and three German-speaking émigrés: Walter Langhammer, painter and art director at the Times of India, Rudy von Leyden, art critic for the Times of India, and Emmanuel Schlesinger, an entrepreneur and art collector. Koenigsberger was already acquainted (from Bangalore) with Anil de Silva, who edited MARG, and her sister and fellow MARG co‑founder the architect Minnette de Silva, who had previously worked with him on the Jamshedpur Development Plan.

Cosmopolitan Indian networks and institution-building Although he socialised with a diverse group of people, it can be argued that the majority of Koenigsberger’s acquaintances and his closest friend – Homi Bhabha – were Indian, particularly after he consolidated his practice in Bangalore and began obtaining commissions from other parts of India. It is, however, important to be more precise here. Many of these individuals, such as Homi Bhabha, Vikram Sarabhai, Mulk Raj Anand and later Jawaharlal Nehru, had an internationalist outlook and a Western university education. Beyond sharing a similar academic training, their experiences of having lived in a different culture must have been a further source of mutual understanding and attraction. Moreover, the oppression Koenigsberger experienced in National Socialist Germany must have contributed to his sympathy for the Indian independence movement, his dislike of the British Raj20 and his willingness to contribute to Indian nation-building projects with his acquaintances. Indeed, in addition to publishing and outreach initiatives such as MARG, Koenigsberger was determined to strengthen and expand Indian professional organisations – part of his drive to increase the awareness of architecture and planning issues and to improve the quality and appeal of education in those fields in India. In November 1944 he became an Associate Member of the Institution of Indian Engineers, and in June 1947 he became a fellow of the Indian Institute of Architects. Most importantly, he was involved with the genesis of the Institute of Town Planners, India, since the inception of the idea in 1947, becoming a founder member in July 1951.21 And as his career progressed and his network of Indian colleagues grew, Koenigsberger increasingly worked collaboratively with them on architecture and town planning projects, including their names on drawings and documents. It is interesting to note that Koenigsberger became a naturalised Indian citizen in 1950 with the support of the last British Viceroy, Louis Mountbatten, and Jawaharlal Nehru.22

Conclusion As a highly qualified architect entering a country where important doors had already been opened by his uncle Max Born, Koenigsberger’s was, in terms of access, a case of elite exile. Nonetheless, his family connections could only help him to a certain degree. The vast majority of the networks

20  From an interview with Renate Koenigsberger, June 2010. 21  According to their website, the names of the fifteen founder members of the Institute of Town Planners, India, are as follows: C. S. Chandrasekhara, L. M. Chitale, G. B. Deolaikar, M. Fayazuddin, Walter George, S. K. Joglekar, B. R. Kagal, Dharam Singh Kler, O. H. Koenigsberger, T. J. Manickam, Vishwanath Prasad, K. L. Seth, John Terry, Jari Singh Virdee, S. R. Yardi (see India Institute of Town Planners 2012). 22  Landesarchiv Berlin Ref: B Rep 025–05 Nr. 153/62.

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Koenigsberger formed in Bangalore and the career that he built were the result of his own tenacity. Within five years, he had established himself firmly enough to commit to a long-term stay in India, and within nine years he had secured a high-level government position in Delhi. The status of Bangalore as the administrative hub of progressive Mysore State, with its commitment to industrialisation and education, played a major role in Koenigsberger’s career, as the city attracted a diverse range of national and international figures with whom Koenigsberger worked and socialised. It was, for a limited time, a small, cosmopolitan nexus – particularly in the field of science and technology. Because of this, there were openings and opportunities for a young migrant architect such as Koenigsberger that would not have existed in other parts of India. The networks that he built there provided the basis for his later career, which traversed Mysore State’s boundaries, to other regions of India and beyond. In Bangalore, Koenigsberger experienced spaces of possibility, exchange, collaboration and expansion, not marginalisation or provincial isolation. However, with independence becoming increasingly tangible, by the mid-1940s it was clear that Mysore State’s days as a cosmopolitan hub were numbered. In an independent India, Mysore would no longer be a princely state with a distinctive political setup, but a reconfigured territory in a large federation of states with a central government in Delhi. Koenigsberger and others, such as Homi Bhabha, set their sights on North India. Koenigsberger considered working full-time for the Tatas: The reason is not so much the higher pay (though that does count as well) as the chances of having a hand in very big post-war schemes which are under consideration in the North. […] This will also give better publicity to my work than Mysore, which is more and more assuming the character of a backwater.23

Despite these ambitions, Koenigsberger continued to work for Mysore State, juggling his local work with housing and town planning commissions for the Tatas in other parts of India, as well as the Orissa State government, for whom he produced the master plan for Bhubaneswar – the new administrative capital of the state. With his appointment as Federal Director of Housing in 1948, Koenigsberger relocated to Delhi to supervise the nationwide planning and development of new towns as well as to design and oversee the mass production of low-cost housing. Both projects – related to the refugee crisis that India experienced after Partition – were a somewhat fitting conclusion to his career in India (fig.10). As the capital of the new nation state, Delhi was a confluence point for emerging post-war international architecture and planning networks, which Koenigsberger, with his governmental position, had access to. Indeed, due to the substantial expertise and experience he had accrued, the diverse projects he had participated in and the multi-disciplinary networks he had built up, Koenigsberger was a key contact for these international groups: the UN Tropical Housing Mission team visited several of Koenigsberger’s building sites, and ‘tropical’ architects such as Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry from the UK or the US American Albert Mayer, who were also involved in nation-building projects, consulted him. These interactions provided a foothold for his continued career in Europe after he left India in 1951. From his base at the Architectural Association in London he expanded his transnational and transcultural architecture and planning work, attempting to create cosmopolitan educational spaces that would engender collaboration and 23  Otto Koenigsberger to Max Born, 16 July 1945 (Churchill Archives Centre: Born 1/2/2/6).

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Fig. 10 | Government Housing Factory, New Delhi, 1950, with prefabricated aerated concrete wall panels for building refugee housing in the foreground

exchange between young professionals from less privileged areas of the world (Lee 2015). Through his assignments for the UN and other international organisations, Koenigsberger’s networks swiftly grew to encompass figures in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and South East Asia. Globally active as part of an architecture and planning elite, from the mid-1950s Koenigsberger, though no longer in exile, was always a migrant. Building on his family connections, Koenigsberger’s networks in India formed a solid foundation from which to practice on a global level. Their diversity, particularly in terms of discipline – very few of his acquaintances were architects – seems to have been crucial to Koenigsberger’s professional success. This suggests that studies of exiled artists and architects should look further than purely artistic networks, thereby embracing a broader approach to understanding such exiles’ professional lives. Exploring the places in which the networks were formed, rather than examining figures in isolation, can also provide a productive framework for focussing the analysis of artistic exile and grasping its particularities. Analysing the physical and social factors that co‑produce an exilic milieu, as in Koenigsberger’s case, illuminates how he was able to build up a private practice and progress into the higher levels of national government. Without figures such as Homi Bhabha in his network, and located in a city less cosmopolitan than Bangalore, Koenigsberger’s career in exile would have taken a very different course.

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References Anderson, Robert S. Nucleus and Nation: Scientists, International Networks, and Power in India. University of Chicago Press, 2010. Copland, Ian. The Princes of India in the Endgame of Empire, 1917–1947. Cambridge University Press, 2002. Desai, Anita. Baumgartner’s Bombay. Random House, 2012. Deshmukh, Chintamani. Homi Jehangir Bhabha. National Book Trust, 2010. Dogramaci, Burcu, and Karin Wimmer. Netzwerke des Exils: Künstlerische Verflechtungen, Austausch und Patronage nach 1933. Gebrüder Mann Verlag, 2011. Göckede, Regina. Adolf Rading (1888–1957): Exodus des Neuen Bauens und Überschreitungen des Exils. Gebrüder Mann Verlag, 2005. Greenspan, Nancy Thorndike. The End of the Certain World: The Life and Science of Max Born: The Nobel Physicist Who Ignited the Quantum Revolution. Basic Books, 2005. Harris, Frank Reginald. Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata: A Chronicle of His Life. Blackie & Son, 1958. Hettne, Björn. The Political Economy of Indirect Rule: Mysore 1881–1947. Curzon Press, 1978. Ikegame, Aya. Princely India Re‑Imagined: A Historical Anthropology of Mysore from 1799 to the Present. Routledge, 2013. India Institute of Town Planners. Origin. 2012, http://itpi.org.in/content/origin.‌aspx. Accessed 18 June 2012. Koenigsberger, Otto. “Action Planning.” AA [Architectural Association] Journal, May 1964, pp. 306–312. –. Jamshedpur Development Plan. Tata, 1945. Lee, Rachel. “Constructing a Shared Vision: Otto Koenigsberger and Tata & Sons.” ABE Journal. Architecture beyond Europe, no. 2, September 2012, http://journals.openedition.org/abe/356. Accessed 7 March 2018. –, and Kathleen James-Chakraborty. “Marg Magazine: A Tryst with Architectural Modernity.” ABE, no. 1, February 2013, http://journals.openedition.org/abe/623?lang=​en. Accessed 7 March 2018. –. “Otto Koenigsberger, Transcultural Practice and the Tropical Third Space.” OASE, no. 95, December 2015, https://www.oasejournal.nl/en/Issues/95/OttoKoeningsberger. Accessed 7 March 2018. –. “Otto Koenigsberger und Gustav Krumbiegel – Zwei Deutsche Planer in Bangalore.” Der Gärtner des Maharadschas : Ein Sachse bezaubert Indien, edited by Anja Eppert, Bäßler, 2016, pp. 32–35. Manor, James. “Princely Mysore before the Storm: The State-Level Political System of India’s Model State 1920–1936.” Modern Asian Studies, vol. 9, no. 1, 1975, pp. 31–58. Prakash, Gyan. Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India. Princeton University Press, 1999. Ramusack, Barbara N. The Indian Princes and Their States. Cambridge University Press, 2003. Said, Edward W. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Harvard University Press, 2000. Visvesvaraya, Sir Mokshagundam. Memoirs of My Working Life. Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1960.

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PHOTODOCUMENTARIES OF GLOBAL ­M IGRATION Visual Narrativizations of Displacement

Migratory narrativity in social documentary photography How is the lived experience and perception of global migrant realities, their precarious transitory human condition between displacement and relocation, translated and mediated in social documentary photography? While photojournalists operate ‘in-field’, embedded in the factual world of the social, political and environmental living context, they cannot avoid traversing aesthetic spaces of fictionalization for the purpose of photodocumentary representation. The “Documentary Debate” (2003), as discussed by David Levi Strauss, has pointed out that every form and practice of representation, even documentary ones, are subject to aesthetization, and that the “idea that the more transformed or ‘aesthetized’ an image is, the less ‘authentic’ or politically valuable it becomes, is one that needs to be seriously questioned” (Levi Strauss 2013, 107). Documentary photography, in particular, necessitates the mediation of a consistent, emotionally appealing story to mobilize human concern, raise public awareness of social grievances and focus political attention. To compose the story, a fictional storyline has to be visually constructed through compositional image sequencing. Hence, from an analytical point of view, photodocumentary accounts of global migration require an approach combining visual sociology and visual narratology. Narrativity is a vital and indispensable element in all forms and fields of application of photo-documentation. The primary task of the documentary photographer, especially in the context of photojournalism, is to tell visual stories. This aspiration to storytelling is usually implemented by means of a series of photographs in the form of a picture story, photo reportage, photo essay or photobook. Yet it can even be expressed in a single photograph (cf. Scheuermann 2010, 191– 206). Viewed from a more general photo-theoretical level, this narrative conditionality is not restricted to documentary photography as a particular photo genre. According to the Catalan photographer and photo theoretician Joan Fontcuberta, the meaning of a photographic image lies in its narration. In terms of graphicality, a photograph is defined by him both as a light inscription and as a form of visual writing in the sense of storytelling: “The language of photography constructs the story, insofar as the story lends meaning to the photograph” (cit. in Sánchez Escuer 2017).1

1  Original quotation in Catalan: “El languaje de la fotografía articula la historia, en la medida en que la historia da sentido a la fotografía.” Fontcuberta, Joan. “La fotografía será narrativa o no será.” El Cultural, 3–9 June 2004, n. p.

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By explicitly drawing upon a narrative photography approach, this article seeks to trace the storytelling of global migration in photodocumentaries. The topic of human migration itself already comprises a deep narrative horizon, as it entails (hi)storytelling on a civilizational and personal level: it invokes the metanarrative of great migrations of peoples throughout human history as well as the emotionally moving stories of personal life histories of exiled and displaced individuals, families and groups. Migration is a social phenomenon that exhibits basic narrative features: it is an event or a sequence of events across time and space, unfolding a story and forming a narrative discourse (Porter Abbott 2002, 16); under the premise of a causal explanation, it involves the “transition from one state to another state, caused or experienced by actors” (Bal 1997, 182). The term “state” can refer to both the state of being and feeling of a displaced person, and a national territorial entity and politically organized community. Given this inter-relational structure, it can be argued that the narrativity inherent in histories of migration and the narrativity of (particularly journalistic) photography overlay, complement and reinforce each other in photodocumentaries of migration. If a narrative is – following Marie-Laure Ryan’s narrative theory – concerned with human experience, the temporality of existence, interpersonal relations, conflict and problem solving (Ryan 2007, 22), then the photodocumentaries of global migration meet this definition to the fullest extent. As it is impossible to represent the complex realities of global migration in one single photograph or a short sequence of photographs, the photo essay, mostly in the form of a picture story in the press or a photobook, lends itself as the best format, medium of representation and distribution channel for publishing documentary narratives of migration.

Photo stories on migration: the shift toward global narratives In terms of the history of the media, the photo story has evolved as a central means of expression in social documentary photography. One of the first photo stories in book-length form that has a written photo history, Jacob A. Riis’ How the Other Half Lives (published in 1890 in New York), was produced by a Danish immigrant working as a photojournalist in New York. A study of tenements, the photobook documented the desolate living conditions in the poor neighborhood of New York City slums – a situation of social tension and conflict to which the extensive wave of immigration to New York at the end of the nineteenth century had contributed considerably.2 Another pioneering photo essay in the emerging field of social documentary photography, Dorothea Lange’s and Paul Taylor’s An American Exodus. A Record of Human Erosion (1937), engaged with the topic of internal migration in the United States.3 While working for the Farm Security 2 See The Open Book. A History of the Photographic Book From 1878 to the Present, edited by Andrew Roth, exhibition catalogue, Hasselblad Centre, 2004; Bill Hug. “Walking the Ethnic Tightwire: Ethnicity and Dialectic in Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives.” Journal of American Culture 20/4, 1997, pp. 41–53; Keith Gandal. The Virtues of the Vicious. Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and the Spectacle of the Slum. Oxford University Press 1997; Ferenc M. Szasz and Ralph F. Bogardus. “The Camera and the American Social Conscience: The Documentary Photography of Jacob A. Riis.” New York History, vol. 55, no. 4, 1974, pp. 409–436. 3  On Lange’s photobook, see Helmut Lethen. “Die Madonna des New Deal.” Ibid. Der Schatten der Fotografie. Bilder und ihre Wirklichkeit. Rowohlt, 2014, pp. 128–148; James C. Curtis. “Dorothea Lange. Migrant Mother, and the Culture of the Great Depression.” Winterthur Portfolio: A Journal of American Material Culture 21, 1986, pp. 1–20; on Lange’s role as a photographer of the Farm Security Administration, see Michael L. Carlebach.

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Administration in the 1930s, the photographer and writer documented the rural poverty of the Depression-era exodus driven by economic deprivation. Over 300,000 migrants were moving westwards to California in search of farm work. Lange’s photograph “Migrant Mother”, one of the most popular icons of social documentary photography, was shot to narrate the moving photo story of the American exodus. Although migration, flight and expulsion in all parts of the world were central themes in social documentary photography from its beginning, whole photobooks with both a particular focus on migration and a comprehensive global coverage of this subject, its sociopolitical and human/ist dimensions, are rarely found.4 This situation changed sharply when the economic, social, environmental and political consequences of a new phase of radically accelerated and systemically reinvigorated globalization became visible at the end of the twentieth century. Migration, including the social, political, legal and cultural issues arising out of it, have taken on a new global dimension, one previously unseen in human history. Photography studies are therefore called upon to reorient their focus toward global migration as a recent transnational theme in contemporary photobooks.5 The migrant discourse, most pressingly conducted in central Europe and the countries of the Global North, is an indicator of the turbulence of migration on a global scale. Sociologists, human geographers and cultural scholars have identified global migration as a societal phenomenon, geopolitical category and cultural concept worth studying in its widely ramified complexities. Nikos Papastergiadis and Daniella Trimboli stress that “the contemporary migration terrain has a new, networked shape. More accurately, the terrain is perpetually reshaping itself, operating as one node in a complex network of mobility, a turbulent or kinetic force.”6 They suggest taking this permanently shifting migratory network character into account when studying global migration. Elizabeth Mavroudi and Caroline Nagel view migration as a key element in the globalization of labor markets. In their understanding, global migration is “taking shape in a world characterized by increasing economic, political, and social integration.” However, they emphasize that the patterns, processes, and policies of global migration are “shaped and mediated by nation-state boundaries and the uneven landscape of rights, privileges, and opportunities for

“Documentary and Propaganda: The Photographs of the Farm Security Administration.” The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts, vol. 8, Spring 1988, pp. 6–25. 4  In photography research, the definition of the photobook is not a clear-cut one, greatly depending on the disciplinary approach and entry point of the researcher to the medium. Related to the photodocumentaries under investigation, my understanding of the photobook includes three criteria: the comprehensiveness of a photo-work published in a printed book-format; the narrativity constructed by the arrangement of the sequence of photo-images; and the claim of authorship by the photographer. For definitions of the photobook in recent literature, compare Printed Matter. Fotografie im/und Buch, edited by Barbara Lange, Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2004; The Photobook. From Talbot to Ruscha and Beyond, edited by Patrizia Di Bello et al., I. B. Tauris, 2012; Gerry Badger. “It’s all Fiction. Narrative and the Photobook.” Imprint. Visual Narratives in Books and Beyond, edited by Hans Hedberg et al., Art and Theory Publishing, 2013, pp. 15–47. 5  The photo researcher Burcu Dogramaci has said that “aspects of migration and changes of location in times of globalization could have a more prominent position in the newer photobook research, alongside the major topics of economy and ecology” (Burcu Dogramaci et al. “Das Fotobuch als Medium künstlerischer Artikulation: zur Einleitung.” Gedruckt und erblättert. Das Fotobuch als Medium ästhetischer Artikulation seit den 1940er Jahren, edited by ibid. et al., Buchhandlung Walther König, 2015, p. 15; English translation by the author). 6  Papastergiadis and Trimboli in the abstract for their contribution to this handbook.

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a better life.” In this regard, migration also demonstrates “the power of the state to monitor, control, and manage global flows” (Mavroudi/Nagel 2017, 15). Photodocumentaries of global migration put a particular focus on the channeling, controlling and managing of migrant movements, as these processes present the more invisible and undocumented side of migration (hi)stories. Even though global migration has a historical perspective, extending back to the formation of a European-centered world economy in the modern period, the political transformation of nation states, the restructuring of the world economy and the resulting shift in the migration system at the end of the twentieth century have brought about a new phase of globally reinforced migration. This new period is historically marked by the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Eastern bloc, economically defined by the shift of production to low-wage countries in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, politically provoked by major conflicts and wars throughout the 1990s and 2000s in the aftermath of the terror attacks of 9/11, and ecologically by natural disasters and global climate changes as additional push-factors. Furthermore, it is characterized by the development of extensive migration systems and networks within Southeast Asia as well as large-scale migration flows between Southeast Asian countries and the Gulf Arab states. Among the numerous contemporary photodocumentaries on issues of global migration, of which the largest proportion is represented by news press picture stories,7 only a few photobooks stand out in terms of a stringent narrativity and global coverage of migratory routes, actor-network structures and migrants’ living conditions. To the common features they share belong the long-term experiential perspective of photo-documenting global migration, the social engagement and human/itarian concern of the photographers, together with their clear understanding of themselves as documentary storytellers, and the medial framing of the migration stories in the format of the classical photobook. Since 2000, five major photobooks on the topic of global migration have appeared on the international photo publication market: Migrations. Humanity in Transition by the Brazilian-French photographer Sebastião Salgado (New York: Aperture 2000); Go No Go. The Frontiers of Europe by the Dutch photographer Ad van Denderen (Endam: Paradox 2003); Open See by the American photographer Jim Goldberg (Göttingen: Steidl, 2009); Foreigner. Migration into Europe 2015–2016 by Daniel Castro Garcia and Thomas Saxby, who form the London-based John Radcliffe Studio for Photography (2016); and Upheaval. Refugee Trek Through Europe by the German-based Islamic scholar Navid Kermani and the Spanish-American photographer Moises Saman (Malden: Polity, 2017). In their search to track the human paths, experiences and meanings of global migration, they commit themselves to a form and ethics of visual documentation that can be described as ‘slow photojournalism’. The term slow photojournalism was introduced in order to define long-term photodocumentaries involving in‑depth storytelling.8 It is used to characterize “[a]n increasing number of 7  In the field of documentary photography of migration, picture essays in the news press mostly focus on immigration to Europe and the migration movements at the US‑Mexican border. “Border Project 2017”, for instance, aims to document the life on both sides of the US‑Mexico border. Three Agence France Presse photographers, Jim Watson, Yuri Cortez and Guillermo Arias, spent ten days traveling along the 2,000-mile frontier from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. 8  See Gemma Padley. “Slow Photojournalism: The Rise of Long-term Assignments.” BBC News, 21 December 2015. Accessed 6 August 2017. Characteristic examples of slow photojournalism include The Sochi Project. An

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documentary photographers and photojournalists” who “are developing their own projects, publications (in print or online) and exhibitions, through which they can tell a story that the regular – printed – media no longer has space for” (Sikking 2017, n. p.). This trend articulates a counter-reaction, even a countermovement to ‘fast photojournalism’, with its accelerated speed, driven by the instantaneity of online news production.9 A defining feature of the working style of slow photojournalists is looking further “than the immediate (hard) news. This makes it necessary to stay longer in a certain area, even though the world’s press may already have left. As a result, the photographer not only continues to be an observer but also becomes a participant in daily life” (ibid.). Longer production times and long-form narrative features are common attributes of the five photo essays on global migration, mentioned above as representative examples. Salgado is a strong proponent of slow photojournalism; he has expressly dissociated himself from fast photojournalism, also derogatively referred to as “churnalism” (Davies 2009, 59): [Y]ou don’t just go somewhere for two hours, get a picture and come back. You spend time, live with the people and understand their reality, which has its own speed. If you come with your own speed and push and push and push, you don’t see what’s in front of you. (Salgado cit. in Muchnic 2002)

In order to realize his global-scale photo project Migrations. Humanity in Transition, Salgado has traveled to forty countries and photographed over a period of six years. To organize his photo work over a longer period of time and wide geographical distances, he founded his own Paris-based press agency, Amazonas Images.10 The working results of his long-term photo-documentation project on global migrations were presented in the form of two photobooks – Migrations. Humanity in Transition (2002) and The Children: Refugees and Migrants (2005) – and as a series of exhibitions in photo/art museums and international institutions, for example at the United Nations in New York City.11 Jim Goldberg spent four years in over eighteen countries, from Russia and the Middle East to Asia and Africa, in order to document the stories of refugees and immigrant populations who had arrived in Europe. The long-term photo project was published in a compendium of four photobooks under the title Open See (2009). The Dutch photojournalist Ad van Denderen worked over a period of fourteen years to document the migration movements within the borders of the Schengen Area. His photographic works were narrativized in the feature format of a photobook entitled Go No Go. The Frontieres of Europe. Because of his slower,

Atlas of War and Tourism in the Caucasus (photographs by Rob Hornstra, texts by Arnold van Bruggen). Aperture, 2013, and the ongoing project On Thin Ice by the Slovenian photojournalist Ciril Jazbec, which documents the human face of climate change in Greenland. 9  Urry stresses the collage effect of fast journalism, its conflicting with narrative storytelling: “Stories from many different places and environments occur alongside each other in an often chaotic and arbitrary fashion, serving to abstract events from context and narrative. The experience of new is thus a temporally and spatially confused collage organized around instantaneously available stories simultaneously juxtaposed” (Urry 2009, 189 f.). 10  It was founded in 1994 together with his wife, Lélia Deluiz Wanick Salgado. 11  Salgado’s photo exhibition The Children: Refugees and Migrants was part of a major exhibition at the United Nations in New York City during the Millennium Assembly in 2000.

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more contemplative and investigative mode of photodocumentary with its long-term commitment, Ad van Denderen can be identified with the movement of slow photojournalism.12 Before publishing the photobook, the long-term goal of their fieldwork, most of the photojournalists pre-published extracts of their photo material in magazines and newspapers, but also on their own webpages.13 After the release of the photobook, they started presenting their photodocumentaries in solo or group shows, most often in the art-and-museum context of photo exhibitions.14 From within this art-institutional space – where the journalistic photographs were augmented with art/istic pictures hanging on the wall or forming art installations – the genre-migrating process of the aesthetization of the documentary began to develop, thus appealing to a different audience. Taken together, the pioneer photo-documentarists of global migration are unified by their primary and intentional choice of the photobook as an alternative, globalization-critical format of photojournalism. In accordance with the characteristics of slow journalism,15 they value accuracy, quality and context reportage, take long periods of time to investigate their topic, seek out untold, visually undocumented human stories, rely on the power of the narrative (of slow storytelling), encourage co‑production (even with the subjects photographed) and view the audience as collaborators. In addition to editing their own photobooks, they position their photodocumentary work in the exhibition field. By crossing the border between photojournalism and (documentary) photo art, the photobook and the photo catalogue, they reinvent the practice of photo-documentation in a time of global media while creating genre-migrating images (see Demos 2013).

12  Slow journalism was even the title of a solo exhibition by Ad van Denderen at the art fair Art Amsterdam in 2010. 13  Sebastião Salgado, for instance, delivered region- or event-specific photo reportages, such as the documentation of flight and migration in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, to a global network of press and picture agencies as well as magazines. The individual contracts helped him gain publicity around the world and finally publish his photobook Migrations. Humanity in Transition as an outstanding photo monograph on the topic of global migration. Ad van Denderen pre-published his photo-documentation of European immigration online on his own website, before he could raise the necessary budget and publishing infrastructure to edit the material as a stand-alone photobook. 14  Among other places, Go No Go was shown as a solo exhibition in the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago de Chili (2010), and as a group exhibition in the Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration in Paris (2011/2012), the Contemporary Art Museum in Marseilles (2013), the Headquarters of the Gestapo in Lyon (2016) and in the exhibition World in Transition in Rostock (2016). Ad van Denderen’s photographs were projected on eight to ten screens. This image installation alternated with texts and filmed portraits of migrants produced by photographer and film maker Marjoleine Boonstra. Photographs from Sebastião Salgado’s photobook Migrations. Humanity in Transition were presented in the traveling exhibition Migrations: Photographs by Sebastião Salgado, which began at the Berkeley Art Museum at the University of California in 2002. It was sponsored by the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Under the title Exodus, international exhibitions all over the world followed. They were accompanied by a separate exhibition catalogue, which differed from the original photobook. 15  See Mark Berkey-Gerard. “Tracking Down the ‘Slow Journalism’ Movement.” Campfire Journalism Blog. Notes on Teaching Digital Storytelling, 29 July 2009, http://markberkeygerard.com/2009/07/tracking-the-journalism-movement/. Inaccessible website, 8 August 2017. Cit. following Le Masurier 2015, 142.

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The grand narrative of global migration in Migrations. Humanity in Transition According to W. Eugene Smith, one of the first auteur photographers in the history of documentary photography, a “photo essayist is a photographer who manages to comprehend a subject – any subject […] – and gives a lot of thought to weaving the pictures into a coherent whole in which each picture has an interrelationship with the others.” In composing the story, the pictorial interrelations “make the whole more than its parts” (Smith cit. in Moran 1974, 14). The sequence of images in Sebastião Salgado’s voluminous photobook Migrations. Humanity in Transition is constructed in such an inter-pictorial manner; the aim is that the “photographs in one chapter should have echoes in another” (Salgado 2000, 8). The upshot of this relational interweaving of individual images of diverse migrant realities is one large picture – “a troubling image of our world at the turn of the millennium” (ibid.). Migrations provides a photodocumentary human and societal portrait of global migration as a mass phenomenon. The global dimensions and patterns of mass migration that have become perceptible since the mid-1990s are portrayed as threatening and potentially destructive symptoms of a new phase of transition in human history. In the foreword to his photobook, Salgado raises arguments for the presence of (new) global migrations that are affecting the life and chances of survival of the whole human race: People have always migrated, but something different is happening now. […] We are undergoing a revolution in the way we live, produce, communicate, and travel. Most of the world’s inhabitants are now urban. We have become one world: In distant corners of the globe, people are being displaced for essentially the same reasons. (ibid.)

Displacement and urbanization are considered the most visible, mutually dependent effects of globalization in the post-industrial information age. The main narrative thread and overarching compositional framework of the photobook Migrations is structured according to these effects. It starts with stories of displacement and uprooting and ends with urbanization as a point of departure of the grand migration narrative. Even though the causes and effects of migration are represented as resembling each other on a global scale, the phenomenon of global migration is dissected in all its complexity and diversity of concrete socioeconomic, (geo)political and local situations. As the most important reasons for migration, Salgado’s photodocumentary presents rural poverty, political instability, war and terror, natural disasters and climate change, and the structural transformation of the working world from the industrial era to the information age. The photobook is conceived as a grand narrative, starting with the exodus16 as fleeing from home(lands), continuing with large travel and migration movements and ending in “arrival cities” (Saunders 2010)17 as new migrant living and working places. The structure of the four main

16  Beside “Transitions”, “Exoduses” in the plural was among the first titles intended to be given to the photobook. The new German edition of the photobook has resumed this idea by entitling the republication Exodus in the singular. 17  In this book, the journalist Doug Saunders discusses “arrival cities” as urban places where migrants end up after a phase of migration. They exist on the fringes of established cities in slums, suburbs and immigrant quarters.

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chapters follows this transitional logic of migratory displacement and relocation. Whereas the first chapter presents flight and migration as survival attempts in all parts of the world, the second, third and fourth chapters focus on specific situations of displacement in Africa, Latin America and Asia. Africa is visualized as the continent of the uprooted, Latin America as the subcontinent of the dispossessed, and Asia with its megacities as the final destination for new (im) migrants. The atlas-like continental mapping of contemporary global migration18 unfolded in the narrative sequence of the photodocumentary sees Africa as a point of origin, from where the beginning of the story of human displacement and migration is told, and moves on – via Latin American migration paths – to Asian cities as future-oriented places of arrival for migrant existences, thus confirming the rise of Asia to an attractive destination for urban dwellers and a new economic world power in the twenty-first century. The first chapter introduces migration as a human “survival instinct”. It pictures migration on different refugee routes and illustrates the hardships and dangers of traveling in order to reach the two main destinations of international migration – the United States of America and Europe. Neuralgic transit zones form the point of departure for the photodocumentary narration of migrations: the border crossing from Guatemala to Mexico as a transit country, the Mexican‑US border with Tijuana as the main transition point for illegal immigrants from Central and Southern America, and the Strait of Gibraltar as a sea border between Africa and Europe. While focusing on the aspects of movement of migrant traveling, Salgado traces the diversity of flight routes by water, land and air. In doing so, he sheds light on the different means of transportation that people on the move have used on their escape routes. The Vietnamese migration of the so‑called Boat People to places all over Asia, for instance, is covered in one subpart, as well as the emigration of Russian Jews to the USA via airplane, officially arranged by the International Organization of Migration. In documenting the travel routes, transitory stations and temporary abodes of migrating people, the photo-author makes clear distinctions between migrants (who have left their homes in the hope of a better life), refugees (who were forced to flee due to persecution, violence and war), and displaced persons (who have also forcibly moved, but are without eligible protection), be they exiles or expellees.19 The Afghan exodus caused by the terror of the Taliban 18  Only Australia is left out of the mapping of global migration. 19  According to UNHRC, the UN Refugee Agency, migrants “choose to move not because of a direct threat of persecution or death, but mainly to improve their lives by finding work, or in some cases for education, family reunion, or other reasons. Unlike refugees who cannot safely return home, migrants face no such impediment to return. If they choose to return home, they will continue to receive the protection of their government.” Refugees “are persons fleeing armed conflict or persecution.” They are “defined and protected in international law. The 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol, as well as other legal texts, such as the 1969 Organisation of African Unity Refugee Convention, remain the cornerstone of modern refugee protection. […] The protection of refugees has many aspects. These include safety from being returned to the dangers they have fled; access to asylum procedures that are fair and efficient; and measures to ensure that their basic human rights are respected to allow them to live in dignity and safety while helping them to find a longer-term solution. States bear the primary responsibility for this protection.” (UNHCR viewpoint: “Refugee” or “migrant” – Which is right?, 11 July 2016, http://www.unhcr.org/news/latest/2016/7/55df0e556/unhcr-viewpoint-refugee-migrant-right.‌html. Accessed 17 September 2017). According to definitions by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, “displaced persons” are people who were forced to move “from their locality or environment and occupational activities. It is a form of social change caused by a

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regime and the subsequent war on terror is captured as an example for a nation of (internally) displaced people; the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon whose camps, after fifty years of existence, have grown into urbanized communities, as a contemporary example of exiles. The difficult situations of displaced Kurds who live in camps in Iraqi Kurdistan or have been stranded in internment camps in Lithuania on their flight routes to Europe, as well as that of the war refugees of the former Yugoslavia who fled religious persecution and ethnic cleansing, among them Croatians from Bosnia, Serbs from Croatia, Roma, Albanians and Serbs from Kosovo, are included as representative examples of the most dramatic events in the history of migration at the end of the twentieth century. Despite the distinctions highlighted between different migrant types and their statuses, as particularized on the basis of specific political/economical situations and national/local conflicts, the narrative illustrates how, due to the permanently changing situation of displacement, flowing transitions between the different migrant groups emerge: the role and status of refugees might shift toward that of displaced people, and conversely, displaced persons might move (up) to migrants living in (arrival) cities and metropolitan areas. As a main consequence of these fluctuations in the migrant status, the effect of urbanization is highlighted in the photo-narration – be it that through global migration movements parts of major metropolises are turned into slums or become arrival city-areas with an ascending middle-class, or that settlements of refugees develop at official refugee camps or informally at border points and in transit zones (such as Tijuana at the US‑Mexican border and at the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla on the North African coast), resulting in the formation of refugee/migrant cities as – in the course of time – permanently installed agglomerations. The second chapter, entitled “African Tragedy: Continent of the Uprooted”, depicts the diversity of inner-African migration routes. With compassionate and humane directness, the author-photographer documents the often-fatal itineraries of long migration marches and brings to light the cruel inhumanity of life in the refugee camps, whose size and infrastructure have grown to that of small or medium-sized cities; yet he also reports on hope-filled remigrations to homelands. Despotism and (civil) war due to ethnic conflict are pinpointed as the major causes for the numerous internal migrations on the African continent. Droughts and famines are only presented as secondary causes adding to the primary political causes for migration by worsening the food supply situation on the migration routes and even in the camps. Hotbeds of war and flight are spotlighted: the civil strife in South Sudan where children and young men try to escape forced recruitment by the Sudanese army or various rebel groups, the situation of thousands of displaced people without refugee status in Angola after the end of the civil war, and the

number of factors, the most common being armed conflict. Natural disasters, famine, development and economic changes may also be a cause of displacement.” Internally displaced persons are “people who are forced to flee their homes, often for the very same reasons as refugees – war, civil conflict, political strife, and gross human rights abuse – but who remain within their own country and do not cross an international border. They are therefore not eligible for protection under the same international system as refugees” (Displaced Person/ Displacement, UNESCO 2017, http://www.unesco.org/new/en/social-and-human-sciences/themes/international-migration/glossary/displaced-person-displacement/. Accessed 17 September 2017).

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remigration of Mozambique refugees to their homelands after years of exile in Tanzania and Malawi.20 Within the inner-African photo-narrative of migration, the large-scale Rwandan post-genocide migrations are presented as one of the greatest and cruelest tragedies of human displacement and cultural uprooting in twentieth-century Africa. The dramatic events of the Rwanda genocide happened in 1994 during a period of one hundred days from 6 April to mid-July. Approximately one million Tutsi and moderate Hutu sympathizers were murdered in the largest organized killing of human beings in the shortest period of time in modern history.21 Salgado shows the different escape routes and gathering points of the post-genocide movement of refugees. By focusing on the complex route network of escape, he does not refrain from dragging the visually most hidden and most taboo side of after-genocide flight and displacement into the light of photo-documentation. While sharing the walking routes and temporary whereabouts of Rwandan refugees in camps and prisons, he captures, among other subjects: the corpses of murdered victims at the roadside of the main street from the Rwandan capital of Kigali to the Tanzanian border camp in Ngara; the deadly remains of atrociously mutilated people in an empty school building in the village of Nyarubuy close to the Tanzanian border; the desperate living conditions and situation of Rwandan refugees in overcrowded refugee camps in Benako, Tanzania and Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo, afflicted by hunger, deadly disease and even racial violence; the human carnage on the road during migrations; the coincidental crossing of refugee streams on the route – for example, the flight of Hutu refugees from Rwanda to Burundi and the remigration of Tutsi refugees from their Burundi exile to Rwanda. The third book chapter on Latin America puts an emphasis on internal migration as a rural, socioeconomically motivated exodus. It starts out from the changing life conditions of major tribes of Amazonian Indians in Brazil who, despite being increasingly granted autonomous territories by the state, are in constant danger of displacement and even disappearance as a result of large-scale deforestation, mining and the extraction of mineral and plant resources. From this indigenous uprooting, it moves on to depict the predominantly male rural to urban migration movement in Ecuador, as a result of which women and children are left behind to do the hard work in the fields. Following up on the social problems of labor migration, it continues to raise awareness of the political protest movements of the landless and expropriated people in Mexico and Brazil. Beside socioeconomic causes, natural disasters, such as the hurricane in Honduras in 1998, are shown as factors involved in rural to urban migration. The final section portrays the exodus of rural and labor migrants to the biggest cities in Latin America, Mexico City and São Paolo. It provides a seamless transition to the fourth chapter on Asia, which is dedicated to urbanization, creating rural depopulation and labor migration. In confirmation of the idea that the causes and effects of human migration strongly resemble each other when compared globally, the major causes for rural to urban migrations are visualized on the basis of specific Asian experiences. The struggle for survival of threatened peoples

20  Remigration and resettlement were encouraged by governmental repatriation programs begun in 1994 as part of the post-civil-war peace treaty. 21  For historical information on the Rwanda genocide, see Gérard Prunier. The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide. C. Hurst & Co, 1998; Dominique Franche. Rwanda. Généalogie d’un génocide. Mille et une nuits, 1997.

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and ethnic minorities in Bihar, South India, on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines and in villages in northern Vietnam is manifested as a valid reason for leaving rural homes and resettling in urban areas. The largest proportion of the final chapter focuses on portraying Asian megacities, among them Bombay, Jakarta, Manila, Ho‑Chi-Minh-City and Shanghai, in a random mix of topically interrelated city pictures. Urban images of Cairo and Istanbul are included, arguably for purposes of comparison. The main documentary focus of this part is laid on the cultural and social (partly also religious) clash between rural and urban ways of life, habits and behavior. Views of local markets, railroad stations for suburb commuters, mosques and slums in migrant neighborhoods are contrasted with pictures of high urbanism representing the rise of Asian cities to future global cities. The photobook ends with a final picture of the futuristic skyline of the megacity of Shanghai, a glittering panorama view over the riverside promenade of the Bund toward the financial district of Pudong with its landmark building of the Oriental Pearl TV Tower. The hotchpotch of wildly composed images in the fourth part on Asia, captioned “The New Urban Face of the World”, seems to reflect on a rapidly transforming world, on the chaos produced by the turbulence of global migration at the turn of the millennium.

Readings and interpretations of the grand photo-narrative of displacement Due to its thematic and structural complexity, argumentative stringency of chapter-spanning storytelling, and global comprehensiveness, Salgado’s documentation of global migration movements exhibits a form of ‘grand narrative’. Conceived as a picture story on human migrant histories, it adopts the symbolic narrative of the biblical Exodus, with the expulsion from home as a beginning of displacement and the arrival in the promised land as a (temporary) ending of migration. ‘Grand narrative’ is a literary term for a totalizing and universalizing narrative. Jean-François Lyotard introduced it in his classic work The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979) as a meta-discourse category. He did so for the purposes of arguing against it, critiquing its modernist totalizing vision of ideological knowledge and history construction. Also identifying it as a metanarrative in critical theory, John Stephens and Robyn McCallum have defined it as “a global or totalizing cultural narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge and experience” (Stephens/McCallum 1998, 6). According to John Anthony Cuddon, it is “[a]ny theory or intellectual system which attempts to provide a comprehensive explanation of human experience and knowledge” (Cuddon 2013, 312). These definitions stress the point that the grand narrative is not only a form of storytelling, but a meta-discourse for producing and legitimizing knowledge. By constructing interrelations between events and establishing causal links, it strives to make sense of history. Salgado’s photodocumentary project Migrations is framed as a grand narrative in order to make sense of contemporary world history since the mid-1990s, of the effects of economic, political, social and cultural globalization on mankind and humanity. The grand narrative of migrations “extends the global narrative of the effects of capitalism” with its “focus on human displacement as a key consequence of large-scale profit-centred practices” (Nair 2011, 88). Migrants across the globe are presented as “the most visible victims of a global convulsion entirely of our

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own making” (Salgado 2000, 8). Because of this self-causation, people all over the world share, according to Salgado, the ‘migrant condition’, with rural to urban migration as the most salient point of commonality:22 More than ever, I feel that the human race is one. There are differences of color, language, culture, and opportunities, but people’s feelings and reactions are alike. People flee wars to escape death, they migrate to improve their fortunes, they build new lives in foreign lands, they adapt to extreme hardship. Everywhere, the individual survival instinct rules. (Salgado 2000, 15)

The grand narrative of global migrations – a portrait of human suffering and at the same time a celebration of the dignity of humankind – is mediated through a modern photo-narrative on universal humanity.23 It is anchored in the tradition of humanist photography with its link to modern universalism, the aesthetic and rhetoric of the “Family‑of-Man” imaging,24 and the history and practice of humanitarian photography, the goal of which is to care for and improve the welfare of the people and the human race at large. With humanist photography, it shares universality, historicity, quotidianity, empathy, commonality and monochromaticity – the six features that Peter Hamilton has defined as essential categories for the humanistic paradigm of photography (Hamilton 2001, 188 f.). The photobook’s emphasis on a unifying perspective is related to both: the conjunction of mankind through the common global experience of displacement and migration as a phase of “humanity in transition”, and, from a photo-aesthetic point of view, the complicity, compassion and solidarity of the documentary photographer with his subjects. The imaging of humanitarianism is expressed in the fact that in producing Migrations, the photojournalist Salgado collaborated with humanitarian initiatives and aid organizations across state boundaries.25 He has also revealed himself as a humanist photographer by stating that “We cannot afford to look away” (Salgado 2000, 15), in a moment of history in which the survival of the human race as a whole is threatened, and that a new form of social cohabitation instead of a divisive individualism pushed by the forces of global capitalism is required.26

22  In the introduction to his photobook Migrations, Salgado states: “In Latin America, Africa, and Asia, rural poverty has prompted hundreds of millions of peasants to abandon the countryside. And they crowd into gargantuan, barely inhabitable cities that also have much in common” (Salgado 2000, 8). 23  According to Salgado, each migrant contributes to the reformation of mankind (Salgado 2016, 9). 24  Family of Man is the title of the legendary humanist photo exhibition created and curated by Edward Steichen for the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1955. In the form of a photo essay, it covered the universal aspects of human life across 37 themes. In terms of viewership, it became one of the most successful postwar photo exhibitions touring worldwide. Tamara Kay argues that “Salgado’s images cover the ‘Family of Man’ gamut, depicting people working, building, loving, warring, playing, celebrating, and grieving – without invoking stereotypes” (Kay 2011, 425). 25  Among others, he collaborated with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the International Organization of Migration, Médecins Sans Frontières, The United Nations Children’s Fund, Norwegian People’s Aid, Christian Aid, and Save the Children. 26  “My hope is that, as individuals, as groups, as societies, we can pause and reflect on the human condition at the turn of the millennium. The dominant ideologies of twentieth century – communism and capitalism – have largely failed us. Globalization is presented to us as reality, but not as a solution. Even freedom cannot alone address our problems without being tempered by responsibility, order, awareness. In its rawest form, individualism remains a prescription for catastrophe. We have to create a new regimen of coexistence” (Salgado 2000, 15).

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If a grand narrative is any theory or intellectual system of totalizing the construction of knowledge and history for the purpose of legitimation and sense-making, then what is the unifying explanation model expressed in the master narrative of Migrations. Humanity in Transition? That of a modern human universalization through global migration? Or that of a contemporary human globalization prompting global migration? Or even the crossing of both grand narratives, thereby supporting the discourse paradigm of a global modernity – a modernity located in the age of global capitalism? (see Dirlik 2007). In visual analyses of Salgado’s photodocumentary project, different readings and interpretations can be found. Most commonly, the photographer is criticized for creating a grand unifying narrative of timeless and placeless human universalism incompatible and irreconcilable with the contradictions and divisions of contemporary, locally sited globalisms. In the discussions, the ‘modern’ paradigm of black-and-white-photography recurs as a photo-aesthetic argument to critique the human(ist) universalization of global migration by historical distancing that, as a visual paradigm, runs through Salgado’s photodocumentary work. Indeed, Migrations contains only analogue black-and-white photographs; this accentuates the high significance of a historicizing documentation of global migration flows, and invokes the modern tradition of art photography. The white passepartout-like framing of each photograph supports the history-documentary value of the recorded reality while placing it within the fictional, artistically aestheticized frame of the book. Anna Szörényi, for example, sees the black-and-white photographs in Migrations as “timeless monuments”: The archetypal style of the images makes them multilayered, but at the same time produces a sense of timelessness which is easily read both as inevitability and as invoking nostalgia, with the latter’s tendency to emphasise the distance between the viewer and (any responsibility for) the geo-political realities that have created this particular scene. (Szörényi 2006, 30, emphasis in ­original)

She identifies the risk that Salgado’s pictorial documentary style of photography positions the people in the past, and that this retrograde aesthetics of temporal distancing or even total de‑temporalization tends to promote the visual impression of resignation and passivity. Contrary to this opinion on the universalizing and monumentizing effect of distancing, Saskia Sassen recognizes in the black-and-white photography of Salgado a productive distancing that allows for theorizing. Arguing as a sociologist and social theorist interested in the relation between documentary photography and sociology, she experiments with the thesis “that black and white photography of actual settings creates distance and thereby unsettles meaning”, whereas “color photography of actual settings overwhelms with its specificity and leaves little room for distance and thereby for theory” (Sassen 2011, 438). In Salgado’s grand narrative of human global migrations, she rediscovers the new logics and dynamics of expulsion that have surfaced as an effect of global neoliberalism since the 1980s.27 In establishing connections between global capitalism and global migration, she theoretically overwrites and reinterprets Salgado’s universalist framing of human displacement and migration with concepts of deterritori27  “My argument is that this multisited array of expulsions is actually signaling a deeper systematic transformation that has been documented in bits and pieces but not quite narrated as an overarching dynamic that is taking us into a new phase of global capitalism” (Sassen 2011, 439).

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alization and transnationalization. The local siting of migration and unrest across the most diverse places in the world creates new global geographies of sub- and transnationalization. According to Sassen, Salgado’s photo-documentation of migrations can be characterized as photography of these “thick, localized realities” (ibid., 442). Building on her argument and following W. J. T. ​Mitchell’s claim for picturing theory (Mitchell 1995), I would maintain that, through its black-and-white grand narrative, Salgado’s photobook on migrations constructs a picture theory of a horizontal, networked globality that does not necessarily conflict with the universal humanist approach of concerned author photography. The practice of social documentary photography enables both the visualization of a social theorizing on the migratory effects of globalization, and the expression of humanizing empathy for those displaced and uprooted people who are “the most visible victims of a global convulsion” and a “humanity in transition”. This is particularly true for the genre of the photo essay as a combined visual-textual form of narration in which the interrelationships between the pictures and the interrelations between picture and text are the defining elements of storytelling. Postcolonial criticism of Salgado’s humanist photo-documentation of migrants and refugees is easily given, when the photodocumentary of Migrations is – reducibly – read as “refugee coffee-table book”, as Anna Szörényi has suggested in her analysis of photobooks on the topic of migration and refugees (Szörényi 2006). While asking on whose behalf the images speak, she argues: even as they appear to promote intimacy and empathy, ‘refugee table books’ emphasise, in both concept and content, the distance between the refugees on display and the readers of the book […] [i. e.] the difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’. ‘We’ […] are those who look. ‘They’ are those who are looked at. (ibid., 24)

In her critical view on photodocumentary consumption of human suffering due to displacement, “[t]he end result is that in spite of their professed humanitarian concern, such books seem designed to reiterate, rather than challenge, the uneven distribution of suffering across the globe” (ibid.). Although the argument of a victimizing ‘othering’ of the photographed subjects through (black-and-white and pictorial-style) distancing between viewer and viewed cannot be totally dismissed, it is much too simple and one-sided. It neglects the multi-perspectivist dimension of photo-narration, which is present on the level of focalizations, image montages and, most importantly, text-image relations. One must stress the fact that Migrations was conceived by Salgado as a serious photojournalistic book with a high level of documentation and information to be looked at and read – and not as a coffee-table book for pure visual consumption. It is of crucial relevance that the photo documents are all embedded in a textual frame that serves as the explanation of the topic of the photobook and the contextual documenting and situating of the images. The picture story is prefixed by an introductory essay by Salgado in which he outlines his personal motivation, target and working method for the project on migrations. In that same foreword, he provides facts about the countries and places where he has photographed. In an accompanying booklet, he explains the background and concrete context of each individual photograph in detail. The purpose of the textual commentaries is to authenticate the documentation and the status of the image. They translate it into the concrete situatedness of the migrant reality. The tone in the descriptions is that of factually oriented reportage.

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On the level of mere visual perception, localizations of the photo-documented scenes are nearly impossible. The recorded situations and people remain mostly unidentifiable. This anonymity of the photographed sites and persons is an intended photo-aesthetic principle for visually constructing the migration narrative. It contributes to the formation of a universal/izing narrative of human displacement and migration, as discussed before on the basis of Salgado’s statements. Whereas the images present the anonymous destinies of the globally homogenizing effect of mass migration, the texts provide the frame of reference for the concrete factual readings of the photographs – that is, their history- and place-specific political situating and social positioning. If it is images and texts interwoven into an icono-textual co‑reading that builds the concept and content of the photo-narrative, spanning across the level of the single picture to the level of the grand photobook narrative, then the apparent conflict between universalization and particularization of human migration (hi)stories seems to dissolve. The photobook Migrations theorizes – in the etymological sense of theorein (θεωρει˜ν) as viewing/observing – what the pure photographic eye cannot see: the multi-sited migration effects of particular and changeable historical, political, economic and social processes that occur along the networking forces of a global transformation. The master narrative of migration transversally laid out across the globe is constructed from a diversity of highly heterogenous micro-narratives of locally sited displacement and migration stories, thus providing a multi-perspectival and multi-layered picture of the world. Narrativity is an indispensable element in constructing and interpreting photodocumentaries of global migration. Due to this conditionality, the literary genre and medium of the photobook has gained a new prominence among photojournalists and art photographers. The “photobook phenomenon”28 is not only a social and media phenomenon reflecting the turbulence of global migration, but also a genre-migrating phenomenon, transgressing the borders between photojournalism and photographic art, photo-documentation and photo-fictionalization. “Through the photobook, photography narrates. The photobook is a genre of narration with images. And narrating does not simply mean applying a temporal thread to link things. Fragmentation, accumulation, dispersion, the circular tracking shot, and the shot/countershot contrast are also narrative strategies” (Villatoro 2017, n. p.). It is precisely for this reason that studies of icono-textuality and photo-narrativity should be included when analyzing social documentary photobooks. Unfortunately, photo narratology is still an underdeveloped research area in photographic theory, in particular when it comes to documentary photography. Categories of narrative theory, such as sequential ordering, perspectivization, focalization, temporalization, and spatialization, could inspire the study of photodocumentary narrativizations of displacement in an innovative way, from which both migrant storytelling and migrant photodocumentation could benefit.

28  This is the title of a photobook exhibition that was simultaneously shown at the Foto Colectania Foundation and the Centre de Cultura Contemporània in Barcelona in 2017. Curated by a team of photobook specialists, among them Martin Parr, Horacio Fernández, Markus Schaden, Frederic Lezmi, Gerry Badger, Ryuichi Kaneko, Erik Kessels, Irene de Mendoza and Moritz Neumüller, it intended to offer new insights into the impact of the photobook in contemporary visual culture.

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References Bal, Mieke. Narratology: An Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. University of Toronto Press, 1997. Cuddon, John Anthony. A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Theories. Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. Davies, Nick. Flat Earth News: An Award-winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion and Propaganda in the Global Media. Vintage, 2009. Demos, T. J. The Migrant Image. The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis. Duke University Press, 2013. Dirlik, Arif. Global Modernity: Modernity in the Age of Global Capitalism. Radical Imagination, 2007. Hamilton, Peter. “‘A Poetry of the Streets?’ Documenting Frenchness in an Era of Reconstruction: Humanist Photography 1935–1960.” The Documentary Impulse in French Literature, edited by Buford Norman, French Literature Series, vol. 28, Rodopi, 2001, pp. 177–217. Kay, Tamara. “Building Solidarity with Subjects and Audience in Sociology and Documentary Photography.” Sociological Forum, vol. 26, no. 2, 2011, pp. 424–430. Le Masurier, Megan. “What is Slow Journalism?” Journalism Practice, vol. 9, no. 2, 2015, pp. 138–152. Levi Strauss, David. “The Documentary Debate.” Documentary. Documents of Contemporary Art, edited by Julian Stallabrass, Whitechapel Gallery, 2013, pp. 103–108. Mavroudi, Elizabeth, and Caroline Nagel. Global Migration. Patters, Processes, and Politics. Routledge, 2017. Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory. Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. University of Chicago Press, 1995. Moran, Tom. The Photo Essay. Paul Fusco and Will McBride. Alskog, 1974. Muchnic, Suzanne. “Teller of Human Stories”. Los Angeles Times, 22  October 2002, http://articles.latimes. com/2002/oct/22/entertainment/et-muchnic22. Accessed 8 August 2017. Nair, Parvati. A Different Light. The Photography of Sebastião Salgado. Duke University Press, 2011. Porter Abbott, H. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. Cambridge University Press, 2002. Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Toward a Definition of Narrative.” The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, edited by David Herman, Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 22–36. Salgado, Sebastião. Migrations. Humanity in Transition. Aperture Foundation, 2000. –. Exodus. Taschen, 2016. Sánchez Escuer, Mónica. “Photo-Narrative: The Stories in an Image.” ZoneZero, 26 January 2015, http://zonezero.com/en/photonarrative/245-photo-narrative-the-stories‑in-an-image. Accessed 6 August 2017. Sassen, Saskia. “Black and White Photography as Theorizing: Seeing What the Eye Cannot See.” Sociological Forum, vol. 26, no.2, June 2011, pp. 438–443. Saunders, Doug. Arrival City: How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World. Pantheon, 2010. Scheuermann, Barbara J. “Narreme, Unbestimmtheitsstellen, Stimuli – Erzählen im fotografischen Einzelbild.” Die fotografische Wirklichkeit. Inszenierung – Fiktion – Narration, edited by Lars Blunck, transcript, 2010, pp. 191–206. Szörényi, Anna. “The Images Speak for Themselves? Reading Refugee Coffee-Table Books.” Visual Studies, vol. 21, no. 1, April 2006, pp. 24–41. Sikking, Iris. “A Thing Called Slow Journalism.” issuu, 22 May 2010, https://issuu.com/bintphotobooks/docs/ slowjournalism. Accessed 8 August 2017. Stephens, John, and Robyn McCallum. Retelling Stories, Framing Culture: Traditional Story and Metanarratives in Children’s Literature. Garland, 1998. Urry, John. “Speeding Up and Slowing Down.” High Speed Society. Social Acceleration, Power, and Modernity, edited by Hartmut Rosa and William E. Scheuerman, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009, pp. 179– 200. Villatoro, Vicenç, et. al. Photobook Phenomenon. RM Verlag, 2017.

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CLIMATES OF DISPLACEMENT From the Maldives to the Arctic1

A profusion of scientific accounts today warns of a near future of forced displacement on a massive scale due to climate change. Inhabitants of small island nations, such as Tuvalu and the Maldives, exposed to the threat of rising ocean levels, commonly figure as imminent ‘climate refugees.’ Although these populations are small compared to the millions of impoverished people vulnerable to forced migration in places such as the Sahel in Africa, coastal Bangladesh, and Vietnam’s deltas, their cases exemplify how climate refugee discourse is currently shaped and visualized, and as such they take on global relevance. According to Koko Warner, an expert on climate change and migration at the United Nations University in Bonn, the displacement of these populations could represent “a phenomenon of a scope not experienced in human history” (cit. in Morris 2009, n. p.). Such an eventuality appears credible, especially given the ever-increasing rise in greenhouse gases and quickly approaching tipping points, in addition to the disasters related to extreme weather events in our present – for instance, Hurricane Sandy hitting New York in 2012, Typhoon Haiyan devastating the Philippines in 2013, and Hurricane Harvey resulting in historic levels of flooding around Houston in 2017. While the scientific basis of that potential future is clear, such narratives do not need to be seen as irrevocable – although it is difficult not to be seduced by frequent spectacular visions of apocalyptic climate disasters and mass migrations (think of the films The Day After Tomorrow, 2004; Flood, 2007; The Road, 2009; and Oblivion, 2013). Yet such predictions – whether presented in the media, popular visual culture, scientific discourse, or artistic practice – risk being debilitating and fatalist, for they overlook forms of political agency in the present that variously resist the fossil-fuel economy driving climate change. Before we accept the inevitability of climate-refugee narratives, we must ask: how might we invent creative modes of resilience and mitigation in the face of approaching climate chaos and interpret aesthetics in relation to the politics of climate justice – as summed up in the slogan “System change, not climate change!” – rather than surrendering to futurist speculation that potentially eclipses real options in the here and now? In what follows, I shall investigate this question in relation to the intersection of visual culture and political discourse that confronts the ecological situations of the Maldives and the Arctic. In particular, I shall examine the work of the Argos Collective and Subhankar Banerjee – examples of photographic and research-based visual culture presented in art exhibitions as well as circulating through NGO media publicity, independent media forums, and environmental activism. Ad1  This essay derives from T. J. Demos. Decolonizing Nature. Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology. Sternberg Press, 2016.

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dressing geopolitical hotspots from different vantage points, the engagements of these practitioners makes visible the threat of global warming today, when migration is often presented as an unavoidable fate.

The Maldives: A French Requiem? For the low-lying Maldives, the threat of rising seas is a present danger, forcing residents to consider migration as a near-future necessity. Moving would mean abandoning their home in the Indian Ocean, which has been inhabited since the third century BCE. Approaching the Maldives’ ecologically and socially precarious situation and emphasizing this migration scenario, the Argos Collective created The Maldives: A Nation at the Water’s Edge (2005–2007), a photographic series that documents the islands’ inhabitants and their fragile environment. Comprised of eleven writers and photographers from France, the Argos Collective works with environmental and humanitarian NGOs, maintains a website with a full range of visual projects, and publishes books of documentary journalism, including Climate Refugees (2010), which contains photos and essays addressing the situation in the Maldives as well as in parts of Bangladesh, Chad, the United States, Germany, China, and Nepal.2 “Our job is to tell stories we have heard and to bear witness to what we have seen,” writes journalist and member Guy-Pierre Chomette. “The science was already there when we started in 2004, but we wanted to emphasize the human dimension, especially for those most vulnerable” (Chomette cit. in Argos Collective 2010a). In their photo suite, Maldivians are pictured in domestic settings, preparing food, playing on the beach, and swimming, alongside images of their threatened environment, which is beset by coastal deterioration and blanched coral reefs. In relation to one photograph showing a group of youths, the Argos Collective points out that 60 percent of Maldivians are under fifteen, and “during their lifetime they will probably see the first exiles leave the island due to sea-level rise and erosion” (Collanges/ Argos Collective). Consisting of a double string of twenty-six atolls joining an archipelago of 1,190 islands, two hundred of which are inhabited – giving a total population of almost four hundred thousand – the Maldives form the smallest Asian nation in terms of land and population. Under Portuguese and Dutch reign during the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries and a British protectorate from 1887 to 1965, the country gained its independence only to be ruled by an authoritarian government for three decades, until its first free elections in 2008 brought the progressive Mohamed Nasheed to the presidency.3 Like other low-lying island states such as Kiribati, Tuvalu, and Nauru, the Maldives are particularly vulnerable to inundation and storm surges.4 Eighty percent of the country’s islands are less than one meter above sea level, and studies predict the Maldives could be completely submerged within one hundred years. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) fourth climate-change assessment from 2007 forecasted an approximate fif-

2  Argos Collective [Collectif Argos]. Climate Refugees. MIT Press, 2010. 3  Nasheed served in office until 2012, when he was forced to resign, found guilty under the country’s Anti-Terrorism Act, and sentenced to thirteen years in prison – all of which has been described by Amnesty International as a politically motivated persecution. 4  On the case of Tuvalu, see Berzon 2006.

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ty-centimeter sea-level rise by the end of the twenty-first century, an increase increased in the IPCC’s fifth report in 2014 to nearly double that amount.5 The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration offers an even direr scenario, predicting as much as a 6.6-foot increase by 2100.6 While coastal geomorphologists point out that islands are more flexible than often thought, and are capable of adapting to the vagaries of the sea level and currents over time, it remains uncertain how the Maldives will confront a future menaced by water.7 In addition to inundation and storm surges, the negative effects of sea-level rise include coastal erosion (destroying protective coral reefs), salination of fresh water supplies, and extreme weather events, which in turn threaten infrastructure, human settlements, health, agriculture, and trade. A negative economic hit is particularly harsh for a country that relies on tourism and whose per capita GDP was just US$8,600 in 2016. The Maldives, it is claimed, may be the first nation whose entire population will become climate refugees, foreshadowing “an age of insurgent climate refugees on a far more threatening, chaotic scale” (Nixon 2011, 265). At the same time, nations such as the United States and European Union members (as we are currently seeing with the response to Syrian refugees, on the move owing to extended Middle Eastern drought, poverty, civil war, and violent militarism), as well as India and Bangladesh, are already preparing for an unprecedented demographic influx by turning their borders into increasingly militarized and high-tech zones to control migration (figs. 1 and 2).8 The text accompanying the Argos Collective’s photographs describes their visits with diverse Maldivian representatives, such as the director of the Maldives Environmental Research Center, the head engineer at a resort on the island Thulhagiri, and the manager of the artificial island Hulhumale. Each contribute to Argos’s narrative of the Maldives’ vulnerability and likely disastrous future: “A puff of a wind, a wave, and this emerald necklace that appears to be floating precariously on the water might just sink irretrievably into the depths of the Indian Ocean,” Chomette explains (Chomette 2010, 125). While the aim of such depictions may be to raise awareness of the current ecological crisis and its effects on frontline communities, the Maldivians themselves are conspicuously allotted little political agency in these images and narratives. By projecting a climate-refugee subjectivity onto the islands’ population, the Argos Collective ends 5  “A rise in sea level of approximately 50 cm during the 21st century remains the most reliable scenario to employ in future studies of the Maldives.” (Mimura et al. 2007, 694) Also see Pachauri et al. 2014, 13. 6  As reported by Folger 2014. There is great uncertainty about the future rate of Greenland and Antarctic glacial melt – if all their ice melted and entered the sea, then waters would rise by 216 feet (as in the Eocene period over 33 million years ago), although such an eventuality, scientists expect, would take thousands of years. 7  See research of Paul Kench, a coastal geomorphologist at the University of Auckland, as reported in Schmidle 2009. At Columbia University’s Earth Institute, scientists argue that sea rise and surf will reshape islands, not drown them. 8  See Wright 2007 and Hayes 2012. These texts detail the securitization of response to climate change in regard to state, military, and corporate planning for worst-case scenarios. Climate change is viewed as a threat multiplier, where migration, for instance, figures as a criminal menace rather than a mode of behavioral adaptation for human survival. The state/military/corporate response to climate change imagines a nightmare future that demands ever more advanced weaponry and full-spectrum dominance to protect borders, as developed by security-service corporations and defense contractors in a billion-dollar industry, overriding all concerns for human rights or environmental stability.

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Fig. 1 | Guillaume Collanges/Argos Collective, Coral reef in the Maldives, 2005

up objectifying their subjects, reducing them to anthropological evidence, and casting their situation as urgent according to the collective’s own humanitarian criteria, which tends to emphasize victimhood and people deprived of political self-determination. Though the group advocates immediate international cooperation to stop global warming, they expect that it will not be enough to halt sea-level rise, and that we must prepare now for the negative consequences. They observe that we can expect two hundred million refugees by the end of the century, claiming that it is a question of human rights when a nation’s people is “suddenly shorn of their self-determination.” To meet this imminent humanitarian disaster, they contend, we must “immediately begin planning for the mass migration of climate refugees that will mark the 21st century” (Argos Collective 2010b, 14–16). This story is in fact a familiar one, in the mainstream media especially, where it is also often uncritically compared to the very different situation of well-resourced countries similarly at risk from inundation. In a recent issue of National Geographic dedicated to the subject of rising seas, for instance, the lead article predicts that developed nations such as the Netherlands are already planning to negotiate shifting coastlines and sea levels via experimental architecture, innovative design, and geo-engineering projects – the floating housing project of Ijburg in Amsterdam is an example – whereas nations without comparable resources or technical capabilities face the increasingly likely situation of forced migration. Arnoud Molenaar, manager of Rotterdam’s Climate Proof program, explains: “To build on water is not new, but to develop floating communities on a large scale and in a harbor with tides – that is new. […] Instead of fighting against water,

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Fig. 2 | Laurent Weyl/Argos Collective, A Tuvalu island during a tsunami, 2006

we want to live with it” (Folger 2013, 54). Yet for less prosperous countries the prognosis is very different: “By 2100 rising seas may force Maldivians to abandon their home” (ibid., 44).9 The problem with such accounts is that they simply accept the differential effects of climate change, determined by disparate levels of economic and technological capacity, and reproduce environmental injustice, thereby helping to normalize it. The narratives produced by artists and journalists in the Global North in turn often fail to critically reflect upon the fact that the greenhouse-gas-producing industries of developed countries have historically created the ecological effects that small island states are now confronting. Resigning itself to a doomsday scenario, the title of the Argos Collective’s series on Tuvalu is crystal clear: A Polynesian Requiem. In an act of “wishful sinking,” to use the phrase of environmental anthropologist Carol Farbotko, a critic of just this sort of catastrophe-seeking projection, the island is pictured as if already underwater (Farbotko 2010).10

9  “The United Nations Development Programme estimates that $86 billion will need to be spent annually by 2015 to help developing countries adapt to the effects of global warming. The UN has launched a fund for this purpose, but it has only collected $100 million so far. What’s more, rich countries commonly use so‑called adaptation funds as a bargaining tool to push for lower emissions from the industrializing countries of the developing world” (Morris 2009, 2). 10  This narrative was also reproduced in Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth, in which Gore observed – falsely – that “the citizens of these Pacific nations have all had to evacuate to New Zealand,” a claim

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The Maldives have been cast to headline an emergency, an SOS call in geomorphological terms – as shown in visual terms in a digitally manipulated photograph produced by Australian artists Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielewski for the Maldives’ pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013.11 Yet we do not need to accept such projections, even if we should take the warnings seriously. Consider the alternate approach taken by artists Christoph Draeger and Heidrun Holzfeind, who recently proposed a very different narrative. In 2011, the Swiss-Austrian duo initiated a research project to investigate countries affected by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, including Thailand, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, and India, resulting in a video also shown at the 2013 Maldives Pavilion.12 Their video Tsunami Architecture/The Maldives Chapter Redux (2011), at just under a half hour, explores the post-disaster architectural achievements and challenges in the Maldives, and offers an early glimpse of future climate-change dangers. Documenting conversations with survivors, aid workers, and rescue personnel, the video looks at how aid money, which flowed into the Maldives following the tsunami, transformed the land and refashioned local economies. Populations were relocated from particularly vulnerable islands so that government services could be more concentrated, and new housing was built on the safer islands, those better protected against future tsunamis and sea-level rise. The interviewees – including Abdullah Shahid of the Maldives’ Disaster Management Center, Nadine Waheed of the UN Human Settlements Programme for the Maldives, and Wardell Eastwood of the Red Cross, as well as inhabitants of the island of Dhuvaafaru – acknowledge that ultimately there is no such thing as a safe island and that the new housing is often inadequate, especially for the poor. The video, however, offers critical insights into how the Maldivians possess realistic options in the present, and thereby resists accepting the fatalism of migration as the only response to climate change. “I would say in terms of preparedness, we’re quite ready,” explains Waheed toward the end of the video. All of the islands […] have their own disaster management plans, in case of tsunami or sea-level rise. And we also have early-warning systems established. But obviously if it’s a nineteen- or twenty-meter-high wave I don’t think we stand much of a chance. It’s climate change that’s leading to the increase and frequency of disasters and it’s something that we’ll have to continue to face. (Waheed in Tsunami Architecture/The Maldives Chapter Redux 2011)

As such, Draeger and Holzfeind’s video is in stark contrast to the Argos Collective’s photo-text project, in which islanders are reduced to humanitarian victims in need of aid, exposed to an ostensibly implacable future of migration, against which they appear powerless, and presented without political agency, scientific knowledge, or legal recourse.

accompanied by photographs of a flooded Tuvalu. For a critical review of the Argos Collective’s book, see McKee 2011. 11  The pavilion at the Venice Biennale, itself a significant development, was curated by the Chamber of Public Secrets to bring international visibility to the plight of the islands in an era of climate breakdown. 12  Also see Khaled Ramadan’s video Maldives To Be or Not (2013), shown on the same occasion, which presents an anti-spectacular and sensitive account of the concerns of numerous interviewed Maldivians, questioning the consequences of capitalist modernization and tourism for traditional island life.

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Climate refugees? Some legal theorists argue that offering environmental refugees recognition under the Geneva Conventions will grant them internationally assured protection, independent of the laws of their own governments (Conisbee/Simms 2003, 39). Yet this suggestion raises complex legal questions, beginning with the fact that Article 1 A of the 1951 Geneva Convention grants refugee status only for those fleeing persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, social association, or political opinion. The term “environmental refugees” was defined subsequently in a 1985 United Nations Environment Programme policy paper as “those people who have been forced to leave their traditional habitat, temporarily or permanently, because of a marked environmental disruption,” which means “any physical, chemical, and/or biological changes in the ecosystem (or resource base) that render it temporarily or permanently unsuitable to support human life” (El‑Hinnawi 1985, 4).13 But this definition has yet to be recognized in international law. Recognition could occur, analysts point out, by expanding the Geneva Conventions, developing existing international law (the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, for instance), or extending the mandate of the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) as the Argos Collective proposes (see Oels 2008, 10; Argos Collective 2010, 15). There are, nonetheless, several reasons to question this route (of establishing the rights of climate refugees) as a proposed response to the displacement brought on by climate change. First, it is difficult to define strictly environmental causes and separate them from poverty, war, or any of the multifarious factors that are co‑extensive with the effects of climate change. The climate refugee thus, by definition, is an intangible figure, owing to the difficulty in disaggregating the causality of the circumstances causing migration. Climate change exacerbates an already complex set of challenges for vulnerable populations, including uneven access to diverse resources, such as water, land, infrastructure, institutions, capital, and the rule of law (see Farbotko/Lazrus 2012; Smith 2006). Indeed, political theorists, such as Angela Oels, remain skeptical of establishing such confusing and complex distinctions in classifying refugees, as “it will leave plenty of room for thresholds of indistinction that leave the final decision on the status of life up to sovereign power” (Oels 2008, 11), which can then abuse any ambiguity in oppressive ways.14 In addition, placing climate refugees under the UNHCR’s jurisdiction will not simply grant rights to refugees; it will also potentially transform them into objects (or victims) of humanitarianism, which can withdraw aid at any time.15 Consider, for example, the displaced of Hurricane Katrina and their effective relegation to the status of bare life – a form of life stripped of political agency, reduced to mere biological existence – in their 13  For more on climate refugees, see McAdam 2012, Westra 2009, and White 2011. 14  Here Oels references the political theory of Giorgio Agamben and his discussion of the power of sovereignty to designate a state of exception, or internal exclusion from the law, and deny rights on that basis, particularly as outlined in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford University Press, 1998). 15  “Assistance to refugees is conceived of in terms of charity rather than as a means of enabling refugees to enjoy their rights. There are insufficient resources to meet needs, with the power to decide their allocation placed in the hands of humanitarian workers who are said to be responsible to the donors but not to the recipients.” Barbara Harrell-Bond. “Can Humanitarian Work with Refugees Be Humane?” Human Rights Quarterly, vol. 24, no. 1, February 2002, p. 53; cit. in Oels 2008, 8.

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sports-stadium-turned-camp environment. That dystopian real-life scenario foreshadows the potential future treatment of climate migrants in the United States, the European Union, and elsewhere. (Those migrants, deemed ‘illegal’, are in fact already treated in this way.)16 We should be skeptical of proposals to institutionalize the climate-refugee category; they imply a proliferation of distinctions between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ migrants and an intensification of biopolitical regimes of control, including measures such as automated and weaponized surveillance systems, the militarization of borders, expanded refugee camps, biometrics, and the commodification of migration via the increasingly Kafkaesque bureaucracy of visas and work permits (Wright 2007; Parenti 2012). Not surprisingly, many islanders reject the refugee role allotted to them by humanitarian groups and NGOs who wish to enlist them as poster children in their political campaigns.17 “In the eyes of Tuvaluans,” write Farbotko and Heather Lazrus, “permission to cross a western border as a refugee falls far short of the climate change remedies required: extensive, immediate reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions, and significant legal and financial action to redress lost livelihoods and self-determination if emissions reduction is not achieved” (Farbotko/Lazrus 2012, 388). One final problem regarding the climate-refugee category is that migration narratives – and even those that stress the ‘autonomy of migration’ perspective, arguing for open borders and protesting the growing criminalization of migration18 – tend to minimize the resilience of both political agency and climate justice in the present. Many experts argue that adaptation strategies are currently most important (see United Nations 2011; World Bank 2014). Still, even if joined to human rights claims, this solution tends to shift the conversation to geotechnical fixes (such as buttressing seawalls), instead of cutting emissions.19 In this regard, advocates for adapting to the effects of climate change come all too close to those who deny the anthropogenic causes of climate change in the first place: in both cases, the danger remains that people will stop trying to act to counter the causes of global warming (see Yuen 2012).

Climate justice now! Representatives of small island nations, figuring as some of the most vulnerable populations, are thus on the forefront of demanding climate justice in the present rather than accepting a future of forced migration. Consider the case of Tuvalu, the Pacific island nation halfway between Ha16  “The social practice of the politics of migration in Europe shows that such ‘exceptions’ are becoming more and more the rule” (Oels 2008, 8). On contemporary art and migration, see my book The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis. Duke University Press, 2013. 17  One conflict involved the campaign by Friends of the Earth to aid Tuvaluan “climate refugees” at the 2008 Climate Camp in Newcastle, Australia, only to be told by islanders that they rather wished to receive training to become skilled migrants should they have to leave their land (Farbotko/Lazrus 2012, 383). 18  The autonomy of migration perspective supports “the call for legislation of all migrants, without distinction,” and “the recognition of fundamental human rights like the right to reside, to work and to non-discrimination. Migration activists believe that only open borders will eventually trigger policymaking to address the perpetuation of global injustice” (Oels 2008, 18, emphasis in original). 19  Adaptation discourse also allows governments to abdicate responsibility for climate change in the first place. For instance, the US Chamber of Commerce, in a bid from 2009 to prevent the EPA from regulating carbon emissions, argues that in the event of global warming, “populations can acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of behavioral, physiological, and technological adaptations” (cit. in Klein 2014, 48).

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waii and Australia, which international media and NGOs, the Argos Collective included, predict will succumb to future submergence. The IPCC warns, however, that such narratives silence alternatives voices of resilience (even if that means accepting the unavoidability of certain global warming) – for them, it is “adaptation, perhaps even more than relocation or mitigation initiatives, which is of immediate importance in island places [… especially] in the face of changes brought about by ‘global warming’” (Farbotko 2005, 289). The danger of future environmental chaos “is as much associated with the narrowing of adaptation options […] as it is with uncertain potential climate-driven physical impacts” (Barnett/Adger 2003, cit. in Mimura et al. 2007, 707).20 Yet instead of reproducing a form of environmentalist determinism  –  which portrays global warming as one-directional and irreversible – it is crucial to consider climate change as part of a “web of vectors” (Farbotko/Lazrus 2012, 384), where gradually unfolding outcomes depend on multiple factors, including the circumstances of people (including social and class-based distinctions), geopolitical conditions, and sociopolitical structures. Against the “narrowing of adaptation options,” the Maldives’ (formerly named) Ministry of Home Affairs, Housing and Environment, for instance, outlined the following goals: coastal protection; a reduction in the number of inhabited islands; the development of hydroponic agricultural systems; solar energy and rainwater harvesting; public awareness and education campaigns; and increasing coastal elevation through engineering.21 An additional measure is for these small states to become “renewable energy islands” (Mimura et al. 2007, 702) and model a path away from fossil fuel dependency, as Fiji, Samsoe, Pellworm, and La Réunion have done, all of which presently generate more than 50 percent of their electricity from renewable energy sources.22 Reference to these various approaches is completely absent in the Argos Collective’s overview. The group might also have considered the legal recourse taken up by island nations as an emerging mode of exerting political power in relation to global warming, as the governments of the Maldives and Tuvalu have done by demanding that polluting countries pay for damage caused by climate change. The argument is framed as a matter of climate justice, rather than one of humanitarian charity, aid, or loans for adaptation.23 “Rather than relying on aid money, we believe that the major greenhouse polluters should pay for the impacts they are causing” (Oels 2008, 16), claimed Tavau Teii, the deputy prime minister of Tuvalu, expressing support for 20  “The enhancement of resilience at various levels of society, through capacity building, efficient resource allocation and the mainstreaming of climate risk management into development policies at the national and local scale, could constitute a key element of the adaptation strategy” (Mimura et al. 2007, 711). 21  Adaptation strategies can also include internal migration: consider the examples of Niue and Tokelau, two islands in the Realm of New Zealand, whose populations have almost entirely emigrated to New Zealand. See the work of anthropologist Michael Goldsmith, as discussed in Berzon 2006, and also Mimura et al. 2007, 705. 22  The 1989 Malé Declaration on Global Warming and Sea Level Rise, initiated under then Maldivian President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, had already called on the UN and developed nations to adopt alternative energy sources to reduce pollution. See Argos Collective 2010, 133. 23  Tuvalu has lobbied for effective policy making on climate change and the rejection of refugee status for its population, with Tuvalu UN Ambassador Enele Sopoaga arguing against the rhetoric of relocation: “To relocate is a shortsighted solution, an irresponsible solution. We’re not dealing here with Tuvalu only. All of the low-lying island coastal areas are going to be affected. You tell me whether the world is ready to evacuate everybody” (cited in Berzon 2006, 3). See also Oels 2008, 15.

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the principle of climate debt.24 In 2002, Tuvalu even considered initiating a lawsuit in the International Court of Justice in The Hague to sue major greenhouse gas emitters such as the United States and Australia, though they decided ultimately against the idea, given the difficulties in winning such a case.25 Nevertheless, the example points to a potentially litigious future in addressing the effects of and responsibilities for climate change, as well as corporate environmental malfeasance, a future where one could imagine the situation where a small island nation like Tuvalu could sue the oil giant ExxonMobil (see Morris 2010). Proponents of this legal strategy have been steadily developing an emerging model of “Earth jurisprudence” (Cullinan 2011), attempting to reconcile human governance structures with a paradigm-shifting biocentric – rather than market-centered – global legal system, which forms one source of hope for climate justice in the near future.26 The Argos Collective has little to say in regard to these juridico-political developments, choosing only to acknowledge the Maldivians’ migrant fate. They ask: “Where will the Maldives get the billions of euros necessary to construct more artificial islands? Where will they find the funds to build tetrapod seawalls around the 200 inhabited islands?” (Argos Collective 2010, 134). Declining to think of solutions, they embrace a migration framework devoid of climate justice claims. The inadequacy of their analysis and prognosis, however, is evident in a short informational video accompanying their Maldives project, which presents a montage of still photos with voice-over testimonies in English and Dhivehi, both ultimately drowned out by the Argos Collective’s fatalistic commentary. It begins by quoting the UN’s predictions that 150 million people will have to migrate by the end of the century due to global warming (which is translated into grammatically awkward English in the subtitles). The voices of everyday Maldivians are then heard reflecting on their uncertain future: “What will we do if the sea level rises? Climb the coconut trees or live on boats!” (Argos Collective 2010c). With this, viewers are presented with a narrative of isolated localism (where the effects of climate change are foregrounded with no reflection on the global causes), portraying the Maldivians as victims. Ultimately this story serves the interests of those sectors of the humanitarian industry that accept climate change as a fait accompli; meanwhile, the Argos Collective position themselves to document the expected consequences.27

24  Teii estimated that helping countries to adapt to the negative impacts of climate change, such as by installing seawalls or raising land levels by dredging sand, would cost around US$80 billion per year. He proposed the creation of a global insurance institution financed by the polluters that would compensate vulnerable countries for the damage they have suffered from climate change. See the press release by the Permanent Mission of Tuvalu to the United Nations. “Tuvalu Calls for Climate Change Polluters to Pay.” September 29, 2007 (cit. in Oels 2008, 16). 25  “Until the United States takes significant action, it is vulnerable to this type of lawsuit.” Jennifer Morgan cit. in Reuters. “Tiny Tuvalu Sues United States Over Rising Sea Level,” August 29, 2002, http://www.tuvaluislands.com/news/archived/2002/2002‑08-29.‌htm; see Oels 2008, 16. 26  Earth jurisprudence, or “wild law,” encompassing the juridico-political project organized around enshrining the rights of nature, has seen substantial development in recent years. See Cullinan 2011 and Burdon 2011. 27  On the humanitarian industry, see Polman 2010, De Waal 1997, and Demos 2013.

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The Arctic oil rush An atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration today of roughly 400 parts per million, up from 275 in the eighteenth century, due to the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation, is unprecedented since the Pleistocene 800,000 years ago, when extreme volcanic outgassing trapped heat in the atmosphere. This shift has introduced significant environmental transformations in the Far North (comprising the Arctic and Subarctic regions), including warmer temperatures leading to the loss of permafrost, freezing rain instead of snow, and ever-accelerating ice melting in the polar region (which leads to sea-level rises in coastal zones – especially low-lying deltas such as those in India and Bangladesh and island nations such as the Maldives) (see Shoumatoff 2008; Goldenberg 2013; and Sejersen 2015). The consequences for Arctic life are severe – invasive species increasingly move north and disrupt fragile ecosystems and food chains established over millennia, migratory animals lose their habitat, and Indigenous Arctic peoples are pressured to relocate, such as those in Shishmaref, an Alaskan village located on an island in the Chukchi Sea, just north of the Bering Strait – an Arctic corollary to the Maldives. At the same time, one-fifth of the planet’s undiscovered oil and natural gas is thought to be buried in the Arctic floor, according to the US Geological Survey in 2013, making the region, in the agency’s words, “the largest unexplored prospective area for petroleum remaining on earth” (cit. in Mouawad 2008).28 As a result, oil prospecting has led to a new geopolitical struggle over rights to ocean territory, fought between countries such as Russia, the United States, Denmark, Canada and Norway. In 2007, Russian scientists boarded the submersibles Mir‑1 and Mir‑2 to descend through a hole in North Pole ice to assert a claim to the region by planting a flag on the ocean floor – “The Arctic is Russian” (Nixon 2011, 267), declared the expedition leader. This mediagenic gesture initiated a new submarine landgrab, a race to the bottom of the sea, and forms a poignant counterimage to the Maldivian president’s underwater cabinet meeting. The comparison suggests an irony of energy politics in the age of climate change: fossil-fuel-induced global warming is melting ice caps in the Arctic, only to reveal more sources of fossil fuel that were previously unreachable. The result is that inhabitants of the Far North – people and wildlife alike – have become “both the leading suppliers and the leading subjects of humanity’s current experiment in warming the planet” (Jacoby 2009, 10). Far from being a remote wilderness of natural splendor, the Arctic, according to arts writer Nicola Triscott, is a place where competing worlds jostle: landgrabs supported by high-tech electronic fortresses and military encampments share space with migrating animals, oil extraction plants, mines, launch sites, and nuclear reactors, while submarines glide beneath the ice – the vast plains dotted with scientific research stations and remote Indigenous settlements (see Triscott 2001). It is this conflicted geography that the photographer and writer Subhankar Banerjee has approached in a further model of a visual culture that addresses a region threatened by the effects of global warming, the energy industry, and narratives of migration. Banerjee’s work operates at the intersection of aesthetics and politics, more in the tradition of eco-activism than ethnography, photojournalism, or fine art photography, even if it also broaches each of these areas. An Indian-born American photographer, writer, and environmental activist, Banerjee has 28  See also Rosenbaum 2015.

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worked for the protection of ecologically significant areas since 2000, particularly in the Arctic, and for Far North Indigenous human rights in the era of climate change; in 2010, he founded ClimateStoryTellers.‌org, a website that gathers his writings on these subjects.29 In the introduction to his edited anthology on the subject, Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point, Banerjee explains: The Arctic has become our planet’s tipping point – climate change is wreaking havoc up there. Resource wars continue to spread. Industrial toxins continue to accumulate widely. But also, the voices of resistance are gathering, are getting louder and louder – and that is the story this volume presents. It is the noise and the music of all our voices bundled together. (Banerjee 2012, 20)

Those voices include Inupiat cultural activists and tribal leaders, a Gwich’in elder and activist, NGO conservationists, environmental writers, wildlife and conservation biologists, and environmental activists, joined together in this interdisciplinary study of the Arctic, a micro-version of a larger social movement, supplemented with Banerjee’s writing and images. Banerjee’s photographs are wide-ranging, from aerial landscape shots to close-ups of animal life in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), spanning over nineteen million acres in northeastern Alaska. One stunning panorama, Snow Geese I, shows the autumnal coastal plain of the ANWR, the ocher of the land and blue of the water speckled with the white of migrating birds in flight. Another aerial shot, Caribou Migration I, depicts a flat bluish ice field punctuated with ant-like progressions of the circumpolar species (both are from the 2002 series Oil and the Caribou). There are also shots of Indigenous communities that Banerjee spent time with while researching the environment, including landscape images of Evens in northeastern Siberia herding reindeer in a snowy mountain range (from the series Even and the Climate, 2007); close-ups of Yukaghirs in eastern Siberia ice fishing (from Yukaghir and the Climate, 2007); and intimate portrayals of Gwich’ins hunting caribou, dressing the bloody carcasses besides their snowmobiles (from Gwich’in and the Caribou, 2007). While these images startle with their visual power, owing to the awesome environments and saturated colors, they also come with extended captions that disclose the regions’ ecological transformations, placing the images in relation to the traditional knowledge of First Nations peoples and the scientific insights of recent geology and climatology. We learn that shifting environmental conditions that lead to wetter snow and freezing rain make foraging difficult and cause a decline in reindeer and caribou populations, which threatens Indigenous food supplies in turn; that fish species, such as the Arctic char, are particularly vulnerable to displacement owing to warming waters, and migrating fish threaten to introduce new parasites and diseases to northern regions, carrying health risks for the Yukaghir population; and that oil development in the ANWR endangers the calving area of the Porcupine River caribou herd, which adversely affects the Gwich’in since they rely on the animals for sustenance.30 The captivating aesthetics of these images, in other words, is backed up by substantial research, with Banerjee’s project intertwining conceptual substance and visual seduction.

29  Banerjee’s articles on ClimateStoryTellers.‌org include: “Destabilization of Arctic Sea Ice Would Be Game Over for Climate,” 27 September 2013; “Colorado’s Thousand-Year Flood: Repeated Assaults Culminate with Epic Floods in Colorado,” 16 September 2013; and “Walking the Waters: How to Bring the Major Oil Companies Ashore and Halt the Destruction of Our Oceans,” 2 August 2012. 30  See the exhibition catalogue Subhankar Banerjee, p. 22.

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Banerjee’s images and texts reveal how climate change impacts the mobility of Indigenous Arctic peoples, as well as animals, in a number of ways.31 Transformations in habitat and weather alter foraging and hunting practices, changing the usual range of herd animals, and fragment landscapes, where thinning ice makes rivers and lakes harder or impossible to cross.32 In this regard, Banerjee’s work resonates with Indigenous documentary practices, such as Isuma Productions, based in Igloolik, Nunavut, which has focused on the changing environment from a native perspective since the mid-1990s.33 The company focuses on the independent production and distribution of community-produced films, TV programming, and Internet content, to preserve and widen the culture and languages of the Inuit, mainly located in First Nations’ territory in the Canadian Arctic, and presents storytelling traditions for Indigenous and nonnative audiences. For instance, the TV series Nunavut: Our Land, directed by Zacharias Kunuk in 1995, comprises thirteen half-hour programs that reconstruct traditional Inuit life, and was presented at documenta 11 in 2002, which was especially attuned to documentary media and postcolonial approaches to cultural politics.34 In 2010, Kunuk and Ian Mauro directed the hour-long documentary Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change, in which elders discuss how environmental transformation has altered traditional modes of living, hunting, and harvesting, and modified weather and atmospheric conditions. Video is a memory medium in this case, recording culture and tradition and transmitting eyewitness testimony to the environmental changes caused by a warming climate over the last eighty years. The medium helps Isuma Productions fulfill its aim: to use modes of community-based cultural representation to respond to the transformation of traditional forms of life and to begin to reverse the suppression by the Canadian state of 4000 years of oral-history, demonstrating that the Indigenous people of Igloolik can control their self-representation in word and image.35 Banerjee’s work forms a parallel aesthetics of survival, focusing on signs of ecological breakdown rather than depicting an idealized purity of the nature reserve, to contribute to a politics of resistance.36 This aspect of destruction resonates with the theories of the photographic me-

31  These communities, although traditionally nomadic and settling only in the last century owing to colonialist government policies and economic reasons, are now subjected to climate change-induced mobility. 32  “About five years ago the sea ice used to take longer to melt. It lasted about 10 months but now it’s only 8 months. This harms our way of life, our way of hunting, our way of fishing, and our way of traveling from one place to another.” Charlie Nakqashuk, of Pangnirtung, Nunavut, cit. in Randall 2013, n.p. 33  Also see the work of Arctic Perspective Initiative, a transnational artistic and scientific collaboration with offices in Canada and Slovenia, founded by Marko Peljhan and Matthew Biederman in 2006, which seeks to challenge dominant visual representations of Arctic geopolitics through its media interventions and collaborations with the Igloolik community. They have also covered Isuma Productions. On Indigenous uses of new media, see Soukup 2011, Triscott 2001, and Scott 2013. 34  Kunuk also made the first Aboriginal-language feature in 2001, Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, which received international acclaim. 35  See Kunuk 2010. On the political history of Far North Indigenous peoples, see Heininen 2011. 36  “Rarely, despite the increasing interest in the Arctic, does the political complexity of the region find visual representation as a contested arena of aspirations – a fragile set of ecosystems that are simultaneously a storehouse of resources, both renewable and nonrenewable, a transport zone and a theater for military operations, as well as homelands to dozens of different indigenous groups” (Triscott 2001, 23). Yet Triscott neglects to mention the biodiverse flora and fauna of the region, which Banerjee investigates in relation to fossil fuel extraction and the industrialization of the landscape via mining infrastructure.

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Fig. 3 | Subhankar Banerjee, Caribou Skeleton, from Oil and the Caribou, 2006

dium and its ontology of death, materialized in Banerjee’s melancholy visual imaginary of threatened forms of life stranded in time and space.37 More literally, Banerjee’s photography exposes how climate chaos brings about destructive alterations to the food chain, and compounds environmental pollution that afflicts the Arctic’s cold zone, where toxic substances such as PCBs, DDT, and mercury have settled, wreaking havoc on animal, plant, and human life (see Jacoby 2009 and Cone 2005). In a particularly grisly image, One Polar Bear Eating Another (2000), Banerjee’s perspective juxtaposes two animals, one desperate and alive, the other eviscerated, caught in a cannibalistic act that is the direct outcome of climate change’s reduction of traditional food sources (Banerjee 2010). In a shot from 2006, a caribou skeleton lies on the shores of Teshekpuk Lake, on the Arctic coast of Alaska, indicating a deviation from traditional migratory routes likely driven by hunger as freezing rain on the tundra sealed the plants the caribous eat in ice, causing sudden population crashes, as Banerjee’s caption informs us.38 In this vein, Banerjee’s images form

37  See, for instance, the classic text by Roland Barthes. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, translated by Richard Howard, Vintage, 1993; and for contemporary political implications, Ariella Azoulay. Death’s Showcase: The Power of Image in Contemporary Democracy. MIT Press, 2003. 38  See http://www.subhankarbanerjee.org/photohtml/oilncaribou10.‌html.

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Fig. 4 | Subhankar Banerjee, At the Corral – Ilya Golikov, Nikolayev Matvey and Osennia Dariya Mikhailevna, from Even and the Climate, 2007

an iconography of the ruins of the Arctic ecology and, as critic Yates McKee observes, extend environmental relevance to “[theorist Eduardo] Cadava’s axiom that ‘there can be no [photographic] image that is not about destruction and survival, and this is especially the case in the image of ruin’” (McKee 2012, 76) (fig. 3). The titles of Banerjee’s series situate his images within the larger conflicts between nature and human industry that determine such cycles of destruction and survival today – Coal and the Caribou, Oil and the Caribou, Oil and the Geese, Even and the Climate. Integral to the meanings of the photographs, they express divergent values regarding nature, signifying both a ‘natural resource’ in the capitalist petro-economy and a biodiverse ecology, and resonating with Indigenous approaches to the environment (evident in the photographer’s writings, and exhibitions such as Resource Wars from 2008).39 The photograph Caribou Tracks on Coal Seams II (2006) brings the two together visually: the tracks of centuries of migrating herds are etched on the surface of coal beds, testimony to the close physical connection in this habitat between human energy supplies and animal environments. It is exactly this coexistence that is often covered up by those supporting fossil-fuel development in the Arctic, as if the extraction industry’s object of interest 39  See the exhibition catalogue Subhankar Banerjee: Resource Wars, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, 2008.

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can be clearly disassociated from the region’s fragile ecologies. Investigating this nature-culture conflict, other artists and collectives tend to focus on technological interventions in the Arctic landscape – such as the Center for Land Use Interpretation’s Trans-Alaska Pipeline (2008), a forty-minute slideshow of photographs of the oil conduit as it traverses eight hundred miles across the state; or Bureau d’études’s Conquête du Grand Nord (2009), a map detailing military and industrial activity in the Far North, showing military bases, nuclear reactors, radar stations, sites of nuclear tests, mines, oil extraction plants, and polluted areas. In contrast, Banerjee foregrounds the ecosystems, both fragile and sublime, of the open Arctic expanses and animal migrations, showing their precarious existence, ever threatened by industry, which has already led to the present scenes of ecological breakdown (fig. 4).

The Arctic image complex In addition to practicing photography as an artistic activity – one that focuses attention exclusively on the aestheticized picture – Banerjee has deployed his images within the fields of politicized visual culture and the mainstream media to raise consciousness about climate-justice grievances. In 2003, for example, Banerjee’s ANWR photographs, just before they were to be exhibited at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, made a fascinating detour into the environmental deliberations of US government policy. At the time, Republican politicians under President George W. Bush’s administration were arguing that the Arctic was empty of wildlife and therefore opening up the area to oil drilling should pose little environmental risk. Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton described the region as a “flat, white nothingness” (Dunaway 2009, 259) and Alaskan Senator Frank Murkowski held up a blank white poster and claimed it showed an accurate picture of the Far North.40 Such hyperbole is only the latest example of a self-serving politics of erasure, going back to the colonial days of the forced displacements and violent resettlements of native peoples, as well as nineteenth- and twentieth-century conservation practices that attempted to define and protect unsettled lands as pure wildernesses, depopulated of Indigenous inhabitants, a practice now extended to Arctic life (see Guha 1999 and Solnit 1999). It is just this view – politically instrumental to the energy industry – that Banerjee’s images have opposed by highlighting the biodiversity of the region, and by locating First Nations peoples and nonhuman nature alike within distinct political, ecological, and aesthetic constellations. Intervening in the same congressional debate, Democratic California Senator Barbara Boxer displayed a reproduction of Banerjee’s 2001 photograph depicting a polar bear walking amid pools of melting ice on the coast of the Beaufort Sea, having been given an advance copy of Banerjee’s book Seasons of Life and Land: Arctic National Wildlife Refuge by the Alaska Wilderness League, with whom the photographer had been collaborating.41 She mobilized Banerjee’s image,

40  Murkowski’s stunt figured in the 2004 documentary Oil on Ice, directed by Bo Boudart and Dale Djerassi. 41  Banerjee explained: “My first book, Seasons of Life and Land: Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was published in 2003. The official publication date was in April, but my publisher The Mountaineers Books received a few early copies from the printer in March and immediately sent it to the Alaska Wilderness League office in Washington, DC, a national conservation organization fully dedicated to conservation of Alaska’s wild places.

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entitled Polar Bear on Bernard Harbor, Barter Island, in support of the continued protection of the region, claiming that the visual evidence showed the Northern environment to be a life-filled habitat, counter to the claims of the likes of Norton and Murkowski. The March 18 debate was shown on the TV network C‑SPAN, and Banerjee’s work featured prominently in the movement that successfully stopped the drilling proposal on the floor of Congress. As a result of this politicized framework, Banerjee’s extensive captions were subsequently abridged for the 2003 Smithsonian exhibition, “Seasons of Life and Land: Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,” an act of censorship that occasioned a further exhibition a year later – with restored captions – at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.42 Through these intersecting fields of exposure, in the media, exhibition spaces, and governmental politics, Banerjee reinforced the work of various activist groups, including the Alaska Wilderness League and Greenpeace, who in recent years have focused their energies on protecting the Arctic from oil drilling and on stopping Canadian tar sands exploitation. A further example of this collaboration is Banerjee’s Caribou Migration I (2002), which shows a herd traveling over the frozen Coleen River in the ANWR, its aerial viewpoint emphasizing the connectedness of animal life and land as an integrated ecosystem. Banerjee volunteered this image to be used as part of a political campaign mounted in the pages of the New York Times in November 2002, in collaboration with US environmental NGOs, including the Alaska Wilderness League, Natural Resources Defense Council, and Earthjustice, and with the endorsement of the Gwich’in Steering Committee. The advertisement asked readers to take responsibility for the “public” land of ANWR, in part by contacting Senate and House representatives to voice opposition to its proposed sell-off to the energy industry. Banerjee’s work forms part of a movement that links climate-change threats in the Far North to the oil and gas industry in the United States: connecting his photography to environmental movements produces a network of visuality that exerts pressure on governmental politics. This results in an “image complex,” which, as described by Meg McLagan and Yates McKee, identifies “the channels of circulation along which cultural forms travel, the nature of the campaigns that frame them, and the discursive platforms that display and encode them in specific truth modes” (McLagan/McKee 2012, 12). Banerjee’s work opens up channels connecting environmentalist photojournalism, grassroots activism, and media imagery – as well as discourses of art, science, politics, and Indigenous community groups – corresponding to ecology’s very definition as the science of connection. It thus adds further momentum to the collective will to act, whether against the oil and natural gas rush in the Arctic or for native rights. And it is the visual legibility of his images that renders them capable of addressing multiple audiences and constituencies. I was already working with AWL since 2001, and was contributing my images for the campaign and also visited DC several times to lobby Congress. The debate was coming up on March 19. Alaska Wilderness League gave a copy of the book to Senator Boxer who was to lead the opponent voice on the Senate floor against drilling in the Arctic Refuge.” E‑mail to the author, June 23, 2015. 42  Banerjee wrote this caption to accompany a photograph of a buff-breasted sandpiper before the Senate debate: “This species, a long-distance traveler that migrates each year from Argentina to the Arctic Refuge coastal plain to nest and rear their young, is one of the top five bird species at greatest risk if their habitat is disturbed.” After the Senate vote, the Smithsonian edited the caption to read: “Buff-Breasted Sandpiper/ Coastal Plain of the Jago River” (see Louvar 2004). For the larger context of the controversial political reception and censorship of Banerjee’s work when it was displayed at the Smithsonian, see Dunaway 2009.

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On May 14, 2015, his iconic polar bear image made another appearance – this time on Democracy Now! – accompanying a video interview with the artist-activist regarding the Obama administration’s decision, opposed by many environmentalists, to approve Shell’s request to conduct offshore drilling in the Chuckchi Sea, which scientists estimate contains approximately fifteen billion barrels of oil (see Prupis 2015). In his interview with Amy Goodman, Banerjee explained his support of protestors fighting to stop Shell’s drilling plans, including the ‘kayaktivists’ blocking Shell’s oil rig off Seattle’s coast before it headed to the Arctic. The flotilla constituted a protest action by the ‘Shell No’ coalition, comprising environmentalist and activist groups such as 350Seattle, the Mosquito Fleet, Rising Tide, Bayan USA, and the Backbone Campaign. Given the likelihood of industrial accidents in waters where there is inadequate infrastructure for cleanup operations, the presidential decision supporting oil drilling can only be seen as “irresponsible and reckless,” according to Banerjee; it places “a national and an international ecological treasure” (Banerjee, 14 May 2015, on Democracy Now!) at unnecessary risk – and in fact the governmental approval was rescinded months later owing to environmental concerns.43 Throughout the struggle, Banerjee’s polar bear has come to figure metonymically as an image of precarious survival, and equally one of popular resistance, visualizing the terms of the wider debate around the manifold impacts of climate change, as it documents a threatened life-form endemic to the biodiverse Arctic.

The politics of legibility By employing visual forms that emphasize legibility over experimental imagery or conceptualist opacity, the photography of both the Argos Collective and Banerjee takes on a populist dimension. Both models distinguish themselves from the Western avant-garde’s politics of representation – its attempts to revolutionize modes of perception through unconventional, experimental aesthetics – which, however, tend to cater to exclusive audiences versed in the highly specialized discourses of contemporary art. In contrast, this embrace of legibility, privileging the representation of politics rather than the politics of representation, recognizes the imperative to make directly visible the growing crisis of habitat loss, species extinction, environmental calamity, and mass displacement. As such, it invests in the potential of that imagery to reach wide audiences via accessible media, inclusive education, and informative framing devices, which can better contribute to social transformation in the present, unlike those forms of artistic specialization presented in galleries. This openness extends as well to sites of exhibition: Banerjee’s photography, for instance, has been shown by such diverse hosts as the California Academy of Sciences, the Smithsonian Institution, and contemporary art institutions (such as in Nottingham Contemporary’s 2015 exhibition Rights of Nature: Art and Ecology in the Americas, which I co‑curated). It has, in addition, been featured in nature magazines such as Orion, Audubon, and Sierra, and independent media websites such as Truthout, Common Dreams, and Democracy Now!, where its aesthetic versatil43  “‘Irresponsible & Reckless’: Environmentalists Decry Obama’s Approval for Shell Drilling in Arctic,” Democracy Now!, May 14, 2015, http://www.democracynow.org/2015/5/14/irresponsible_reckless_environmentalists_decry_obamas_approval.

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ity – and its image complex – allows it to fit into this expanded field of reception. Yet, at the same time, his work has a representational and political complexity not shared by the visuality and discourse of the Argos Collective or conventional conservationism, as found in the photographic illustrations of media platforms such as National Geographic, to which it might also occasionally bear superficially similarity in terms of composition, image style, and referential lucidity. In contrast to photography and its histories, which emphasize landscape as an anthropocentric enterprise, Banerjee’s work creatively approximates what Bruno Latour calls “hybrid” formations, by bridging cultures and natures, the pictorial and the geophysical, the image and the trace, the photograph and the text (Latour 1993, 42).44 The result restructures perception so that it no longer reaffirms human sovereignty over nature, which has defined photography’s longstanding focus on human subjects (from Nadar to the Argos Collective), or its production of aestheticized landscapes as human-constructed zones of experience (from Ansel Adams to Andreas Gursky).45 Conversely, Banerjee’s photography and texts, whether focusing on caribou and coal or Yukaghirs ice fishing in Siberia, reveal a world of ecologies that are interrelated as much as conflictual. On the one hand, his work provides a post-anthropocentric account of biodiversity, part of which is to depict a more egalitarian composition of a common world (again in Latour’s terms) (Latour 2004, 8); on the other, it forms a critical view of the increasingly destructive effects of corporate and industrial activity on nonhuman life-forms and their environments. Banerjee’s writing contributes further to this speculative discourse, expressed visually as an inclusive space for nonhuman life and natural environments. Consider his 2012 essay “Ought We Not Establish ‘Access to Food’ as a Species Right?” which advocates granting legal status to his photography’s animal subjects. Here, Banerjee defends his rights-expanding proposal by referencing the precedents of the World People’s Conference on Climate Change in Bolivia in 2010, attended by some 30,000 people from over one hundred countries, and the UN resolution of the same year which declared, for the first time, that access to clean water and sanitation is “a fundamental human right,” with 122 nations voting in favor, none against, and forty-one abstaining (the United States and Canada among them) (UN General Assembly 2010, cited on Democracy Now!).46 Banerjee contends that access to food as an animal rights claim is not only necessary for the survival of other-than-human life, but is also at the root of the struggle of First Nations peoples against habitat loss caused by the industrial exploitation of their lands: “By making this claim

44  He argues that in addition to the “purifying” practices that characterize modernity, there are other “hybrid” models that mix politics, science, technology, and nature, which open our culture anew to others past and present (Latour 1993, 42). 45  Banerjee made this observation on photography and human subjects in his presentation at a conference I organized on the release of the special issue of Third Text, “Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology,” University College London, March 2, 2013. On the typical dominance of human portrait photography in current major Western exhibitions, see Banerjee 2013a and Wells 2011, 2; the traditional anthropocentric bias of photography theory is also expressed in Deborah Bright, “Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men: An Inquiry into the Cultural Meanings of Landscape Photography,” The Contest of Meaning, edited by Richard Bolton, MIT Press, 1989, p. 126: “Whatever the aesthetic merits, every representation of landscape is also a record of human values and actions imposed on the land over time.” 46  See “In Historic Vote, UN Declares Water a Fundamental Human Right,” Democracy Now!, July 29, 2010, http://www.democracynow.org/2010/7/29/in_historic_vote_un_declares_access.

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they are fighting to protect access to food for human and non-human communities – caribou for the Gwich’in, and cotton grass for the caribou, during calving time” (Banerjee 2013a, 38).47 In 2009, Indigenous representatives from the Arctic, North America, Asia, Pacific, Latin America, Africa, Caribbean, and Russia met in Alaska to demand the “inherent rights of Indigenous Peoples,” including the “rights to our lands, territories, environment and natural resources,” and to declare their traditional lands as Food Sovereignty Areas, “free from extractive industries, deforestation and chemical-based industrial food production systems” (Indigenous Peoples’ Global Summit on Climate Change 2009). By extension, Banerjee’s photographs of caribou and snow geese can be considered speculative ‘portraits’ of rights-bearing subjects, rather than as natural objects whose value is defined by human criteria of usefulness, pragmatic or aesthetic. In this regard, his work gives visual form to one modeling of an interspecific democratization of politics, working toward the composition of a common world – the result of an image complex formed out of photography, political theory and practice, legal testimony, activism, and exhibitions between the fields of science, visual culture, and environmental humanities. Banerjee’s politicization of visual culture exists at a far remove from the fatalism of climate-refugee narratives and shows that resigned adaptation to the dislocations of climate change is hardly our only option.

References Argos Collective. Climate Refugees. MIT Press, 2010a. –. “From Global Warming to Climate Refugees.” Indian Ocean: Maldives, Archipelago in Peril, edited by GuyPierre Chomette. MIT Press, 2010b, pp. 14–16. –. The Maldives: A Nation at the Water’s Edge, 2010c, http://www.collectifargos.com/en/interactive-documentary-blogs/multimedia-reports/the-maldives‑a-nation‑at-the-water‑s-edge/multimedia#.VXhbcRPtlBc. Accessed 22 October 2015. Banerjee, Subhabrata Bobby. “A Climate for Change? Critical Reflections on the Durban United Nations Climate Change Conference.” Organization Studies, vol. 33, no. 12, 2012, pp. 1761–1786. Banerjee, Subhankar. “Thankful for Polar Bear Habitat But Shell Must Not Go There.” ClimateStoryTellers.‌org, November  26, 2010, http://www.climatestorytellers.org/stories/subhankar-banerjee-polar-bear-habitat/. Accessed 7 April 2018. –. “From Kolkata to Kaktovik: En Route to Arctic Voices.” Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point, edited by Subhankar Banerjee, Seven Stories Press, June 2012, pp. 1–22. –. “Ought We Not Establish ‘Access to Food’ as a Species Right?” Third Text, no. 120, January 2013a, pp. 33-43. –. “Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology.” Lecture, conference on the release of special issue of Third Text, University College London, March 2, 2013b. Barnett, Jon, and W. Neil Adger. “Climate Dangers and Atoll Countries.” Climatic Change, vol. 61, no. 3, December 2003, pp. 321–337. Berzon, Alexandra. “Tuvalu Is Drowning.” Salon, March 31, 2006, http://www.salon.com/2006/03/31/tuvalu_2/. Accessed 6 December 2017. Burdon, Peter, editor. Exploring Wild Law: The Philosophy of Earth Jurisprudence. Wakefield Press, 2011.

47  For further consideration of contemporary art’s relation to this judicial discourse, see my catalogue essay for the “Rights of Nature” Nottingham Contemporary exhibition I co‑curated, “Rights of Nature: The Art and Politics of Earth Jurisprudence.” April  2015, https://creativeecologies.ucsc.edu/wp-content/uploads/ sites/196/2015/10/Demos-Rights‑of-Nature-2015.compressed.‌pdf.

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T. J.  Demos Schmidle, Nicholas. “Wanted: A New Home for My Country.” New York Times Magazine, 8 May 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/10/magazine/10MALDIVES‑t.‌html. Accessed 6 December 2017. Scott, Emily Eliza. “Artists’ Platforms for New Ecologies,” online supplement to Third Text 27, no. 1, January 2013, http://www.thirdtext.org/domains/thirdtext.com/local/media/images/medium/scott_ee_artists___ platforms_cc.‌pdf. Accessed 6 December 2017. Sejersen, Frank. Rethinking Greenland and the Arctic in the Era of Climate Change: New Northern Horizons. ­Routledge, 2015. Shoumatoff, Alex. “The Arctic Oil Rush.” Vanity Fair, May 2008, pp. 237–239. Smith, Neil. “There’s No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster.” Understanding Katrina: Perspectives from the Social Sciences, 11 June 2006, http://understandingkatrina.ssrc.org/Smith. Accessed 6 December 2017. Solnit, Rebecca. Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West. University of California Press, 1999, pp. 215–385. Soukup, Katarina. “Traveling through Layers: Inuit Artists Appropriate New Technologies.” Arctic Geopolitics and Autonomy, edited by Michael Bravo and Nicola Triscott, Hatje Cantz, 2011, pp. 57–69. Tokar, Brian. “Is the Paris Climate Conference Designed to Fail?” Common Dreams, 11 November 2015, http:// www.commondreams.org/views/2015/11/11/paris-climate-conference-designed-fail. Accessed 6 December 2017. Triscott, Nicola. “Critical Art and Intervention in the Technologies of the Arctic.” Arctic Geopolitics and Autonomy, edited by Michael Bravo and Nicola Triscott, Arctic Perspective Cahier, no. 2, Hatje Cantz, 2001, pp. 19–36. –, and Michael Bravo, editors. Arctic Geopolitics and Autonomy. Arctic Perspective Cahier, no. 2, Hatje Cantz, 2001. United Nations. “UN Expert Urges Maldives to Tackle Displacement Caused by Climate Change.” UN News, July 21, 2011, http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.‌asp?NewsID=​39111. Accessed 6 December 2017. Wells, Liz. Land Matters: Landscape Photography, Culture and Identity. I. B. Tauris, 2011. Westra, Laura. Environmental Justice and the Rights of Ecological Refugees. Routledge, 2009. White, Gregory. Climate Change and Migration: Security and Borders in a Warming World. Oxford University Press, 2011. Williams, Frances. “Climate Is Rights Issue, Says Maldives Minister.” Financial Times, 4 March 2009, http://on.ft. com/1MBKAZI. Accessed 6 December 2017. World Bank. “Maldives – Climate Change Adaptation Project: Environment and Social Assessment and Management Framework”, documents.worldbank, 2014, http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/ en/2014/11/23008510/maldives-climate-change-adaptation-project-environment-social-assessment-management-framework. Accessed 6 December 2017. Wright, Steve. “Preparing for Mass Refugee Flows: The Corporate Military Sector.” Surviving Climate Change: The Struggle to Avert Global Catastrophe, edited by David Cromwell and Mark Levene, Pluto, 2007, pp. 82–101. Yuen, Eddie. “The Politics of Failure Have Failed: The Environmental Movement and Catastrophism.” Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth, edited by Sasha Lilley et al., PM Press, 2012, pp. 15–43.

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PLACES, SPACES, AND BOUNDARIES OF MIGRATION

SILVIA NAEF

FROM BAGHDAD TO PARIS AND BACK Modernity, Temporary Exile and Abstraction in the Arab World*

By my current lifestyle, I am a European, but my heart turns to the East. I find myself in it.1

Hurufiyya – the use of elements of the Arabic alphabet in a mostly abstract pictorial or sculptural composition – can be considered to be the one original trend that has emerged in modern art in the Arab world during the 20th century. It is also often seen as the embodiment of Arabness, conjugating abstraction and tradition, as the subtitle of the first book published on this topic, Charbel Dagher’s Arab Hurufiyya, Art and Identity, suggests. As such, the movement is strongly tied to attempts to link modernity and authenticity, a position that appeared in the late 1940s and was influential until the 1980s. Although the theoretical foundations of Hurufiyya were laid in 1971 with the manifesto The One Dimension (Al-bu’d al‑wahid) (Al Said 1973, 38–40; Dagher 2016, 137–140), artists had been experimenting with the letters of the Arabic script since the 1940s. Some of the main representatives of this movement, such as the two Iraqis Shakir Hassan Al Said and Jamil Hamoudi, spent some years in Paris in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Since the adoption of art in its Western modality, between the end of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, artists from the Arab world had been to Paris – but also to Rome and other European destinations – in order to acquire an art training or to complete it. The Lebanese painter Moustafa Farroukh (1901–1957) went to Rome in the 1920s, then to Paris, at his own expense; the Egyptian sculptor Mahmoud Mukhtar (1891–1934) was sent to Paris on a scholarship as early as 1911; and in Iraq, Hafiz al‑Droubi (1914–1991) was sent to Rome, while Faiq Hassan (1914–1992) and Jawad Salim (1919–1961) were sent to Paris in the 1930s. After World War II, this movement increased, and although New York started to supplant Paris as the center of world art, the French capital continued to exert an attraction on artists from all over the world. A chosen temporary exile in Paris had a high added value in the training of young artists from the Arab world; for most of them, as they came from countries where the art scene was still in its beginnings, it was a source of discoveries and inspiration, a chapter that ought to be further explored in academic research. Although some artists decided to finally stay in France, this article will deal with migration as a

*  Parts of this text (mainly those on Shakir Hassan Al Said) were presented in French in a slightly different form on 7 December 2017 as a lecture given within the “Ecole des Modernités” at the Fondation Giacometti in Paris. 1  Hassan Massoudy, Si loin de l’Euphrate. Une jeunesse d’artiste en Irak. Albin Michel, 2004, p. 158 (my translation). Hassan Massoudy is an Iraqi artist living in Paris who is known for his calligraphic compositions.

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deliberate choice, limited in time and seen as a part of an artistic curriculum; it will focus on the effect it had on the development of the specific movement known as Hurufiyya. Since the end of the 1940s, the art scene in the French capital was burgeoning with new artistic trends, such as Isidore Isou’s Lettrisme and Abstraction lyrique, centered around Georges Mathieu. Although at the present state of research it is not possible to establish if there were direct contacts between those artists and their Iraqi counterparts,2 this paper will try to outline some of the aspects of what could possibly have been an interaction between artists of diverse horizons and of the climate of intellectual exchange that reigned then in Paris.

Hurufiyya and Arab artistic modernity With the adoption of art in its Western modality, a process that started in the late 19th century, what might be labelled ‘Islamic art’ or, more generally, the artistic practices of the region, were progressively abandoned. In a first period of adoption of these Western patterns, ‘modernity’ consisted in the fact of practicing Western art. Although artists adapted it to local tastes and motifs, the question of how this new language could be related to former traditions was only marginally or symbolically posed. For Moustafa Farroukh, for instance, the Alhambra in Granada was the Arabs’ Acropolis; it showed their capability to produce masterworks and was a way for him to legitimize his being an artist, in a context where this was often seen as resulting from the desire to mimic the West (Farroukh 1982, 100; Naef 2014). However, Farroukh and other artists of his generation would never have contemplated going back to Islamic art patterns and concepts, or to other forms of regional visual expressions, since Islamic art was then perceived as a less developed form of art or even as a non-art (Naef 2003). Being modern thus meant adopting art in its Western shape. In the late 1940s some artists began to explore the modern trends that had emerged in the West since the beginning of the century, where non-European art had played an important role. They tied the question of modernity to the necessity of rooting it in the region’s visual heritage. This is what the Group of Modern Art in Cairo or the Baghdad Group for Modern Art formulated (Naef 1996; Shabout 2007). In this search for new forms of expression, a few artists started to experiment with the formal possibilities of Arabic letters, laying the foundations of what would later on be called Hurufiyya. Charbel Dagher, in his 1991 book (translated into English in 2016), designates the Iraqi Madiha Omar (1908–2005) as the first Hurufi artist. Omar, who was then living in Washington, D. C., became interested in Islamic art after being introduced to it by Islamic art historian Richard Ettinghausen. In a manifesto she wrote in English in 1949, Omar made an important statement: although Islamic calligraphy had been a major genre in Islamic lands, it could no longer be reproduced in its traditional shape but had to be adapted to the present age. For her, each letter of the alphabet “sa[id] something in abstract design” (Dagher 2016, 137) and had a personality:

2  Although academic research on modern art in the Arab world has steadily developed in recent years, much work is still to be done. For most artists of the first generation, for instance, there are still no monographs or major reference works available.

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From Baghdad to Paris and Back With that conviction in mind, I started using the Arabic alphabet as a basis of my abstract painting, gradually developing it from plain surface manipulation into a more expressive dynamic movement of a thought in a picture, using the letters appropriate to the meaning of that abstraction considering their force, individuality, rhythmic effect, power of expression and adaptability. (Dagher 2016, 137)

There are two main ideas expressed in the manifesto that led Dagher to consider Omar the founder of Hurufiyya in spite of the fact that she did not have disciples: (a) using the letters of the Arabic alphabet is not equal to practising calligraphy in the traditional sense; (b) letters are employed as mere shapes, not for what they stand for in writing and not in order to produce linguistic meaning. Other artists from countries as different as Sudan, Morocco and Lebanon experimented with the Arabic script in the 1960s, before the movement was named and theorized by the Baghdad group The One Dimension in 1971. An interesting example is that of the Lebanese poet, writer and painter Etel Adnan (b. 1925). Born and raised in Beirut, Adnan moved to California, after a short stay in Paris, in the 1950s. There she was introduced to the use of script in artworks by a friend who invited her to write in Japanese. One year later, she wrote down the poem “City of Sindbad” by the Iraqi Badr Shakir al‑Sayyab into a Japanese notebook. Writing Arabic poems in notebooks became one of her favorite ways of expression. What is relevant for us here is that Adnan learned Arabic, spoken and written, only at a later stage, as she was educated in a French school where Arabic was forbidden. Her father, however, a Syrian and former Ottoman officer, taught her Arabic, letting her copy from an Arabic-Ottoman Turkish phrasebook (Adnan 2014, 12–14). Thus, for Adnan, who did not understand what she was copying, writing was a form of drawing, or as she puts it: “I didn’t need to write in French anymore, I was going to paint in Arabic“3 (Adnan 2014, 22). In that sense, although she “writes” poems by well-known Arabic authors in her notebooks, her approach is one of drawing. The manifesto The One Dimension published in 1971 in Baghdad by a group of artists led by Shakir Hassan Al Said, including Jamil Hamoudi, Dia Azzawi and Rafa Nasiri, declared that the letter had a purely formal value, that it was a dimension rather than a subject and that its real base was movement and directionality. “Therefore, what is meant by the one dimension (as an idea) is taking the written letter as the departure point for arriving at the meaning of the line [khatt] (as a pure plastic element)” (Dagher 2016, 137). Using the letter was a way of getting back to the true value of art. The unidimensionality of the letter would return art to the truth of the line. “It creates then a space for interrogating the world of dimensions or the one dimension through an objective presence on the pictorial surface in particular” (Dagher 2016, 138). The manifesto further underlines the relation between the line traced through the letter and the cosmic dimension that ties the artist to the surrounding environment. Thus, the letter loses its linguistic function in order to become the expression of an inner truth that the artist explores in a work of art – not art as representation but as an expression of another value. What remains of the letter is not its linguistic/phonetic value but the line the artist forms when tracing it.

3  Emphasis added.

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The Arabic text of the manifesto plays on the semantic ambiguity of the term for “line”, khatt. While khatt means “line” or “trace”, it has also the sense of “calligraphy”. Although Hurufi artists explicitly stated that they were not calligraphers but painters, the double meaning of the Arabic word suggests another association to the reader: it links to calligraphy not as a genre to be practiced and adopted again by modern artists, but as a form of heritage to which Hurufiyya, although defining itself as a new practice embedded in modern art, refers itself as a civilizational value. “The one dimension is part of the Arab civilizational traditions through history, since the unity of the letter and the representational surface are like the unity of the art of the arabesque and of Arabic calligraphy” (Al Said 1988, 102). Most artists who practiced Hurufiyya – as the movement started to be named (from the Arabic huruf, “letters”4) – were interested specifically in this aspect; it was a tool connecting them to an Arab tradition and an Arab identity. The complex intellectual and spiritual reflections that Al Said expressed in the manifesto, and that, as we shall see, can be traced back to some of his former writings, did not become a central element of Hurufiyya as it spread in the Arab world.

Thinking about art and abstraction Jamil Hamoudi arrived in Paris in 1947, where he entered the École des Beaux-Arts and the École du Louvre. He had previously studied art in Baghdad, and had been teaching at the Teachers’ Training College. He had founded the cultural periodical Al-fikr al‑hadith, presenting to the Iraqi reader the most recent trends in literature, poetry and art. As his friend and biographer Paul Balta, a French writer and journalist, states, he quickly entered Parisian art circles and exhibited from 1949 to 1953 at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, created in 1946 as a venue for non-figurative artists, a trend still rejected by some of the major art critics and institutions in Paris. Hamoudi had initially been fascinated by Surrealism and met André Breton and other Surrealist poets, whom he appreciated, but he eventually distanced himself from their way of painting, as he felt that their canvasses were too dark and desperate (Balta 1986, 20). While still in Baghdad, he had discovered in a bookshop a few old issues of the French magazine L’lIlustration, where some of the book paintings by the 13th-century miniaturist Yahya al‑Wasiti were reproduced. Al‑Wasiti came from the town of Wasit, in today’s Iraq. Hamoudi was deeply impressed by the purity of the color surfaces, by “his expressionist forms”, which he felt were close to Surrealism (Balta 1986, 19). He is also reported as having discovered at age 14 that he “had to transgress the signifying sign of the Arabic alphabet and of its writing, in order to give it a new shape” (Galy-Carles 1986, 18) In Paris, Hamoudi met some of the capital’s main intellectuals, and in 1958 started to publish the cultural periodical Ishtar, which aimed at being “a bridge between Orient and Occident” in the cultural field, as the editorial of the first issue stated (Ishtar, 1958, 3).5 If we believe an article by the French philosopher Raymond Bayer, published in 1962 in Ishtar (but written in 1955), Hamoudi started to use Arabic letters in painting in 1949 (Bayer 1962, 349). It is in Bayer’s home that Hamoudi first showed his work to a Parisian audience (Bayer 1962, 349). He is quoted as having said that his art started to become abstract without intention, while he was seeking a 4  There might also be a reference to the mystical sect of the Hurufiyya in the Middle Ages, however. 5  With Maria Menegues, Paul Balta and André Robin.

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simple form able to express something that would be more profound than “a normal form”. Bayer underlines that Hamoudi’s sculpture was more abstract than his painting, highlighting Hamoudi’s study of non-representational motifs in Assyrian-Babylonian art (Bayer 1962, 350). In a short non-dated interview published in 1964 in a book of conversations with abstract artists who had exhibited at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, and where Hamoudi is presented in the section dedicated to sculpture, Raymond Bayer states again that “Hamoudi is not really an abstract artist, abstraction being for him a simplification of forms” (Bayer 1964, 297). The French abstract painter Félix Del Marle, who participated in the interview, also shared the view that there was no “abstract spirit since its inception in Hamoudi’s [sculptural] works” (Bayer 1964, 298). Asked to show his paintings, Hamoudi affirmed that he moved into abstraction in Paris, but that he had previously been impressed by the abstraction that he found in Islamic painting (ibid.). He added that he had painted the names of some friends in Arabic script, but that he considered himself rather a Surrealist than an abstract artist (at that time) because he resorted in his compositions to their method of free association (ibid.) (fig.1).

Fig. 1 | Jamil Hamoudi, Composition Mim (also Composition M), 1951, gouache

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Fig. 2 | Jamil Hamoudi, The Nationalization of Oil Frees the People, 1974, oil on canvas, collection of the Museum of Modern Iraqi Art, Baghdad (looted in 2003)

For Hamoudi, art was a quest for “the pure truth”, as he wrote in 1952; it could not exist if it ignored “philosophical and religious questions”. André Parinaud speaks of a “spiritual path” reflected by the work of the artist (Jamil Hamoudi 1987, 7), who thought that music, literature and scientific discoveries ought to become more relevant as sources of inspiration in the future (Hamoudi 1958a, 111). As for abstraction, “In my opinion, abstraction is this inner necessity that pushes the artist to create in his work a balance and a plastic value that are self-sufficient. This exists in all great works of art at all times” (Hamoudi 1958b, 111).6 In a later text, Hamoudi explained that he was then trying to “translate the linguistic value of the letter into a purely formal one” (Hamoudi 1984, 43). In his early Hurufi work, Hamoudi had been non-figurative. This would change from the 1970s on, when he introduced representational motifs that were accompanied by painted sentences illustrating the title of the composition or the represented figurative motives, making them readable and understandable, as in his 1974 The Nationalization of Oil Frees the People (fig. 2), a homage 6  Text written in May 1953.

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to the nationalization of Iraqi oil in 1972 by Saddam Hussein. The sentence, in Arabic, covers the surface of the canvas, which is illustrated with oil wells. Other paintings by Hamoudi in this period “represent” Koranic verses, or more generic humanistic values, such as Iraqi-French friendship. Thus, Hurufiyya takes on, in Hamoudi’s work, a different sense: while in the early years in was pure formal exploration, it subsequently became declamatory. In 1984 Hamoudi had been appointed as a supervisor of the Iraqi cultural center in Paris and was the editor in chief of Lettre de Bagdad, a propaganda vessel of the Iraqi government. In an article he wrote in this publication, he praised the support that the then ruling Baath Party had given to the visual arts and underlined that, as a consequence, artists had abandoned romanticism and total abstraction (grande abstraction), striving to make works that respected their people and were understood by them (Hamoudi 1984, 40). This echoes the official party line, which although not prescribing a specific style, suggested that works exhibited at the yearly Party Exhibition (Ma’rad al‑hizb), the main artistic event in the country, should represent the struggle of the Arab people and support Baathist politics (Naef 1996, 275–290). This might explain why Hamoudi, who had an official function, moved away from considering Hurufiyya a pure formal exercise and turned it into a “committed” form of art. Shakir Hassan Al Said (1925–2004) was born in the southern Iraqi town of Samawa. In 1948, he obtained a degree from the Teachers’ Training College, and in 1954 from the Fine Arts Institute in Baghdad. From 1955 to 1959 he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.7 Back in Iraq, he became an art teacher and one of the country’s leading artists. He is also known as an art critic and art historian and authored several books on the modern art movement in Iraq, among them a two-volume art history (Al Said 1982, 1988). In his youth, he was part of the first group of modernist artists in Iraq to theorize their research; this was the Baghdad Group for Modern Art (Jama’at Baghdad li-l-Fann al‑Hadith), founded by the painter and sculptor Jawad Salim (1919–1961), considered the father of modern Iraqi art. In the group’s manifesto, issued in 1951 and written by Shakir Hassan, we find the two key elements of the artist’s thought: the total adoption of modernity, symbolized by the importance that the text accords to Picasso; and the will to draw on the sources of Iraqi culture and heritage in order to give a specific meaning to this modernity, which the reference to 13th-century miniaturist Yahya al‑Wasiti highlights. Al Said’s work in this period reflects the style disseminated by the group: a figurative modernist style enriched by elements of Iraqi visual traditions, mainly inspired by folk or pre-Islamic arts (fig. 3). An essential passage in Al Said’s subsequent artistic career is the discovery of Sufism. He defined it as “a second birth”, a “conversion experience towards religious practices” (Dagher 2016, 87); this conversion took place in Paris in 1961. Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, in an article published in 2005, goes so far as to say that at a time when most of the artists in the region aimed to express a national character or anti-colonial resistance, Al Said was interested in the spiritual aspects of Islam (Wilson-Goldie 2005). This is expressed in the Contemplative Manifesto (Al-bayyan al‑ta’mmuli), which he published on June 23, 1966 in the literary supplement of the Iraqi daily Al-Jumhuriyya.8 For Al Said, contemplative art must allow the artist to overcome the individualism that characterizes modern art and lead him to uncover the truth (haqiqa), rather than express his own self 7  Other sources indicate 1956–1961: Dagher 2016, 87. 8  Issue Nr. 880, p. 52. I refer here to the text published in Al Said 1973, pp. 49–52.

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Fig. 3 | Shakir Hassan Al Said, Al deek al faseeh (The Articulate Cockerel), 1954, oil on canvas, 60 × 44 cm, Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah

and his humanity (Al Said 1973, 49). He compares artistic work to a religious ritual and considers that art “is a form of devotion” (Al Said 1973, 50); in his devotion, the artist does not differ from a sincere devotee. If contemplation is passive, it can, for the artist who grasps through it the grandeur of the universe, acquire a partially active aspect. By being annihilated (talasha) by the beauty and majesty of the universe, the artist becomes part of the universe itself (Al Said 1973, 51). Contemplative art will therefore be an attempt to attain true existence. The aesthetics of contemplation is based, according to Al Said, on two principles. First, the contemplative work of art is a description of the world and an explanation of the relation of what is between the subject (al-dhat), that is, the artist and the object, or the artist’s work. It is a description that can only be fulfilled by taking the meaning of an ascension (mi’raj) or rising movement (su’ud) which goes from the subjective to the objective (mahalli) and from the objective to the global and to the universal. Through this, the artist will manage to reveal hidden meaning (batin) through apparent meaning (zahir). Second, the contemplative work of art “is the refuta-

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Fig. 4 | Shakir Hassan Al Said, The Victorious, 1983, mixed media on wooden panel, 122 × 101 cm, ­Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah

tion of mimesis (taqlid); it is pure creativity that tends towards formless form and non-abstract abstraction. Art is unity (tawhid) with the creator which is created by the artistic form and this form is concretized by sincerity in the work” (Al Said 1973, 52). In this manifesto, Al Said calls the public and artists to become aware of art as a form of contemplation and not of creation in the modern sense of the term. “It is by this means alone,” he says, “that we will succeed in realizing our true humanity”, a humanity that is a vital and universal phenomenon (Al Said 1973, 52). Al Said builds a theory on what modern art should be on the vocabulary used in Sufi thought: hidden and apparent meaning, for instance, refer, in Islamic mystical texts, to the interpretation of the Koran. Al Said turns them into art historical terms, as he does with tawhid, which means for the Sufis the final union with God. Here, the artist becomes a modern mystic whose work will put him in harmony with the creator. Equally, “ascension” refers to the journey of Prophet Muhammad to heaven, a central episode of mystical contemplation and one often illustrated in Islamic manuscripts.

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However, Sufism is not the only reference. We can see a prelude to some of the themes covered in the Contemplative Manifesto in a publication that was issued after a conference Al Said held in Baghdad, at the Museum of Modern Art, in 1964, on the artistic and sociological specificities of the paintings of Yahya al‑Wasiti, who had become a point of reference for Iraqi artists. In this writing, Al Said developed an analysis of the different ways of rendering the three-dimensionality of the real world on the bi‑dimensional surface of the painting. He explained that in al‑Wasiti, there was no desire to render reality as it was, but rather the will to represent on a sheet of paper the specific universe of art (Al Said 1964, 6). For Al Said, the absence of linear perspective and of the mimetic representation of reality did not stem from the artist’s incapacity to create such a depiction, but from deliberate choice: “In al‑Wasiti, the overcoming of this obstacle depends on his skill in using color and light as basic instruments to surrender to the world of art, rather than as tools allowing to transpose real-world characteristics, as it is done through this type of perspective [linear perspective]” (Al Said 1964, 6). The Contemplative Manifesto, as well as these considerations around al‑Wasiti, are essential and make it possible to understand the subsequent evolution of Shakir Hassan Al Said’s artistic thought as materializing in the theorization of the use of the Arabic letter. Al Said advocates a distancing from art as representation, whether figurative or abstract, calling on us to conceive of creativity as a means of making manifest what he calls the truth of the universe. The influence of Sufism is evident. It is also worth noting that Al Said distances himself from the movement he helped to found with Jawad Salim, the type of art advocated by the Baghdad Group for Modern Art. The theorization of Hurufiyya will be the culmination of this turning point. This theoretical evolution is reflected in Al Said’s painted work, which shifts from the figurative patterns of the 1950s to abstract endeavors, turning, in his more accomplished phase, to his representations of graffiti on the walls of Baghdad, a kind of pictorial prefiguration on canvas of street art (fig. 4).

Hurufiyya and the Parisian context The Iranian-born artist Charles Hossein Zenderoudi (b. 1937) assumes in plain language his belonging to the art movements of the French capital, where he moved in 1961 and still lives. After having been among the founders of the Saqqakhaneh modernist group in Tehran, which introduced elements of Shiite popular art, including handwriting, into modern Iranian painting (Keshmirshekan 2005), he “came [to] the Parisian Informel and Lettrisme” as a consequence and development of his previous Saqqakhaneh period (Restany 2010). Zenderoudi sees himself as having been the first to use alphabetical signs in his paintings in the late 1950s (Keshmirshekan 2005, 609) and as having, by his example, “triggered the wave of hurufiyya in the Arab world” (Dagher 2016, 28). However, this is contradicted by the earlier explorations of Hamoudi, Omar and others. Dagher also notes that even in Iran, other artists used alphabetic expression before him (Dagher 2016, 28). In contrast to Zenderoudi, both Hamoudi and Al Said mainly refer to Oriental, Arab sources and authors in order to describe their explorations. Hamoudi’s French biographers Raymond Bayer and Paul Balta underpin his “Orientalness” and tend to give essentialist explanations of Hamoudi’s visual quest, thereby barely expressing their own Orientalist point of view when it

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comes to Arabs. It also seems worth mentioning that Paul Balta defined, in 1986, Hamoudi’s work as “calligraphy”, in spite of the Hurufis’ claim to be painters in the modern sense of the word and not calligraphers. Hurufi abstraction, Hamoudi himself wrote in 1984, differed from its Western counterpart, because there was a hidden meaning in the composition moving through the elements of the work. For him, while it was essential to follow the most advanced visual research in the West, it was also crucial not to lose one’s sense of belonging (Hamoudi 1984, 43). However, the understanding that Jamil Hamoudi and Shakir Hassan Al Said developed of art should also be replaced within the French debate of that time, the late 1940s and 1950s. Abstraction started to be more universally accepted, as the creation of the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles shows. Georges Mathieu was then theorizing the necessary end of art as it had been understood in the West since the Greeks and that the Renaissance had imposed again on the conception of art. For him, the humanist vision of art, initiated by Cimabue and Giotto, then developed by Botticelli, Leonardo, Raphael and Titian in the Renaissance, was “the largest endeavour of ossification (sclérose) of the spirit” (Mathieu 1975, 168); it had transformed art into a form of handicraft. As our civilization turned itself towards “the cosmic aspects of human life”, humanism was of no more use (Mathieu 1984, 42). Western art had to get rid of all the prejudices it had accumulated over two thousand years (Mathieu 1984, 32). Mathieu advocated an art that would go back to former traditions and reconnect with “certain aspects of Oriental philosophies such as Taoism, Zen, Chan, or the mystical experience of Ibn Arabi” (Mathieu 1963, 256) or the Zohar and the Kabbala (Mathieu 1963, 282). For him, Abstraction lyrique had finally succeeded in erasing from art any reference to nature, but also to geometry (Mathieu 1975, 170). Mathieu was strongly inspired by Japanese calligraphy, although what he retained from it was not the writing per se, but the rapidity and the gesture of the painter. In Al Said’s quest for an art form which would go beyond the representational we find an echo of the final break with the humanistic tradition of the Renaissance sought by Mathieu. Another movement that played a role in the Parisian scene was Lettrisme, whose initiator was the Romanian artist, poet and thinker Isidore Isou. Isou arrived in Paris in the same year as Hamoudi and started with initiatives that became quickly influential. Lettrisme aimed at substituting the painted object with phonetic signs (Lemaître 1954, 97) that would give back to painting and sculpture their ability to “become again spiritual messages or narratives” (Lemaître 1954, 98). In a second phase, and in order to break the representational character of art, Lettrisme proposed ‘hypergraphy’ (hypergraphie), an invented ‘alphabet’ of pictograms allowing a reconnection with writing, seen as the original source of painting, and the reintroduction of ‘meaning’ in the visual arts, while not neglecting the formal aspect (Lemaître 1954, 98); the aim was the re‑founding of the visual arts. In a text written in 2000, Isou came back to the notion of beauty and criticized the Western tradition (Descartes, Kant, Schopenhauer and Hegel) because its definition of it was based on “Reason, which seems justifiable even in the aesthetic part, but in reality it is debatable”9 (Isou et al. 2000, 12). The solution lay in ‘kladology’, one of Lettrisme’s key concepts, which takes into consideration all fields of knowledge, so that aesthetics would not be in contradiction with other paths, “scientific, philosophical, technical and theological”. A selection was necessary to reveal the major artists of human history, and within this selection, “letterism 9  The English translation is taken from the quoted publication.

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[sic] is a quintessential current, comparable to the best, and […] is destined to endure in humanity, as long as the world shall last” (Isou et al. 2000, 15). Although the radicalism and all-encompassing character of Lettrisme is not to be found in Hurufiyya, they share the goal of going beyond the realm of representational art and of re‑founding artistic practice in a new dimension. Isou’s project included all of the arts, from literature to visual arts and cinema, although his starting point had been linguistic. The idea of using letters as an alternative to mimetic art would have found fertile ground in artists coming from a tradition where an art genre based on the letter and writing, calligraphy, had been the most appreciated form of aesthetic expression. In addition, Lettrisme aimed at going back to the time before representational art had existed at all, in order to give art a new start, while Hurufiyya strove toward the sole dimension of the line, the one dimension. Thus, even if Jamil Hamoudi and Shakir Hassan Al Said do not refer directly to those movements in Paris, it is difficult not to note certain parallels. My point is not to say that there was imitation, or mimicry, but rather to reintroduce Hamoudi’s and Al Said’s visual and theoretical work within a broader stream rather than to single them out as exotic Orientals. If one cannot exclude the possibility that their status as exiles pushed those artists to think of their culture of origin, the ongoing intellectual debates also had an impact on them. Elka Correa has shown for an earlier period, discussing the example of Egyptian sculptor Mahmoud Mukhtar, that rather than a marginal foreigner from a far-away country, he was an artist fully inspired by the mainstream sculpture style dominating in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. If his Pharaonic and Egyptian touch harmonized with the national aspirations of his country at that time, and made his sculptures their embodiment, those references were also a common feature of Parisian art of the day (Correa 2016). The same could be said of the first steps of Hurufiyya, which nourished itself – among other elements – on the intellectual climate of post-war Paris, before becoming the first pan-Arab artistic trend.

References Adnan, Etel. Écrire dans une langue étrangère. L’Echoppe, 2014. Al Said, Shakir Hassan. Al-khasa’is al‑fanniyya wa‑l-ijtima’iyya li‑rusum al‑Wasiti [The Artistic and Social Peculiarities of al‑Wasiti’s Paintings]. Wizarat al‑thaqafa wa‑l-’ilam, 1964. –. Al-bayyanat al‑fanniyya fi al-‘Iraq [Artistic Manifestoes in Iraq]. Wizarat al-’ilam, 1973. –. Fusul min ta’rikh al‑haraka al‑tashkiliyya fi al-‘Iraq [Chapters from the History of the Fine Arts Movement in Iraq]. Part I. Wizarat al‑thaqafa wa‑l-’ilam, 1982. –. Fusul min ta’rikh al‑haraka al‑tashkiliyya fi al-‘Iraq [Chapters from the History of the Fine Arts Movement in Iraq]. Part II. Wizarat al‑thaqafa wa‑l-’ilam/Dar al‑shu’un al‑thaqafiyya al-’amma, 1988. Balta, Paul. Jamil Hamoudi. Précurseur. Editions de l’A. D. E. I. A. O., 1986. Bandini, Mirella. Pour une histoire du lettrisme. Translated by Anne-Catherine Caron, Jean-Paul Rocher, Editeur, 2003. Bayer, Raymond. “Jamil Hamoudi.” Ishtar, nos. 12–13, 1962, pp. 349–350. –. Entretiens sur l’art abstrait. Editions Pierre Cailler, 1964. Correa Calleja, Elka M. “Modernism in Arab Sculpture. The Works of Mahmud Mukhtar (1891–1934).” Asiatische Studien/Etudes asiatiques, vol. 70, no. 4, 2016, pp. 1115–1139. Dagher, Charbel. Arabic Hurufiyya. Art and Identity. Translated by Samir Mahmoud, Skira, 2016.

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From Baghdad to Paris and Back Farroukh, Moustafa. Rihla ila bilad al‑majd al‑mafqud [Travel to the Country of Lost Glory]. Dar al‑Mufid, 1982. Galy-Carles, Henry. “Un précurseur: Jamil Hamoudi.” Signe et calligraphie, Cahiers de l’ADEIAO, no. 2, 1986, pp. 18–32. Hamoudi, Jamil. “Les artistes écrivent, 1 (June 1952).” Ishtar, no. 3, 1958a, p. 111. –. “Les artistes écrivent, 2 (May 1953).” Ishtar, no. 3, 1958b, pp. 111–112. –. “L’art irakien à travers les civilisations et les âges.” Lettre de Bagdad, no. 14, 1984, pp. 35–48. Isou, Isidore, et al. La peinture lettriste. Jean-Paul Rocher, Editeur, 2000. Issa, Rose, et al. Signs of Our Times. From Calligraphy to Calligraffiti. Merrell, 2016. Ishtar, “L’ORIENT c’est l’Orient L’OCCIDENT c’est l’Occident … ils ne se rencontreront jamais.” Ishtar, vol. 1, no. 1, 1958, p. 3 [editorial of the first issue]. Jamil Hamoudi: Texte de André Parinaud. Éditions Universitaires, 1987. Keshmirshekan, Hamid. “Neo-Traditionalism and Modern Iranian Painting: The Saqqa-khaneh School in the 1960s.” Iranian Studies, vol. 38. no. 4, 2005, pp. 607–630, doi: 10.1080/00210860500338408. Lemaître, Maurice. Qu’est‑ce que le lettrisme et le mouvement isouien?. Editions Fischbacher, 1954. Lettrisme XXIe siècle, site officiel, http://lettrisme.typepad.com/lettrismofficialxxi/dictionnary.‌html. Accessed 8 April 2018. Lhotellier, Henry. Réalités nouvelles: 1946–1956, exh.-cat. Musée des beaux-arts de Calais, 1980. Mathieu, Georges. Au‑delà du Tachisme. Julliard, 1963. –. La réponse de l’abstraction lyrique et quelques extrapolations d’ordre esthétique, éthique et métaphysique. La Table ronde, 1975. –. L’abstraction prophétique. Gallimard, 1984. –. Georges Mathieu. Rétrospective, exh.-cat. Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris. Editions du Jeu de Paume, 2003. Naef, Silvia. L’art de l’écriture arabe. Passé et présent. Slatkine, 1992. –. A la recherche d’une modernité arabe. L’évolution des arts plastiques en Egypte, au Liban et en Irak. Slatkine, 1996. –. “Peindre pour être moderne? Remarques sur l’adoption de l’art occidental dans l’Orient arabe.” La multiplication des images en pays d’Islam – De l’estampe à la télévision – (17e- 21e siècles), edited by Bernard Heyberger and Silvia Naef, Orient-Institut/Ergon Verlag, 2003, pp. 189–207. –. “Voyage au pays de la gloire perdue. Le peintre libanais Mustafā Farrūh et le sens des splendeurs de Gre nade.” Babylone, Grenade, villes mythiques, edited by Katia Zakharia, Maison de l’Orient et de la Méditerranée, 2014, pp. 245–264. Restany, Pierre. “The Man of True and Just Measure in Communication.” Charles Hossein Zenderoudi, 2010, http://www.zenderoudi.com/english/bio.‌html. Accessed 8 April 2018. Shabout, Nada. Modern Arab Art. Formation of Arab Aesthetics. University of Florida Press, 2007. Wilson-Goldie, Kaelen. “Paying tribute to an Iraqi master before his legacy disappears.” The Daily Star, Lebanon, 21  March 2005, http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Culture/Art/2005/Mar‑21/95326-paying-tribute‑to-aniraqi-­master-before-his-legacy-disappears.‌ashx. Accessed 8 April 2018.

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THE PLACE OF FAITH Accommodating Religious Minorities in the German and the Irish Cityscape

Migration is nothing new; waves of newcomers have swept across most places across history, whether pulled by opportunities or pushed to escape. Moreover, migrants have long brought new architectural ideas with them as well as occupied existing spaces in ways that changed their original meanings. Architects and artisans have been hired for their technical knowledge and their familiarity with exotic styles, while merchants, soldiers and scholars have all facilitated the introduction of new ideas and motifs. Monumental structures such as Canterbury Cathedral and the Taj Mahal, now considered emblematic of the cultures of the countries in which they stand, are actually examples of the creative interchange between local and imported ideas – the French Gothic in the case of Canterbury and Central Asian tombs in that of the Taj (Gibson 1995, 63; Koch 1991, 94). Today the originally foreign elements of Canterbury and the Taj have become so assimilated into their host cultures that they have become powerful symbols of them. There are other important ways in which architecture can offer powerful evidence of inclusion. Among the most explicit is the urban prominence accorded to buildings in which migrant communities adhering to what are minority faiths in the host community worship. The respect accorded Jews in late seventeenth-century Amsterdam or the political clout of the British in the mid-nineteenth-century Rome and Istanbul are manifest in the Esnoga synagogue in Amsterdam and the Anglican churches that George Street erected nearly two centuries later in Rome and Istanbul (Krinsky 1985, 391–94; Crinson 1996, 124–66). In the first case, however, the designer did not introduce any palpably Jewish style into the exterior design of their building. Street’s churches engage with their settings while still being informed by the same taste for a modern version of French Gothic that characterized the architect’s work in his native Britain; such limited interest in assimilation is hardly unusual considering the extent of the British empire at the period and the status of the country as a world power. As the Swiss vote in 2009 to ban minarets demonstrates, the introduction of what are regarded as patently foreign, non-Christian elements into the contemporary European cityscape has in more recent times become a flashpoint in contemporary discussions of migration, especially when the assumption (not necessarily correct) is that migrants are of lower social and economic status (Cumming-Bruce/Erlanger, 2009). That the patent exoticism of buildings for Hindu and particularly Buddhist worship are generally regarded as less problematic highlights the degree, however, to which Islam has often been viewed with a hostility not accorded other faiths. Part of the reason for this is undoubtedly the degree to which many Christians in Europe have since the rise of Islam defined themselves in opposition to it, despite (or indeed perhaps because of ) the substantial presence it has historically had in Iberia and in the Balkans (Delanty 2013, 97–110).

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Germany and Ireland, two European countries which are currently experiencing particularly high levels of inward migration, make an interesting pairing for several reasons (Immigrants 2015). The Federal Republic Germany has witnessed the arrival of large numbers of migrants since the immediate aftermath of World War II, while in Ireland inward rather than outward migration on a notable scale is a much newer phenomenon. Only in the 1990s did arrivals regularly outnumber departures for the first time since the famine of the 1840s (O’Mahony 2006, 10). In Germany migrants have devoted considerable resources into approximating what they have left behind, not least as a symbol of the success they have subsequently achieved. In Ireland there has been much more flexibility about both the adaptive reuse of existing structures and the design of new ones that are usually more reflective of their local surroundings. The Irish have also been remarkably willing to accept the presence of prominent markers of non-Christian faiths. Many Germans, by contrast, remain suspicious of the visible presence of Islam, although they often welcome the distinctive presence of more obviously marginal faiths. The Irish tolerance occurs, moreover, in the context of a society where the Church – and with it respect for any religion – continues to play a larger role than has been the case in Germany for nearly half a century. Paradoxically, however, faith in Ireland is more detached from physical cultural heritage than in Germany, where churches belonging to the locally dominant denomination continue to embody a communal sense of identity. This is not the case in Ireland, where Catholics were during the Reformation forced out of nearly every church and monastery on the island and only in the nineteenth century allowed to erect a new religious infrastructure of their own. The built environments of both Germany and Ireland were marked by their long history of receiving migrants long before the postwar period that is the focus of this chapter. Houses of worship offer particularly strong evidence of their arrival. While St. Hedwig’s Cathedral was erected in Berlin in the eighteenth century not so much to serve the small community of Catholics in what was then an overwhelmingly Protestant city as to commemorate Prussia’s recent annexation of largely Catholic Silesia, the French church on Gendarmenmarkt welcomed the city’s Huguenot population, most of whom arrived following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 (Goetz/Elbern 2000; Fuhrich-Grubert 1992). Paired with a nearly identical church serving the German Lutheran community, it symbolized the integration of the Huguenots into their new home. In Ireland, Presbyterians from Scotland began to construct churches in the seventeenth century (Holmes 1999, 40 and 44). Anglicans, whether converts or new arrivals, controlled the island’s entire stock of medieval churches, leaving Catholics to create a new sacred infrastructure following Catholic Emancipation in 1829 to supplement the modest churches erected during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century in defiance of the Penal Laws (Loeber 2014, 287–295). Although Anglicans erected new buildings of their own as well, little of this construction can be credited specifically to migrants. Not all migrants to either country have been Christian, however. German and Irish Jews achieved full civil rights in the nineteenth century. Although Germany, especially, already had a substantial Jewish community, Russian pogroms prompted new influxes of Jews into both. More recently, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of an increasingly globalized economy have in combination resulted in a new wave of Jewish migrants since the 1990s to Germany and Ireland. Until recently neither country hosted more than a smattering of Muslims. Guest workers from Turkey began to arrive in Germany in the 1960s; most of Ireland’s Muslim commu-

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nity has come since 1990. Buddhists, Hindus and Sikhs, although present in much smaller numbers, also contribute to the religious diversity of the two countries, upon rare occasions sponsoring the construction of buildings that become local landmarks of religious and cultural diversity. Migrants transform the communities in which they settle in part through the creation of new houses of worship or the transformation of existing structures to serve new purposes. Since World War II both German and Irish cityscapes have been altered, sometimes in significant ways, by the arrival of new Christian congregations, as well as the presence of those of other faiths, particularly Muslims and Jews, but also Sikhs, Hindus and Buddhists. Although a handful of new German synagogues occupy highly visible locations, most of the structures serving the religious needs of migrants are clustered on outlying suburban sites. Significant differences exist, however, in the ways that the presence of migrant communities has manifested itself architecturally in the two countries. In Germany, new Christian and Jewish churches and synagogues have since the 1950s often become prominent local landmarks, displaying both the architectural ambition and social significance of their worshippers. Only since the 1990s have mosques and, much more rarely, other sites of non-Christian worship been constructed across the country; newcomers are more likely to rent or purchase existing spaces and transform their interiors to suit their needs. Efforts to integrate new purpose-built mosques into German communities have at times met with considerable opposition to such obvious expression of cultural and religious difference. In Ireland, on the other hand, there has been almost no need to build new sacred space for minority Christian faiths. Most new arrivals share or have taken over the buildings of churches whose original Protestant congregations are dwindling in size (Arnold 2009, 6). These are often historic structures in established neighborhoods. Only one major synagogue has been built since 1945, but it is a landmark in the history of modern religious architecture on the island, being far more strikingly modern in style than anything that had yet been designed then for Christian purposes. Finally, the arrival of Islam and other faiths has been much less controversial in Ireland than in Germany, not least because most migrants have been university educated, rather than working class, and because the community is too small to dominate any one neighborhood. One major mosque has been designed in an emphatically European style, and another is housed in a centrally located former church, something that has not happened in Germany. With the exception of large temples in the German city of Düsseldorf and Hamm that serve Buddhist and Hindu communities respectively, the communal worship of other recent migrants continues in both countries to be located in nondescript spaces, in some cases rented for the celebration of particular annual festivities. Almost invisible strategies of integration in both Germany and Ireland contrast with the construction of obviously new structures that proudly proclaim the presence of recent arrivals. The debate in many German communities over the role of Islam in contemporary society is very different from the open accommodation of migrants in the immediate postwar period (Moeller 2001, 51–87; Chin 2009). The emphasis then was on creating houses of worship in the Federal Republic for recent refugees from the east and for the fraction of the Jewish community that had survived (there was much less new church construction and no new synagogue building in the German Democratic Republic). Before 1945, many parts of what became the Federal Republic were overwhelmingly Protestant or predominantly Catholic. The arrival of refugees from the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia and from Silesia, now turned completely over to Poland, created

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Fig. 1 | Gustav Gsaenger, Matthäuskirche, Munich, Germany, 1955

substantial Catholic communities in formerly Protestant areas, while new arrivals from the territory of the German Democratic Republic and territories to its east created pockets of Protestantism in Catholic-dominated areas (Spotts 1973, 47–50). The resulting new churches, while generally located in suburbs rather than city centers, often differed only slightly from those erected by the other denomination. Prominent examples include the Church of the Assumption in the Hamburg suburb of Rahlstedt, consecrated in 1960, which houses the largest Catholic congregation in that city, ministering to Poles and Vietnamese as well as to ethnic Germans, and the Protestant Church of the Reconciliation in the Stuttgart district of Büsnau, dedicated in 1957. Most notably, the architect Gustav Gsaenger spent his career designing Protestant churches in Munich and other historically Catholic areas that, although clearly intended to be urban landmarks, were conventional enough not to disturb the sensibilities of those living near them (Hübner/Braun 2010). Gsaenger’s Matthäus Church in Munich, for instance, completed in 1955, features a clearly articulated concrete frame with red brick infill (fig. 1). There is nothing specifically Protestant about the imposing structure, which is quite evidently a church, and equally obviously an example of mid-twentieth century modernism. A clock tower and a bell tower anchor the opposite ends of the building, whose central location just outside the original walls of the city is due to the fact that it replaced an earlier church demolished by the Nazis in 1938. The amorphous curves of the central volume create an extremely open space focused on the slightly raised

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platform holding the table-like altar, while the pulpit wraps around one of the stark black columns supporting the roof slab. The use of polished red marble for the floor and in the inset panels edging the balcony rhymes with the brick exterior, while also recalling the more ornate architecture of the region’s eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Catholic churches. In postwar Germany the arrival of Christians from what was the minority denomination prompted the construction in many communities of modern suburban churches. The situation was quite different in Ireland as Orthodox and other groups who had not previously been present in large numbers began to arrive in the final decades of the last century. Ireland’s surplus of mostly Protestant nineteenth-century church buildings has absorbed many of these new congregations, while maintaining the architectural status quo. Dublin has many examples of such conversions (Arnold 2009, 10 f.). One of the earliest dates to 1961, when Dublin’s small Lutheran community, most of whom are German-speaking, leased St. Finian’s on Adelaide Road from the Church of Ireland and re‑dedicated it for their purposes (McCurdy/Murphy 1997). Another milestone was attained when in 1983 the Islamic Foundation of Ireland purchased a former Presbyterian church on Dublin’s South Circular Road, which they turned into a mosque (JamesChakraborty 2014b, 323). In 2001 a Russian Orthodox congregation took control of an Anglican Church in Harold’s Cross, which is now Holy Apostles Peter and Paul (Anonymous, “Orthodoxy in Ireland” n. d.). Also in Dublin, the Catholic parish church of St. Audoen’s, which enjoys a prominent site in the city center, has been revitalized by its transformation in 2006 into the seat of the Polish chaplaincy in Ireland. It thus now serves the country’s largest immigrant community. Beginning in the 1970s, the original congregation of Christ Church Leeson Park, built by the Church of Ireland, shared its facilities with Irish Methodists. In 2005 they turned their share of the facility over to the Romanian Orthodox Church. On the north side of the city, St. Thomas, erected in 1930 to serve the Church of Ireland, is now called St. George and St. Thomas, and is shared with a South Indian Orthodox community. This approach has been crucial to the conservation of a number of handsome structures that would otherwise have become redundant, but it has hindered the visibility within the cityscape of the new communities. Even alternations to the interiors of such buildings are often reasonably modest. The church that became the Dublin mosque had no steeple, and the building still lacks a minaret, although prominent letters affixed to the facade identify its new use. In the interior, worship was reoriented in the direction of the mihrab inserted into the side wall, and a gallery for women was erected facing it. Many conversions from one Protestant sect to another require almost no refurbishment, but the transformation of an Anglican church into the locus of Orthodox worship in Harold’s Cross required the insertion of an iconostasis that blocks the original chancel off from the nave. A refurbishment of St. George and St. Thomas, completed in 2008 by the firm of Clancy Moore, created two small rooms at the back of what had been the nave, but did not visually express the presence of the Indian community in any other ways. In both Germany and Ireland, Jewish congregations have since the middle of the last century been responsible for the erection of many architecturally distinguished and prominently sited houses of worship (Schwarz 1988; Kadish 2011, 80–81, 206, 239–242). Postwar German synagogues, in almost all cases replacements for buildings destroyed by the Nazis in Kristallnacht in 1938 or by bombs during World War II, have been constructed in two waves. The first took place in the 1950s and early 1960s. Small communities of survivors reclaimed sites in what was

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Fig. 2 | Peter Schmitz, New Synagogue, Bochum, Germany, 2007

then the Federal Republic that had been used as synagogues or community centers before the onset of the Third Reich. These were mostly modest structures that attracted relatively little attention. Since the fall of the Berlin wall, however, the arrival of Jews from the former Soviet Union accompanied by the need to rebuild a Jewish infrastructure in the former German Democratic Republic has resulted in the construction of a number of much more ambitious synagogues. These have been built in Bochum (designed by Schmitz Architekten and dedicated in 2007), Dresden (designed by Rena Wandel-Hoefer and Wolfgang Lorch and dedicated in 2001), Duisburg (designed by Zvi Hecker and completed in 2000), Munich (designed by Rena Wandel-Hoefer and Wolfgang Lorch and completed in 2006), and Ulm (the work of Kister Scheithauer Gross and dedicated in 2012), among other cities, usually with very little controversy and with financial support from local governments as well as private organizations and individuals, most themselves not Jewish (Stiftung Baukultur Rheinland-Pfalz 2010). Many of the structures belonging to this second generation are easily identifiable as synagogues, despite the fact that there is no one architectural solution for this building type. The Bochum building, for instance, features a facade embellished with stars of David, a motif that also is prominent in the synagogue in Ulm (fig. 2). In part because the construction of new churches in Germany has ebbed since 1968, the synagogues erected since the 1990s are among Germany’s most celebrated religious buildings of the last quarter century. Few have been designed by Jewish architects (Heckar’s Jewish Community Center in Duisburg is a prominent exception), and they do not adhere to any particular prototype; all are in a patently modernist style. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century most synagogues in both countries were loosely Islamic, Byzantine, or Romanesque in style, with Gothic reserved entirely for Christian churches, but the often orientalizing ornament characteristic of these earlier buildings have not been revived. That many of these buildings are clad in or

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Fig. 3 | Wilfrid Cantwell, Dublin Hebrew Congregation, Dublin, 1953

constructed of stone communicates a sense of permanence undoubtedly prompted by the nearly complete erasure of Central European Jewry during the Holocaust. The only requirements for a synagogue are an ark to hold the Torah scrolls and a bima, or podium, from which to read them, but the interiors of most of these buildings are more alike than the exteriors, with the ark and the bima placed at the far end of a space lined with seating. This is very different from the less church-like practice that still prevails in Britain and Ireland, where the bima is typically located in the middle of the interior, rather than in a position resembling that of a Christian pulpit. Furthermore, almost all of the architects whose work is mentioned here have favored clerestory lighting; there is typically no view out of the surrounding city. Nor are the balconies above the back of the sanctuary where women sit still de rigeur. In Germany, many synagogues adopt spatial and illumination strategies pioneered in postwar churches. The inverse is the case in Ireland, where Wilfrid Cantwell’s synagogue, built in the Dublin suburb of Terenure in 1953, anticipated the modernist churches to come (JamesChakraborty 2014a, 322 f.) (fig. 3). At a time when Dublin’s Archbishop John Charles McQuaid favored highly historicist styles for the barnlike churches that were then being erected on the edges of the city, Cantwell’s synagogue was certainly the most radically modern example of sacred architecture yet erected in Ireland. He probably turned for inspiration to the architect Erich Mendelsohn’s B’nai Amoona Synagogue, in the St. Louis suburb of University Heights, which had already been extensively published (James-Chakraborty 2000, 49; Rothery 1991, 211 f.).1 Once again, stars of David identify the purpose of the building. Seating includes a separate balcony for women. Although his building had no immediate progeny, Cantwell became a leader among the young Irish architects determined to use German precedent to transform the 1  In 1937, before immigrating to the United States, the German Jewish architect lectured in Dublin.

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architecture of the Catholic Church, which they were finally able to begin to do after the reforms instituted by Vatican II (Hurley/Cantwell 1985, 16 f.). Building for a minority faith open to experimentation gave Cantwell, a devout Catholic, an opportunity his own denomination was not yet ready to provide. Cantwell’s building was hardly the first synagogue in Ireland, but it is the most visible now that most of the one which stood on Adelaide Road has been demolished. Although Jews have lived in Ireland since the Middle Ages, most of the present community arrived in two waves, the first in the final decades of the nineteenth century and the second beginning with the economic boom that started in the 1990s. Substantial Victorian synagogues in Belfast, Cork, and Dublin co‑existed with houses converted to serve small congregations, one of which is now embedded in Dublin’s Jewish Museum (Kadish 2011, 80–82, 89, 160–164). In recent years the number of Muslims in first Germany and then Ireland has surpassed the numbers of Jews. In Germany most were originally from Turkey and came to take blue collar jobs in factories; in Ireland early arrivals were Arabs, South Africans and Indians who came to study at university (Anonymous, “History of Muslims in Ireland” n. d.). For the most part both German and Irish mosques are housed in structures built for secular purposes. Germany’s mosques are often in converted warehouses and factories, Ireland’s in former houses. The smaller Irish Muslim community was quicker to make its presence felt architecturally, especially in Dublin. Financial support for the construction of new and the purchase of repurposed buildings came largely from the Gulf. The early twenty-first century has seen the construction, however, of purpose-built mosques across Germany. Most of these have been erected with the assistance of DITIB, the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (Dechau 2009; Welzbacher 2017). Closely allied with the Turkish state, it funds the day‑to-day operations of many German mosques as well as the construction of new buildings. Two very different approaches can be seen in two large mosques that DITIB commissioned in Duisburg and Cologne. These in turn contrast with the approach represented by a smaller mosque that an independent congregation erected in the Bavarian city of Penzberg. The DITIB Merkez mosque in the Duisburg suburb of Marxloh is, like most purpose-built German mosques, clearly based upon Ottoman Turkish precedent (fig. 4). Designed by Cavit Şahin and completed in 2008, it was built with support from the state government as well as the European Union (Schmitt 2012, 207–217). Although the muezzin is not allowed to broadcast from it, a 34‑meter-high minaret supplements a prominent dome in identifying the purpose of the building. The exterior is more austere than that of a mosque built in what is now Turkey during the years of Ottoman rule, but the upper levels of the spacious interior are decorated with colorful ornament in much the same way, even as the use of modern materials makes it easier to span large spaces. The mihrab, the niche built in the wall of every mosque that orients worshippers toward Mecca, and the minbar, the pulpit from which the imam delivers the Friday sermon, are made of intricately carved woodwork. A prominent light fixture, composed of concentric circles, echoes the shape of the dome. Finally, a large balcony, running around three sides of the interior, ensures that the separation of worshippers by sex does not deny women visual and aural access to what is happening below. As is customary, there is no fixed seating; worshippers, who are required to take off their shoes before entering, sit and kneel on the comfortably carpeted floor. Erected in a neighborhood whose residents are predominantly ethnically Turkish, the mosque, although the largest in Germany, created little controversy.

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Fig. 4 | Cavit Şahin, DITIB Merkez Mosque, Duisburg-Marxloh, 2008

In Duisburg DITIB proved able to attract considerable public funding for a building that satisfied both Turkish and German expectations regarding the appearance of a mosque and that, although large, did not intrude upon the appearance of the historic city, which is located several kilometers away. The situation was quite different in nearby Cologne, when DITIB proposed to build a large mosque on a prominent inner ring road site (James-Chakraborty 2011, 189–203; Godson/James-Chakraborty 2019, 213–231) (fig. 5). The intention was to symbolize the integration of Islam into the German cityscape. The effort got off to a promising start. In 2006, Gottfried Böhm and his son Paul won the competition to design the building, with a proposal that evoked Gottfried and his father Dominikus’s centrally planned Catholic churches, such as St. Engelbert in Cologne-Riehl (1932) and the Mariendom in Velbert-Neviges (1968) (Flagge/Voigt 2005, 145– 147; Kiem 2006, 60–79). These number among the most original and widely heralded church designs of the twentieth century. First anticipating and then fulfilling the precepts of Vatican II, they feature abstract, unornamented surfaces shaped to gather congregations together in the shared celebration of the mass and rendered transcendent through the theatrical use of light. The mosque design’s many critics overlooked this clear recollection of a specifically modern and German approach to religious architecture, however. Instead, they focused on the building’s bold scale. The height of the paired minarets, which at 55 meters are just over a third that of the spires of the local cathedral, and the prominence of the dome both came under attack as unnecessarily foreign (Damm 2006). Although permission to build a lightly revised design was quickly granted, the project was plagued by construction delays. Meanwhile shifts in the leadership within the mosque altered the design of the interior. Although it remains partly transparent, and thus open to the neighborhood, it was fitted out in a more conventional style than originally anticipated. The complex also includes administrative offices and room for shops that can be

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rented out by anyone who agrees not to sell alcohol or pork. This adheres to traditional Islamic financing of religious and charitable foundations through rents, but is also intended to encourage the broader community to frequent the facility. Less was at stake in Penzberg, where the imam, Benjamin Idriz, was a native of the former Yugoslavia, and where the congregation, not affiliated with any larger organization, prides itself upon the regular use of German at Friday prayers. The architect, Alen Jasarevic, is the German-born son of Bosnian parents. The absence of a dome is striking here. Instead a single lacy minaret anchors the corner of a rectangular mosque, itself set perpendicular to the library and office block (fig. 6) (Jasarevic 2005; Welzbacher 2018). The mihrab niche, designed in the same open abstract pattern as the minaret, floats free of the glazed exterior wall that conveys the impression of openness to the community, even as the actual window is both colored and opaque, providing both privacy and an appropriately spiritual atmosphere to those engaged in prayer. The result, completed in 2005, is a modern building that communicates its purpose as a mosque while being largely detached from the history of a specifically Islamic architecture. The ritual purposes are all fulfilled here independently of the styles with which they had become associated in different parts of the Muslim-ruled world over time. This approach had already been adopted more than a decade earlier in Dublin, when the Islamic Cultural Centre of Ireland (ICCI) erected its quarters in the suburb of Clonskeagh (fig. 7). Opened in 1996 in the presence of Sheikh Hamdan bin Rashid Al Maktoum, a member of the ruling family of Dubai whose foundation had funded its construction, and the Irish president Mary Rob-

Fig. 5 | Gottfried and Paul Böhm, DITIB Mosque, Cologne, 2013

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Fig. 6 | Alen Jasarevic, Mosque, Penzberg, 2005

Fig. 7 | Michael Collins Associates, Islamic Cultural Centre of Ireland, Dublin, 1996

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inson, it was designed by the local firm Michael Collins Associates Architects (James-Chakraborty 2014b, 323). The architects turned to Hendrik Petrus Berlage’s Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, completed in 1935, for an example of the way in which the emphasis on geometry they associated with Islamic architecture could be made specifically modern and European. Both Berlage’s museum and the ICCI are erected out of buff brick with black banding and feature an emphasis on cubic massing. The architecture of the mosque complex is more overtly decorative, with grilles on the windows, as well as on the minaret, and the additional embellishment of small domes over the entrance canopy as well as a larger one above the mihrab niche. The interior is much more austere than that of the Merkez mosque, but the geometrical patterns of the carpet and the ceiling coffers, as well as the circlet of arched openings around the bottom of the dome and the regular insertion of wooden panels into the white walls, contribute to setting an appropriate tone, as do the thin strips of marble running down the center of each face of the columns and pilasters. A simple lectern replaces the raised minbar. A double rectangular surround, composed of an inner layer of red marble in turn framed in black marble, establishes the importance of the mihrab. Set well back from a busy road, and bordered by a university campus as well as a residential neighborhood, the compound also includes a restaurant, a shop, a school, and housing. The presence of the shop and the restaurant has been crucial in encouraging non-Muslim neighbors to visit the Centre. The arrival of Islam has caused much less concern in Ireland than in Germany. This is partly a matter of class. Muslims in Ireland, many of whom are physicians, are on average better educated than the general populace, which is the reverse of the situation in Germany (McGarry 2016). Germany’s Muslim community has historically been largely working class, although the large influx of Muslim refugees, predominately from Syria, which began in 2014, included trained professionals alongside those with only a primary school education (Knight 2016). In Germany, the role of Islam has often been posited as a challenge to a specifically German identity. Such views have helped spark the rise of the new Alternative for Germany party, which in 2017 was elected to 94 seats in the Bundestag. In 2006, Cardinal Joachim Meisner, Archbishop of Cologne, explicitly ruled out the conversion of churches into mosques, as has occurred in Ireland (Hippe 2006). The following year Chancellor Angela Merkel declared that mosque cupolas (she almost certainly meant minarets) should not rival church steeples (Heneghan 2007). In a move that foreshadowed her later declaration that Germany could manage the integration of the new arrivals, in 2010 she reversed her position, allowing that mosques would necessarily become “a more prominent part of our cities than they were before” (Merkel 2010). Since 2015 debates over the place of Islam in Germany have focused more on migration policies than on mosques, but the appropriateness of clearly representative buildings remains contested. In 2017, newspaper articles documented heated discussions regarding the construction of new mosques in Karlsruhe, Potsdam, and Sulzbach, to give only three examples (bo 2017; Faltin 2017; Garzke 2017). Typically, the Christian Democrats were hesitant. In Ireland, where Protestant churches have long towered over a predominantly Catholic population (all churches erected before the Reformation still belong to the Church of Ireland, which also built prodigiously in the eighteenth and especially the nineteenth centuries), the new prominence of minority faiths is not seen to pose such a threat to the dominant culture. Approval for a large new mosque in Dublin’s western suburbs was granted with little fanfare in 2017, despite neighborhood concerns about parking, after it was clarified that the call to prayer would be broadcast only within the

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Fig. 8 | Durga Puja Festival, Cologne, 2009

complex and not disturb nearby residents (Kelly 2017). Although German Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish organizations all enjoy state funding, much of it provided through a church tax, Ireland is a much less secular society than Germany, with almost all schools and many hospitals, for example, still associated with and run by particular denominations. This greater prominence of religion has facilitated the imam of the ICCI in particular developing a close working relationship with both the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin and the President’s office. Islam is only the most widely practiced of the new religions that migrants to Germany and Ireland have brought with them over the course of the last several decades. Sikhs, Hindus, and Buddhists have all established facilities in the two countries, with Germany’s larger and wealthier communities at times erecting substantial structures designed in styles imported from their worshippers’ homelands. They appear to be received as charmingly picturesque rather than threatening, and as such have apparently generated none of the controversy stirred by mosque construction in Germany. Of course, these are much smaller communities whose presence rarely dominates even an individual neighborhood. The one serious attack upon such a structure, against the Sikh gurdwara in Essen in 2016, was the work of Islamicists and had as its target a relatively nondescript building whose purpose was not particularly clear from the exterior. Such buildings are far more typical than fantastical representations of what home ideally resembled. The Gurdwara in Sandymount, just south of the Dublin city center, is representative of the modest scale of such facilities. A former cinema, it has served as the Temple of Gurdwara Guru Nanak Darbar since 1986 (Tipton 2017). Similar facilities exist across Germany. As in a mosque, worshippers sit on a carpeted floor. A raised dais at the opposite end of the former cinema hall from the entrance contains the Takht, a domed throne holding the Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh

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holy texts. Only rarely, as in the case of the Gurdwara in Cologne, do architectural motifs, such as a dome, distinguish the exterior of the structure, which is not usually purpose-built, from its neighbors. Behind this room is the kitchen where the langar, a free vegetarian meal, is prepared. Many Hindus in Germany and Ireland celebrate their main festivities in rented halls. For instance, Bengalis from across northwestern Germany as well as the Low Countries have since 1991 gathered for Durga Puja in a community hall in the Cologne district of Chorweiler (fig. 8) (Indischer Kulturverein n. d.). In Dublin, where what are normally five days of festivities are compressed into a single day, they regularly use a sports club in Portmarnock. The temporary presence of the image of the goddess and her children transforms these mundane places into appropriately sacred spaces. Germany’s largest Hindu temple is, however, purpose-built. Completed in 2002 in the city of Hamm, the Shankarar Sri Kamadchi Ampal Temple was designed by a local architect, Heinz-Rainer Eichhorst, in a traditional South Indian style (fig. 9). Built in an industrial district on the outskirts of the city, it was modeled on a temple in Kanchipuram in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, and serves a largely Tamil congregation, though many of its members came to Ger-

Fig. 9 | Heinz-Rainer Eichhorst, Shankarar Sri Kamadchi Ampal Temple, Hamm, 2002

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Fig. 10 | Ekō Temple, Dusseldorf, 1993

many not directly from India but from neighboring Sri Lanka, uprooted by the civil war that broke out in the 1980s (Hindu Shankarar Sri Kamadchi Ampal Temple 2017). Düsseldorf is home to Germany’s largest Japanese community. In 1993 a Japanese-style Buddhist temple and community center were erected in the Niederkassel district, on the opposite side of the Rhine from the city center (fig. 10). The Ekō Center for Japanese culture includes a Shin Buddhist temple, a garden, a traditional house with a tea room, and exhibition and conference rooms, as well as a kindergarten and a library (Ekō-Haus der Japanischen Kultur 2017). The temple contains a basement room where Buddhist sects other than the one that built the facility have altars and can conduct ceremonies. While the interiors of the city’s other most distinctively Japanese spaces, such as sushi bars and luxury hotels, are obviously commercial, the Ekō Center emphasizes Japan’s pre-modern religious and artistic heritage. The facility’s tri-lingual website makes clear that this is a tourist attraction and a place of intercultural dialogue as well as of worship. Not all buildings dedicated to minority faiths can be credited to migrants from the cultures associated with those religions; those who convert to a religion other than the one in which they were raised may seek out a new place to follow it. Ireland’s first Buddhist temple is currently under construction on the site of an established Buddhist retreat on the coast in west County Cork. The land was purchased and the center established in 1973 by two immigrants from Britain. Peter Cornish’s mother’s family was Irish, but he and his wife, Harriet, both grew up in England (Cornish 2014). The Tibetan Buddhist Retreat at Dzogchen Beara is part of the Rigpa network of

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Buddhist centers established by Sogyal Rinpoche, who was born in Tibet and began his teaching in London. Another lama, Orgyen Tobgyal Rinpoche, offered advice on the design and siting of the Dzogchen Beara temple (Anonymous, “Building the Temple at Dzogchen Beara” n. d.) Here, as in the Shankarar Sri Kamadchi Ampal and Ekō Temples in Germany, there has been no effort to assimilate to a specifically European context nor criticism for having failed to do so. Instead these are places that stand out for evoking the architectural traditions and cultural identity of faraway places in order to establish the authenticity of the rituals practiced within them, as well as to express the economic resources and commitment of those who worship in them. Most places where migrants worship remain almost invisible either because they reuse existing churches, as is common in Ireland; because they take over nondescript buildings on the suburban fringe, as happens quite often in both Germany and Ireland; or because they rent the places where they hold their festivities for only a few days, as is the case with the Bengali community in both countries. When they are visible, however, Jewish and Muslim migrants are the most likely to attempt to assimilate into the local architectural context, although such efforts, made in Penzberg and Dublin, are not yet the norm on the part of Muslims. More often, migrants, including migrant converts, once they become architectural patrons seek to establish a clear link with the pre-modern sacred architecture of either their own homeland, as in the case of Turks, Tamils (many of whom arrived in Germany via Sri Lanka, to which their families had earlier migrated from India), and Japanese, or that of their spiritual leaders, as is the case at Dzogchen Beara. This brief survey suggests that there is not a single authentic architectural expression of any faith. Migrant adherents balance the memories they bring with them with what is available where they settle and, more rarely, with the traditions of faiths to which they have only recently converted. The spaces of worship that result may be merely a matter of convenience or of conscious choice to reference the homeland of the migrant, the homeland of the faith, or the past or present of the host society. Such decisions appear do little, however, to determine whether or not the newcomers’ visible expression of their faith is accepted by their new neighbors. Instead, as this comparison of Germany and Ireland has demonstrated, the degree of openness that the host society shows to religion in general and the extent to which it can identify with the experience of migration appears to be far more important. What matters above all in this context, however, is the role that architecture plays as a marker of identity. Whether individuals understand built heritage as central to their own religious observances and their national pride may not affect how they actually treat immigrants, but it does influence how they accommodate minority religions. Symbols do matter: Kristallnacht demonstrates that the destruction of places of worship can forecast the murder of their congregations. And yet long before globalization there was already almost no architecture that was so specific to the culture and conditions of its own place that it did not bear the imprint of new ideas imported by people from other places or who had at the least traveled well beyond the confines of a single community. While reminding people of this may not change minds, it does forestall the assumption that architecture can serve as the unique marker by which the character of a culture can be judged. This assumption has for more than a century played an outsize role in German debates over the built environment. The products of such thinking range from the Bauhaus and the Zepplinfeld to the Stalinallee and the Jewish Museum. In Ireland’s landscape, literature and music have all mattered more than architecture to forging an inde-

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pendent national identity, not least because for much of the twentieth century most historic architecture was associated with first English and then British conquerors. Newcomers thus feel less need to make their presence physically felt, but it is also less controversial when they do as so much less is at stake. Today’s migrants are not the proud successors to Strongbow, Cromwell, and the victors of the Battle of the Boyne. They often arrive with little more than mobile phones and the clothes on their backs. The changes they effect are likely to be subtler than either Norman castles or Ascendancy country houses, both of which were designed to express political and economic supremacy. The flavors they impart to a society are nonetheless real, and nowhere perhaps are they as intense as in the places where continuity is expressed – often across vast geographic distances – through the repetition, often in unfamiliar settings, of cherished rituals. One does not even have to be a believer to take comfort in performing the ritual ablutions that precede prayer, in throwing flower petals once again at the feet of the goddess, in repeating a chant first memorized in childhood. It is through such acts that we make ourselves at home.

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The Place of Faith Fuhrich-Grubert, Ursula. Die Französische Kirche zu Berlin: Ihre Einrichtungen 1672–1945. Deutsche Hugenotten-Gesellschaft, 1992. Garzke, René. “Moschee-Debatte: Grüne kritisieren AfD und CDU.” Potsdamer Neueste Nachrichten, 10 August 2017, http://www.pnn.de/potsdam/1207745/. Accessed 21 December 2017. Gibson, Margaret. “Normans and Angevins.” A History of Canterbury Cathedral, edited by Patrick Collinson et al., Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 38–68. Godson, Lisa, and Kathleen James-Chakraborty, editors. Modern Religious Architecture in Germany, Ireland, and Beyond: Influence, Process and Afterlife since 1945. Bloomsbury, 2019. Goetz, Christine, and Victor H. Elbern. Die St. Hedwigs-Kathedrale zu Berlin. Schnell & Steiner, 2000. Heneghan, Tom. “Merkel muddles mosques and minarets.” Reuters, 4 December 2007, http://blogs.reuters. com/faithworld/2007/12/04/merkel-muddles-mosques-and-minarets/. Accessed 21 December 2017. Hindu Shankarar Sri Kamadchi Ampal Temple. “The Hindu Shankarar Sri Kamadchi Ampal Temple, Hamm, Germany,” 2017, http://kamadchi-ampal.olanko.de/index.php/temple.‌html. Accessed 21 December 2017. Hippe, Wolfgang. “Society,” 2006, http://www.geschichte.nrw.de/artikel.‌php?artikel%5Bid%5D=​877&lkz=​en. Accessed 21 December 2017. Holmes, Finlay. The Presbyterian Church in Ireland: A Popular History. Columba Press, 1999. Hübner, Hans-Peter, and Helmut Braun, editors. Evangelischer Kirchenbau in Bayern seit 1945. Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2010. Hurley, Richard, and Wilfrid Cantwell. Contemporary Irish Church Architecture. Gill and Macmillan, 1985. Immigrants, 2015, http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/File:Immigrants,_2015_ (per_1_000_inhabitants).‌png. Accessed 21 December 2017. Indischer Kulturverein. “Durga Puja, Cologne-Germany,”, http://www.durgapuja.‌de. Accessed 21 December 2017. James-Chakraborty, Kathleen. In the Spirit of Our Age: Eric Mendelsohn’s B’nai Amoona. Missouri Historical So­ ciety, 2000. –. “The Debate over the Mosque in Cologne: An Architectural Historian’s Response.” Crossing Borders: Space Beyond Disciplines, edited by Kathleen James-Chakraborty and Sabine Strümper-Krobb, Peter Lang, 2011, pp. 189–203. –. “Synagogues.” Architecture: 1600–2000, volume IV of Art and Architecture of Ireland, edited by Rolf Loeber et al., Royal Irish Academy/Yale University Press, 2014a, pp. 322–323. –. “Mosques.” Architecture: 1600–2000, volume IV of Art and Architecture of Ireland, edited by Rolf Loeber et al., Royal Irish Academy/Yale University Press, 2014b, p. 323. Jasarevic, Alen. “Sogar das Minarett wird gefeiert,” 2005, http://www.islam-penzberg.‌de/?p=​305. Accessed 21 December 2017. Kadish, Sharman. The Synagogues of Britain and Ireland: An Architectural and Social History. Yale University Press, 2011. Kelly, Olivia. “Appeal against Dublin mosque over call to prayer ‘noise pollution.’” Irish Times, 12 October 2017, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/religion-and-beliefs/appeal-against-dublin-mosqueover-call‑to-prayer-noise-pollution‑1.3253880. Accessed 21 December 2017. Kiem, Karl. “The Multi-Layered Concrete Rock: The Pilgrimage Church in Neviges.” Gottfried Böhm, edited by Wolfgang Voigt, Jovis, 2006, pp. 60–79. Knight, Ben. “Refugees in Germany ‘better educated than expected.’” Deutsche Welle, 14 November 2016, http://www.dw.com/en/refugees‑in-germany-better-educated-than-expected/a-36388835. Accessed 21 December 2017. Koch, Ebba. Mughal Architecture. Prestel, 1991. Krinsky, Carol. Synagogues of Europe: Architecture, History, Meaning. MIT Press, 1985. Loeber, Rolf. “Introduction.” Architecture: 1600–2000, volume IV of Art and Architecture of Ireland, edited by Rolf Loeber et al., Royal Irish Academy/Yale University Press, 2014, pp. 287–288. McCurdy, Monika, and Alan Murphy, editors. Evangelisch-Lutherische Kirche in Irland, 1697–1997. Belfast, 1997.

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Kathleen James-Chakraborty McGarry, Patsy. “Ireland’s Muslims more educated than general population.” Irish Times, 14 December 2016, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/religion-and-beliefs/ireland‑s-muslims-more-educated-than-general-population‑1.2904661. Accessed 21 December 2017. Moeller, Robert G. War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany. University of California Press, 2001. Merkel, Angela im F. A. Z.-Gespräch. “Moscheen werden Teil unseres Stadtbildes sein.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 18 September  2010, http://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/inland/angela-merkel‑im‑f-a‑zgespraech-moscheen-werden-teil-unseres-stadtbildes-sein-11036846.‌html. Accessed 21  December 2017. O’Connell, Sandra. “Concrete Memory. New Synagogues in Germany: Dresden, Munich, Ulm.” Modern Religious Architecture in Germany, Ireland, and Beyond: Influence, Process and Afterlife since 1945, edited by Lisa Godson and Kathleen James-Chakraborty, Bloomsbury, 2019, pp. 155–176. O’Mahony, Eoin. “The Structure of Demographic Change in Ireland, 1995 to 2005,” 2006, https://www. catholicbishops.ie/wp-content/uploads/images/stories/cco_publications/researchanddevelopment/ demographic%20change%20in%20ireland%201995%20to%202005%20-%20final.‌pdf. Accessed 21 December 2017. Rothery, Sean. Ireland and the New Architecture: 1900–1940. The Lilliput Press, 1991. Schmitt, Thomas. “Mosque Debates as a Space-Related, Intercultural, and Religious Conflict.” Migration and Religion: Christian Transatlantic Missions, Islamic Migration in Germany, edited by Barbara Becker-Cantarino, Editions Rodopi, 2012, pp. 207–217. Schwarz, Hans-Peter, editor. Die Architektur der Synagoge. Deutsches Architekturmuseum, 1988. Spotts, Frederic. The Churches and Politics in Germany. Wesleyan University Press, 1973. Stiftung Baukultur Rheinland-Pfalz, editor. Gebauter Aufbruch: Neue Synagogen in Deutschland. Schnell  & Steiner, 2010. Tipton, Gemma. “Did you know there was an unused theatre under Busáras?” Irish Times, 15 November 2017, https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/stage/did-you-know-there-was‑an-unused-theatre-underbusáras‑1.3290495. Accessed 21 December 2017. Welzbacher, Christian. Europas Moscheen: Islamische Architektur im Aufbruch. Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2017. –. “Religion is Form is Art is Politics: On the Relationship between mosque building and the modern in Europe.” Modern Religious Architecture in Germany, Ireland, and Beyond: Influence, Process and Afterlife since 1945, edited by Lisa Godson and Kathleen James-Chakraborty, Bloomsbury, 2019, pp. 177–195.

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THE MIGRATORY LIVING ROOM Dwelling and Furnishing in a Foreign Land

The media philosopher Vilém Flusser, himself an emigrant, reflected on the relationship between migration and language, creativity, and dwelling in his texts, employing the conceptual pairing of home and homelessness to guide his considerations. Migration, as Flusser saw it, frequently goes hand in hand with maintaining a familiar setting, for cultural assimilation is a long and difficult process. Thus, the dwelling and its furnishings, either brought with the migrant or reconstructed, are the real home of the expatriate: People think of heimat as being a relatively permanent place; a home, as temporary and interchangeable. Actually, the opposite is true: one can exchange heimats – or have none at all – but one must always live somewhere, regardless of where. […] I built a house for myself in Robion. My desk is in the center of the house, surrounded by the customary disorder of my books and papers. […] I am embedded in the familiar so that I can reach out toward the unfamiliar and create things yet unknown. […] Dwelling is the founding of my existence in the world; it is fundamental. (Flusser 2003, 12 f.)

In a migrant’s situation, dwelling – in the dual sense of a place and the inhabitation of this place – can thus be defined as a reservoir for what is remembered: it is a space of memory. This interpretation of dwelling as a stable home in times of upheaval and change is, however, just one possible approach to trying to determine what constitutes a sense of home for the person living in a foreign land. In this contribution, I would like to take a close look at the living rooms of migrants from southeast Europe in Germany, focusing on the first decades of labor migration to West Germany. Photographs from the 1960s to the early 1990s provide glimpses into the dwellings of the migrants and how they furnished their living spaces. However, I will not be considering these photographs solely as historical documents of migration to Germany. They can also be seen as condensed visions of what was considered one’s own  –  the intrinsic  – while living in alien surroundings, in a foreign land. This dual aspect is evident in how many of the furnished dwellings of Turkish migrants reveal references both to the logic behind ‘German’ living rooms and to imported ‘Orientalisms’ or ‘Turkisms’.

Separate spheres: German and migrant living spaces in the 1970s With the dynamic economic growth in post-war West Germany creating a pressing need for workers, recruitment agreements were initiated with a number of countries from 1955 onwards, prominent among them Italy, Greece and Turkey. The aim was to ensure that the German labor

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Fig. 1 | Ulla-Kristina Schuleri-Hartje. Ausländische Arbeitnehmer und ihre Familien. Teil 1: Wohnverhältnisse. Deutsches Institut für Urba- nistik difu, 1982

Fig. 2 | Cihan Arin, editor. Ausländer im Wohnbereich. Dokumen­tation eines Seminars der Internationalen Bauaustellung Berlin. Express Edition, 1983

market could be replenished in a controlled manner (Yano 2007, 1). Between 1955 and 1973, employing foreigners was considered a temporary phenomenon; the permanent settlement of the imported labor force was never intended, meaning that sustainable and long-term integration programs were not developed. For decades, the political discourse in West Germany was framed around a “policy for foreigners” and not an “immigration policy” (Bade 1992, 14). It was only when long-term settlement by working migrants was an established fact that scholarly research turned its attention to the issue. From the mid-1970s and the early 1980s, an increasing number of studies were published on the housing conditions of migrants in West Germany (see Schildmeier 1975; Keilig 1980; Schuleri-Hartje 1982; Arin 1983, figs. 1–2). A problem-oriented perspective is evident from the outset: the lack of access to the housing market, the poor state of residential buildings, in many cases ripe for demolition, and above all segregation and the emergence of “foreigner ‘ghettos’” (Schildmeier 1975, 37)1 led to the widely articulated 1  This warning of segregation was counterbalanced by a 1975 “blockade” issued by the Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs; cities and districts could declare themselves to be overburdened settlement areas. In the migrant passports, some cities were recorded as no‑go areas (see Terkessidis 2000, 28).

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assumption that integration and housing conditions were unavoidably interconnected (see Schildmeier 1975; Schuleri-Hartje 1982). These studies on the “housing problem of the foreign workers in the Federal Republic” (Keilig 1980, 3) are hard-hitting, claiming an asymmetry between the living situation of Germans and those of the immigrants. In one study from 1983, we read that “the housing conditions of the foreign families from the main recruitment countries” are characterized by a “low standard of furnishing and the poor state of repair of the flats and dwellings […], on average the number of occupants is double that of German households […], while there is a relatively short period of residency in the respective dwelling and the frequency with which people move house is high” (Wurtinger 1983, 64 f.; see also Zieris 1972; Seidel 2012, 164 f.). In press reports from the 1970s, the texts are often accompanied by stereotyped and racist ascriptions, for example when the news journal Der Spiegel repeatedly places the “Turkish flat” in the context of the fear of being swamped by the number of foreigners and the levels of crime attributed to foreigners (fig. 3). The photographs emphasize the confined spaces and the (excessively) large number of occupants. Through the dramaturgy of image and text, the squalor of the housing is turned into a metaphor for the threat migration poses to ordered German society. While the scholarly studies on labor migration clearly name the housing problems and we often encounter stereotyped clichés about the “Turkish flat” in the journalistic coverage, the texts

Fig. 3 | Ausländerkinder – „ein sozialer Sprengsatz“, Der Spiegel, no. 43, 1978, pp. 86 and 90

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definitely shy away from looking at the furnishings and addressing questions of taste.2 It is thus feasible here to speak of ‘separate spheres’, which in feminist discourse indicates the gender-specific, binary separation of spaces: men are active in the public space of production, while in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries women were primarily present in the private space of reproduction (see Pollock 1988, 2000). The idea of separate spheres can also be used when considering the migrant milieus of West Germany from the 1960s to the 1980s and how they were perceived by the host society. Studies on the culture of domestic living in West Germany ignore how migrants lived. Neither Gert Selle’s cultural history study on domestic living (Selle 1993) nor the exhibition Wohnen im Wandel (16 June‑19 September 2000), held by the Berlin Municipal Museum, consider how migrants might be contributing to the culture of (German) domestic living (see Pyritz/Altner 2000). At the Berlin exhibition, it is astonishing that although a children’s room, the youth club culture and even living on the moon as a vision of the future are exhibited, migration is not discussed, at least in the detailed exhibition report. In Rybczynski’s cultural history of living, Verlust der Behaglichkeit, the topic of migration is also excluded. Migration is passed over too in Herlinde Koelbl’s Das deutsche Wohnzimmer (1980). Conceived as a “social study” (Vogt 2015, 3), Koelbl’s photography book sought to determine the status quo of domestic living in West Germany across all social groups and geographical locations. The guiding question of the book was: “Is the living room an expression of the cultural and civilising situation of a society, nation or generation?” (Koelbl/Sack 1980, 132). It can be surmised that Koelbl was indeed attempting to articulate a “grammar of domestic living” (Koetzle 2009, 278) in this work, a grammar determined by cultural and national factors. The residents were always photographed in their living rooms with a wide-angle shot, their gazes directed toward the camera (fig. 4). Frequently sitting, sometimes standing and only rarely lying down, they position themselves in the interior, setting themselves in the scene alone or with a group. Most protagonists have an air of self-confidence, seemingly unperturbed in their ordered and standardized ensembles, but here it is precisely the absences, the empty spaces, which appear interesting. Displacement or a change in one’s home country hardly play a role in Koelbl’s work; the question of how to approach and comprehend domestic living under the conditions of migration is not considered (see Dogramaci 2016, 74–80). Only the captions implicitly refer to the far-reaching and long-term changes gripping West German society around 1980, for example when the couple Heinrich and Ursula T. are quoted as saying: “We live in a new housing estate. More and more foreigners are moving in, Greeks, Turks and Romanians. The playgrounds are often damaged beyond repair. There’s a lot more trouble and problems now” (Koelbl/Sack 1980, n. p.). In reaction to this perceived threat, the living room becomes a place of refuge, where one’s own is clearly demarcated vis‑à-vis the ‘other’ and the foreign. But what did the living room of the migrants actually look like, beyond all the perceptions of distrust and unease? Is it possible to speak of taste in domestic living and furnishing habits among the migrants? Is the way they furnished a living room indicative of an ability to adapt?

2  This can still be seen in publications from the late 1990s: The publication Fremde Heimat/Yaban, Silan Olur (1998) collects valuable everyday photographs and reproduces objects of migration. However, in its theoretical reflections on the housing of migrants the publication remains attached to the problem discourse (see e. g. the contribution of Boos-Nünning 1998 in the catalogue).

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Fig. 4 | Herlinde Koelbl and Manfred Sack, Das deutsche Wohnzimmer, List, 1980, Photographs: Herlinde Koelbl

Places of overlapping: the living room of migrants Private photographs of labor migrants in West Germany show interiors in which what they brought with them coexists with the new. The question here is whether the living rooms of migrants fit in with the observations on domestic living culture between the 1960s and early 1990s, or whether something new and different is discernible. In his 1979 essay “On the Situation of the Corner Seating Ensemble”, a study of the history and contemporary features of the bourgeois living room, the art historian Martin Warnke observes that the bulky furniture pieces still prevalent in the 1970s are at once artifacts of a dead domestic living culture and expressions of a changed living situation. Over the course of the history of bourgeois living culture, the bedroom

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and dining room have retreated into their own areas, leaving behind the glass cabinet or the wall cupboard unit, where the “best china” is put on show; the separation between the private and the public is expressed in the curtain, which functions to repel the gaze of strangers (Warnke 1978, 674 f.). The smaller spaces in the newly built flats clash with the need to display affluence inherited from the bourgeois salon culture, creating a “regency room without a castle in the background” (Mitscherlich 1971, 120). A vestige of this need survived in the photographs of the migrants’ living rooms with the hermetic couch corner and the living room cupboard with glass cabinet. The individuals photographed pose in front of their glass cabinets, put on display the whole china set and the crystal ware, making them the proud centerpiece of their possessions. In Das deutsche Wohnzimmer Herlinde Koelbl had already noticed that many of her subjects had purchased complete interior furnishings from furniture stores and that scarcely any individual free space or personal aesthetic taste were recognizable: “To live as one lives, to be ‘completely furnished’ – all these seem to be constraints that most of our contemporaries were barely able to get rid of. They are exposed to the massive ‘interior design influences’ of market-dominant furniture stores and brochures distributed millions of times” (Koelbl/Sack 1980, 132). The single piece of furniture often lost the power it had to indicate anything about its owner; in turn, the furniture purchased and the arrangements of it betray something about the willingness to assimilate and

Fig. 5 | View into the Living Room of the Turkish Family K., Krefeld, 1984, photographer unknown, DOMiD Archive, Cologne, E 1015,0503

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Fig. 6 | Turkish Family in their Living Room, BonnBeuel, 1991, ­photographer unknown, DOMiD Archive, Cologne, E 1085,0004

collectively subordinate, to submit to the dictates of mass consumerism. At home, as the design researcher Gert Selle indicates, individual memory remains linked to collective memory: This should also apply to the wide and at the same time narrow space of experience of living. In this we are also what we recall: autobiographically in the processing of personal events of perception, at the same time integrated into collective traditions and spectra of experience and embedded in a far-reaching collective memory, which we do not have to be aware of at all. (Selle 2011, 215)

Many of the living rooms photographed by Koelbl obey a standardized choreography with a cupboard unit in veneer, a sofa and an armchair. The center of the living room is the coffee table, which although a key communicative element has to compete with the television for attention. Any view out of the windows is hidden behind tulle curtains reaching to the floor, enfolded by heavy drapes.3 The walls are often decorated with a patterned wallpaper, and a rubber tree, the favorite houseplant at the time, is usually positioned in front. These furniture pieces, paradigmatic of the domestic living culture in West Germany, are also found in the living rooms of migrants (figs. 5–6). They could be interpreted as insignias of assimi3  Peter Richter interprets the heavy curtains in front of German windows as a national peculiarity, a sealing-off of the outside world (Richter 2006, 160).

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Fig. 7 | Family D. from Cologne, 1970s, 8.3 × 12.9 cm, photographer unknown, DOMiD Archive, Cologne, BT 0868,0000

lation and social advancement, articulated in the photographs in the form of objects, furniture and poses. Here we may assume that the photographs were not only taken for the subjects’ own private use but functioned as a form of proof sent to friends and relatives, for example in Turkey – an announcement that the migrants had ‘arrived’ and finally found a place in the host country. Domestic living is thus not only a fundamental human need and, as a sign of a settled life, a facet of human existence per se,4 it also gives expression to a self-image that shows off social status and achieved prosperity (see Selle 2011, 70). Authors such as Stephen Riggins have pointed out the living room in particular is a “stage”: “This architectural feature that is found in practically every house and apartment constitutes a transactional space for the household as well as a stage for selective contacts with the outside world” (Riggins 1994, 101). The question arises whether the presence of a wall unit (fig. 7), coffee table and a seating corner unit also brings the coziness of a German bourgeois lifestyle into the migrant living rooms. As early as 1898, in the multi-volume series on the “German Room” (Deutsches Zimmer), living was connected with coziness: “We are longing for a home that lives up to our cozy constitution, we want a suitable room for our domestic life, just as we want suitable clothes to make us feel com4  On the possible definitions of living, see Pyritz/Altner 2000. On privacy in the context of living, see Nierhaus 2001; see also Häußermann/Siebel 2000.

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fortable inside” (Rosner 1898, 2). It is precisely the “German coziness” (Deutsche Gemütlichkeit) that marks the withdrawal of the bourgeoisie into privacy in changing eighteenth and nineteenth-century society (Schmidt-Lauber 2003, 11, 146). The history of the term gemütlich (cozy) also refers to an emergence in the genuinely German context of a late-medieval gemüetlich, originating from the word Gemüt (mind) as well das Angenehme (the pleasant) (ibid., 140). Thus, if the interior desires of migrants in Germany correspond to the bourgeois coziness cultivated since the Biedermeier era, it can be assumed that it is not only taste and social distinction that are adapted here. Rather, the interiors also reveal a “bourgeoisization” and revaluation of the private sphere, which is represented by the living room with its cozy furnishings. Furthermore, a need to give expression to perceived status, style and taste is evident in the arrangements of the living room in particular, a room that is far more a representative space than the bedroom, children’s room or home office. Memories and emotional connections are also condensed in this space, however, for instance in the furniture and objects. As photographs from the 1960s onwards show, the interiors of Turkish migrants are frequently decorated with objects such as Nazar amulets to ward off the ‘evil eye’ or wall hangings with ‘Turkish’ motifs (see, for example, Candida Höfer’s photographs of Turkish migrants in the 1970s, Dogramaci 2015, 295– 301). These may be seen as objects of an imported domestic living culture. An amalgamation thus takes place in the living rooms of Turkish migrant workers in Germany – between the migration and the objects and furnishings, arranged in a creative dialogue. For the Greek artist Vlassis Caniaris, the hybrid rooms of the working migrants in Berlin were an important reference point for his exhibition Guest worker – foreign worker (fig. 8), held in 1975 in the Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst. Caniaris lived in Berlin as a fellow of the German Aca-demic Exchange Service between 1973 and 1975. During his time there he explored the lives and domestic circumstances of migrants from a variety of different countries. In fourteen settings he then presented headless figures made of wire, furniture and other objects in a series of constellations. Many of the installations evoke associations with interiors, suggested by a door or a cupboard. All of the settings have a provisional quality about them and, as far as the effect of the appearance of the materials used is concerned, seem to be ‘poor’ and decrepit, thus alluding to a porous existence threatened by uncertainty. What is little known about these assemblages is that they had their starting point in photographs taken by Caniaris. Commenting on the working concept he submitted to the German Academic Exchange Service, Caniaris underlined the importance of the personal conversations he had with the “workers” in their homes (Caniaris 1991, 139). Caniaris took black-and-white photographs of the living rooms (fig. 9) to capture the atmosphere and document the furnishings. The shots are casual, as if taken in passing, the persons not shown in full, with unpretentious details of the rooms. The furniture is worn out and provisional. Cracked panes in the doors are patched up but not replaced. Caniaris’s photographs show precarious lives, a domestic setting that has nothing hospitable about it – clearly the reference point for his environments with their anonymous spaces and headless occupants with no outward sign of identity. Presumably, Caniaris was already looking for an overriding logic in how the migrants furnished their flats in his photographs. This is why he emphasized that his project was not interested in specific nationalities, but rather in a “group, in a mechanism, and not in a personal or personified example” (Caniaris 1991, 140). It is striking that Caniaris’s photographs, which accentuate poverty and isolation, are clearly different from the

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Fig. 8 | Vlassis Caniaris. Gastarbeiter – Fremd­ arbeiter, Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, Berlin 1975, cover

private photographs largely found in the archives of migrants such as the Documentation Centre and Museum of Migration in Germany. It is obvious that the perception of living culture and its appearance lies in the eye of the beholder.

(Re‑)Migration of furnishings and visions My concluding remarks will focus on the relationship between re‑migration and domestic living. In her book Migrating Spaces, the artist Stefanie Bürkle has described how migration processes not only have an impact on the destination country but also recoil, as it were, on the original homeland (Bürkle 2016). Spaces and cultural practices accompany the migrants; this is also the case when migrants build homes in the countries they have left and invest their capital there, with some eventually returning for good. In a photograph by Günay Ulutuncok, Mehmet B., who has returned to Turkey, poses with his children in his living room in Istanbul (fig. 10). It is 1984. He was one of several hundred thousand re‑migrants who returned to Turkey in this year. Under the chancellorship of Helmut Kohl, in 1983 a law was passed that provided support for foreigners willing to return to their original home countries – foreigners who had settled in West Germany were to be given an incentive to return home. Under the law, foreign workers received a one-off payment (known as the “return bonus”) and early reimbursement of contributions to state pension funds – on the proviso that they left the country within four weeks (Yano 2000, 7; Eryılmaz/Kocatürk-Schuster 2011, 39). The legislation triggered a wave of re‑migration. In Duisburg the industrial conglomerate Mannesmann offered

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Fig. 9 | Vlassis Caniaris, Berlin-Kreuzberg, 1974, photographs for the project ­“Gastarbeiter – Fremd­arbeiter”, DOMiD Archive, Cologne, E 0377,0007

their foreign employees particularly high return bonuses; they were to be paid two additional months’ wages if they signed up before 30 June 1984, the final day the law was to be in force, to give up their jobs as early as January of the same year. Pressure was applied through in‑company language tests. Allegedly carried out to provide the proficient with more highly qualified work, in fact those who scored poorly in the test feared that they would lose their jobs (Hunn 2005, 480– 482). Weighing up their prospects, they decided to make use of the return bonus. After working for sixteen years at Mannesmann in Duisburg-Hüttenheim, Mehmet B. also decided to return to Turkey, even though his children had been born in Germany.5 During his time working in West Germany he had built a house with eight flats in Alibeyköy, a slum district in Istanbul. And this is where the family moved to upon their return. Posing before the camera, the returnees now stand in front of a large wall cupboard unit. They had brought this piece of furniture with them from Germany, and so it reminds them of the time they had spent there. The experience of crossing borders and changing locations is materialized in the furniture. The threshold space of transition is articulated in the heavy cupboards, which were transported thousands of kilometers with immense effort and cost. This photograph corresponds to other shots showing Turkish families in their empty German flats in Duisburg. The exodus of Turkish families from Duisburg-Hüttenheim triggered by the federal legislation and the company strategy of downsizing staff numbers was documented by the photographers Manfred Vollmer and Brigitte Kraemer, who in 1984 visited Turkish families 5  Information from the data sheet of the photography in the Archive of DOMiD, Cologne.

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Fig. 10 | Günay Ulutuncok, Remigrants to Turkey, Istanbul 1984, DOMiD Archive, Cologne, E 1053,0124

Fig. 11 | Manfred Vollmer, Duisburg-Hüttendorf, 1984, photography

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shortly before their departure, their flats already empty (fig. 11, further photographs in Dunkmann/Vogt 2012, 42, 43, 163). In this in‑between time, their lives seem naked and exposed. Only the lavishly patterned wallpaper reveals the phase of life just concluded and their aesthetic preferences. The empty flat in Duisburg and the flat in Istanbul represent the moment of circulation inherent to migration. Memories of an earlier life are attached to the furniture (on the qualities of remembrance of living and furnishing in general, see Selle 2011, 209).6 At the same time, the perception and appropriation of furnishings in the respective cultural contexts change. Moreover, they are combined with new pieces, giving rise to new relationships between the objects and their owners. The dwelling and its furnishings thus point back to both the past as well as to the present and future of its residents.

References Arin, Cihan, editor. Ausländer im Wohnbereich. Dokumentation eines Seminars der Internationalen Bauausstellung Berlin. Express Edition, 1983. Bade, Klaus Jürgen. “‘Einheimische Ausländer’ und ’fremde Deutsche’ im vereinigten Deutschland.” Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte, vol. 33, no. 2, 1992, pp. 9–28. Boos-Nünning, Ursula. “Arbeiten und Wohnen als Lebensgrundlage. Die Situation der Arbeitsmigranten und Arbeitsmigrantinnen und ihrer Kinder von 1968 bis 1995.” 40 Jahre Fremde Heimat – Yaban, Sılan olur. Eine Geschichte der Einwanderung aus der Türkei, edited by Aytaç Eryılmaz and Mathilde Jamin, exh.-cat. Ruhrlandmuseum Essen, Klartext, 1998, pp. 337–357. Bürkle, Stefanie, editor. Migration von Räumen/Migrating Spaces. Architektur und Identität im Kontext türkischer Remigration. Architecture and Identity in the Context of Turkish Remigration. Vice Versa, 2016. Caniaris, Vlassis. “Autobiographische Notizen (Mai 1975).” Michael Fehr. Vlassis Caniaris, Konkreter Realismus. Skizze einer künstlerischen Strategie 1952 bis 1983, Verlag für Moderne Kunst, 1991, pp. 129–141. Dogramaci, Burcu. “My Home Away from Home: Artistic Reflections on Immigration to Germany.” The Culture of Migration. Politics, Aesthetics and Histories, edited by Sten Pultz Moslund et al., Tauris 2015, pp. 289–308. –. Heimat. Eine künstlerische Spurensuche. Böhlau, 2016. Dunkmann, Nina, and Christine Vogt, editors. At Home. Der Blick durchs Schlüsselloch. Wohnen im Ruhrgebiet – gesehen durch die Kunst, exh.-cat. Ludwiggalerie Schloss Oberhausen, Kerber, 2012. Eryılmaz, Aytaç, and Bengü Kocatürk-Schuster. “50 Jahre Migration aus der Türkei. Ein historischer Rückblick.” Geteilte Heimat. 50 Jahre Migration aus der Türkei. Paylaşılan Yurt, edited by Aytaç Eryılmaz and Cordula Lissner, Klartext, 2011, pp. 34–43. Flusser, Vilém. “The Freedom of the Migrant.” Ibid. The Freedom of the Migrant. Objections to Nationalism. University of Illinois Press, 2003, pp. 1–15. Häußermann, Hartmut, and Walter Siebel. Soziologie des Wohnens. Eine Einführung in Wandel und Ausdifferenzierung des Wohnens. Juventa, 2000. Hunn, Karin. “Nächstes Jahr kehren wir zurück …” Die Geschichte der türkischen ‘Gastarbeiter’ in der Bundesrepublik. Wallstein, 2005, pp. 480–482. Keilig, Stefanie. Wohnverhältnisse der Familien ausländischer Arbeitnehmer in einer mittelgroßen Industriestadt, dargestellt am Beispiel der türkischen Arbeitnehmer eines großen Industriebetriebes. Eine sozialhygienische Studie. Diss. Julius Maximilians University, Würzburg, 1980. Koelbl, Herlinde, and Manfred Sack. Das deutsche Wohnzimmer. List, 1980. Koetzle, Hans-Michael. “Kaleidoskop des Sozialen. Anmerkungen zur Fotografie von Herlinde Koelbl.” Mein Blick. Herlinde Koelbl, exh.-cat. Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin, Steidl, 2009, pp. 277–283.

6  Selle writes: “It is necessary to ask where the part of experience in living that is embedded in oblivion (or in the unconscious) remains, in what relation to the known and clearly recognized.”

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Burcu Dogramaci Mitscherlich, Alexander. “Konfession zur Nahwelt. Was macht eine Wohnung zur Heimat?” (1965). Ibid. Die Unwirtlichkeit unserer Städte. Thesen zur Stadt der Zukunft, Deutscher Bücherbund, 1971, pp. 107–121. Nierhaus, Irene. “Munitionen des Hauses. Zur Diskursivierung der Grenzen des Privaten.” Kunstgrenzen. Funktionsräume der Ästhetik in Moderne und Postmoderne, edited by Alice Bolterauer and Elfriede Wiltschnigg, Passagen, 2001, pp. 199–213. Pollock, Griselda. Vision and Difference. Femininity Feminism and Histories of Art. Routledge, 1988. –. “Excerpts from ‘Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity’.” Gender Space Architecture. An interdisciplinary ­introduction, edited by Jane Rendell et al., Routledge, 2000, pp. 154–167. Pyritz, Albrecht, and Renate Altner. “Das Zuhause. Die Zeit. Die Wohnkultur. Berichte zur Ausstellung Wohnen im Wandel.” Jahrbuch Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin, vol. VI, 2000, pp. 187–204. Richter, Peter. Deutsches Haus. Eine Einrichtungsfibel. Goldmann, 2006. Riggins, Stephen Harold. “Fieldwork in the Living Room: An autoethnographic essay.” The Socialness of Things. Essays on the Socio-Semiotics of Objects, edited by Stephen Harold Riggins, Mouton de Gruyter, 1994, pp. 101–147. Rosner, Karl. Das deutsche Zimmer im 19. Jahrhundert. Eine Darstellung desselben im Zeitalter des Klassicismus, der Biedermeierzeit, der rückblickenden Bestrebungen und der neuen Kunst. G. Hirth’s Kunstverlag, 1898. Rybczynski, Witold. Verlust der Behaglichkeit. Wohnkultur im Wandel der Zeit. dtv, 1991. Schildmeier, Angelika. Integration und Wohnen. Analyse der Wohnsituation und Empfehlungen zu einer integrationsgerechten Wohnungspolitik für ausländische Arbeitsnehmer und ihre Familien (GEWOS-Schriftenreihe, NF. 14). Hammonia, 1975. Schmidt-Lauber, Brigitta. Gemütlichkeit. Eine kulturwissenschaftliche Annäherung. Campus, 2003. Schuleri-Hartje, Ulla-Kristina. Ausländische Arbeitnehmer und ihre Familien. Teil 1: Wohnverhältnisse. Deutsches Institut für Urbanistik difu, 1982. Seidel, Hans-Christoph. “Wohnen und Wohnkultur im Bergarbeitermilieu des Ruhrgebietes nach 1945.” At Home. Der Blick durchs Schlüsselloch. Wohnen im Ruhrgebiet – gesehen durch die Kunst, edited by Nina Dunkmann and Christine Vogt, exh.-cat. Ludwiggalerie Schloss Oberhausen, Kerber, 2012, pp. 157–165. Selle, Gert. Die eigenen vier Wände. Zur verborgenen Geschichte des Wohnens. Campus, 1993. –. Die eigenen vier Wände. Wohnen als Erinnern. Form + Zweck, 2011. Terkessidis, Mark. Migranten. Rotbuch, 2000. Vogt, Christine. “Herlinde Koelbl. Fotografie.” Herlinde Koelbl. Das deutsche Wohnzimmer. Spuren der Macht. Haare und andere menschliche Dinge. Fotografien von 1980 bis heute, edited by Christine Vogt, exh.-cat. Ludwiggalerie Schloss Oberhausen, 2015, pp. 3–16. Warnke, Martin. “Zur Situation der Couchecke.” Stichworte zur geistigen Situation der Zeit, edited by Jürgen Habermas, vol. 2, Suhrkamp, 1979, pp. 673–687. Wurtinger, Hermann. “Reproduktionsbedingungen der Ausländerbevölkerung.” Ausländer im Wohnbereich. Dokumentation eines Seminars der Internationalen Bauausstellung Berlin, edited by Cihan Arin, Express Edition, 1983, pp. 59–70. Yano, Hisashi. “Migrationsgeschichte.” Interkulturelle Literatur in Deutschland. Ein Handbuch, edited by Carmine Chiellino, Metzler, 2007, pp. 1–17. Zieris, Ernst. So wohnen unsere ausländischen Mitbürger. Bericht zur Wohnungssituation ausländischer Arbeits­ nehmerfamilien in Nordrhein-Westfalen. Dehl, 1972.

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OF INNER CITIES AND OUTER SPACE (African) Futurism and (Utopian) Migration

In John Akomfrah’s film The Last Angel of History1 (fig. 1) the data thief travels from the future 200 years back in time to a postcolonial present of the year 1995. Surfing across the internet of black culture, he assembles fragments of a history of a black preoccupation with outer space, space travel, speculative technologies and music. As a montage of found footage, photographs, animation, sounds and interviews with an array of black musicians, writers, artists, cultural critics and scientists,2 the film provides a fresco of the artistic and intellectual movements for which the term Afrofuturism was coined in the early 1990s (Dery 1994).3 At times projected in an already outdated computer as if to show “the present and the past in one moment” (Eshun et al. 2017, 259), the film associatively brings together different temporal layers and a variety of sources in fast cuts: images of Ghana celebrating independence; mosque buildings as an allusion to the ancient ‘Islamic’ and African contributions to the sciences; images of decayed inner cities as the spaces predominantly inhabited by marginalized groups in the USA. For the musician and writer Greg Tate, slavery, under which the forefathers of many blacks suffered, and the alien abduction scenarios in science fiction are but the same. Their descendants’ feeling of alienation, the (nowadays) experience of not being part of the ‘American collective’, but instead of being foreign in a strange land are very similar to the narrations in science fiction, where extraterrestrial travel, abduction and enslavement feature prominently. The Last Angel of History introduces Afrofuturism as a techno-cultural movement originating in the 1950s in the USA and aligning itself with futuristic approaches to music and literature. The historical experiences of a black diaspora in North America materialized not only in science fiction and cyber culture, but also in a futuristic aesthetic and iconography interlinking androids and aliens with African mythologies and cosmologies. The film argues “that since the great rupture of the Middle Passage, African diaspora people have been doing science fiction, assembling futures from fragments of the past” (Marks 2015, 112). People who have lived the legacy of the 1  The Last Angel of History (UK 1996, 45 min.) was directed by John Akomfrah and the Black Audio Film Collective. It was produced by Lina Gopaul and Avril Johnson, and written by Edward George, with research by Kodwo Eshun and Floyd Webb. Currently only the German version is available on Vimeo: https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=​FyVOx-X5mAY. Accessed 10 June 2018. 2  Among others, the cultural critic Greg Tate, black fiction authors Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler, the artists Kodwo Eshun and George Clinton, African-American shuttle astronaut Bernard Harris and actress and musician Nichelle Nichols (Nyota Uhura in Star Trek) were interviewed. 3  More recently, Alondra Nelson has defined Afrofuturism as African American voices with “other stories to tell about culture, technology, and things to come” (Nelson 2002, 9).

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Fig. 1 | John Akomfrah, The Last Angel of History, 1995, single channel colour video, sound; 45 minutes 7 seconds

transatlantic slave trade, the film further suggests, are space and time travellers. In the US context, the harsh reality of blacks living in the decayed inner cities has often been mentally replaced by outer space, where the world could be different – far from racial stereotypes. Space is the Place (1974), reachable by utopian migration – as Sun Ra declares in the eponymous film.4 In this sense John Akomfrah and the Black Audio Film Collective’s film reveals the search for an alternative historiography; it deals with desirable futures, opening up new spaces for historical location, emancipation and empowerment. There are many visual works similar to The Last Angel of History that are connected to space travel, extraterrestrial beings and the figure of the astronaut as a means of negotiating (utopian) migration, displacement and, more generally, the notion of foreignness in society. In spite of the fact that for the European and US imagination, “outer space developed into one of the major sites of twentieth-century utopian thinking” (Geppert 2018, 4),5 in this essay I will expand on the critical potential of this approach, especially in the Afro-Diasporic and African context. I will demonstrate how for African and African-American artists, space travel, alien worlds and astronauts,

4  Space is the Place was directed by John Coney; the script and soundtrack stems from Sun Ra, USA 1972, but it was released only two years later, in 1974. Interestingly, the film highlights the status of space travel’s ambivalent characters as both colonists and exiles. Artist Ellen Gallagher brings in yet another aspect with her series Watery Ecstatic (2007). It is based on the widespread imagination of Drexciya as a kind of underwater world inhabited by the unborn children of pregnant women who were thrown off slave ships. The babies, the myth goes on, adapted so they were able to breathe underwater in their mothers’ wombs. With her paintings of undersea creatures, Gallagher not only reflects on the history of slavery and the experience of dehumanization, but also makes clear that where people were excluded from civil rights, they defined themselves as extraterrestrials or as submarines. Apart from this regional context there are similar works which deal with the idea of freeing oneself from oppressive political systems via migration into outer space (for this, see Groys 2006). 5  For more on past visions of the American Future, see Corn et al. 1984.

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among other (Afro)futuristic tropes, became powerful metaphors for coming to terms with past and recent distortions. Focusing on a range of media – film, installation and performance – I examine four intersections between futuristic tropes and migration in contemporary art in Africa. It will become clear that the notion of space is important here – whether as outer space, imagined or real (urban) space, or territory.

On Afronauts The figure of the astronaut plays a crucial yet ambiguous and versatile role (Armillas-Tiseyra 2016). Among its many associations, one strand of work refers to the ideological constructions by the Global North of Africa’s presumed technological backwardness. The ‘Afronaut’, as invented by Yinka Shonibare MBE in his work Cloud 9 (1999–2000), can be seen as a particularly poignant example of this critical stance. Wearing a costume made entirely out of ‘African’ factory-print cloth, which is actually of Asian-European background and thus alludes to the history of global trade and colonialism, Shonibare overtly subverts stereotypical expectations of ‘Africa’. By using the iconic image of the astronaut placing a flag on the moon, he further brings to mind themes of discovery, expansion and colonization. Whereas in this first setting the astronaut is at least partly represented as a colonizer, in a second work on issues of flight and displacement, he appears more as an estranged victim: in Shonibare’s most recent series of Afronauts the focus has significantly changed. The nexus to flight and migration in Refugee Astronaut (2015) is obvious. He has become a rather earthly being, the technical support system on his back replaced by more mundane items. This is an itinerant astronaut who has yet to find a home and who – with his loose and unconnected supply pipes – conveys a sense of uprootedness. In contrast to Shonibare’s astronauts, Missouri-born dancer and artist Nick Cave’s soundsuits were deliberately made to protect. He designed his first suit in 1992 in response to the Rodney King incident and subsequent race riots in Los Angeles one year earlier. With its designation and especially its heavy appearance, Cave’s twig costume clearly refers to the astronaut’s space suit – beside its allusions to certain masque practices from West Africa, the vehicle for negotiating alterity. According to Elizabeth Hamilton, Cave’s kinetic sculpture is very much about “finding safe spaces for black life” (Hamilton 2017, 22). While with these works we are still moving in the Afro-Diasporic context where the Afronaut took shape as a symbol to negotiate race, displacement and alterity, on the African continent itself the figure has its own genealogy. For some years now, Afrotech or African Futurism has attracted greater attention there and has undergone a process of actualization and reshaping. This includes a rediscovery and updating of an earlier enthusiasm for (African) space travellers, as manifested in the space programme conceived by Edward Makuka Nkoloso in independent Zambia. However, new topics, such as ecological debates or the quest for sustainable futures, have also emerged. According to Kenyan filmmaker Wanuri Kahiu, who is well-known as the director of the film Pumzi (2009), Futurism has always been part of (East) African cultures, especially with regard to its divination techniques and fortune-telling (Kahiu 2012).6 As a way of marking this specific

6  For more on Futurism and celestial subject matter in African cultures, see Mullen Kreamer 2012.

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Fig. 2 | Gerald Machona, Vabvakure. People from Far Away, 2014, installation view of the work in the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, 2014

‘African’ approach, it was suggested by Pamela Sunstrum that Afrofuturism should be reserved for the Americas and that the term African Futurism should be used in Africa (Sunstrum 2013, 120 ff.).7

The African space traveller: encountering otherness Gerald Machona’s installation Vabvakure. People from Far Away8 (2014) is dominated by two lifesize sculptures of astronauts facing each other (fig. 2). They are dressed in space suits made entirely out of (worthless) paper money. Their black helmets contribute to their remote appearance. 7  For more on Afro-tech and the digital arts, see Bristow 2016. 8  Gerald Machona, Vabvakure. People from Far Away (ca. 7 min), 2012: https://vimeo.com/94380286. Accessed 8 May 2018.

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Fig. 3 | Gerald Machona, Vabvakure. People from Far Away, 2012, video still

Machona, who currently lives in South Africa, was born and brought up in Zimbabwe. Vabvakure, the title of his work, equally refers to that country being Shona; it translates as ‘foreigners’ – ‘people from far away’. Zimbabwe from 2000 to 2009 suffered from a severe economic collapse, which greatly devalued the currency and led to upheaval and the migration of thousands of people to neighbouring South Africa. In addition to the astronaut’s twin presence, two shimmering gold flags are mounted in brightly illuminated heaps of sand. Just like the space suits, they are also stitched together out of decommissioned bank notes. Also on display are five different specimens of futuristic-looking flowers of the same material, each protected under a glass capsule, partly wrapped in golden tape. Machona’s film of the same title from 2012 is screened on one of the back walls flanking the astronauts. It now becomes clear that most of the assembled objects are simply film props and costumes. The story of the video can quickly be summarized (fig. 3): Vabvakure opens with a take of Ndiri Afronaut – Shona for “I am Afronaut”. Shortly he has landed in an apparently hostile sand desert, one bearing references to a lunar landscape. He is totally disoriented and stumbling, his space suit has decomposed, and he has lost one of his boots. In spite of his obvious vulnerability – which is once more communicated by the (non‑)protective space suit – Ndiri Afronaut tries to mark the newly gained territory by mounting a flag in the sand. This is, again, a reference to the famous lunar landing in 1969, but also to the concept of the nation. Next, walking further on through an unfamiliar landscape, he gently picks one of the strange-looking flowers. Just like him, the plant seems alien, in need of shelter and protection. A red painted wooden door (the border) suddenly appears; after passing it, they both traverse the now urban territory as outsiders. They become the focus of the inhabitants’ open curiosity and outright hostility. The encounter with an ATM creates another moment of bewilderment. Ndiri Afronaut finally meets another astronaut; with him or her he seems to restart a kind of mini-community very similar to those networks built by migrants all over the world. The film ends with them entering a church build-

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ing (the only sanctuary?). This can be read as a (critical?) comment on the predominant role the Pentecostal churches have often come to play in the context of migration. Gerald Machona’s work is full of references to the current political situation in southern Africa. Most importantly, it has to be understood in the political context of the economic and social crisis in Zimbabwe in the last decade. In this context of hyperinflation, the decommissioned (Zimbabwean) currency became his favourite material. He even distributed it in a public performance at a bus terminus, an important transit point for migrants. With its deliberate affinity to well-known practices of displaying wealth, the performance Ita Kuti Kunaye II – Making it Rain (2010) made tensions visible and negotiable. Moreover, it problematized different forms and conditions of mobility (as with refugees, for instance, or well‑to-do citizens). The daily medium of money was totally worthless, despite its literally huge physical and visual presence, and is thus for Machona an ideal tool for communicating with his audience. While the space suit per se already bears the notion of strangeness, by fashioning it entirely out of obsolete currency in Vabvakure it became a powerful metaphor for the vulnerability of its wearer. (The labour-intensiveness of stitching together the bank notes might be another allusion to migrants’ working conditions.) The feeling of estrangement is made tangible here as well as in the specific use of language. As Shona is a foreign language in South Africa, the title of the film is also a reflection on language as a connective link or as an amplifier of feelings of uncertainty and strangeness. The technologies of survival in Machona’s work have to be seen as a response to violence against Africans, not entirely but often against Zimbabweans who have migrated to South Africa. In this context, the Afronaut evolves into a character through which current practices of oppression and feelings of alienation are negotiated. Machona addresses hyperinflation, migration, displacement and xenophobia – or Afrophobia – here.9 Exploring the complex relationship between immigrants and citizens, Machona merges (Afro)futuristic aesthetics and icons with (older) masking practices. Alongside possession cults, these are a medium in many parts of Africa for coming to terms with cultural encounters. Researchers such as Fritz Kramer (1987) or Paul Stoller (1995) have convincingly argued that they can be understood as a kind of embodied but ephemeral archive of historical contacts with foreign cultures, including violent displacements such as slavery (see also Wendl 1999 and Roberts 2012). In the special case of Machona’s work, so‑called nyau masquerades are referenced; these are performed by the Chewa all over Malawi, Zambia and Mozambique. Nyau masks stand for encounters with mysterious external forces, beasts and spirits, but also with real cultural others such as members of foreign ethnic groups, traders, missionaries and colonial officers – always located spatially as well conceptually outside of community life. Thus, in the case of nyau masquerades, the emphasis on alterity prevails (Probst 2000; Peffer 2005, 344 f.). One well-known character represents the Virgin Mary, used and danced as a sort of resistance to white missionaries and British colonialists. Another example stems from the Brooklyn museum collection and is clearly identifiable as Elvis. “In Zimbabwe,” Machona explained, “the Chewa utilized this practice to challenge local perception of their identity as ‘aliens’ and negated xenophobic attitude developing towards them as foreigners to that social landscape” (Yancatarol Yagiz 2018). 9  Because mostly African working-class migrants were the target of brutal attacks and even killings, it has been argued that it should be referred to as Afrophobia instead of xenophobia.

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In this reading Vabvakure is not only a direct reference to the ongoing Afrophobic attacks, but also a more general exploration of the global issue of migration and how the alien is constructed in society. The figure of the astronaut in this context no longer stands for an optimistic take on the future, but unfolds its critical potential by pointing to migration forced by poverty and finally to the failure of the postcolonial nation state.

Non-predictable moving pattern Space is a frequent theme in Afrofuturistic art. Whether it is outer space, the cosmos, virtual space or physical space, there is often an understated agreement that to think freely and creatively, particularly as a black person, one has to not just create a work of art, but also literally or figuratively create the space to think it up in the first place. (Womack 2013, 142)

In Machona’s work, outer space only plays a marginal role: it is mainly used as an indicator of the astronaut’s otherness. There is no extraterrestrial aspiration that could lead to exile, as was often the case in the Afro-Diasporic imagination. Instead, the itinerant African space traveller is very much earthbound  – bound by geopolitical affairs. For the works analysed in the following, ‘space’ has to be understood in the concrete sense of ‘territory’ and its often repressive measures of (border) control. South African apartheid was first and foremost a politics of space (Pinther 2006, 180); people categorized as black had no rights to the city unless they could prove they had employment – in which case, they were allowed to be ‘temporary users’ of the city. Otherwise they were allocated to townships or (ethnicized) homelands. Only when the apartheid system became more and more fragile and the influx control laws were lifted in 1986 did these strict systems begin to change. Former ‘white’ inner city areas, especially in Johannesburg, were completely transformed by black people from townships as well as by refugees and immigrants moving in from other African countries. This was the start of the ‘white flight’ from the inner city to the northern suburbs. With this new layout, hitherto unknown urban practices of informality have arisen; former residents often consider the inner city a no‑go area. Writers such as Phaswane Mpe see this very differently  – for them, these ‘alter-territories’ are full of humans displaced from across the continent (Mpe 2001).10 “The inner city,” writes sociologist AbdouMaliq Simone, “is a domain that few want to belong to or establish roots in. But it keeps alive residents’ hopes for stability somewhere else, even as it cultivates within them a seemingly permanent restlessness and capacity to make something out of the city” (Simone 2004, 425). In his view, the architectural shells provide only the framework for new ‘social’ infrastructures – the highly complex African diaspora networks from Zimbabwe, Congo, Nigeria and many other countries. For many, the numerous chances on offer in the inner city – networking, living in cheap accommodation and having access to a range of possible jobs – make life there a springboard to other quarters, countries and careers – and to a better life. As urban theorist Edgar Pieterse makes clear, spatial divides persist today, although along a different matrix, mainly one of class (Pieterse 2013). The current urban setting is marked by its segregationist history and has become the stage for new and different social disruptions, often xenophobic and homophobic in na10  For more on the spatial transformations in the context of apartheid and post-apartheid, see Judin/ Vladislavic 1999 and Nuttal/Mbembe 2008.

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ture. Whereas during apartheid identities were externally attributed, post-apartheid society has produced – and is still producing – its own norms and new forms of both inclusion and exclusion. It is in this context that many artists have become involved in performative acts ‘moving’, tagging and ‘infecting’11 the cities. In the last decade especially, they have started to address these new spatial arrangements by inserting themselves into (urban) landscapes. In fact, in order to raise questions about visibility and non-visibility, many artists in southern Africa have left the ‘safe’ spaces of art in order to perform on uncertain grounds. They have literally become ‘space invaders’. One of the earliest and probably most famous performances in the urban space of Johannesburg was Steven Cohen’s Chandelier (2002). He performed in a kind of queer outfit, wearing high heels and a chandelier tutu, in a squatter settlement in Newtown just before – and even while – it was destroyed and vacated by the so‑called red ants. By making himself highly visible (as a homosexual, white, Jewish man) to audiences in spaces where he did not ‘fit in’, Cohen raised questions of cultural belonging and human vulnerability – provoking manifold reactions. Cohen’s approach can be interpreted site-specifically. The practice of confrontation creates situations of collective ambiguity – and thus new spaces for negotiation. Beside the inner-city areas, border crossing points, bus termini, and taxi ranks can be identified as especially contested territories. Thus, they have become prevalent sites for public interventions by artists, interventions that question the precarious condition of African migrants. As a point of departure and arrival as well as of passage, these sites became neuralgic nodes in the topography of mobility and migration. Space Invader is not only the name of a computer game designed in 1978 but is also the title of a public intervention by Daniel Halter – an artist from Zimbabwe who, like Gerald Machona, currently lives in South Africa. For his performance Space Invader (Johannesburg taxi rank) (2009) he chose such an important point of entry (fig. 4).12 An aerial photograph shows its location, the walled enclosure of the terminus. Next to it is a pile of bags; these, on closer inspection, turn out to be the tartan print bags often associated with migration and mobility – the bag’s pattern itself being an example of transnational movement, as with wax prints (Hemmings 2015, 95). Only from above – and this can be seen as a clear allusion to the techniques of surveillance used by border regimes – does the composition of the ephemeral sculpture become visible: it reproduces the exact image of the alien creature from the Atari game. The video resulting from Halter’s intervention shows people on the ground moving the bags one after another, so that the ‘alien-image’ itself ‘floats down’ or drifts, just like the aliens in the computer game with the same name. But whereas in the game the alien has to be caught and actually shot, in the performance the alien’s image is playfully re‑constructed in joint action and thus moves fast. This work not only plays on the science fiction notion of aliens arriving from outer space, it also transfers the well-known icon from virtual space into ‘real’ space – or, more precisely, into territory controlled by the nation state. Thereby, one could argue, Space Invader

11  Infecting the City is the name of a public arts festival with a focus on performance held in Cape Town since 2008. See http://infectingthecity.com/2017/. Accessed 8 May 2018. For a broader discussion of performance art and its relation to urban space, see Siegenthaler 2017. 12  Space Invader (Johannesburg taxi rank) can be watched on Vimeo: http://danhalter.com/category/selected-work/. Accessed 8 May 2018.

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Fig. 4 | Daniel Halter, Space Invader (Johannesburg taxi rank), 2009, photographic Lambda print

itself works on the dissolution of boundaries, between art and popular/game culture, between spaces reserved for ‘art’ and the artists’ involvement in more political actions. Whereas in Space Invader Halter juxtaposes ideas about migrants, perceived as aliens, with a non-predictable moving pattern, another cross-border performance is directly informed by migratory tactics. The Beitbridge Moonwalk13 and its video documentation is inspired by a story that Halter was told by a Zimbabwean immigrant. The man was part of a group who was illegally crossing the border into South Africa. In order to avoid detection, they all walked backwards across the bridge. Their idea was to throw the border police off by leaving footprints facing in the opposite direction. Walking backwards also allowed the immigrants to change direction instantly if they were seen.14 What is at first a playful adaptation of this story – and moreover quotes Michael Jackson’s famous moonwalk – on a second view adds another layer of meaning to both of Halter’s works discussed here. They seem to underscore what in critical migration studies is referred to as the autonomy of migration or the micro-politics of migrancy. Migration is not easy to control; it adapts differently to each particular context; it is arbitrary in its flows and above all it is not entirely predictable (Simone 2000). Instead, the video seems to suggest that migrants follow their own strategies, relying on very specific techniques. Halter reflects not only surveillance technology, but also stresses the migrants’ agency and the tactics with which they aim to 13 The Beitbridge Moonwalk can be watched on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/44189342. Accessed 8 May 2018. 14  As explained by Dan Halter; see his homepage: http://danhalter.com/category/selected-work/.

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counter the border control mechanisms. By abstaining from tragic genres of migratory representations (Canclini 2011, 27), Halter privileges an understanding of migration that is about its “desire and tactics” (Papadopoulos/Tsianos 2007, 223 ff.) and about the migrants’ agency. But still, as the title Space Invader testifies to, in mainstream discourse the border-crossers are viewed as somehow aggressive and invasive; they are “often derogatorily referred to as amakwerekwere15, and through regular reference to their ‘alien-ness’, they are reminded that their arrival can never be complete” (Simbao 2012, 18). They are in a permanent state of becoming.

On the conquest of space: contested terrains The exhibition Life on Mars by Stary Mwaba16 had as its focal point a reflection on the conquest of (outer) space. It was divided into two bodies, both linked to very specific urban sites in Lusaka, the capital of Zambia. Whereas the Afronauts are bound to the city’s sport stadium, Chinese Cabbage refers to Soweto Market. According to Mwaba, the latter is the place where the present cultural and economic relations between Africa and China manifest themselves; here, the effects of economic colonization become most evident. From the stadium, back in the 1960s, the first African astronaut should have flown to the moon. Like other artists before,17 Mwaba connects to the space programme initiated by Edward Makuka Nkoloso. In fact, with his (acrylic) paintings from the Space Project Series, his work can be read as a homage to that pioneer. Nkoloso, a natural science teacher, was not only a freedom fighter in the late 1950s and early 60s in what was then Northern Rhodesia but is even better known as the founder of the National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy. Its coming into existence proves the fact that international competition on the last frontier in space is deeply embedded in the African imagination as well. In the era of independence, when political utopias were mushrooming widely, Nkoloso hired a group of people to build a rocket designed to fly to the moon and to Mars. Stary Mwaba’s huge painting Obsessed with Space (2014), mainly in black and white, brings together the main protagonists and equipment of this endeavour: the female astronaut, the 17‑year-old Martha Mwamba, the oil barrels used for rolling down hills as part of the anti-gravity training, parts of the copper aluminium rocket, among others (fig. 5). By foregrounding and depicting the equipment in great detail – the use of local material, which was finally intended to be transformed for interstellar use – he is interested in Africa’s technoid ability and confidence in the past. With the second part of the exhibition he brings in another topic: one that helps him to expand from historical events to current social-political conditions. The relationship between these two interconnected bodies of work evolves around issues of technology and access to natural resources. In Chinese Cabbage Stary Mwaba relies on the vegetable’s omnipresence in today’s Zambia in order to critically reflect the complexity of China-Africa relations, which have steadily grown

15  Amakwerekwere is a highly pejorative term used in South Africa for foreigners from African countries. 16  From 2014 to 2015 Stary Mwaba was on a residency at the International Studio Programme at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin. The exhibition and the catalogue Life on Mars are outcomes of this stay. See Stary Mwaba, Life on Mars 2015. 17  Widely circulated was the work The Afronauts by Cristina de Middel. In 2014, Ghanaian director Frances Bodomo released her video Afronauts using the same motif.

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Fig. 5 | Stary Mwaba, Obsessed with Space, 2014, acrylic on canvas

since the country’s independence in 1964. A simple cabbage leaf, which once took on the form of a gigantic copper wire sculpture and then could be found in a tricolour drawing, evolved together with copper into the central symbol of the exhibit. The three-coloured leaves appear again in a lab-like setting in which each single leaf is dipped into yellow, red, and blue water, accordingly entitled copper, manganese, and cobalt. Minerals and metals from local mines, which are often owned by Chinese companies (Michel/Beuret 2008, 349 ff.), are essential for the production of electronic cables, measuring devices, and mobile phones (fig. 6). With this overlapping of two ‘materials’, both strongly associated with the Chinese presence in today’s Zambia, Stary Mwaba reflects on highly disputed cultural relationships and their economic implications. He thus touches on ‘classical’ African futuristic topics – in the same way that Jean Katambayi Mukendi does. The artist grew up in Lubumbashi, on the edge of the copper belt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). In a situation where the mines are integrated into the global network of the mobile communications industry through a joint venture with an

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Fig. 6 | Stary Mwaba, Copper, Cobalt and Manganese Cabbage, 2014, mixed media installation

Fig. 7 | Jean Katambayi Mukendi, Voyant, 2015, mixed media, cardboard, pen, paper

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international company, he created a gigantic robot sculpture, Voyant (2015), entirely made out of paper and cardboard (fig. 7). The wealth of raw materials, such as copper and coltan – the work suggests – is diametrically opposed to the many problems in everyday lives of the local residents: insufficient infrastructure, power supply shortages, inadequate healthcare, poverty. He thus contrasts local low-tech objects with the valuable resources which are exported in order to enable high-tech production abroad (Pinther/Weigand 2018, 93). Mukendi’s as well as both of Mwaba’s works share a common interest in space and its conquest. Though in the Space Project Series the adventure of space travel stands for a moment of freedom and independence and thus for a future outside of colonialism and the Cold War spheres of influence and domination, in Voyant and Chinese Cabbage ‘space’ is dealt with more controversially. Both works are inspired by the unequal access to land as well as the exploitation of raw materials. In the DRC, but also in Zambia this has led to a permanent state of emergency imbuing daily life in this region (see Malaquais/Khouri 2016, Michel/Beuret 2008, 349 ff.). This critical approach by Mwaba culminates in the central sculpture of the Life on Mars exhibit, which links the – at first glance unconnected – series: its main object is made out of an oil barrel forming the basis for an energy-generating test device. In this arrangement, all the important elements are brought together – the oil barrel, cabbage, the leaves – as if to suggest that the erstwhile dream of freedom and independence has been overthrown by new dependencies and neo-colonial agendas. This is also the focal point of Kongo Astronaut’s Postcolonial Dilemma Track 3 Unended (2014).18 With its old fashioned, bricolage-like space suit, made out of found material – outsourced computer hardware, circuit boards, electronic waste – it underlines again the ongoing conflicts over natural resources and their disastrous effects on the fragmented state of the DRC – circumstances which make people long for other spaces and initiate migratory movements (De Boeck/Plissart 2004, 45 ff.).

Conclusion: earthbound Mikili refers to such a real or imagined spaces reachable by (utopian) migration. The term stems from Lingala, a language spoken in large parts of the DRC and its adjacent regions; mikili translates as Europe or to an unidentified third space.19 It features prominently in the installation Ground/Overground/Underground by the Kinshasa-based artist collective Mowoso. The work was on display at the Afropolis exhibition (fig. 8),20 and consisted of a huge black painted space machine containing video and audio recordings. It served to connect three different worlds. As can be seen in a sketch it first links to Mbandaka on the equator line. The Geostationary Earth Orbit 18  Postcolonial Dilemma comes as a trilogy. See for Kongo Astronauts, Postcolonial Dilemma Track 1 Redux (2014) https://vimeo.com/103135132 and for Kongo Astronauts, Postcolonial Dilemma Track 2 (2014), https:// vimeo.com/103135134. Postcolonial Dilemma Track 3 Unended (2014) can be watched on Vimeo as well: http://panafricanspacestation.org.za/author/dj_pass/page/3/?cat=​8. Accessed 8 May 2018. 19  The collective social imaginary concerning the West in Congo is often referred to as mikili. According to Filip De Boeck, it is “rich in fairy tale images that conjure up the wonderland of modernity, and the luxurious, almost paradisiacal lifestyle of the West” (De Boeck/Plissart 2014, 46–47). In the work of Mowoso, however, mikili and its associated imaginations are far more ambivalent. 20  Ground/Overground/Underground was on display at the Afropolis exhibition. The project’s artists were Dicoco Boketshu, Eléonore Hellio, and Bienvenu Nanga. See Pinther et al. 2012.

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Fig. 8 | Mowoso, Ground/Overground/Underground, 2010, installation view of the work in the exhibition Afropolis at the RautenstrauchJoest-Museum, Cologne, 2010

hovers over the city, making it home to most of the planet’s communication satellites. Second, it refers to Kinshasa as the capital of the DRC and, third, to mikili. An accompanying performance tracked the (psychic) path of a man travelling from Mbandaka to Paris; he can be seen as he is sucked into the equatorial earth. Dominique Malaquais explains this scene as follows: Arrayed around his (trophy) head is a vortex of bureaucracy: passports and laissez-passers; birth, marriage, health, and death certificates; applications for movement, departure, residency, and potential return – all real (the man is Mowoso cofounder Boketshu Bokungu, seeking access to Mikili) and many times canceled, reissued, waterlogged, and damaged beyond legibility. Below the surface, hidden by the mud and papers that threaten to choke him, is a pipeline into which his body will shortly descend for a voyage through the bowels of the planet, popping out at the doors of Gare du Nord, in the heart of Mikiliste Paris. (Malaquais 2011, 52 f.)

During the course of the video and audio sequences it becomes clear that in Kinshasa’s dream Paris or Brussels are exaggerated, mythical locations. The borders of reality and imagination are blurred. Mikili then turns from utopia into dystopia, from a dream into a nightmare. The artists whose works have been discussed here make use of Afrofuturistic icons, tropes, and strategies in one way or another, in order to negotiate issues related to migration and to

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capture notions of dislocation. By doing so they contribute to an ongoing futuristic debate and its various strands on the African continent. In this way, they are in line with Kiluanji Kia Henda’s Icarus 13, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum’s Disrupter X or Kapwani Kiwanga’s latest exploration of African cultures of technology, to name but a few. African Futurism provides a space to think up and negotiate identities, ruptures, and urgent questions on social and economic issues, migratory practices included. In this context, the Afronaut becomes a strong metaphor for dislocation and estrangement. Fictitious visions of the future are employed in order to counter Afrophobic violence against migrants. But unlike the argument in The Last Angel of History, outer space and the cosmos do not provide a blueprint for a better future. One could argue with regard to Machona’s work that ‘traditional’ practices (such as masques performances) become a future device, looking back to imply certain older techniques in the future. In that sense, it is not so much about outer but inner space; discourses on migration and possible futures are very much earthbound. Yet another image of the Afronaut takes shape in the works by Mowoso. Here, the moment of alienation stands for a postcolonial economic imbalance, which often leads to migratory movements. And it is with regard to this work that I wish to elaborate on an important difference between American Afrofuturism and African Futurism. Whereas the former nearly always refers to the historical experience of slavery (Middle Passage, Drexcya), in African Futurism colonialism, recent neo-colonial claims on territory, and economic and ecological exploration are ever present and still debated. In addition, in this context the character of the Afronaut, but also in a more general sense futuristic scenarios, aim to unveil ideological and material constructions of Africa’s presumed technological backwardness. They intend to unsettle ideas about Africa as a continent of permanently developing nations – images that were mainly created by the Global North. In this sense they strive for an equally technoid future – and for multiple perspectives on the future.

References Armillas-Tiseyra, Magalí. “Afronauts: On Science Fiction and the Crisis of Possibility.” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, vol. 3, no. 3, 2016, pp. 273–290. Bristow, Tegan. “Access to Ghosts.” African Futures. Thinking about the future in word and image, edited by Lien Heidenreich-Seleme and Sean O’Toole, Kerber, 2016, pp. 207–220. Canclini, Néstor García. “Migrants: Workers of Metaphors.” Art and Visibility in Migratory Culture. Conflict, Resistance and Agency, edited by Mieke Bal and Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro. Rodopi, 2011, pp. 23–36. Corn, Joseph J., et al. Yesterday’s Tomorrow. Past Visions of the American Future. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984. De Boeck, Filip, and Marie-Françoise Plissart. Kinshasa: Tales of the Invisible City. Ludion, 2004. Dery, Mark. “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose.” Flame Wars. The Discourse of Cyberculture, edited by Mark Dery, Duke University Press, 1994, pp. 179–222. Eshun, Kodwo, et al. “Sonic Utopias: The Last Angel of History. A Conversation between Kodwo Eshun, Ayesha Hameed and Louis Moreno.” Futures and Fictions, edited by Henriette Gunkel et al., Repeater, 2017, pp. 249–266. Geppert, Alexander C. T., editor. Imagining Outer Space. European Astroculture in the Twentieth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Groys, Boris. Ilya Kabakov. The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment. Afterall Books, 2006. Hamilton, Elizabeth. “Afrofuturism and the Technologies of Survival.” African Arts, vol. 50, no. 4, 2017, pp. 18–23. Hemmings, Jessica. “An imagined Africa: stories told by contemporary textiles.” Cultural Threads. Transnational Textiles Today, edited by Jessica Hemmings, Bloomsbury, 2015, pp. 92–117. Judin, Hilton, and Ivan Vladislavic, editors. Blank: Architecture, Apartheid and After. NAI Publishers, 1999.

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CATHRINE BUBLATZKY

MEMORY. BELONGING. ENGAGING. Artistic Production in a Migration Context

Introduction Many artists who have experienced forced displacement and have to live outside their home country deal with themes of memory, loss or social-political constraints. Their paintings, installations or multi-media works turn into production sites of cultural (Assmann/Czaplicka 1995) and global memory (Bhabha 2009) that entail modes of belonging and engagement with a society, its past, present and future, which consequently affect and empower the people involved. This article aims to disentangle the cultural politics of art with respect to artists living in exile. With a focus on Iranian-born and German-based artist Parastou Forouhar and her site-specific installations Documentation, Written Room and Thousand and One Days, the discussion will provide an investigation of art in terms of its dynamic and transcultural quality of memory production (Erll 2011). Going beyond debates on cultural and global memory, this paper will stress processes of cultural transmission (Bhabha 2009, 51) as central in Forouhar’s artworks. Art does not simply preserve, uphold or share a certain state of ‘embodied’ knowledge and ‘belonging’. Instead, following temporal and spatial changes of movement and mobility and the experiences of expulsion and flight inscribed into the artistic language, art generates a sensitivity and a form of intimacy of social relations between the artist, the art and the audience in which the crossing of cultural boundaries plays a substantial role. Pursuing a conceptual approach to art as an agency-driven system of cultural production, the focus will be on the intersection between the artist’s life story, the art and a situation of exile. As an in‑between status, this cumulates in a creative, constructed space that enables critical and transregional socio-political engagement for the artist and the viewer, and turns artistic memory work into a form of resistance.1 In memory studies, it is essential to distinguish between individual and collective memories, the variety of practices such as commemorating, representing or forgetting the past, and the wide range of memory technology and its relation to trauma, terror and disaster (Tota/Hagen 2015, 26; Ricœur 2004). It can be argued that “the traces of the past as they are actualized in the present through practices of commemoration and remembrance in art and popular culture” (Plate/Smelik 2013, 3) specify the role of cultural memory and its performance through art. In its

1  This article presents first results of the research project “Contemporary photography as a cultural practice by diasporic Iranians in Europe”. I am indebted to the Baden-Württemberg Foundation for the financial support provided for this research project through the Elite Programme for Postdocs. My gratitude goes to the artist Parastou Forouhar, the editors of this book, Burcu Dogramaci and Birgit Mersmann as well as to my colleagues Fiona Siegenthaler and Tayebe Naderabadi for their comments.

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performative sense, cultural memory implies dynamism and represents, as Forouhar’s work will show, “an ongoing process of remembrance and forgetting in which individuals and groups continue to reconfigure their relationship to the past and hence reposition themselves in relation to established and emergent memory sites” (Erll/Rigney 2012, 2). Given the fact that for an uncountable number of cases of oppression and violence against human dignity in Iran no memorials exist within the country or elsewhere, and that any form of public mourning is restricted, art provides a powerful political stance of resistance. In advancing such position, this article seeks to explore Forouhar’s art as practice in exile to provide sites and forms of critical engagement. It will investigate how memory is mediated and (re)defined in forms of artistic archivism and through an ongoing artistic transformation of calligraphy and ornament into site-specific installations.2 How does Forouhar’s art inform memory, notions of belonging to, and at same time, an engagement with societies and social groups that face socio-political oppression and forced displacement? In approaching Forouhar’s art in its role of mediating, performing and generating memory, the reciprocal relationship with forgetting (or the fear of it) (Ricœur 2004) and with the artistic archive as a space of resourcefulness (Edwards 2011) deserve particular attention. By reinforcing the understanding of the dynamic and transcultural power of artistic memory work, the idea that cultural identification precludes a cultural continuity in an exilic lifeworld will be a central consideration. In contrast, living in exile implies a process of dis-continuity and complex contradictions, one which exceeds a simple sense of belonging to this or that society (or to both). The state of being ‘in-between’ – this is how Forouhar, forced to live in German exile, identifies her own situation – seems not to be represented by cultural multiplicity, difference or “bi‑cultural knowledge” (Demos 2013, 3). Instead, as art allows the artist to fill the ‘in-between’ and to liberate herself from the constraints of time and locality, this chapter aims at revealing the ‘in-betweenness’ as a central catalyst for creativity and transcultural memory work. According to this argument, memory is understood in terms of its mobile and transcultural quality, to which travel and ongoing transformation are explicitly central (Erll 2011, 11). In this sense, it is important to state that art does not enact a single state of memory, but makes it available for negotiation, contestation and change. An art installation of materials from the past can turn a background of displacement and loss into an artistic archive and thus a ‘place of memorizing’, (re)defining, preserving and sharing experiences of an ‘embodied’ knowledge and state of ‘belonging’ that the aspect of mobility raises. Due to the dynamic mobility of artists and art works in changing cultural and exhibition contexts, the processuality of ongoing negotiation and the engagement with spaces and audiences achieve central importance. Departing from the overall theme of this book, which is about challenges in art production and art theory brought about through global migration, the guiding hypothesis for this article contends that memory, belonging and engaging are inextricably interconnected by migratory experiences. From here the following questions can be derived. In which way are personal histories of migration and exile inscribed into artistic work? How does art provide a visual language to express and 2  I use the term “archivism” in order to stress the relation between art, archiving and activism. According to the online Merriam Webster dictionary, “archivism” means the process of archiving. See the weblink https:// www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/archivism. Accessed 8 January 2018.

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translate cultural memory across/beyond cultural and spatial borders? Does memory work in art help to shape a kind of intimacy between the artist and the audience, and mediate the cultural disposition of traumatic lifeworld? In order to reveal Forouhar’s artistic (re)action, the following discussion addresses the works Documentation (since 2003), Written Room (since 1999) and Thousand and One Days (since 2003). These works are based on documentary materials written to seek clarification about her parents’ murder or that relate to themes of torture and loss. The artists employs techniques of ornament, miniature painting and Persian calligraphy, and are representative of Forouhar’s work as a whole. Thus, the article essentially frames a twofold approach that combines the introduction to the artworks with an analytical discussion through the lens of the main themes of memory, belonging and engagement. Even though each of the three thematic approaches is employed to address only one of the artworks, all the art installations intrinsically combine and interweave all of the three themes. An anthropological perspective is introduced in the second part and focuses on art as transcultural memory work. Created by the essential dialectic between individual experiences and historical situations, this article will mirror cultural complexity in Forouhar’s artworks and remind us that life-stories illustrate both the possibilities and limits of individual choice, political consciousness and action (Al‑Ali 2001, 155). Her practice involves migration and memory and the creation of works as a semantic field that interacts with different publics and governments and raises issues about documenting, archiving, resisting and sustaining memories, both personal and collective. With installations such as Documentation, the artist fosters the relevance of an artist’s archive to sharing her engagement. Her strong commitment to documenting implies the central status of visualization, of making visible what was not intended to be. To achieve this, as she explained to me in one of our conversations, such visibility and transparency in various material forms and media are very important. This represents a crucial support against possible repression by the Iranian regime and strengthens the awareness of global publics of the political situation in Iran.3

In exile – the artist Parastou Forouhar The article focuses on Parastou Forouhar, an internationally renowned installation and multi-media artist. Forouhar was born in Tehran in 1962 and moved to Germany in 1991 in order to pursue and finish her art studies at the University for Design in Darmstadt.4 She is the daughter to Parvaneh and Dariush Forouhar, both prominent political activists and founding members of the Party of the Iranian Nation (1951). Due to their activism against the Shah regime, and later, after the Islamic Revolution, in favor of secular democracy under the Islamic regime, her parents faced constant surveillance and repression. On 22 November 1998, and in the course of the politically motivated series of murders (also known as ‘Chain Murders of Iran’) in Iran (1988–1998), they were brutally killed in their house in Tehran. This political assassination of her parents became a decisive moment in Forouhar’s life: living in Germany at that time and with no travel restrictions, the 3  Parastou Forouhar in a Skype conversation with the author, 24 May 2017. 4  See Parastou Forouhar’s website: http://parastou-forouhar.‌de/. Accessed 4 December 2017.

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incident forced her into exile in the country as the Iranian government considered her a political threat. Since then, the internationally celebrated artist has been strongly engaged in seeking clarification of the assassination of her parents and to open legal proceedings, even though the file was officially closed in 2000. Living in exile, her art became a practice against the crime and forgetting, a gesture of resistance, unbroken and unswerving, despite the increasing repression by the Islamic regime against her art and her person. Despite the fact that Forouhar is not free to live and work in Iran, and that she runs the risk of being censored when she exhibits her art, she frequently travels to Iran.5 For the anniversary of her parents’ death she travels each year in November to Tehran and her parents’ house, where she has managed to set up a public memorial day, an event that was officially proclaimed illegal in 2004, and which is since then, regularly prevented from taking place by governmental security forces. The humiliation continued in November 2017, when the artist faced a court case for “propaganda against the regime” and “blasphemy” in Tehran. Even though Forouhar’s art is in many ways political, it is strongly connected to autobiographical sources. In her work, including installations, animation, digital drawing and photography, she responds to politics, which have not stopped shaping and defining her life and her citizenship, both in Iran and in Germany, and to experiences of loss, pain and state-sanctioned violence. This links to her belief that it does not help a society to ignore its real experiences and historical past. Instead, it should resist and take up its rights because resistance can change the way the state acts. A society must face its history because what has happened in the past does not only belong to the past, it has an impact on the present and the future.6 Memory plays an integral part in her social and artistic life, and to the ways she constitutes her personal identity in relation to people, places, events, the past and the present. Forouhar’s experiences of migration and displacement, living in exile, as well as her regular traveling to Iran (among other destinations) play an important role as a source of inspiration. There is no doubt that the quality of moving – the condition of permanent travel – is a crucial element in the formation of memory (Creet/Kitzmann 2011, 6), which is neither fixed nor stable. The artist has stated: My homeland, Iran, is a constant theme in my artistic practice, but the conception is complex and continuously in flux. Beyond Iran, there is also the collective memory of Germany, where I have lived since 1991. When I arrived there, I was Parastou Forouhar, but I have since become ‘Iranian.’ Every space I inhabit is accompanied by a feeling of displacement. (Forouhar 2011)7

At this juncture of overlapping and contrasting personal perceptions of belonging by the artist, we gain insights into an oppressive space of cultural difference in which Forouhar feels situated as an artist in exile. Here exile unfolds as:

5  Currently it is completely prohibited for galleries and museums to exhibit Forouhar’s work in Iran due to a present trial Parastou Forouhar is confronted with. 6  Interview with Parastou Forouhar by Mohammad Heydari (2016), “Trial is a Process of Creating Awareness Not for Taking Revenge”. United For Iran. Translated from Persian by Tayebe Naderabadi, https://united4iran. org/persian-interviewforohar1. Accessed 21 January 2017. 7  Parastou Forouhar (2010), Artist Statement. Signs, http://signsjournal.org/parastou-farouhar/. Accessed 1 December 2017.

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Memory. Belonging. Engaging. a process of becoming, involving separation from home, a period of liminality and in‑betweenness that can be temporary or permanent, and finally incorporation into the dominant host country. Although separation begins with departure from the homeland, the imprint, the influence, of home continues to well into the remaining phases and shapes them. (Naficy 1993, xvi)

For Forouhar such a situation of exile has a distinctive history and meaning, and with her statement, we gain some idea that her home is not be ‘here’ nor ‘there’ but somehow located ‘in-between’. Such an unfixed situation of exile demands an investigation of art as cultural production (Geertz 1976) and as a system of agency in which art significantly functions to perform social relationships (Gell 1998) in order to do justice to the impact exile has on the artistic practice, one that is strongly marked by two overarching impulses – not forgetting, and sharing with others. Forouhar communicates and produces knowledge outside and against political and media narratives and official archives, and beyond contexts of exhibition and publication. An archival impulse (Foster 2006) unfolds in Forouhar’s practice of the private and artistic archive, which has the function of questioning public documentation, subverting orders and disturbing the symbolic order at large. The archive as a site of remembering and collecting, of keeping alive, as form of resistance, has played multiple roles in her life: as hidden and secret archives of the secret political activism of her parents, as judicial archives in the context of seeking clarification about the political murders, or in her art and public relations work. In the years following the murder of her parents, Forouhar started to search for and collect as many of her parents’ documents and writings as possible. She digitized and published them on a website in Farsi in remembrance and to continue her parents’ work.8 Her parents’ house in Tehran was turned into a site of collective memory and protest. In the context of her journey in 2016 marking the anniversary of her parents’ deaths, when the Iranian judiciary announced that a case against her would be brought to trial, she decided to restructure her homepage and to increase her visibility with more and larger images, short texts and a blog. In this regard, her art has turned – together with the digital platforms and social media communication – into an infrastructure of sites which I will consider using ideas of art and archivism as a ‘lived, dynamic artistic archive’ and activism.

Memory – Documentation I now turn to the installation Documentation (fig. 1) and a description from an interview with the artist in the context of exhibiting the work at the Brunei Gallery (London, 2014): You walk into a room. Documents are stuck across its interior walls, and boxes containing further sheets of information are set below them on shelves. In the middle of the space is a photocopier on a plinth. You are free to move around as you please, picking up and reading documents. You immediately sense that there is a lot of information to process here. You won’t be able to read everything. (Hodge/Yousefi 2014)9

8  See the website www.forouharha.‌net/. Accessed 5 December 2017. 9  David Hodge and Hamed Yousefi. “On Documentation, Parastou Forouhar in Conversation with David Hodge and Hamed Yousefi.” Ibraaz. Contemporary Visual Culture in North Africa and the Middle East, 31 March 2014, https://www.ibraaz.org/interviews/120. Accessed 8 January 2018.

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The next document one finds is a letter from Forouhar herself to a person who is a member of the International Commission of Jurists. She writes about her parents and about her efforts to progress the legal investigation into these crimes, and her regret that the Iranian judiciary seems to offer her no hope. She urges him to help her in putting the case before an international court (ibid.). Forouhar explains that she likes the aesthetic of the archive (fig. 2) with its neutral boxes and simple materials which avoid any kind of emotionalizing: it “shows what I think a normal public space designed for sharing information would look like. I wanted to put the viewer in such space” (ibid.). From the beginning, this installation was meant for a German audience because most of the conversations and documents were originally written in German. Following the logic of the archive being bound to language, some crucial questions came up for the artist: “How does this audience understand Iran? How does it read about or understand political disaster in Iran?” (Hodge/Yousefi 2014). The artistic sites of social interaction that emerge from the interrelation between the archive, the artist and the viewer lead us to a concept that anthropologist Elizabeth Edwards has defined as “resourcefulness” (2011, 52). This, as Edwards observes in photographs and archives, is produced in the social relations between people and things. When it is applied to an art installation such as Documentation, we begin to understand that the materialities and single objects are not seen as mere evidential passive resources that have a particular meaning but as active

Fig. 1 | Parastou Forouhar, Documentation, 2001, installation view of the work in the exhibition Recalling the Future: Postrevolutionary Iranian Art, Brunei Gallery at SOAS, London, 2014

Memory. Belonging. Engaging.

Fig. 2 | Parastou Forouhar, Documentation, 2001, detail view of the installation in the exhibition Recalling the Future: Postrevolutionary Iranian Art, Brunei Gallery at SOAS, London, 2014

players within networks of non-humans and humans, which themselves constitute social processes. The objects, here the documents of activism, letters and newspaper articles, acquire an agency which is exercised in the moment that they are made accessible to audiences in the exhibition space. As they are made available for copying and taking away, one main social effect lies in the function to construct and influence the field of social action. As Edwards emphasizes, the materiality of the object creates not only an “objective space” but an “affective space”, that she calls a space of resourcefulness (ibid.). Documentation creates such an affective space, crossing spatial, political and cultural borders, in which the affect (Clough/Halley 2007) is demonstrated by remembering whereas what is remembered can completely differ from the artist’s intent and correspond approximately to Iran, general strongly intertwined with documenting and ‘not forgetting’.10 The artist explained in our conversation that it is a demonstration of what she understands as the “right to a public” – meaning opening up even the most private and intimate information without any reservations.11 Archiving in general, and this work in particular, is the reverse movement of the production of stereotypes, and at the same time, functions against forgetting when a private archive is turned into a public site of memory. Forouhar refers to the complexity of life, the contradiction which

10  One incident of German social history that can be remembered in context of Parastou Forouhar’s work is the visit of the Shah of Iran Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and his wife Farah in Berlin in early summer 1967 and the demonstrations and brutal violence that accompanied this visit. 11  Parastou Forouhar in a Skype conversation with the author, 24 May 2017.

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exists in reality, in the logic of bureaucracy as it is grounded in secrets which she wanted to open up to the viewer. The function of the artist’s archive unfolds on various levels and deals with notions such as ‘remembering the past’. This work allows to understand the social dynamics of cultural memory that are specific to the ongoing emergence of the artist’s archive and as it appears as mediation, remediation and performance by creating a certain cultural immediacy and intimacy between the artist, the artwork and the public.

Belonging – Written Room When the artist and I talked about the meaning of the relation between art, migration and memory, she described the ambivalent relation between all of them, creating a space ‘between’ – between identities, between different belongings, between different ‘homelands’. Her practice, as she said, fills these in‑between spaces, the simultaneities of the opposites.12 An example of this is Written Room (ongoing since 1999) (fig. 3), in which Forouhar fills walls, floors and ceilings with ornaments, letters in her mother tongue of Persian, which, as an immigrant, she is concerned about losing, and which remains alive only in her memory. Thus, Written Room “is something between pattern, ornament, and the memory of language”, as Forouhar explained in an inter-

Fig. 3 | Parastou Forouhar, Written Room, ongoing since 1999, exhibition view at the 7th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art. Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 2012

12  Parastou Forouhar in a Skype conversation with the author, 24 May 2017.

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Fig. 4 | Parastou Forouhar at work, installation view of Written Room at the exhibition El Greco Year 2014, University of Castilla‑La Mancha, Toledo, 2014

view (2017).13 She hopes that with its ornaments as imagery of the Middle East, it will encourage viewers to question their perception of language and their orientation to it. When she creates the writings in museum and gallery spaces, she uses the Persian alphabet in combinations that, despite the illusion of legibility, do not make any sense. “What might be understood initially as a loss of meaning, can instead be interpreted simply as abstract visual language, as an environment that cultivates subjective experience” (ibid.). She explains that this work demonstrates a way of occupying a space; it illustrates the presence of herself, as the migrant, who re‑thinks the space, changing it despite formerly not belonging to it (fig. 4). This happens by negating its earlier shape and form, and by adding the script to it – which does not have any meaning and does not relate to its original function. She thereby creates a space of associations and imagination. It is a challenge to her, as she explained to me, that the work does not appear as simple decoration, or an oriental pattern of design, but that it brings liberation and freedom to associate with it whatever a viewer might want to. For those who are not familiar with this calligraphy, it might create a space for opening minds and hearts to others. Earlier in 2017, Forouhar was invited to the Museum voor Schone Kunsten in Ghent to cover the walls with the ornaments of the scrawled calligraphies; these express an embodiment of memory, a conception of the simultaneity of the sense of something lacking and the sense of belonging. Forouhar belongs to an imagined social group that is defined by a mother tongue that other migrant groups and refugees may also know. Referring to this, she shared an experi13  Video interview with Parastou Forouhar on website of the Museum voor Schone Kunsten (Ghent) www. mskgent.be/en/exhibitions/parastou-forouhar-written-room. Accessed 8 December 2017.

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ence with me that had touched her deeply: when she was painting the ornaments on the walls in the entrance hall, a group of refugees entered and one man from Afghanistan stopped and watched her at work. In their conversation, he stated that this work and ‘the melody of these familiar letters’ reminded him of his home country, even though Persian is not his mother tongue. With Written Room Forouhar brings together the volatile and the transitory; because the work is fragile, it always vanishes at a certain point, whereas the memory of it remains.

Engaging – Thousand and One Days If you look from far away, the pattern of the wall paper appears beautiful and with a colorful joyfulness. Covered with a consistent pattern of little figures in pink, the scenes remain uncertain, and the viewer’s eye is pleased by the harmonious ornament. But as it turns out when getting closer, appearances are deceiving. With the multi-media project Thousand and One

Fig. 5 | Parastou Forouhar, Thousand and One Days, ongoing since 2003, installation view at the exhibition The Power Of Ornament, Belvedere Museum, Vienna, 2009

Days (fig. 5), Forouhar plays with the aesthetic of the ornament, turning its meaning into the opposite  – with faceless, anonymized figures drawn in neutral form, the artist depicts cruel scenes of torture and violence (fig. 6). Stating that the ornament has some parallels with a totalitarian political system, she acknowledges the nature of the ordering system of the ornament and a totalitarian state which does not allow any form of interruption, individualism or

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Fig. 6 | Parastou Forouhar, Thousand and One Days, ongoing since 2003, detail view of installation at the exhibition The Power Of Ornament, Belvedere Museum, Vienna, 2009

change.14 Playing with an ambivalence that confronts the viewer when the pattern is closely inspected implies that the sense of beauty breaks apart and the ornament becomes a gesture of crime and violence. In precarious times of global phenomena, war, terror and flight, the artist turns herself into an agent who “disrupt[s] the global reach of digital immediacy by introducing the issue of mediation: the diverse elements and processes – each carrying its own cultural and formal signature – that come together to give a work its visual presence and its yield of pleasure” (Bhabha 2009, 48). The technique of the ornament is transformed; it mediates crime and cruelty in a performative form, creating an “architecture of agency” (ibid., 51), in which the artist, the beholder and the object are participants. The motive of the comic strip-like figures is repeated in other works by Forouhar. In, for example, I surrender (since 2006) (fig. 7), helium-filled balloons are covered with similar ornamental patterns and motives. Pulling the balloons down from the ceiling with the long strings attached to them, the viewer is confronted by the clash of the balloons’ weightlessness and the weight of the stories they carry, producing an artistic gesture that forces the beholder to look at and to engage with representations of torture and violence. As Forouhar explains to me, her work is about the contemporaneity of contrasts, which she hopes creates a personality, a depth, whereas the viewer always has the option of stepping out of this intimacy by letting the balloons go. 14  Werneburg, Brigitte. Interview with Parastou Forouhar, 22 August 2009. db‑artmag 56, http://werneburg.nikha.org/home.‌php?id=​440&sn=​1. Accessed 1 December 2017.

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Art as memory work In their article “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity”, Jan Assmann and John Czaplicka argue for cultural memory “in order to relate three poles – memory (the contemporized past), culture, and the group (society) – to each other” (1995, 129). In response to a situation of migration and exile, such relationality attains new dimensions in artistic memory work: in the artworks Documentation, Written Room, and Thousand and One Days, Forouhar interweaves memory with belonging and engaging. Whereas biographical sources mark for the artist clear reference points in the past, they can be considered only as starting points for a much more complex engagement with contemporary situations in German and Iranian society, and her own future, one that is forcefully shaped by living in exile and an experienced transnationality.

Fig. 7 | Parastou Forouhar, I surrender, ongoing since 2006, installation view at the exhibition No Home Game, Kunst-Raum-Akademie, ­Weingarten, 2012

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In the face of displacement, which is often a long, complex and painful process, artists develop significant social and civic competences that enable them to reflect and express their experiences of living in exile and in a new host society (Dogramaci 2011). Their particular situation enables them to compare different conditions of life, and to express their critical opinion on political developments in their country of origin. Like Forouhar, many Iranian artists who live and work in Europe critically engage with the ongoing struggles against restricted freedom of speech, social upheaval and political repression in Iran. Such socio-political engagement, in combination with references to particular Persian artistic techniques, sometimes produce a misleading perception of their art as ‘Iranian’, as if they were pursuing some kind of essential cultural or ethnic origin.15 But migration and exile are a matter of transmission, and the same holds true for memory and artwork stemming from such conditions of life. The responsibility of the field of transcultural studies is therefore to investigate the complex entanglement of migration and artistic practices through a heuristic lens shaped by transculturality. Migrants are increasingly portrayed as agents with “strategic transculturalism” (Pütz 2002, 560), which allows them to navigate not only between different economic networks, but also between different symbolic systems of cultural representation (Hall 1997). This idea supports an emphasis on art and, related to this, on memory, which is defined less by its boundaries but by its processuality. It underlines transcultural entanglements between various local and social contexts in both the host and the home society, and opens up toward a translocal field of cultural practice and relationality, a “critical transregionality” and “ethical, political, aesthetic willingness to demonstrate complicity in the crisis of the Other” (Adajania/Hoskote 2010).16 Experiences of torture and violence, forced displacement and the loss of home, language and family members represent only some examples of the crises of others – others who might be members of Iranian society, belonging to the same generation as Forouhar’s parents. The complicity can also be demonstrated with reference to members of younger generations who have participated in protests against repressive regimes in Iran and elsewhere and who often have to face a similar state reaction. When Forouhar engages with socio-political developments in her home country, with her individual experience and the tragic loss of her parents, her art is always also a performance of memory on a crises and resistance that others have experienced as well. And even though Forouhar refers in many of her works to personal trauma, this provides the viewer with the opportunity to either establish a complicity in form of an intimacy with her and others in similar situations, or to feel reminded of one’s own trauma and memory. And even though the artist’s own experience of living in exile foregrounds, as she has stated, her identity as an Iranian, processes of cultural transmission become inherent to her work, for example when she invites the viewer to participate in her quest for clarification of her parents’ murder, or when she asks for conscious viewing of her ornament installations.

15  See for a critical engagement with the notion of ‘Iranian art’ the exhibition Recalling The Future: post-revolutionary Iranian art (2014) at Brunei Gallery, London. https://www.soas.ac.uk/gallery/recallingthefuture. Accessed 27 April 2018. 16  Nancy Adajania and Ranjit Hoskote. “Notes towards a Lexicon of Urgencies.” Independent Curators International Research, 2010, http://curatorsintl.org/journal/notes_towards_a_lexicon_of_urgencies. Accessed 8 January 2018.

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Forouhar’s personal history and cultural sensibility urges her to a critical engagement, and to substantially create with her art an interpretative space of critical transregionality for the viewer. Installations such as Documentation, Thousand and One Days and Written Room unfold spaces for collective and cultural trauma remembrance; these can be related to what Homi Bhabha calls global memory, when “memory’s global reach is not merely a spatial extension of ethical attention that crosses cultures, moves beyond borders and converges upon new maps of the global world picture” (Bhabha 2009, 49). In pushing further Bhabha’s claims that “the ethical project of global memory is a more mixed and mediated reflection upon the barbaric transmission of cultural value” (ibid.) and that the global functions “as a structure of contradictions and ambivalence” (ibid.), I wish to emphasize the idea of contradiction and ambivalence. Art provides sites of identification and serves as “vehicles of knowledge, as threads of thought that bind things and people via things to one another” (Küchler 2013, 25), and this is particularly true when read from the perspective of displacement. When art emerges out of exile, it becomes a mediator, transforming its materiality in a process of cultural transmission and the production of knowledge. When the artist shares copies of original documents from her work as an activist and her efforts to gain clarification about the murder of her parents, the materialities of such paper files are transformed into a system of art and agency (Gell 1998, 6), creating social relations and mediating social agency as social agents (ibid., 7). The objective – “to account for the production and circulation of art objects as a function of this relational context” (ibid., 11) – becomes observable. Artistic techniques, such as archiving or calligraphy, turn into a system of social relations – a system of action intended to change the world (ibid., 6). It seems to be appropriate to discuss Forouhar’s artworks along these lines. Yet, given the transnational contexts and transcultural epistemology, I believe art objects and their materiality also require a semiotic approach in order to underline the notion of cultural transmission. Following the idea that art objects carry signs and symbols open for interpretation (Geertz 1976), art installations such as Documentation might not represent active agents per se, but are instead objects to which human beings – and in the first place the artist – attribute meaning, and transmit or mediate knowledge, memories and imaginations. Thus, the discussion that I suggest employs a double approach: I consider Clifford Geertz’s semiotic formulation relevant to analyzing the perception when the beholder of the wallpaper or balloons in Thousand and One Days or I surrender looks at the ornamental pictograms and interprets and understands the signs and meanings. At same time, the action system is also appropriate, when the audience starts to build up “social relations in the vicinity of objects mediating social agency” (Gell 1998, 7), for example, by selecting and copying documents from the installation Documentation to distribute them beyond the exhibition context, and to establish social relations. To advance such an argument and to consider both production and social agency in the investigation of contemporary and socially engaged art, which are as important to artistic practice and memory work in exile, the understanding of a global memory as proposed by Bhabha seems limiting. Especially in the context of transcultural and translocal border crossing and memory production, the emphasis must lie on the fact that not all of the participating agents share the same kind of cultural memory and knowledge, but that the artist and the art object enforce its production that the beholder accomplishes with his or her own knowledge and memories. Thus, it seems to be equally important that in the first place the human agents, such as the artist, but also curators and audiences, play out their agency in such a way that they use the art objects to

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establish new forms of knowledge. I describe this as an intimacy which connects the artist, the audience, the work and also particular regions and societies. These intimate social relations, I think, are transcultural in their substance. They are based not only on a shared yet contested aesthetic or visual language, but on the different kinds of knowledge and memory of all the people involved. Forouhar stated once that she likes the aesthetic of the archive as created with the work Documentation “because it avoided emotionalizing the situation” (Hodge/Yousefi 2014).17 This might certainly be true for her own person and her emotional response to the far-reaching tragedy of the political assassination of her parents. An international audience, which is likely culturally, locally and temporally distanced from the particular events addressed by the artist, is confronted with an artistic archive of intimate documents and letters. To flesh out such a semiotic overlap of meaning production processes, anthropological research helps to unfold the power of art for a particular memory production, as shaped by various modes of perception and engagement. In this sense, it might not be essential for beholders to localize art objects (or memory) according to an imagined cultural origin (Bublatzky 2011). Instead, the beholder is confronted with a cultural intimacy (Herzfeld 2009). This develops in moments created by a locally embedded cultural policy of gesture (such as art), developing situations of discomfort or embarrassment. Michael Herzfeld explains: [T]his space of ostensibly negative values that in fact conceals deep social bonds is above all a zone of discomfort with, and largely implicit critique of, the official discourse that in turn denies and condemns everything that constitutes cultural intimacy. (ibid., 134)

Thus, while “gesture is a way of creating intimating communication while under public gaze” (ibid., 133), it creates cultural intimacy as “the zone of internal knowledge” (ibid.). Applying such zones to the field of art and memory in exile is reminiscent of certain elements and techniques, such as the ornaments in Forouhar’s digital drawings, that surprise with shock and embarrassment. Similarly, the meaning of Thousand and One Days remains uncomplete at first sight – only a detailed second or third look allows one to go beyond the familiar, beautiful and joyful decorative wallpaper and the regular pattern of miniature painting and ornaments to access the contemporaneity of contrasts and the cruelty depicted. With the ornaments showing anonymized figures and acts, and thus creating distance from a concrete everyday practice of torture, the depiction generates and relates to differing yet shared forms of memory. Such memory is, in one form, maintained through cultural formation such as art (Assmann/Czaplicka 1995, 129). And as memory turns its beholder, reader and audience into moral witnesses relating “in a double time frame of memory, surviving the testimony of the past while striving to possess the freedom of the future” (Bhabha 2009, 48), the transcultural approach enables us to shed light on the deeper levels of memory construction, shaped by mobility and movements beyond cultural boundaries, solidified by the desires for belonging and engagement.

Concluding remarks Unlike art that may be said to have a ‘diasporic’ dimension in that it expresses strong long-lasting ties and nostalgia for the home country, forced displacement and dispossession can become a 17  Hodge/Yousefi. “On Documentation”.

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different way of perceiving and understanding artistic practice as socio-political formation. This article has introduced an artist in exile – Parastou Forouhar – who considers herself as being in a state of ‘in-betweenness’. In her art, she intertwines and informs cultural strategies of memory, belonging and engaging as a response to precarious life worlds of migration, flight and political oppression. In such a complex and transregional field of cultural production, art is a constitutive part of a practice of memory that exceeds its qualities of the cultural or the global. Because art has the potential to bind contemporized pasts, cultures and societies to one another, and to inform complex notions of belonging, across various social groups and cultural contexts, it enables artists and viewers to critically engage with human crises across geopolitical and beyond cultural borders. For Forouhar, who moves between different societies, the memories of beloved persons and places enforce desires of not forgetting, belonging and engaging. This personal relatedness indicates in her case the employment of art to express ideas of activism and resistance. When life worlds are affected by global phenomena such as restrictive governments, terrorism or refugee movements, questions of cultural belonging to different socio-political systems imply significant challenges and opportunities, for the artist and for audiences alike. In her art practice, Forouhar follows the aim of maintaining and enforcing visibility, for her own personal situation, for socio-political situations of distress in Iran, for those who share similar experiences of forced displacement and loss, and also for those who do not live under such conditions but have the wish to express their engagement. The artist’s personal and socio-cultural history, which many people from Iran and elsewhere share, allow us to argue that Forouhar cultural sensibilities substantially enable her to support critical engagements and to produce with her work interpretative and intimate spaces that foster processes of cultural transmission. Discussing Forouhar’s site-specific installations such as Documentation, Written Room, and Thousand and One Days according to practices of memory, belonging and engagement has allowed us to show that art emerging from exile transforms cultural memory not only into global memory, but into a transcultural memory which functions to preserve and uphold an ‘embodied’ knowledge and state of ‘belonging’, and to open it up for others to step into.

References Adajania, Nancy, and Ranjit Hoskote. “Notes towards a Lexicon of Urgencies.” Independent Curators Inter­ national Research, 1 October 2010. Al-Ali, Nadje S. “Between Political Epochs and Personal Lives Formative Experiences of Egyptian Women ­Activists.” Auto/Biography and the Construction of Identity in the Middle East, edited by Mary Ann Fay, Palgrave, 2001, pp. 155–176. Assmann, Jan, and John Czaplicka. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” New German Critique, no. 65, 1995, pp. 125–33, doi.org/10.2307/488538. Accessed 8 January 2018. Bhabha, Homi K. “On Global Memory. Reflections on Barbaric Transmission.” Crossing Cultures Conflict, Migration and Governance. The Proceedings of the 32nd International Congress in the History of Art, edited by Jaynie Anderson, The Migunyah Press, 2009, pp. 46–56. Bublatzky, Cathrine. “The Display of Indian Contemporary Art in Western Museums and the Question of ‘Othering’.” Global Studies: Mapping Contemporary Art and Culture, edited by Hans Belting et al., Hatje Cantz, 2011, pp. 298–313.

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Memory. Belonging. Engaging. Clough, Patricia Ticineto, and Jean Halley, editors. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. 1st Ed. edition. Duke University Press Books, 2007. Creet, Julia, and Andreas Kitzmann. Memory and Migration: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Memory Studies. University of Toronto Press, 2011. Demos, T. J. The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis. Duke University Press, 2013. Dogramaci, Burcu. “Interview mit Kobena Mercer.” kritische berichte, vol. 39, no. 4, 2011: Migration, pp. 18–25. Edwards, Elizabeth. “Photographs: Material Form and the Dynamic Archive.” Photo Archives and the Photographic Memory of Art History, edited by Constanza Caraffa, Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2011, pp. 47–57. Erll, Astrid. “Travelling Memory.” Parallax, vol. 17, no. 4, 2011, pp. 4–18, doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2011.605570. Accessed 9 January 2018. –, and Ann Rigney. “Cultural Memory and Its Dynamics.” Mediation, Remediation and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory, edited by Astril Erll and Ann Rigney, De Gruyter, 2012, pp. 2–11. Foster, Hal.“An Archival Impulse.”October, vol. 110, Autumn 2004, pp. 3–22, doi/pdf/10.1162/0162287042379847. Accessed 8 January 2018. Geertz, Clifford. “Art as a Cultural System.” MLN, vol. 91, no. 6, 1976, pp. 1473–1499. Gell, Alfred. “The Problem Defined: The Need for an Anthropology of Art.” Art and Agency. An Anthropological Theory, edited Alfred Gell, Clarendon Press, 1998, pp. 1–10. Hall, Stuart, editor. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. Culture, Media and Identities. SAGE, 1997. Heydari, Mohammad. “Trial is a Process of Creating Awareness not for Taking Revenge.” United For Iran. Translated from the Persian by Tayebe Naderabadi, https://united4iran.org/persian-interviewforohar1. Accessed 21 January 2017. Herzfeld, Michael. “The Cultural Politics of Gesture. Reflections on the Embodiment of Ethnographic Practice.” Ethnography, vol. 10, no. 2, 2009, pp. 131–52, doi.org/10.1177/1466138109106299. Accessed 8 January 2018. Hodge, David, and Hamed Yousefi. “On Documentation, Parastou Forouhar in Conversation with David Hodge and Hamed Yousefi.” Ibraaz. Contemporary Visual Culture in North Africa and the Middle East, 31 March 2014, https://www.ibraaz.org/interviews/120. Accessed 8 January 2018. Küchler, Susanne. “Threads of Thought. Reflections on Art and Agency.” Distributed Objects: Meaning and Mattering after Alfred Gell, edited by Liana Chua and Mark Elliott, Berghahn Books, 2013, pp. 25–38. Museum voor Schone Kunsten (Ghent). Video Interview with Parastou Forouhar, www.mskgent.be/en/exhibitions/parastou-forouhar-written-room. Accessed 8 December 2017. Naficy, Hamid. The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Television in Los Angeles. University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Plate, Liedeke, and Anneke Smelik. “Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture. An Introduction.” Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture, edited by Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik, Routledge, 2013, pp. 1–22. Pütz, Robert. “Culture and Entrepreneurship. Remarks on Transculturality as Practice.” Journal for Economic and Social Geography, vol. 94, no. 5, 2002, pp. 554–563. Ricœur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer, University of Chicago Press, 2004. Tota, Anna Lisa, and Trever Hagen. Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies. Routledge, 2015. Werneburg, Brigitte. Interview with Parastou Forouhar, 22 August 2009, db‑artmag 56, http://werneburg.nikha. org/home.‌php?id=​440&sn=​1. Accessed 1 December 2017.

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MIGRATION, DISPOSSESSION, POST-MEMORIAL RECUPERATIONS An ‘Undisciplined’ View of the Partition of the Indian Subcontinent

The notion of art as an ‘undisciplined’ practice was developed by Irit Rogoff (Rogoff 2012, 108). I draw upon it in this article to throw light on artists’ engagement with memory, language, ­history and trauma, as they unpack what happens when people are uprooted or forced into exile. Visual thinking generated by art has, according to Rogoff, an “undisciplined” texture in that  it can spawn forms of knowing not conflatable with mainstream disciplines, even as it draws upon their resources, such as texts, writing, archives, cartography and oral traditions. Such know-ledge acquires a force of its own, one unpredictable and incipient in any space and location. The historical event at the center of this article is the partition of the Indian subcontinent into two nation states, India and Pakistan, which coincided with the end of the British Raj in 1947. The discarding of the colonial yoke was at the same time the severing of the national body: the provinces of Punjab and Bengal, two regions of the subcontinent with a substantial Muslim population, were divided, with west Punjab and east Bengal forming the western and eastern wings of Pakistan, leaving India sandwiched in the middle. This entailed a large-scale and violent transfer of populations: Sikhs and Hindus who had settled over generations in regions that overnight became Pakistan moved to India, while Muslims moved in the opposite direction. The “underside” (Sarkar 2009, 1) of independence, a trauma of rupture, brought with it more than a million dead in the wake of the eruption of violence, together with the forced displacement of 10 to 12 million people. The decision to migrate was overwhelmingly not an individual, reasoned choice, but a path to survival in the face of annihilating violence. Twenty-four years after the cartographic reorganization of British India into India and Pakistan, a third nation, Bangladesh, appeared in 1971, repeating the act of birth through truncation and the mass displacement of between 8 to 10 million people (Bose 2011; Saikia 2011; Mookherjee 2015). In view of such statistics, it is not surprising that the partition of the Indian subcontinent has often been compared with the holocaust engineered by the Nazi regime against European Jews in the same decade of the twentieth century (Sarkar 2009, 13–14). And yet a major difference between the two traumatic events is that, unlike the prolific culture of memory that has been created to mourn the catastrophes of genocide and war in Europe, there has been till the recent years a conspicuous absence of commemorative practices in the domain of visual and material culture to remember the lives lost in the wake of Partition. There is still no memorial either in India or in Pakistan to commemorate these lives (Dadi/Nasar 2012, 14–15). The first museum of Partition opened in October 2016 in Amritsar Town Hall, in India, and has yet to find

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its feet.1 Historians have frequently suggested that the unspeakable experience of trauma has been impossible to represent (Pandey 2001). Nationalist historiography, which has largely remained celebratory of post-colonial nation-building, has cast Partition as an aberration, while official protocol has imposed its own codes of silence. On the other hand, it has been argued that such representations as do exist are illegible, sublimated and deferred; they can be traced to vernacular practices such as “barefoot cartography” (Ramaswamy 2012, 32–35) or to media such as the photographic image and cinema, which have a privileged relationship to time and memory and are therefore suited to the work of mourning (Sarkar 2009). As opposed to the genocide in Nazi Germany, which was executed by an identifiable state machinery in pursuit of a specific ideology and was systematically orchestrated over a given duration of time, the violence of Partition brought with it a failure of criteria by which to identify victims and perpetrators. It involved an overnight morphing of a neighbor into an enemy and hand‑to-hand destruction, and was couched in extreme dilemmas, such as, to cite one example, the incertitude of a brother about whether love of a sister consisted of killing her to save her from the violence of the crowd. Moreover, while the drawing of the boundary that heralded the birth of two nation states triggered immediate violence, partition‑as-process involved forced displacement on an unprecedented scale, one that meant intrusion upon the most interior aspects of life over an extended time span. Fleeing to an alien space produced a fragmentation of the self and the world that made the relationship between the individual and the world a deeply complex one in the years and decades to follow (Das 1991). The tearing apart of social and psychic space had a palpably physical dimension: injuries inflicted on the body – rape, mutilation, exposure to life-threatening violence as a result of bodily signs of religious affiliation such as circumcision, or the uncut hair of Sikh males – were the starting point of political relationships predicated on radical alterity. In a post-independence polity that compulsively continued to re‑enact the original divide, Partition as fratricide generated antagonistic or punitive forms of citizenship that demanded of minority groups proof of their ‘loyalty’ to the new nation. The anthropologist Veena Das, who has spent long years working with the subjects of this extended history, less to reconstruct moments of horror than to describe what happens to the subject and the world when the memory of such events undergoes a “descent into the ordinary”, speaks of a loss of “voice”, not in the sense of lacking words, but because “these words become frozen, numb, without life” (Das 2007, 8). Recovering Partition therefore as a moment of nationalization has remained a deeply contested task. Recent historiography has effected a shift from paradigms that view the events surrounding the partition of the Indian subcontinent as an aberration in the larger histories of state-building, considered a project of self-determination. Among the several striking aspects of this shift is the move to conceive of the cataclysms of 1947 not as a single event that concluded with the creation of independent nation states, but as part of a long-term political and social

1  See http://www.partitionmuseum.‌org/. Accessed 15 March 2018. The museum was set up by the Arts and Culture Heritage Trust and is headed by Lady Kishwar Desai. To date, scant information is forthcoming on the curatorial perspectives that inform this institution, so it is difficult to get a clear sense of how it will develop in the future. At present, the museum comprises some four rooms that display objects, photographs, video interviews and installations commemorating Partition.

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engagement with migration, return and belonging, and with the interminable nationalization of identity (Gilmartin 1998; Kaul 2001; Zamindar 2007; Butalia 2015). Such histories focus on the ‘everyday’ to show how personal and political worlds were inextricably intertwined. They further explore the after-lives of the profound dislocations of the late 1940s and their reverberations in subsequent events of the 1990s – the destruction of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya (North India) by activists of the Hindu right, the genocide of the Muslims in the province of Gujarat ten years later, the continued production of jingoistic nationalism to mark the triangular relationship between India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and the ritual display of enmity along the Wagah border, one of the most heavily policed in the world. Artistic practice takes a cue from these developments, and at the same time strives to go beyond them; in the course of the past two decades, it has worked to undermine the modernist ideal of the nation state as a formation resting on “horizontal comradeship” (Anderson 1983). It is precisely the erasures, silences and gaps left by the triumphalist narrative of the nation that can and have become an entry point for artists and curators to replay and re‑perform memory. The expansive conception of a work of art that underpins contemporary artistic practice, wherein artists, activists, curators and scholars traverse the boundaries of fields and genres to interactively create a discursive space, has shown the way to map dislocations and disjunctures and has made art – often dismissed as being confined to elites and gallery spaces – a distinct mode of argument. In that much of contemporary art eschews efforts to transform crises into a utopian aesthetic, it engages in a critique of modern institutions and grand narratives. Such a perspective enables it to address the unfinished business of Partition, perhaps even to stitch together separated histories through alternative conceptions of geography and citizenship, through a practice of countervailing what Andreas Huyssen terms “a fundamental crisis in our imagination of alternative futures” (Huyssen 2003, 2). Narrative itself becomes a contested site within different modes of recounting stories. Ananya Jahanara Kabir cautions us against the linear causality built into an excess of narrativization of 1947 and 1971; she points to the proliferation of interpretation, of claims and counter-claims, signaling towards narrative’s susceptibility to reification (Kabir 2013, 18–19). Visual and material communicative modes might force open such a deadlock, more so as their modes of signification in the iconophilic cultures of South Asia are charged with a living synaesthesia that is non-reducible to narrative closure. Artists who lived through Partition – for instance, Satish Gujral, Sardari Lal Parasher and Zarina Hashmi  – did translate its workings in their works, in distinct and individual idioms (Sharma 2005; Mufti 2011; Parasher 2015). Yet most of the artistic engagement with the complex effects of the cataclysms of the 1940s is more recent and has been taken up by artists and curators born later, and who did not experience these events first-hand. Such a resurgence of interest might be seen as a product of the recursive quality of that experience as it plays itself out in conflagrations of the present, as well as in the quotidian dissonances that inhabit the interstices of nationalist politics and local life. Curatorial and art production in recent years can be designated as a form of ‘post-memory’, a term coined by the literary scholar Marianne Hirsch to describe the ways in which a ‘generation after’ relates to the collective tribulations of those who actually lived through the events in question. Such experiences, according to Hirsch, are transmitted through fragments of narratives and mediated “not by recall but by imaginative investment, projection and creation” (Hirsch 2012, 5). Yet this surge of post-memorial creativity is en-

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Fig. 1 | Nalini Malani and Iftikhar Dadi, Bloodlines, 1997, re­fabricated 2011 by workshop of Abdul Khaliq, Saddar, Karachi, sequins and thread on cloth

tangled with the continuing obstacles that confront artists in South Asia, a region divided by militarized borders and haunted by the specter of nuclear war. Cultural exchange, and above all travel, across the nation states is beset by difficulties. Finding a way to make connections, to articulate visions of alternative futures within the space of artistic practice, can be read as the will to overcoming “everyday partitions” (Khullar 2017), as an oppositional stance to official and unofficial nationalisms. In 1996, for example, the artists Iftikhar Dadi and Nalini Malani met by chance at an exhibition in Copenhagen. Dadi was at that time based in Karachi; his family on both sides had migrated to Pakistan in the wake of Partition, and from there to Canada, the United States, Europe and the Middle East, “forming a dispersal that can no longer be gathered in any stable territory that is ‘home’” (Dadi 2012, 20). He bonded immediately with Malani who, a one-year old child at the time of Partition, had moved with her mother and grandmother from Karachi to Bombay during the turmoil of 1947. At the invitation of the Manchester-based curator Alnoor Mitha, the two artists collaborated to develop the work Bloodlines in 1997 (fig. 1). But travel restrictions made it difficult for them to work together on a continued basis: the two port cities of Karachi and Bombay, which had once shared a cosmopolitan past, just as they share the same coast on the Arabian sea, now appeared to be separated by an unbridgeable distance. In the end, Bloodlines was produced by embroiderers in Karachi (Dadi/Nasar 2012, 188).2 The mixed-media installation is composed of sixteen panels, on which thousands of gold, blue and red sequins are embroidered in the image 2  For a color reproduction, see: https://chloeham.wordpress.com/https://www.flickr.com/photos/nashermuseumofart/9719233878. Accessed 24 March 2018.

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of a map reproducing the 1947 Radcliffe Line, the border that sliced the subcontinent in two nation states.3 It also extends to include a cartographic rendering of Bangladesh, as it was formed in 1971. The color red, according to Dadi, signifies the blood that soaked this arbitrary line of demarcation (ibid., 188). A heavy irony is transported by the materiality of the sparkling sequins, a decorative accessory traditionally embroidered onto bridal and other festive wear. Bloodlines was revived and updated in 2008 to feature in Lines of Control, the travelling exhibition curated by Iftikhar Dadi and Hammad Nasar, which was shown at the Johnson Museum of Art (Cornell) in 2008 and the Nasher Museum (Duke University) in 2013–2014. To date it has not been exhibited in South Asia. Post-memorial artistic endeavors to recover the experiences of dislocation, violence and loss find articulation less in the description of moments of annihilation or horror in the sense of the événementielle than through exploring how the event folds itself into the recesses of the everyday and how its memory is constantly being rewritten onto the present. The well-known question posed by Walter Benjamin in his lecture of 1934“Der Autor als Produzent”(Benjamin 2012) – whether the political content of a work of art could be construed as contaminating its aesthetic qualities – has acquired a particularly sharpened edge in contemporary artistic production. New and critical artistic formations, in and particularly beyond the Western world, have increasingly privileged collaborative modes of artistic activity whose dialogical dynamics possess an irruptive force that distinguishes them from the earlier strategies of collective practice fostered by the avant-garde in the early twentieth century. As artists in South Asia navigate the subjectivities produced by the legacies of colonialism, of the birth of an independent, truncated nation and the experiences of modern globalization, they seek forms of conjoined practice that work to transform the modernist legacy of artistic autonomy as a guarantor of a work’s authenticity. Let us remain with the artist Nalini Malani, whose entire oeuvre is propelled by the search for an artistic language to uncover the worlds of the dispossessed, lost and remade, by a striving to attach big historical questions to everyday lives, to understand the ecology of fear that inhabits them, and to locate all these as part of the story of modern nations. As she handles these issues head on, Malani draws on the works of scholars such as Judith Butler, and more closely and concretely on the anthropological research of Veena Das into the mutual absorption of the violent and the ordinary. Malani’s five-channel video Mother India: Transactions in the Construction of Pain (2005) is an ‘undisciplined’ engagement with an article by Das, “Language and Body: Transactions in the Construction of Pain” (Das 1996, reprinted as a chapter in Das 2007, 38–58), in which the artist looks for a way to articulate the trauma of lives and worlds struggling with the effects of the genocidal violence regularly re‑enacted in post-colonial India. In each of her case studies, Das explores the relationships between body and language as they impinge on her anthropological research. Two enmeshed concepts, ‘voice’ and the ‘everyday’, inform her extensive fieldwork and her analysis of the inbuilt violence in tradition, which then translates into subtle everyday violence enacted against women (Das 2007). These concepts are then picked up by Malani in her project of making the deeply ambivalent ethics of nation-building visible through the hand of 3  The Radcliffe Line, named after Sir Cyril Radcliffe, who headed the Boundary Commission in 1947, was the cartographic boundary legislated into existence in August 1947 to mark the creation of the two nation states of India and Pakistan (see Chester 2009).

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the artist, of finding a home for pain in the work of art. Das focuses on “the transactions between language and the body” in rituals of mourning where there is a gendered division of labor. Mourning women, in a tradition going back to Babylonian antiquity, engage in a form of public speech during funerary rituals. Through women’s representation of grief experienced as bodily pain, there is a mimetic relationship established between the body and language. What happens to this work of mourning, the anthropologist asks, when women are victims of violence or witnesses to it (or both) – when they are abducted and condemned to a social death (ibid., 48–49)? The ethnographic data collected by Das refer to a new kind of language that describes the protective silence of women through metaphors that ascribe agency – such as “hiding pain”, “giving it a home just as a child is given a home in a woman’s body”, the only difference being that the pain inside must never be allowed to be born (ibid., 55). Das’s interviews with subjects for whom the act of remembering and articulation transforms the passivity of victimhood into agency are transmuted in Malani’s work into a kaleidoscope of fleeting images and sounds. To make the scholar’s archive of sounds and voices part of the artist’s work involves innumerable experiments with multiple media and expressive forms. Over the years Malani, who during the troubled early 1990s took to video art, has experimented with different kinds of installations combining video and theatre or, more recently, a form of installation she calls “video/ shadow plays” (Christov-Bakargiev 2012), which link the contemporary medium of video with the practices of the past (painting on canvas). The combination of sound, shadow, projection and movement creates a new poetics of materiality through the use of Mylar cylinders; she paints on the reverse surfaces of these, drawing on a technique of glass painting that was practiced in Canton and came from there to India in the eighteenth century.4 At the same time, the artist weaves ethnographic material – tape recordings or extracts from political statements, and photographs – into the body of her work. In Mother India, five screens are arranged in a semi-circle enclosing the viewer. They show footage from the time of Partition, such as the quiet faces of women spinning, photographs of refugees carrying their bundled belongings on their heads, flags, the face of Gandhi; accompanying these are images such as the militant Hindu goddess Durga on her tiger or photographs of attacks on Muslims in Gujarat during the pogroms of 2002. Through a mosaic of synchronically fleeting images, the work unearths the visual ancestry of the Indian nation, both as apotheosized nation‑as-goddess and as abducted ‘property’, whose restitution and reabsorption into the national mainstream was negotiated by statesmen and politicians in the aftermath of separation (Butalia 1998; Menon/Bhasin 1998; Das 2007). Shadow plays became the backbone of Nalini Malani’s artistic praxis once she left painting behind, though she has never completely abandoned figuration.5 It has morphed into “a medium of memory” (Huyssen 2012). Its form seeks not so much to represent a tragic, traumatic past, but to create a flash of recognition in the immediate present, a kind of Benjaminian Jetzzeit that brings with it a recognition of a recursive past (Benjamin 1980 [1940]). History and mythic stories assume through their re‑telling a fresh meaning in contemporary conditions: they seep into the present to highlight the fragility of the social world and capture the temporality of an4  Nalini Malani in a conversation with Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (Christov-Bakargiev 2012, 34). 5  In an interview with Johan Pijnappel, the artist asserted: “I draw therefore I am […] drawing/painting […] helps me compose ideas that can then engage to create works in other disciplines” (Pijnappel 2007, 40).

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Fig. 2 | Nalini Malani, Still from Remembering Toba Tek Singh, 1998, installation with video projections and twelve monitors in trunks

ticipation, for instance the possibility of nuclear war. We see this in an earlier video installation of 1998, Remembering Toba Tek Singh (fig. 2), which directly evokes the events of 1947, to then map them onto the domains of actuality and eventuality. The work – one of Malani’s earliest experiments with video and first exhibited at Bombay’s Prince of Wales Museum in 1998, where it drew several thousand visitors (Pijnappel 2007, 40) – was created in the direct aftermath of the nuclear detonations conducted by both India and Pakistan. The title of the work builds on a short story of 1955 by the writer Saadat Hasan Manto (Manto 2008, 9–15), while its footage comes from a variety of archival sources, including media discussions in the wake of the American bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that had taken place shortly before the decolonization and partition of the Indian subcontinent. Manto’s allegorical story unfolds around the negotiations between India and Pakistan for the mutual restitution (according to religious affiliation) of the inmates of asylums for the mentally deranged interned on both sides of the newly created border. The account ends tragically as a Sikh inmate of the Lahore asylum, known as Toba Tek Singh after the name of his hometown, refuses to be ‘restored’ to India and chooses to die on the strip of no‑man’s land between the two sets of barbed wire demarcating the territories of India and Pakistan. His “madman’s gibberish” (Jalal 2011, 148) echoes the senselessness of meaning surrounding efforts to attach identity to place-names.

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In Malani’s installation, one wall presents the footage of nuclear attacks and tests  –  the iconic clouds of nuclear detonation – while a voice narrates the story of Toba Tek Singh. 6 The facing wall features video projections of women from India and Pakistan attempting to fold a sari across the expanse of the room – a task that symbolically gestures towards remaking the world into an integral whole, but one that is doomed to failure on account of the unbridgeable distance that separates them. Tin trunks, which evoke the vision of refugees carrying their possessions, line the room; upward-facing monitors built into their opening sides draw on several archives to show smaller, more intimate images that inhabit the recesses of the repetitive everyday into which ‘big events’ penetrate. The mobile images here oscillate between thinness and opacity, when they morph into shadows, before disappearing completely – a quality that acquires depths within the subsequent shadow plays, which Andreas Huyssen describes as “writing in images and sounds that interrogate the deep structures of history” (Huyssen 2012, 57). In this, as in subsequent works, all of which create a bricolage of light, sound, shadow and kaleidoscopic pattern, which combine digital technology with the idioms of lanterna magica and bring ancient myths to the threshold of the present, the viewer is drawn into an immersive experience as s/he threads a route through the installation with his/her shadow merging with those of the work. The viewer effects a passage from aesthetic fascination with the “turbulence” (Bal 2017, 44) of the installation to reflection about how memory works and the politics of remembering. Oscillating images and their shadows stage the fugitive quality of memory, while capturing its very structures of evasion, forgetting and re‑emerging through the compulsively repetitive reenactments of the past in the present. The problematic relation of memory to both remembering and wanting to forget, or alternatively to what the anthropologist Das terms “repression of voice” (Das 2007, 6), was present in an early work of the artist. A video animation called Memory: Record/Erase (1996), in which the flow of images is anything but smooth, reveals those residual traces of erasures that evoke the ways memory and its effacing work in the human psyche. The same principle has reappeared in two recent exhibitions – in New Delhi and Paris7 – where the artist prefers the materiality of charcoal on paper to make visible the traces of rubbing out. At both sites, members of the museum staff publicly erased part of the charcoal drawings at the entrance to the exhibition, a performative act that symbolizes the attempt to render lines invisible, testifying to the impossibility of making the past disappear (Bal 2017). Mieke Bal deploys the idea of memory as a bond between recording and erasing and as a lens to engage with Malani’s work Remembering Mad Meg, which formed the “spine” of the exhibition space at the Centre Pompidou;8 she observes that the moving images work to uncover the “heterochronic” nature of memory by making the viewer plunge into several historical times at once (ibid., 50). 6  An excerpt of this video installation can be seen at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=​uXcL1SeSUKU. Accessed 15 March 2018. 7  You cannot keep acid in a paper bag was the title of a three part retrospective of Malani’s work, curated by Roobina Karode for the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi, 1914. See: http://www.aestheticamagazine. com/review‑of-nalini-malani-you-cant-keep-acid‑in‑a-paper-bag-kiran-nadar-museum-new-delhi/. Accessed 9 May 2018. Nalini Malani: La rébellion des morts, curated by Sophie Duplaix featured at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2017 (Duplaix 2017). 8  The term has been used by the artist to describe a form of connectivity that does not follow the logic of a linear chronology (ibid., 18).

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Fig. 3 | Nalini Malani, Excavated Images, 1997, painted quilt

Another early work, though rarely exhibited, possibly due its intimate, private quality, is Excavated Images (1996); it featured in the same exhibition, so as to resonate in a profoundly moving way with the ferment generated by the central shadow play in the entrance space, yet it does so by providing a quiet contrast through its anchored materiality (fig. 3). The work here is a simple object – a threadbare quilt belonging to the artist’s grandmother which had been used to wrap the family’s belongings while they set out in 1947 on their migrant journey from Karachi to Bombay (Duplaix 2017, 182). A carrier of memories, the quilt in the work of the artist becomes a site to ‘excavate’, in the manner of an archaeologist, personal identities and genealogies together with moments in the history of the nation; these the artist brings back to the surface of the object, whose fabric she has overpainted with the muddy colors of sweat and blood. Running down the center is the female line of descent of the artist’s family – painted portraits of her grandmother and the artist, and a small, reverse-printed photograph of her daughter. Black-and-white reverse-printed photographs and cuttings from newspapers cover most of the surface and provide glimpses into the tragic aftermath of independence in the life of the nation. Together with book pages from the short story Toba Tek Singh in English, Hindi and Urdu, we also encounter a portrait of Saadat Hasan

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Manto, which was to re‑emerge two years later in the video installation discussed above. Excavated Images was created for the exhibition Mappings. Shared Histories … A Fragile Self (1997–98), curated by Pooja Sood to mark the fiftieth anniversary of 1947 (Sood 1997). It was possibly the earliest curatorial attempt of its kind: the show travelled from Delhi to Lahore, Karachi and back to Bombay. It can be said to have initiated, fifty years after 1947, a post-memorial move in Hirsch’s sense, transforming the mainstream culture of memory by opening up the trope of Partition to engage with the deep ambivalences built into existing notions of region, territory and belonging. The intervening decades between the fiftieth and seventieth anniversaries of 1947 brought forth a handful of powerful curatorial interventions, whose critical thrust compensates for their regrettably small number. At the same time, these years have witnessed the emergence of artists’ networks and initiatives that, though on a smaller scale, have resulted in the creation of a regional collectivity of artists and curators across South Asia. Karin Zitzewitz has persuasively argued that a mix of institutions and connections – material structures, personal networks and shared discursive frameworks – has resulted in the emergence of an identifiable “South Asian infrastructure” in the form of projects “themselves deeply engaged with the problem of infrastructure and the understanding of networks” (Zitzewitz 2017, 3–4). Such projects have struggled with travel restrictions as well as with (self‑)censorship, when it came to publicly exhibiting works on the other side of the border; they have also managed, using for example the internet, to send works of art across national territories, though the artists themselves have not always been able to travel.9 While such initiatives have facilitated cross-border exchanges among artists, notably in the last decade, and have above all enhanced the visibility of their works in art institutions across South Asia (ibid.), large-scale curatorial enterprises that question the fit between artworks and national containers, or probe experiences of dislocation, exile and belonging, have been few and far between. One such landmark project, however, was the Lines of Control exhibition referred to earlier. Taking its cue from Mappings, this was initiated in 2006 by Green Cardamom, a London-based arts organization. It then travelled to the United States during the sixtieth anniversary of Partition and during this process expanded its regional scope beyond South Asia. Curated by Iftikhar Dadi, Hammad Nasar and Nada Raza, Lines of Control shifted from being about the experience of the partition of the Indian subcontinent to addressing migration, borders and partitions in general. Of the twenty artists of South Asian origin who participated in the exhibition only two were born before Partition, while the work of thirty other artists from, for example, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Syria, Ireland and Palestine enriched the project by framing it globally. The exhibition’s subtitle, Partition as a Productive Space, problematized the other face of generating new lines and maps: borders both function as regimes of control as well as fashion new subjectivities. They reconfigure histories and memories; by producing an irresistible urge to cross them, they open up imaginative possibilities. From such a perspective Lines of Control consciously aspired to move beyond

9  One noteworthy example was the project Aar Paar (this literally means “this side and that side”, implying crossing) initiated in 2000 by the artists Huma Mulji and Shilpa Gupta from Pakistan and India respectively after they attended a workshop organized by the collective Khoj in Delhi. A detailed study of such collectives and initiatives is beyond the scope of this article. (For an informative and insightful survey, see Zitzewitz 2017; on Aar Paar, see Sambrani 2011, 166–177; on Khoj, see Sood 2010.)

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being a display of art to becoming a discursive site or a travelling discursive cluster; the works on exhibit were conceived of as critical texts, not as memorials to an event. The concept of an exhibition as a space where new cartographies can be plotted, where notions of belonging and non-national modes of citizenship can be explored, was offensively proclaimed in a project of 2015, My East is Your West, an unusual exhibition located within the canonical setting of the Venice Biennale. This and the following years, especially 2017, brought forth a number of curatorial enterprises focusing on Partition10 – constraints of space prevent me from discussing all of them here. I have chosen to write about My East is Your West not least because its location outside the nation space gives it a particular resonance. This unusual event strikes me as storehouse of impulses offered by works of art to rehabilitate our understanding of the universal and recalibrate its past histories, so we can respond to the pressing exigencies of the present. To start with, the location of the exhibition contributed to this potential. My East is Your West, sponsored by the Gujral Foundation,11 took place in the sumptuous setting of the seventeenth-century Palazzo Benzon, which opens on to the Grand Canal; it featured two artists, Shilpa Gupta and Rashid Rana, based in Mumbai and Lahore respectively. Their decision to come together in a project at the Venice Biennale gestured towards a vision of the Indian subcontinent which defies the logic of a national pavilion, the organizing principle of the world’s oldest biennial. The 56th Venice Biennial, entitled All the World’s Futures, sought to, in the words of its curator Okwui Enwezor, make sense of a “global landscape […] scarred by violent turmoil”.12 Though not explicitly mentioned, the widespread disarray Enwezor refers to marks a crisis that today has encompassed the entire world: the crisis of national belonging and the meanings of citizenship engendered by mass migration that has breached existing divisions between the so‑called Global North and the Global South. The presence of large immigrant communities in Western societies has generated discussions on citizenship and its nexus with culture: citizenship, a juridical category that secures rights within a national framework, works at the same time as a tool for the bio-political regulation of illegality (Agamben 2001; Balibar 2015). In post-colonial societies such as India and Pakistan, but also in Indonesia, Nigeria, Israel or the Philippines, to name only a few examples, narratives of citizenship and belonging are ceaselessly debated, reconstituted and endangered, as they take on majoritarian hues and punitive forms. The Venice Biennial, held in a city whose rich transcultural past is embedded within the exhibition space of its Arsenale, has

10  For example, India Re‑Worlded: Seventy Years of Investigating a Nation, curated by Arshiya Lokhandwala, Gallery Odysee, Mumbai (11 September 2017–31 March 2018); Part Narratives, curated by Gayatri Sinha, National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi (7 January 2018–21 January 2018); Memories of Partition at the Manchester Museum (15 August 2017–31 January 2018); Beyond Borders at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester (20 May 2018–3 June 2018) and This Night-Bitten Dawn, curated by the Lahore-based curator Salima Hashmi at Gujral House, 24 Jorbagh, New Delhi (30 January 2016–29 February 2016). The latter is discussed in Khullar 2017, 18–29. 11  The Gujral Foundation was established in New Delhi in 2008 by the son of the artist, Satish Gujral, who lived through and produced work on 1947. The foundation is a non-profit organisation that commissions artworks and sponsors exhibitions. See http://gujralfoundation.‌org/. Accessed 20 March 2018. 12  Curatorial statement by Okwui Enwezor, https://universes.art/venice-biennale/2015/curatorial-statement/. Accessed 21 March  2018.

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Fig. 4 | Rashid Rana, The War Within II, 2013–14, digital chromogenic print

despite its ostensible gestures of “cultural hospitality”13 been a site of conflicts generated when works of art challenge the claim by nations to an unequivocal exclusivity of culture. It is not even necessary to look backwards from 2015: in the midst of Enwezor’s Biennale, the controversy that erupted over Christoph Büchel’s artwork which fused a mosque and church in a move to unsettle territorially bound conceptions of culture, and which resulted in its closure to the public, tells its own story. Such a context imparted a special resonance to the ideas of nation and separation, belonging and estrangement that formed the coordinates of My East is Your West.14 Both the artists of My East is Your West – Shilpa Gupta and Rashid Rana – share a concern to take their art beyond being a simply reactive aesthetic, and to make it envisage a new horizon for a moral community to reconstitute bonds that tie it to place, family and the world. To develop this understanding, I will focus here on one particular work from this show, Rashid Rana’s War Within II (2013–14) (fig. 4), not because I wish to privilege it over the others, but because of its exceptional global framing of the nexus between experiences of displacement, community and family, a nexus that did not receive adequate attention in reviews of the exhibition.15 Rashid Rana’s artworks have experimented in different ways with shifts in perspective, to bring together a view from the distance and its dissolution, often a transfiguration when seen at close quarters. His photo-mosaics, as they have been called, take as their starting point a recognizable, iconic image – a remote view – as in his early work I love miniatures (2002),16 which we recognize at a glance as a well-known Mughal portrait of Prince Khurram, later the emperor Shah Jahan. A view from close‑up reveals the work to be a mosaic of snippets of pixelated popular prints, mainly advertisements. 13  The term was used by Achille Bonito Oliva, the Director of the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993, to make a case for the opening of pavilions at the Biennale to new participants from the so‑called peripheries of the world (cited in Fraser et al. 1993, 187). 14  The title of the exhibition, My East is Your West, repeats that of a light installation by Shilpa Gupta that rejects fixity. Here it asserts that the distinction between two poles, entities or individuals exists in perpetual relationality. 15  The equally rich and complex work of Shilpa Gupta has been extensively and insightfully discussed by Sonal Khullar (Khullar 2017, 7–12; see also Dadi 2015). 16  Reproduced: http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details/collection_image_gallery.‌aspx?partid=​1&assetid=​1386243001&objectid=​3442653. Accessed 26 March 2018.

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Another work proffers a Persian carpet that dissolves into photographs of slaughtered animals taken in a Lahore abattoir. Contrasts between beauty and violence, the courtly and the popular, the hand-made and machine-produced, the integral and the fragmented, veiled women and pornography, may at first glance appear simplistic, and yet the invitation to engage with the work at close quarters draws attention to ambivalences that destabilize categories that appear mutually exclusive. By putting time, place and vision into a state of disjointedness which, when viewed from a position of remoteness, might be reassembled into a whole, these works force us to pose larger questions about perception, ways of seeing and not seeing, of how we witness, share and understand. Rana has frequently evoked canonical works from European art history, showing a predilection for neo-classical paintings whose compositional integrity he dismembers to form a grid of thumbnail fragments. War Within II, even as it belongs to this category of work, takes us beyond the specific provincial context of French neo-classical history painting to query the fundamentals of how communities and nations are formed, the nexus between family and gender, and the contract on which the modern state is premised. War Within II can be described as a digital photomontage created by deconstructing JacquesLouis David’s painting The Oath of the Horatii (1785) (fig. 5) and reassembling its fragments in a way that remains strangely faithful to the work, even as it deviates from it. The artist has chosen not to depart from the work when creating pixelated fragments: these, unlike Rana’s earlier photo-mosa-

Fig. 5 | Jacques-Louis David, The Oath of the Horatii, 1785, oil on canvas

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ics, are not a dense accretion of fresh photographs or popular prints that contributed to an oscillatory play between a single unitary image and a mosaic of pixels, as in the works described above, but are culled from the painting itself. A double act of mirroring – of both the entire painting as well as the individual pieces that are plotted on the grid as inverted mirror images – problematizes modes of seeing, remembering and reproducing and in doing so signals towards the proliferation of an image in space beyond a single location. This is an insight that Rana further develops in subsequent works, including Asl‑e-Shuhuud‑o-shaahid-mashhuud (The viewing, the viewer and the viewed, 2015), which also featured in the Venice show (Ginwala 2015, 27–28). The decision to remain faithful to David’s painting while reassembling it to dismantle the dichotomy between ‘East’ and ‘West’ and bring them instead into a less deterministic, more nuanced relationality is an aspect of the work that I wish to develop here by taking a closer look at its content and context. Rana’s intriguing selection of this particular painting from within the large body of neo-classical works that make up the European canon is far from being random. The Oath of the Horatii belonged to a category of history paintings that proliferated on the eve of and during the years of revolutionary upheaval in France, which marked the transition from an absolutist to a democratic polity. History paintings in particular, executed in the so‑called “grand manner”, participated in constituting a canon of virtue upon which the identity of the new (male) citizen was to be premised.17 David’s work, completed and exhibited during the last years of the crisis-ridden ancien régime, partook of a discursive field in which subjects centered on the family – traditionally considered the domain of the private – served as a channel to visualize an ideal republican polity. The narrative content of the painting centers around the tale of two Roman families, the Horatii and the Curiatii, who ruled respectively over Rome and Alba. Three brothers of the Horatii went to fight those of the other family. There is a sentimental twist to the story in that one of the Horatii brothers was married to a sister of the Curiatii, while Camilla, the only sister of the Horatii, was engaged to one of the opponents. In the battle, all the brothers from both sides die except one of the Roman warriors of the Horatii who, upon returning home triumphantly and finding his sister Camilla mourning the loss of her fiancé, kills her in a fit of patriotic rage. Their father, however, defends his son before the assembled people of Rome: he places zeal for one’s country above everything else and succeeds in winning a public exoneration. The story, originally from the Roman histories of Livy and Plutarch, also became the plot of a play by the seventeenth-century dramatist Corneille and advocates a masculinist patriotism as the highest form of duty. Yet David’s painting in the final analysis unsettles this political message, as it deploys pictorial dissonances from within a neo-classical aesthetic to weave a network of critical stances that take apart the concept of state-formation in which alliances between states are cemented by an exchange of women, forcing individuals into a conflict between political and familial bonds (Juneja 2002). Here we have a powerful echo in modern discourses of state-building – notably in the post-colonial nation states of India and Pakistan, whose imaginary was crucially shaped by the sense of national honor that made control over the movements of women a legitimate duty of the state (Das 2007, 18–37). The story of abduction and recovery has become a foundational story of both nations in the years following the mass displacement of their popula17  I have discussed these issues extensively in two articles (Juneja 1996 and Juneja 2002). The ensuing discussion of David’s painting draws on this work; needless to say, it contains further bibliographical references.

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tions, authorizing a particular relation between the social and the sexual contract (Pateman 1988). Abduction, as it was defined in national policies and juridical arguments in South Asia during the post-independence years, signaled a state of disorder since it dismantled the orderly exchange of women through proper kinship – a practice that has been crucial to state-formation across history. The transfiguration of the Oath of Horatii into the War Within II fractures continuity in time and space to capture dislocation. However, it no longer offers the viewer a clearly shifting perspective between near and far to effect a metamorphosis of what is seen. The rearranged fragments of the original image remain what they are – fragments extracted from a whole. The mirroring of the original painting as two flanks that meet at right angles creates a space that draws the viewer into an immersive experience, compulsively pulling him/her into the dystopic mosaic of limbs, gestures and drapery, urging him/her to partake of its expansive, idiosyncratic dynamism. And yet the fragments that contain the memory of the whole simultaneously signal the impossibility of recuperating that memory – once more, we encounter its illusory, fugitive quality, as we did in Malani’s shadow plays. Can the fragments allude to a particular way of inhabiting the world? To picking up pieces and reassembling the self and community? How do we read the artist’s ambition for scale that is not far removed from the ethical qualities attached to monumental format in history painting? By departing from the artist’s earlier practice of setting into motion colliding image worlds to interrogate stereotypical binaries, I would argue that the War Within II might be read as an act of transcultural co‑production, given that the artist describes the “canon of Western art history […] as a kind of shared knowledge”.18 The concern to break across the Eurocentric divide and at the same time to emancipate images – irrespective of their origin – from the prisons of historical tradition, to “subvert any single-point perspective of wherever a person is in space and time”,19 aspires, I would argue, to a universalism different from that already battered by poststructuralist assaults on meta-narratives. Recent philosophical positions, as articulated by Slavoj Žižek and Susan Buck-Morss, have sought to retrieve a notion of the universal in a way that involves a de‑nationalization of events to re‑inscribe them as questions of universal concern (Zizek 2017; Buck-Morss 2009). Such an exigency is a realization brought upon us with full force, as mass migration has forcefully challenged our dominant versions of collective belonging by exposing political and cultural boundaries as artifices of power. Susan Buck-Morss makes an impassioned plea for critical theoretical practice to free itself from the “prisonhouse of its own academic debates” (Buck-Morss 2009, 139), such as an undifferentiated, totalizing critique of Eurocentricity. She asks: “Can we be satisfied with the call for acknowledging ‘multiple modernities’, with a politics of ‘diversality’, or ‘multiversality’, when in fact the inhumanities of these multiplicities are often strikingly the same?” Conversely, ideas – and here she cites the instance of radical antislavery – belong to no one, because they belong to everyone: “Such ideas are the residues of events, rather than the possession of a particular collective” (ibid., 148). Universality, from such a perspective, does not mean pulling everything into the same narrative; rather, it can be used as a method, a mode of intervention in history. Such a possibility is afforded by the ‘undisciplined’ knowledge produced by art, whose dynamics of dis-identification 18  Interview with the artist published in Art Radar Journal, see http://artradarjournal.com/2015/06/12/ rashid-rana-shilpa-gupta‑in-venice-interview/. Accessed 25 March 2018. 19  Exchange between the artist and Sandhini Poddar (Ginwala 2015, 120).

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with disciplinary orthodoxies allow it to rewrite inherited certitudes. By constructing imaginative possibilities that await potential realization, such knowledge can make us see the unexpected. By giving the unthinkable a voice and the forgotten a shape, the ‘undisciplined’ energy of art urges us to find a place for affect and imagination within the historical explanation of social cataclysms. In memory of my father, uncles and aunts, who lives were lived in the shadow of unspoken experiences of 1947.

References Agamben, Giorgio. Means without End. Notes on Politics. Translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino, University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso, 1990. Bal, Mieke. “Exposing Broken Promises: Nalini Malani’s Multiple Exposures.” Nalini Malani. La rébellion des morts. Rétrospective, edited by Sophie Duplaix, exh.-cat. Centre Pompidou Paris, Hatje Cantz 2017, pp. 36–79. Balibar, Étienne. Citizenship. Polity Press, 2015. Benjamin, Walter. “Über den Begriff der Geschichte.” Ibid. Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, vol. 1–2, Suhrkamp, 1980, pp. 691–704. –. Der Autor als Produzent: Aufsätze zur Literatur. Reclam, 2012. Bose, Sarmila. Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War. Columbia University Press, 2011. Buck-Morss, Susan. Hegel, Haiti and Universal History. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009. Butalia, Urvashi. The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India. Penguin Books, 1998. –, editor. Partition: The Long Shadow. Zubaan, 2015. Chester, Lucy P. Borders and Conflict in South Asia: The Radcliffe Boundary Commission and the Partition of Punjab. Manchester University Press, 2009. Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn. “In Conversation with Nalini Malani.” Nalini Malani. In Search of Vanished Blood, edited by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev et al., Hatje Cantz, 2012, pp. 12–35. Dadi, Iftikhar. “Partition and Contemporary Art.” Lines of Control. Partition as Productive Space, edited by Iftikhar Dadi and Hammad Nasar, Green Cardamom and Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, 2012, pp. 19–21. –. “Frayed Geographies and Fractured Selves: Shilpa Gupta’s Untitled (2014–15).” My East is Your West. A Collateral Event at the 56th Venice Biennale, edited by Natasha Ginwala, exh.-cat. Venice Biennale, The Gujral Foundation, 2015, pp. 70–75. –, and Hammad Nasar, editors. Lines of Control. Partition as Productive Space. Green Cardamom and Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, 2012. Das, Veena. “Composition of the Personal Voice: Violence and Migration.” Studies in History, vol. 7, no. 1, 1991, pp. 65–77. –. “Language and Body: Transactions in the Construction of Pain.” Daedalus, vol. 25, no. 1, 1996, pp. 67–91. –. Life and Words. Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. University of California Press, 2007. Demos, T. J. The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis. Duke University Press, 2013. Duplaix, Sophie, editor. Nalini Malani. La rebellion des morts. Rétrospective, exh.-cat. Centre Pompidou, Paris, Hatje Cantz, 2017. Fraser, Andrea, et al., editors. Österreichs Beitrag zur 45. Biennale von Venedig 1993. König, 1993. Gilmartin, David. “Partition, Pakistan and South Asian History: In Search of a Narrative.” Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 57, no. 4, 1998, pp. 1068–1095. Ginwala, Natasha, editor. My East is Your West. A Collateral Event at the 56th Venice Biennale, exh.-cat. Venice Biennale, The Gujral Foundation, 2015. Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust. Columbia University Press, 2012.

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Monica Juneja Huyssen, Andreas. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford University Press, 2003. –. “Shadow Play as Medium of Memory.” Nalini Malani. In Search of Vanished Blood, edited by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev et al., Hatje Cantz, 2012, pp. 46–59. Jalal, Ayesha. The Pity of Partition: Manto’s Life, Times and Work across the India-Pakistan Divide. Princeton University Press, 2013. Juneja, Monica. “Imaging the Revolution. Gender and Iconography in French Political Prints.” Studies in History, vol. 12, no. 1, 1996, pp. 1–65. –. “Family Fictions: Painting and the Politics of Gender in the Making of Republican France.” Studies in History, vol. 18, no. 2, 2002, pp. 335–358. Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. Partition’s Post-Amnesias. 1947, 1971 and Modern South Asia. Women Unlimited, 2013. Kaul, Suvir, editor. The Partitions of Memory: The Afterlives of the Division of India. Permanent Black, 2001. Khullar, Sonal. “Everyday Partitions.” Third Text, doi: 10.1080/09528822.2017.1386946. Manto, Saadat Hasan. Bitter Fruit: The Very Best of Saadat Hasan Manto. Edited and translated by Khalid Hasan, Penguin Books, 2008. Mathur, Saloni, editor. The Migrant’s Time. Rethinking Art History and Diaspora. Sterling and Francine Clark Institute, 2011. Menon, Ritu, and Kamala Bhasin. Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition. Kali for Women, 1998. Mufti, Aamir R. “Zarina Hashmi and the Arts of Dispossession.” The Migrant’s Time. Rethinking Art History and Diaspora, edited by Saloni Mathur, Sterling and Francine Clark Institute, 2011, pp. 174–195. Mookherjee, Nayanika. The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories and the Bangladesh War of 1971. Duke University Press, 2015. Pandey, Gyanendra. Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India, Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pateman, Carole. The Sexual Contract. Polity Press, 1988. Parasher, Prajna Paramita. “A Long Walk Out From Partition.” Partition: The Long Shadow, edited by Urvashi Butalia, Zubaan, 2015, pp. 200–230. Pijnappel, Johan. “Interview with Nalini Malani.” Nalini Malani, exh.-cat. Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Edizioni Charta, 2007, pp. 39–42. Ramaswamy, Sumathi. “Midnight’s Line.” Lines of Control. Partition as Productive Space, edited by Iftikhar Dadi and Hammad Nasar, Green Cardamom and Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Green Cardamom, 2012, pp. 25–35. Rogoff, Irit. “Interview with Irit Rogoff by Hammad Nasar”. Lines of Control. Partition as Productive Space, edited by Iftikhar Dadi and Hammad Nasar, Green Cardamom and Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Green Cardamom, 2012, pp. 101–110. Saikia, Yasmin. Women, War and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971. Duke University Press, 2011. Sambrani, Chaitanya. “Home and Away: Highways and Byways in Asian Art.” Contemporary Art in Asia. A Critical Reader, edited by Melissa Chiu and Benjamin Genocchio, The MIT Press, 2011, pp. 163–178. Sarkar, Bhaskar. Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition. Duke University Press, 2009. Sharma, Aparna, “A Moment in Time: The Sardari Lal Parasher Retrospective.” Leonardo, 2005, pp. 438–439. Sood, Pooja, editor. Mappings: Shared Histories … A Fragile Self, exh.-cat. Eicher Gallery, New Delhi, 1997. Sood, Pooja, editor. The Khoj Book 1997–2007: Contemporary Art Practice in India. Harper Collins, 2010. Zamindar, Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali. The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories. Columbia University Press, 2007. Zizek, Slavoj, “Only a New Universalism can save us from the New World Order.” ABC Religion and Ethics, 11 May 2017, http://www.abc.‌net.au/religion/articles/2017/05/11/4667236.htm. Accessed 18 March 2018. Zitzewitz, Karin. “Infrastructure as Form. Cross-Border Networks and the Materialities of ‘South Asia’ in Contemporary Art.” Third Text, vol. 31, 2017, pp. 341–358, doi: 10.1080/09528822.2017.1380984.

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MIGRATION ON DISPLAY Curatorial Concepts and Artistic Approaches in France and Germany

France was the first European country which promoted the foundation of a national museum of migration (Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration – MNHI). The Parisian institution, a state project, not only struggled with changing political circumstances before its opening in 2007, but has been criticised repeatedly by both scholars and activists since then. One main point of criticism is that the permanent exhibition significantly underrepresents colonial history, while this history remains conspicuously omnipresent in the architecture of the building housing the museum (Ulz 2015, 74–84). The suppression of conflict-ridden fields, such as colonial history, is a result of the political agenda of identity formation that state museums usually follow. The question is therefore whether the production of such exclusions by national institutions is inevitable, or if it is possible to overcome them. For more than a decade, there has been an on‑going debate about the need for a national museum of migration in Germany, and the function and focus of any such institution. Although many different ideas and concepts for such a project have been brought forward in the course of this debate, there seemed to be little political will for their realisation. Late 2016, however, saw a sudden change in the state of affairs. Decisions made in the budget committee of the German Bundestag have since led to competition between Bremerhaven and Cologne about the location and, more importantly, the underlying concepts and approaches for a German national museum of migration (Füller 2016; Berlinghoff et al. 2017). These events have led to more general questions about how to put migration on display (Tanyeri-Erdemir/Çerçioğlu Yücel 2015; Bayer 2015; Dogramaci 2017). What potential risks does a state-led museumisation1 of migration involve, compared to decentralised or participatory exhibitions? Could a central museum of migration succeed in making its approach participatory – or does its identity-forming function make the exclusion of heterogeneous perspectives inevitable? On the occasion of the imminent development of a German museum of migration, I now intend to elaborate on these questions. In the first part of my contribution I will set out my criticism of the French immigration museum (MNHI) and examine the political circumstances of its foundation in more detail. In the second part of the article, and using the MNHI as an example again, I will investigate the importance of contemporary art and everyday objects for the museumisation of migration. My aim is to draw conclusions from the selection and function of these 1  In using the term ‘museumisation’, I am referencing the German concept ‘Musealisierung’. ‘Musealisierung’ simultaneously describes the process of transforming an artefact into an exhibit as well as the way in which certain topics are included in museums.

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groups of exhibits and the way in which they are imbued with meaning. One aim is to draw conclusions from the examples discussed for the conception of future museums of migration.

Founding a national museum of migration in Germany In 2005, the museum Deutsches Auswandererhaus (German Emigration Centre) opened in Bremerhaven as part of a private-public partnership. It stages the history of the 7.2 million Germans who emigrated from Bremerhaven, predominantly to America, in the nineteenth century. After criticism of its one-sided representation of migration, solely focusing on emigration, the museum opened a small extension building in 2015 which focuses on immigration. This extension contains original shop interiors from the 1960s and 1970s, such as hairdressers’, photographers’ studios or ice-cream parlours. Visitors can playfully retrace migrants’ biographies, primarily those of former ‘guest workers’ (Gastarbeiter), in these shop interiors.2 In contrast to Bremerhaven’s entertainment-oriented approach, the Cologne-based association DOMiD (Dokumentationszentrum und Museum über die Migration in Deutschland – Documentation Centre and Museum of Migration in Germany) has compiled a comprehensive archive on the history of migration through the extensive accumulation of documents and materials.3 DOMiD was founded 25 years ago as an initiative by Turkish migrants.4 In January 2017, the association submitted an elaborate framework for the establishment of a museum of migration in Cologne (Kreikebaum 2017, Kolb/Fuchs 2017).5 DOMiD has campaigned for a central institution for several years, as they feel that local or temporary exhibitions cannot fulfil the task of replacing one-dimensional master narratives with multiple perspectives. However, they contend that this could be achieved through a permanent exhibition with a critical perspective and participatory approach (Eryılmaz 2012, 37 ff.). A touchstone for this kind of exhibition is Fremde Heimat – Yaban, Sılan olur (‘foreign home’), which was developed in 1998 by DOMiT in cooperation with the Ruhrlandmuseum, now called the Ruhr Museum, at the UNESCO World Heritage site of the Zollverein Coal Mine in Essen, Germany (Eryılmaz/Jamin 1998). The exhibition slogan, “gemeinsam mit uns” (“together with us”), signalled a pioneering vision of participation, which also manifested itself in the bilingual conception of the exhibition (German and Turkish). The exhibition centred on the recruiting of migrant workers from Turkey between 1961 and 1973.6 Its display engaged with the settlement process of first-generation immigrants until the early 1980s. The primary exhibits were everyday objects and private photographs. In 2005, DOMiD developed a more extensive exhibition called Projekt Migration (Project Migration), shown in cooperation with the Kölnischer Kunstverein and 2  Visitors are given the identity of two people and search for traces of ‘their’ past in several stages. 3  www.domid.‌org. Accessed 15 September 2017. 4  The association was originally founded as DOMiT (Dokumentationszentrum und Museum über die Migration aus der Türkei  e. V.). In 2007, DOMiT merged with the association Migrationsmuseum in Deutschland e. V. 5  See “Auf dem Weg. Ein Forum für die Zukunft: Das Haus der Einwanderungsgesellschaft,” www.domid. org/sites/default/files/broschuere_Haus der Einwanderungsgesellschaft.‌pdf. Accessed 4 March 2019. 6  A recruiting agreement between Germany and Turkey concerning migrant workers was in place during that period.

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a plethora of other scholarly, artistic and civic partners (Projekt Migration 2005). The aim was to show the societal role of migration from different, primarily migrant, perspectives through a multitude of heterogeneous projects and event formats. This pioneering project showed the central role that DOMiD plays in debates on the museumisation of migration. However, it was the Deutsches Auswandererhaus in Bremerhaven which received a grant of six million euros for the development of a German national museum of migration from the German Bundestag budget committee in November 2016. This has brought a German national museum of migration within reach, but the question remains as to how the means to tell a new societal history will be exercised. What role will the bottom‑up perspective of agents such as DOMiD play? Will a national exhibition in Bremerhaven be able to represent their array of perspectives and endure the inevitable contradictions and controversies connected to them? Or will it produce a consensual history in which all too much remains untold? Research into national museums of migration has shown that preceding the foundation of new museums, political agendas always play an important role as they manifestly influence the content of the display. For instance, the museumisation of the Ellis Island immigrant inspection station took place in the 1980s, at a time when the USA was pursuing an agenda of symbolically revaluing European immigrant groups (Welz 1996; Baur 2009; Meza Torres 2014).7 Ellis Island had already been declared a national monument in 1965 in the process of constructing the national self-image of the USA as a nation of immigrants. This first revaluation occurred during a time in which the Bracero Program, the Mexican Farm Labour Agreement in place since 1942, was terminated by America. The history of white population groups of European descent has dominated the exhibition display of the Ellis Island Immigration Museum since its opening. The immigration history of migrants from Asia, South America and countries such as Mexico, as well as forced migration through the transatlantic slave trade, remains underrepresented.

The MNHI in Paris In Europe, the French immigration museum, opened in Paris in 2007, also follows an identity-forming narrative that produces exclusions. As ethnologist Andrea Meza Torres has shown, the perspective of this national museum is closely connected to a certain conception of an ‘own’ or ‘national’ identity. However, the museum also continuously modifies and develops this self-image. Meza Torres contends that while the exhibition does advocate openness to diversity, the colonial history of France is marginalised at the same time. In her view, the immigrants are the new ‘Others’; she emphasises that “exhibitions on migration are the present agoras where power relations stemming since the beginning of the colonial enterprise are re‑contextualized. They re‑emerge anew in contemporary agoras dedicated to the representation and the study of migration” (Meza Torres 2014, 14).8 The Paris museum was originally called Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration (CNHI) and was recently given its current name. Its centrepiece is a permanent multimedia exhibition

7  More than twelve million immigrants – primarily from Europe – entered the USA through Ellis Island between 1882 and 1924. 8  Meza Torres refers to James Clifford’s phrase “Museums as contact zones” (Clifford 1997, 118–219; Boast 2011).

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Fig. 1 | Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration – MNHI, Paris, exhibition view, 2017

called Repères (‘points of orientation’), which offers an overview of approximately 200 years of French immigration history. It focuses on the cultural and societal benefits brought by immigration. The basic structure of the exhibition is a historical narrative, divided into nine thematic sections, presented on light boxes.9 The exhibits are shown in different media forms. The concept was developed in an interdisciplinary cooperation between the departments of history, art history and ethnology at the museum. The result is a juxtaposition of contemporary art, historical documents and everyday objects in the exhibition display (fig. 1). In early 2014, after a period of refurbishment, the museum opened an additional exhibition called Galerie des Dons, a ‘gallery of donations’, in which the museum shows donated objects with a history of migration. The permanent exhibition was also modified on this occasion. Mostly, works of art were exchanged or regrouped. However, the basic structure of nine thematic sections remained unchanged.10 I have already pointed out that the museum significantly underrepresents colonial history, while this history remains conspicuously omnipresent in the architecture of the building housing it. In reconstructing the political context of the French institution’s development, it becomes apparent that the failure to represent French colonial history did not occur by chance. It was a consequence of the political context at the time of the museum’s foundation, which has affected its outlook since then.

9  The nine points of orientation, or thematic sections, are called: “Emigrer”, “Face à l’état”, “Terre d’accueil – France hostile”, “Ici et là‑bas”, “Lieux de vie”, “Au travail!”, “Enracinements”, “Sportifs” and “Diversité”. See www.histoire-immigration.‌fr. Accessed 15 September 2017. 10  The entire permanent exhibition will be redesigned in the near future.

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Defining the museum of migration as a ‘museum of integration’ Preceding the foundation of the new museum in 1990s France, several parties holding scholarly,11 political or civic positions had been campaigning for the larger visibility of migrants in society. Among them was the Association Générique, an association founded in 1987 and similar to DOMiD in Germany, which campaigns for the archiving and exhibition of migrant history in France and Europe.12 However, in contrast to DOMiD, its members were sceptical about the political agenda that a national museum of migration might serve. The results of the French presidential election in 2002 were pivotal for the new museum’s foundation. In this election, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the candidate of the right-wing party Front National (FN), surprisingly came second after Jacques Chirac, the candidate of the conservative party Les Républicains (LR). Chirac declared the museum of migration his personal responsibility after his election victory in the second round. To him it seemed a suitable symbol both for a collective understanding of tolerance and democracy, and against right-wing extremism (Deuser 2016, 46–52). The museum was subsequently planned under tremendous time pressure, but was opened only in October 2007. By this time, Nicolas Sarkozy had become president, who was known for his restrictive migration policies.13 Scholars and civic organisations had hoped that a larger political visibility of migration issues would stem from a museum of migration. Politicians, however, also wanted the new museum to be understood as a ‘museum of integration’ from the outset. As political scientist Patricia Deuser has shown, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the prime minister at the time, emphasised in the museum’s constituent document that not only the “intolerants” (meaning members and voters of the FN) but also “certain tendance communautariste” posed a risk for the country (Deuser 2016, 46). The group of people described as “communautariste”, mainly Arab or Muslim immigrants, is generally stigmatised as being unwilling to integrate into the dominant culture.14 From the outset, the museum was thus conceptualised as a site of education and civilisation for right-wing radicals as well as those ‘unwilling to integrate’, and consequently sought to reinforce republican norms and values. In following this agenda, it ties into the mission civilisatrice, the French concept of civilisation deriving from the colonial era (ibid., 48). As a consequence of the decision to focus on foreign immigrants, the museum generally does not represent migrants with a French passport – those who came to the country during the many migratory movements between foreign territories and mainland France in the period of French colonialism. Contrary to what the museum’s name might suggest, not immigrés (immigrants from former colonies), but étrangers (foreigners), are the point of focus. The differentiation 11  The historian Gérard Noiriel was the leading figure (Noiriel 1992). 12  The exhibition Régards croisés France-Allemagne by Génériques (in cooperation with DOMiD) has been online since March 2016. The exhibition is concerned with the immigration of migrant workers to both France and Germany. www.google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/exhibit/regards-croisés-france-allemagne-blickwechsel-deutschland-frankreich/rALy3UoHZxvlJA?hl=​fr. Accessed 15 September 2017. 13  It took seven years after its opening for the French president, now François Hollande, to visit the museum, which he did on 15 December 2014 (Revault d’Allonnes 2014). 14  The proclamation of the existence of so‑called Parallelgesellschaften (‘parallel societies’) in German debates concerning a contentious Leitkultur (‘leading culture’) is a similar phenomenon.

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between étrangers and immigrés originates in the importance of the French nation state for processes of migration, yet simultaneously serves to ignore those from the colonial era.15 Relocations from colonies to mainland France are, according to the museum’s definition, not to be considered migration.

The Palais de la Porte Dorée The building housing the museum was designed by French architect Albert Laprade (1883– 1978) for the Paris Colonial Exhibition of 1931 (Viatte/François 2002; Murphy 2007). Its suitability, despite its propagation of the success of French colonialism, was not questioned.16 The Palais de la Porte Dorée combines elements of ancient Greek with more modern Moroccan architecture, such as the covered atrium in the building’s centre, and is ornamented in Art Deco style. The building’s widely visible bas-relief, sculpted by Alfred Auguste Janniot (1889–1969), aestheticises the colonial and racist vision of a harmonious and prospering colonialism by constructing a naturalised hierarchy between France and its colonies. Above the portal, France is enthroned as a personification of abundance (Abundantia), whose wealth and prosperity is garnered from the African and Asian colonies, which are represented to the left and right of the portal (fig. 2). The

Fig. 2 | Palais de la Porte Dorée, Paris, 2017

15  An example is the situation of Algerians: they were considered to be subjects from 1830, to be French from 1947 onwards, yet became ‘foreigners’ after 1962. 16  The selection of the site, on the edge of the city but near the centre, was supposed to highlight the importance of the institution and to counteract assumed status problems.

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Fig. 3 | Palais de la Porte Dorée, Paris, 2017

relief shows how products are cultivated and manufactured by the inhabitants of the colonies through manual labour. The colonial subjects are thus depicted as culturally backward. Additionally, the women are represented as sexualised beings, and the men as subordinated. All the figures are characterised through a specific proximity to the plant and animal life surrounding them, as well as the agricultural products they are producing. The connecting element is the water of the oceans, on which sailing ships are shown taking colonial goods to France. The constitutive meaning of this water for colonialism and trade is the leitmotif of the whole building: the basement houses an aquarium, which showcases fish from all parts of the world.17 Outside, the building is surrounded by a water basin containing koi on the Asian side (fig. 3). The building is thus ideologically and architecturally founded on water. In the course of its colonial explorations, French culture was able to appropriate the ‘mysterious 17  Nowadays, the aquarium is primarily visited by school groups, www.aquarium-tropical.‌fr. Accessed 30 September 2017.

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Fig. 4 | Palais de la Porte Dorée, Paris, 2017, sign outside the building showing a photograph of the making of the facade relief by Alfred Janniot in 1930

depths’ and ‘exotic creatures’ of the sea and later exploit them as resources. What was once ‘wild’ nature is represented as ‘conquered’ by the ordered structure of the aquarium.18 The political agenda of colonialism is continued in the building’s interior. While the facade relief stages the wealth of overseas possessions, the murals inside display the alleged benefits of colonisation for the colonised. The general aim was to depict French-owned overseas territories and the country’s worldwide trading posts. The extent of these heterogeneous colonies constitutes France’s unity visually. This is illustrated allegorically in the central ceremonial hall, in which a monumental mural shows France as regent surrounded by personifications of each continent (Ulz 2015). Initially, there were no signs pointing to the building’s colonial symbolism, which visitors passed through in order to reach the migration exhibition on the second floor (Meza Torres 2012). By 2017, signs had been installed at several points throughout the interior and exterior of the building that give visitors basic information on the 1931 Colonial Exhibition, the history of the building and its uses since then. Despite these efforts, the building’s racist visual ideology has generally remained unquestioned. The treatment of the political, historical and cultural context of the building falls considerably short of the aspirations of postcolonial criticism. The following example illustrates this more specifically. One of the signs on the building’s exterior contains the following comment on the facade relief: “The sculptural style of the 1920s and 1930s was used

18  The exterior garden design extends this notion to the plant world.

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for imperial propaganda: muscular and imposing figures, wild and lush nature, ethnic faces that were recognisable and simplified according to the ethnographic codes of the time.”19 This sign is illustrated by a black-and-white-photograph (fig. 4) from the time of the building’s construction. It shows Janniot, dressed in a white jacket, next to a naked black model, both standing in front of the relief. This set‑up shows the artist Janniot in the 19th-century tradition of the Académie royale des beaux-arts (French academy of fine arts), in which the study of the male nude (referred to as an académie) was the focal point of training. By depicting the oppositions between nudity and clothing, and between anonymous model and named artist, the photograph reproduces the hierarchy between white and black which features on the relief. The image is unsuitable for this kind of sign, as it reiterates the colonial gaze subordinating the Other. This (visual) hierarchy, described by Stuart Hall as a regime of representation (Hall 2000), is not a lacuna in the accompanying text, but is constituted anew by the photograph.

Contemporary art in the migration exhibition There have been recent exhibitions in several places providing artistic positions on flight, migration and borders. For example, the art exhibition Uncertain States, shown in the Berlin Akademie der Künste (Academy of Arts) in 2016, approached the topic of migration via the field of the uncertain and precarious, and states of emergency.20 The MNHI, however, has one of the most substantial collections of contemporary art concerned with questions of migration and diversity. These works of art are shown in special temporary exhibitions, but are also an integral part of the permanent exhibition. The integration of an art collection into the museum was intended to raise the prominence of the institution in its foundational phase. However, it becomes apparent when examining the exhibition display that the works of art usually have a certain function assigned to them. In some cases, the works act as illustrations; in others, there is a pedagogic message they are intended to convey. Notably, contemporary art is often used where the exhibition deals with contentious political topics that are generally not overtly addressed by its narrative.21 A comparison of the permanent exhibition before and after the 2014 overhaul shows that several works of art have been replaced or moved from one of the nine thematic units to another. The following example shows how doing this can lead to a shift in meaning of the artwork’s content. Kader Attia’s installation La machine à rêves (2003) shows a black mannequin marked as female by a headscarf and handbag (fig. 5). The figure is wearing a tracksuit bearing the word Hallal and is standing in front of a machine selling consumer goods (e. g. lipstick, condoms, alcohol, underwear) made by the fictional brand Hallal. This ambiguous work questions the compatibility

19  In situ. 20  Uncertain States. Künstlerisches Handeln in Ausnahmezuständen. Artistic Strategies in States of Emergency, 15 October 2016–15 January 2017, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, www.adk.de/uncertain-states. Accessed 15 September 2017. 21  This concerns topics such as the situation of the sans-papiers, undocumented migration, or the role of Islam in France.

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Fig. 5 | Kader Attia, The Dream Machine, 2003, exhibition view at the Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration – MNHI, Paris, 2017

of contemporary consumer behaviour with the situation of young Muslims in Europe. It stages the consumability of Islamic norms and values through the Hallal products and thus suggests a wish to (playfully) ‘integrate’ religious commandments into contemporary youth culture. In the 2011 exhibition catalogue, the installation was listed in the “Ici et là‑bas” (‘here and there’) section, which addresses the inner conflict between old and new homes (CNHI 2011; CNHI 2009, 112 f.). Accordingly, the accompanying text not only refers to Attia’s statement that he had wanted to show how today’s language of youth culture equates halal with consumable, but also suggests that the artwork represents “some young women’s wish for integration”.22 In the

22  “du rêve d’intégration de certaines jeunes filles”, www.histoire-immigration.fr/collections/la-machinereve‑de-kader-attia. Accessed 30 September 2017. In the 2014 exhibition the new text also refers to the emancipation of young women: “du rêve d’intégration et d’émancipation de certaines jeunes filles”.

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2014 exhibition the artwork was moved into the “Diversité” (‘diversity’) section, and the accompanying text was slightly modified.23 In accordance with the republican principle of secularism, which stipulates a division between Church and State in France, wearing religious symbols in public institutions such as schools and universities is banned. This includes wearing a headscarf. In step with this, there is also only one further image in the whole exhibition showing a veiled woman. It is a photograph showing a praying woman in a mosque set under the heading “L’Islam, religion de France”.24 Next to it, the text accompanying a caricature refers to the so‑called “affaire du foulard” (headscarf debate). It also states that the “cohabitation of republican secularism and religion [Islam] cannot escape tensions, and brings identity claims with it that are connected to integration difficulties”.25 In the “Religion” section, Islam is thus contextualised through “integration difficulties”. This is clearly reminiscent of the museum’s political agenda mentioned above. The question of the headscarf as a potentially extended sign of (youth‑)cultural identity is addressed only through Kader Attia’s artwork. The example also shows the extent to which the museum’s political agenda and its thematic structure can influence the interpretation of works of art. Attia’s installation is initially directed at criticising consumerism, and was first conceptualised with a male figure.26 Its realisation with a female figure for the MNHI automatically changes the artwork’s interpretation. By wearing a headscarf, the mannequin represents the conflicts associated with Islam in the “Diversité” section. Yet the rephrasing of the accompanying text also shows that there is now an awareness of the problematic nature of the artworks’ contextualisation, and that there are efforts to modify the museum’s political agenda with the support of works of art. In my view, contemporary art generally has the potential to open up changes in perspectives within controversial debates. However, such a shift can be accomplished only if artworks are given enough room for interpretation, and are not subordinated into a (national) master narrative. This contention will be illustrated by the following example, which is not part of the MNHI collection. Halil Altındere’s installation Space Refugee was shown at the n. b.k. (Neuer Berliner Kunstver27 ein), an association whose exhibition venue is a “site of contemporary art and discourse production”, in 2016 (fig. 6).28 The work focuses on a fictional space programme called Palmyra,29 which envisages human settlement on Mars as a solution to the so‑called refugee crisis. The point of 23  In the 2014 exhibition, “une société d’accueil” was replaced by “une société moderne occidentale”: “Il [l’artiste] construit un langue particulier, à la fois poétique et politique, pour affronter la difficile équation entre désir d’appartenance à une société d’accueil et (la) préservation de valeurs traditionnelles”, www.histoire-immigration.fr/collections/la-machine-reve‑de-kader-attia. Accessed 30 September 2017. 24  The “Religions” unit is a sub-section of “Diversité” (CNHI 2009, 220 f.). 25  “cohabitation avec la laïcité républicaine n’échappe pas aux tensions et la religion porte parfois des revendications identitaires liées aux difficultés de l’intégration” (CNHI 2009, 213). 26  Fault Lines: Contemporary African Art and Shifting Landscapes, Curator: Gilane Tawadros, Venice Biennial, 50th International Art Exhibition, 2003, Arsenale. 27  15 September‑6 November 2016, http://www.nbk.org/en/ausstellungen/_altindere.‌html. Accessed 30 September 2017. (Babias/Becker 2018). 28  www.nbk.org/en/institution. Accessed 15 September 2017. 29  The name of the fictional space programme is taken from the ancient trade metropolis whose archaeological remains were destroyed by “Islamic State” in 2015.

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Fig. 6 | Halil Altındere, Muhammed Ahmed Faris with Family, 2016; Muhammed Ahmed Faris Portrait I-III, 2016, exhibition view Space Refugee at the n.b.k., Berlin, 2016

departure of Altındere’s work is a set of photographs showing the former Syrian cosmonaut Muhammed Ahmed Faris, who was forced to flee his homeland for political reasons and is now living in exile in Turkey. He flew to the Mir space station in the Soyuz TM‑3 as part of the Soviet space programme in 1987. The cosmonaut is portrayed in the style of Soviet realism. However, Altındere does not just put the historical visual material on display, but instead shows oil paintings framed by neon lights that distort and ironically break with the heroic poses of the Cold War era. The pictures, shown in a darkened room, are accompanied by a documentary video that blends interviews with (real) NASA experts and Muhammed Ahmed Faris with the (fictional) design of Palmyra. In the adjacent room, visitors can ‘explore Mars’ in a virtual-reality video by wearing 3D glasses. In the course of his artistic fictionalisation of space exploration, Altındere creates a utopia offering a significant change in perspective on the situation of Syrian refugees. It can be read as criticising European refugee politics, as Europe does not offer long-term perspectives to many refugees. Simultaneously, the ‘Mars expedition’ idea also alludes to the notion that the inhabitants of many countries, especially in Europe, would like to see refugees to disappear – into space. This example shows how works of art can open up alternative perspectives on contentious political topics and thus foster discussion. In the absence of the overarching master narratives and political agendas of national museums of migration, the interpretation of artworks remains open to varying readings.

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Everyday objects as exhibits In addition to contemporary works of art, many exhibitions devoted to migration have everyday objects on display. They make use of the fact that the movement of people always entails the movement of objects. Removing these objects from their original context and circumstances of usage changes their meaning and function. In exhibitions they are thus transformed into historical documents. The permanent exhibition of the MNHI also presents a selection of personal belongings, shown in tall glass cabinets. The first section “Émigrer” (Emigration), which follows the introductory “prologue”, contains an exhibit that seems to have become obligatory for migration exhibitions: the suitcase (fig. 7).30 Suitcases, serving as exhibits, have had a remarkable career in the past 40 years. One of the earliest examples of using suitcases in an exhibition concerned with migration was Gastarbeiter – Fremdarbeiter (‘guest workers’ – ‘foreign workers’) by Vlassis Caniaris, shown in the Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK) in Berlin in January 1975 (Romain 1975; Fehr 1991).31 Caniaris, a contemporary Greek artist who resided in Germany on a DAAD32 scholarship from 1973 onwards, was one of the first artists to deal with the situation of the ‘guest workers’. His three-dimensional assemblages reflect the everyday culture and consumer goods aesthetics of a 1970s migrant milieu in the form of walk-through Environments. The headless or faceless sculptures of these Environments do not represent individual people, but characterise types. The fact that their precarious situation as ‘manpower on demand’ is immediately visible unites most of the figures. The environment of these ‘guest workers’ is characterised by material poverty and temporary arrangements. The suitcase is a ubiquitous sign of the transitory. Caniaris’s installation Himmel und Hölle shows several people with luggage who seem to be waiting on a platform (fig. 8).33 The floor bears a hopscotch chalk drawing, with boxes containing the words “Ausländerpolizei” (immigration police), “Wohnsituation” (living conditions), “Akkordarbeit” (piecework) or “Konsulate” (consulates), instead of Himmel und Hölle (‘heaven and hell’). Initially enacted as a seemingly harmless children’s game, the West German migration regime is ultimately shown to be an existential balancing act that forces those affected into a state of uncertainty, hesitance and continuous waiting. In 1975, Caniaris succeeded in making mental images as well as internal and external viewpoints regarding work migration visible by using objects of everyday culture, such as the suitcase. Caniaris’s use of the suitcase pursued an agenda of critically investigating social realities by contrasting the reality of migrants’ lives with stereotypical perspectives on immigration. However, the object soon became a nearly unavoidable cliché (Wonisch/Hübel 2012, 19–32). Today, it can serve as a symbol of very different narratives on migration and societal change, depending on how it is imbued with meaning, as the Bonn exhibition Immer bunter. Einwanderungsland Deutschland (2014) showed. The exhibition was based on a narrative of “(cultural) diversity as an

30  It is a suitcase formerly owned by Soundirassane Nadaradjane, born in Karikal, a French trading post in India, who came to France in 1972 (with a French passport). See Deuser 2016, 96 f. 31  The nGbK was founded in 1969 with a grassroots structure, www.ngbk.‌de. Accessed 15 September 2017. 32  Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst/German Academic Exchange Service. 33  Vlassis Caniaris. Himmel und Hölle. 1974. EMST, Athens. The work was shown at documenta 14 in Kassel (8 April‑17 September 2017).

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Fig. 7 | Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration – MNHI, Paris, exhibition view, glass cabinet with suitcase, 2017

Fig. 8 Vlassis Caniaris, Heaven and Hell, 1975, exhibition view at documenta 14, Kassel, 2017

asset”, similar to that of the MNHI. It traced the history of immigration to Germany from the German Empire to the recent past, while focusing on the situation of ‘guest workers’ and ‘contract workers’ in former West and East Germany. The foyer of the Bonn exhibition contained the sculpture Der Ausländer (1990) by Guido Messer.34 It shows a man with a suitcase, apparently arriving on a platform, and is often understood to be a representation of the generation of ‘guest workers’ that immigrated to Germany from the 1950s until the 1970s. The last room of the exhibition contained many contemporary, heterogeneous exhibits of German migration society to show potential fields of conflict. Among them was the ‘suitcase bomb’ of the so‑called Sauerlandzelle, namely those members of the “Islamic Jihad Union” who received prison sentences in 2010 after 34  A replica of the original 1982 sculpture.

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attempting a bomb attack on Bonn central station (Böhnlein 2015). Exhibiting this bomb connects the suitcase as an exhibit with the danger of terrorism, and suggests a causal link between immigration and threats to society. Since 2014 the MNHI has chosen a new path by creating the Galerie des Dons, in which contributions are accompanied by notes provided by the donators. Stereotypical exhibits, such as the suitcase, are avoided here. The presentation thus also acts against the risk that migrants become devoid of their subjectivity through depersonalised objects, a mechanism that has been criticised frequently (Hold 2012, 79–108). It remains to be seen whether this approach will be extended to other areas of the permanent exhibition in the future, in order to fulfil the demand for an opening up of the narrative towards an inner view on migration with multiple perspectives.

Conclusion The examples discussed show that generally, centralised museums and exhibitions – in contrast to local institutions and civic organisations – follow the political agenda of forming a (national) Self. They smooth out areas of conflict and controversies in the course of constructing similarities and unity, and locating these historically. Although these constructions of identity are increasingly based on a juxtaposition of diversity, they still generally oppose an equality of difference.35 As in the case of the MNHI, this means that the continuity of the colonial gaze is accepted. The success of a central museum of migration, as demanded by DOMiD in Germany, in changing views on migration will depend decisively on overcoming this regime of representation. In addition to the careful selection of a location, one prerequisite for success is the development of a heterogeneous exhibition narrative that enables visitors to become acquainted with diverse and diverging perspectives. Only a participatory approach that considers different interests could make this kind of project successful. Translated by Moritz Kiermeier.

References Baur, Joachim. Die Musealisierung der Migration. Einwanderungsmuseen und die Inszenierung der multikulturellen Nation. transcript, 2009. Babias, Marius, and Kathrin Becker, editors. Halil Altındere. n.b.k. exhibitions, vol. 21. Walther König, 2018. Bayer, Natalie. “2 qm Migration – Zum Stand der Museumsdebatte.” Movements of Migration. Neue Positionen im Feld von Stadt, Migration und Repräsentation, edited by Sabine Hess and Torsten Näser, Panama Verlag, 2015, pp. 132–153. Berlinghoff, Marcel, et al. “Die Szenographie der Migration. Geschichte. Praxis. Zukunft (Einleitung).” IMIS-Bei­ träge, no. 51, 2017, pp. 7–16. Böhnlein, Lukas. “Immer bunter. Einwanderungsland Deutschland, 10. 12. 2014–09. 08. 2015 Bonn (review).” H-Soz-Kult, 1 August  2015, www.hsozkult.de/exhibitionreview/id/rezausstellungen-228. Accessed 30 August 2017. Boast, Robin. “Neocolonial Collaboration: Museum as Contact Zone Revisited.” Museum Anthropology, vol. 34, 2011, pp. 65–70. 35  Concerning the demand for equality of difference (Gleichheit von Differenz), cf. the gender theory debate of the 1990s (Maihofer 1995).

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Melanie Ulz Clifford, James. Routes. Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Harvard University Press, 1996. CNHI. Guide de l’exposition permanente. RMN, 2009. –. Catalogue. La collection d’art contemporain. Montag Editions, 2011. Deuser, Patricia. Grenzverläufe – Migration, Museum und das Politische. Lit Verlag, 2016. Dogramaci, Burcu. “Migration findet Stadt(museum) – Repräsentation von Einwanderungsgeschichte. Mit einem Exkurs zu Orhan Pamuks ‘Museum der Unschuld’.” IMIS-Beiträge, vol. 51, 2017, pp. 43–62. Eryılmaz, Aytaç, and Mathilde Jamin, editors. 40 Jahre Fremde Heimat – Yaban, Sılan olur. Eine Geschichte der Einwanderung aus der Türkei. Klartext, 1998. –. “Migrationsgeschichte und die nationalstaatliche Perspektive in Archiven und Museen.” Museum und Migration. Konzepte – Kontexte – Kontroversen, edited by Regina Wonisch and Thomas Hübel, transcript, 2012, pp. 33–48. Fehr, Michael. Vlassis Caniaris: Konkreter Realismus. Skizze einer künstlerischen Strategie. Werkverzeichnis 1952– 1983. Verlag für Moderne Kunst, 1991. Füller, Christian. “Schmerz oder Kommerz? Um das erste Migrationsmuseum ist ein Kampf entbrannt, der mit harten Bandagen geführt wird.” Der Freitag, no. 49, 2016, p. 5. Hall, Stuart, editor. Representation. Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. Sage, 3rd ed. 2000. Hold, Eric. “Fremde Personen und Objekte in Frankreich. Die Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration und das Musée du Quai Branly.” Visualisierte Minderheiten. Probleme und Möglichkeiten der musealen Präsentation von ethischen bzw. nationalen Minderheiten (Bausteine aus dem Institut für Sächsische Geschichte und Volkskunde, 26), edited by Petr Lozoviuk, w. e. b., 2012, pp. 79–108. Immer bunter. Einwanderungsland Deutschland, exh.-cat. Stiftung Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn, Nünnerich-Asmus Verlag & Media, 2014. Kolb, Arnd, and Robert Fuchs. “Am Ende des Hindernisparcours? Neue Zeiten und Neue Konzepte für ein ‘zentrales Migrationsmuseum’ in der Migrationsgesellschaft.” IMIS-Beiträge, vol. 51, 2017, pp. 291–307. Kreikebaum, Uli. “Migrationsmuseum in Köln? Fragen und Antworten zur Museumsbrücke.” Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, 31 January 2017, www.ksta.de/koeln/migrationsmuseum‑in-koeln-fragen-und-antworten-zur-museumbruecke-25649380. Accessed: 15 September 2017. Maihofer, Andrea. Geschlecht als Existenzweise. Macht, Moral, Recht und Geschlechterdifferenz. Helmer, 1995. Meza Torres, Andrea. “Die Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration und die ‘Immigranten’ im Kontext der Kolonialgeschichte. Interaktionen und politische Interventionen.” Museum und Migration. Konzepte – Kontexte – Kontroversen, edited by Regina Wonisch and Thomas Hübel, transcript, 2012, pp. 193–222. –. The Museumization of Migration in Paris and Berlin: An Ethnography, PhD. Humboldt University, 2014. Murphy, Maureen. Un Palais pour une Cité. Du Musée des Colonies à la Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration. RMN, 2007. Noiriel, Gérard. Le creuset français. Histoire de l’immigration (XIX-XX siècles). Seuil, 1992. Projekt Migration, exh.-cat. Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, DuMont, 2005. Revault d’Allonnes, David. “Immigration: La contre-offensive de Hollande.” Le Monde, 15  December 2014, www.lemode.fr/politique/article/2014/12/15/immigration‑la-contre-offensive‑de-hollande_4540644_823448.‌html. Accessed 30 January 2015. Romain, Lothar, et al. Gastarbeiter – Fremdarbeiter. Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, 1975. Tanyeri-Erdemir, Tuğba, and Gözde Çerçioğlu Yücel. “Migrant Memories on Display: Migration Museums and Exhibitions in Germany.” Museums, Migration and Identity in Europe. Peoples, Places and Identities, edited by Christopher Whitehead et al., Ashgate, 2015, pp. 233–252. Ulz, Melanie. “Koloniale Rahmungen: Die Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration in Paris.” kritische berichte, vol. 43, no. 2, 2015, pp. 74–84. Viatte, Germain, and Dominique François, editors. Le Palais des Colonies. Histoire du Musée des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie. RMN, 2002. Welz, Gisela. Inszenierungen kultureller Vielfalt. Frankfurt am Main und New York City. Akademie Verlag, 1996. Wonisch, Regina, and Thomas Hübel, editors. Museum und Migration. Konzepte – Kontexte – Kontroversen. transcript, 2012.

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FRANCESCA LANZ AND CHRISTOPHER WHITEHEAD

EXHIBITING VOIDS Displaying Migration and the Role of the Built Environment

A crucial yet still under-investigated aspect of representing the histories and memories of migration in museums is the connection between exhibition design, contents and spaces. The building, indeed, not only provides a venue for the museum – that is to say, a more or less historically meaningful context that frames the exhibits – but also affects the impact of the exhibition and the intellectual, aesthetic and physical engagement of the audience with it (Pallasmaa 2005; Zumthor 2006; Mallgrave 2015; Tzortzi 2015). By comparing two different immigration museums – the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration and the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, both in New York City and both located in historic immigration sites – we seek, in this contribution, to reflect on the role of the museum’s architectural context as an element of the display in immigration museums. We will do so by combining our own diverse yet complementary approaches as an architect (Lanz) and a museologist (Whitehead), building on our previous research on migration, identity and place representation in museums (Whitehead et al. 2015; Lanz 2016; Whitehead/Lanz 2019). We understand display as a “sophisticated form of representation and communication that aims to present particular narratives or organisations of knowledge and to create sensory environments and affective spaces that invite or impel visitors to respond in a certain way” (Whitehead 2016, 2). If, on the one hand, display is “a political, public production of propositional knowledge intended to influence audiences and to create durable social effects” (ibid, 2), on the other, the museum provides different conditions and potentials from other forms and sites of knowledge production, because in its conventional form it invites a physical, embodied, mobile experience. This – in its necessary spatial configuration of bodies and knowledge, its plotting of routes through information and the cumulative staging of spectacular and often emotive encounters with objects, vistas and ideas – is where its specificity lies.

Displaying migration and the role of “containers” All museums are indices movements between places, in a multitude of forms, even if this frequently goes unremarked and unnoticed. The journeys of people, peoples, ideas and objects are the invisible archaeology of museum representations of many kinds. City museums, which seem to give license to situated and insular representations, are often about the different groups who come into contact with one another in the urban space, whether from near or far; such museums are, at the same time, a representation to outside, an imagination of what one population looks like to others who make the journey to see. Natural history, ethnography and art museums – cer-

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tainly in the West – were premised in their early development on a surveying impulse that led curators to make expeditions to capture and marshal materials from elsewhere, within a colonial politics of desire for territory, order and mastery of otherness. Many art museums are also subtly animated by the unspoken stories of how artists travelled and were exposed to new ideas, influences and landscapes; how and where they settled, and why; and how they went on to influence others with hybridised practices that result from mobility. In a second understanding of movement from place to place in the museum we need to consider also that the museum visit is a journey in its own right, for we visitors move through the museum as a geo-temporal ‘space’.1 Whether explicitly or not (usually not), the hidden journeys upon which the museum is built are always and necessarily rearticulated in the organisation of displays, and replayed by visitors, whether consciously or not. Travel and migration permeate the ontology of museum representations, even though this is rarely written onto the walls. Indeed, as a thought experiment, migrations can be used as a key for rereading museums of all kinds: there are very few that are not in some way about migration. Nevertheless, the idea of the ‘migration museum’, one that is explicitly and programmatically produced as such, is more recent. Several new migration museums have been opened across Europe since the early 2000s, creating, it may be argued, a new museum type. Although recently some have expanded their exhibition to include sections on contemporary immigration, European migration museums are mostly devoted to the description of the history of emigration, which distances them from counterpart institutions in the United States, Canada or Australia. As Joachim Baur points out, migration museums in these countries are immigration museums in post-colonial ‘settler societies’, established far before European ones and developed in a context of negotiation of national identity in multicultural societies. “By presenting immigration as the common experience shared by most […], [they] construct a master narrative of migration and thus contribute to revisions of a national imagined community,” eventually serving as an “instrument and platform for the harmonization of ‘dissonant heritages’ and thus of public memory” (Baur 2017, 343 f.). We can – and should – ask about how well this master narrative fits contemporary politics and the dynamics relating to the reception of migrants in these countries, particularly illegal ones, to understand critically the social roles and positions of immigration museums. By contrast, migration museums in Europe tend to tell the story of people forced to move during the European emigration boom that lasted from the turn of the nineteenth century until after the Second World War.2 This is usually presented as a moment of local history, one considered worthy of preservation and transmission as part of the common memory of a specific community and in relation to its potential relevance in the construction and reinforcement of local identity (figs. 1, 2). Despite the differences related to each museum’s specific context and 1  We refer to a substantial corpus of studies by one of the authors (Whitehead) about how to read and interpret display and museums as a map. See “Methodologies and their Theoretical Foundation” in Christopher Whitehead et al., Placing Migration in European Museums, Politecnico di Milano, 2012, pp. 47–60. 2  Examples of such museums and galleries around Europe include the Deutsches Auswandererhaus (German Emigration Center) in Bremenhaven and the Auswanderermuseum (Emigration Museum) BallinStadt Hamburg, both in the north of Germany, and standalone exhibitions such as Destination Tyneside at the Discovery Museum in Newcastle upon Tyne (UK) and MeM – Memory and Migration at the Galata Maritime Museum in Genoa (Italy).

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Fig. 1 | View of the Auswanderermuseum (Emigration Museum), BallinStadt, Hamburg (Germany), hosted in the philologically reconstructed former premises of the Emigration Halls built by HAPAG (Hamburg-America Line), the shipping company formerly located in the same area

origins, most of them have a lot in common in their focus, mission, curatorial practices and design (Baur 2010a; Baur 2010b; Cimoli 2013). Among these, a museum’s location and venue are crucial elements in its founding. Indeed, migration museums are often hosted in places that have a history related to migration, such as port cities, docklands, and border or departure towns, and areas that have seen intense migration flows. Whenever possible, the museum building is also directly connected with stories of migration and itself bears a memory of migration: this is the case, for example, with the Red Star Line Museum in Antwerp (Belgium) or the forthcoming migration museum in Rotterdam, to be hosted at the Fenix warehouse in the city. So typical is this feature that the ‘availability’ of a certain building with a certain ‘migration story’ can itself prompt the decision to create a migration museum. The majority of migration museums in Europe, and especially the very earliest ones, often deploy recurring visual elements and display arrangements that structure their design and narrative (Lanz 2016). These similarities are partially due to the fact that many of them are often largely modelled on their overseas counterparts, even though their premise and context largely differ. Above all, be they temporary or long-term, standalone or integrated in permanent museum exhibitions, organised chronologically or thematically, exhibitions focusing on migration often share the common feature of design solutions: this is largely characterised by the intention to stimulate empathy in the visitors toward the protagonists of the story told, aiming at achieving greater visitor involvement. To do so, they frequently resort to recurring narratives, objects and settings (Whitehead/Lanz 2019; Mason et al. 2018). These encompass: the recurrence of common themes linked to the ‘migration experience’, such as the voyage or the border crossing; the mise en scene of situations largely characterised by role-playing games, such as the presence of

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Fig. 2 | Reconstruction of the Boca neighbourhood in Buenos Aires at MeM – Memory and Migration at the Galata Maritime Museum in Genoa (Italy)

a narrator or interlocutor, with whom visitors have the impression of being able to converse; solutions to put the visitor ‘in the shoes’ of a migrant; tests and quizzes; the use of direct and indirect witnesses, including interviews, video testimonies, original letters and migration office records; and the display of ‘iconic objects’, most typically luggage, travel documents, passports, clothes or baby toys and, more recently (and disturbingly), lifejackets. The latter, in particular, are usually arranged in the exhibition design to exploit their affective visual impact and immediate connection with the exhibition themes. Their value mainly resides in the meaning they embody, the personal – often poignant – story they can help to recount, and the related feelings they evoke, rather than in their rarity or cost. Such museum displays play with the notion of value to emotional effect. The material objects relating to migration are everyday, ubiquitous things, sometimes of poor quality. And yet they are invested with particular specialness because of the sense that they have been vital in someone’s life story. Another recurring solution used with a similar scope is the inclusion in the exhibition of what we may call ‘immersive spaces’. These can be ‘actual’ historical spaces, or set-ups designed to reproduce meaningful spaces related to the migration experience being represented, such as ships, trains, stations, halls and border checkpoints. These large or full-scale exhibits have a dramatic impact because they resemble scenography, staging visitors into the representation. They are often walkable and may include original furniture and replicas, lights, projections, sounds, and sometimes even walk-ons from digital or ‘real’ human interlocutors. The aim is to enable visitors

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to willingly suspend their awareness of subject positions and divest themselves of their roles as spectators in order to become something like characters in the story. An imaginative effort is required of the visitor to do this, and it can prompt questions about the politics of positionality. Can visitors really imagine themselves into a migration story? Or does that run the risk of transforming momentous and sometimes difficult stories into vicarious indulgence? Migrants responding to deadly ‘push factors’ (hunger, war, disaster, etc.) have neither the leisure nor agency to engage and disengage from migration at will that visitors have, so a politics of inequality opens up here. Alternatively, we might argue that anything is beneficial that can raise general awareness in society of migration stories past and present. (For an in‑depth discussion of this, see Whitehead/Lanz 2019 ). In his study on immigration museums in the United States and Canada, Baur defines these elements of display – migrants’ objects, immersive spaces, and so on – as “visual metaphors”, naming them “containers” (Baur 2010b, 9; Baur 2017, 347). In his view, their role in the museum display is to make tangible the museum’s overarching narrative of a common experience of migration, shared in some way by most if not all members of a society. This contributes to a revisioning of the national imagined community (Anderson 1983), by turning the phenomenon and effects of immigration from a challenge for a nation state-based identity into a “constitutive part of its narrative (re‑)construction” (Baur 2017, 343–347). As he also recognises, in doing so, a very peculiar role is played by the architectural context as an actual and powerful “container”. The following two examples – the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration and the Lower East Side Tenement Museum – share such a ‘place-based’ approach to the representation of histories and memories of migration. They are both located in historic immigration sites, which are an inherent part of their communication and museal projects. However, the relationship with the built environment is developed in different ways, both in terms of their curatorial practices and of their exhibition design.

Ellis Island and the Tenement Museum: representing the ‘becoming Americans’ Ellis Island is one of the world’s most renowned migration museums and forms a common reference point for many others. Opened in 1990, it is one of the oldest-running migration museums in the world. It is also one of the largest, with a surface area of about 9,000 square meters, and it is by far one of the most visited, with more than 2 million visitors per year. The museum is hosted in the former premises of one of the major American Federal Immigration Stations located on Ellis Island in New York City. It ran intermittently from 1892 to 1943 as an immigration station. It was then converted into a prison for “alien enemies” during the Second World War and was finally decommissioned in 1954 (Moreno 2001). After some 30 years of abandonment, the main building was eventually restored and turned into a museum at a cost of more than 150 million USD. The project – funded completely by private donations and sponsors – began in 1986; its aim was to take the station back to its original condition, as it had existed between 1918 and 1924.3 Today, Ellis Island can be reached via ferry from Lower Manhattan station at Battery Park or from New Jersey station with an intermediate stop at Liberty Island. The ship docks at the pier, in front of 3  https://libertyellisfoundation.org/immigration-museum. Accessed 8 August 2018.

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Fig. 3 | Main entrance at the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration, hosted in the former premises of the American Federal Immigration Stations

a long glass shelter with a red painted steel structure that marks and protects the entrance (fig. 3). Once you disembark, together with an impressive number of other tourists, there is a short distance to walk before you enter the main red-and-white monumental building of the former immigration station complex, “through the same doors as the immigrants”,4 and thence into the Baggage Room. Here the visit to the Ellis Island Immigration Museum starts. It is a self-guided tour that may be done with the support of an audio guide. The English version of this is narrated by a famous NBC newsreader, a choice aimed at providing a “calculated air of familiarity and gritty authenticity to the historical plot” (Maddern 2017, 390). Despite its fragmented nature, the result of the different agendas of the many actors involved in the museum planning and realisation, a chiefly patriotic rhetoric is implied in the overall museum display (among others, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998; Baur 2006). The ground floor hosts the main museum facilities, including the American Family Immigration History Center, to enable people to undertake registry research about their own immigration background, and the two exhibitions Journeys: The Peopling of America 1550–1890 and Journeys: New Eras of Immigration, 1945-Present, which represent immigration before and after the period narrated in the main exhibition. This is located on the first floor and is organised into two 4  From the museum leaflet.

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Fig. 4 | Map of Ellis Island Museum

main chapters: Through America’s Gate follows the immigration process at Ellis Island, and Peak Immigration Years presents the immigration phenomenon in the period 1880–1924. The second floor includes several smaller exhibitions devoted to Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty and the gallery “Treasures from Home”, which displays several objects brought by immigrants from their homelands and donated by them or their families to the museum (fig. 4). The Lower East Side Tenement Museum is the second immigration museum of New York City, conceived, realised and opened at the end of the 1980s, almost at the same time as Ellis Island Museum (Baur 2017; 2006; Abram 2002; A Tenement Story 1999). The museum is located in a former 1867 tenement, no. 97 Orchard Street, in the middle of the Lower East Side neighbourhood, which has always been one of the liveliest and most multicultural and dynamic areas of Manhattan. The museum dates back to 1985, when Ruth J. Abram, the museum founder, and Anita Jacobson, the curator, started to look for a tenement suitable for the museum in the Lower East Side neighbourhood. Since the search was initially unsuccessful they started the museum as a “museum without walls” (A Tenement Story 1999, 12) by developing public history programmes. In 1988 Abram found, almost by chance, a tenement that had been disused for more than 50 years. In the same year, the museum launched a series of exhibitions on neighbourhood history, while fundraising to purchase and restore the building and researching the lives and

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Fig. 5 | Main entrance of the building at 97 Orchard Street, Lower East Side ­Tenement Museum, New York City

stories of the people who had lived there, with the aim of establishing a museum “promoting tolerance as well as historical perspective” (ibid., 17). In 1992, the museum was officially recognised by the inscription to the National Register of Historic Places and in 1994 the first guided tour was held. Since then several other apartments have been researched and carefully restored, former residents’ stories retraced, and new tours organised. This is achieved through continuous research on the tenement and its materiality and social history, carried out by the museum staff with the support of a wide interdisciplinary team that includes researchers from different disciplines – anthropologists, social historians and museologists, as well as urban architects and interior restorers. Today the Lower East Side Tenement Museum welcomes over 220,000 visitors per year, offering 11 thematic tours of the building and a variety of complementary programmes, which include: historical re‑enactment of the tenement life played by costumed interpreters; neighbourhood visits; seminars; initiatives on social issues and social justice;5 and some targeted activities for immigrants (fig. 5).6 Visits to the museum last an hour and a half on average and are based exclusively on guided tours, with a limited number of participants. Each tour takes place in the tenement’s spaces and delves into the daily life of its inhabitants – all carefully reconstructed through archival research in civil registries, church registers, municipal records and other archives and, whenever possible, 5  Such as the promotion of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience to help sites across the world by spurring visitors to become actively engaged in issues ranging from slavery to poverty. The International Coalition of Sites of Conscience has been founded in 1999, by nine museums from four continents including the Tenement Museum; nowadays, the Coalition includes over 250 members in 65 countries. www.sitesofconscience.‌org Accessed 24 October 2018. 6 In A Tenement Story we learn that this is the first of any National Historic Site to establish an Immigrant Programs Department in order to allow people to “step into the shoes of an immigrant, building empathy for the experience of their foreign-born peers” (1999, 18).

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through interviews with the descendants of former inhabitants. There are family and personal stories about different people who lived there: German, Irish, Italian, Jewish, Eastern European, Chinese and other immigrants, as well as formerly enslaved African-Americans in different historical moments (Abram 2002). During the tour, the guide uses their stories as a starting point to talk about the daily life of the tenement’s inhabitants and immigrants’ struggles for human and civil rights, the development of the neighbourhood and the impact of different immigration flows that still characterise this area of the city today. During the visit, the narration expands from the specific inhabitants’ micro-stories to wider issues, from historical facts to contemporary matters, in order to foster reflection about challenges posed by contemporary immigration phenomena, and about “making it in – and remaking – America […] Who is America? What does it mean to be a citizen? What is our responsibility to those in need? What should a ‘home’ look like?” (A Tenement Story 1999, 22, 52). As Baur points out, even though the two museums adopt “alternative approaches in re‑presenting immigration history […] both are, after all, essentially concerned with American identity and frame immigration history in terms of ‘Becoming Americans’” (Baur 2006, 137) and both adopt a master narrative founded on the same idea of e pluribus unum (the national motto of the United States). Two approaches to the historical site: the place as a frame and the place as a witness Starting from these accounts of the two museums, what interests us in this essay is their different uses of the site in relation to the displays and the relationship of the architectural context with the exhibition design and the curatorial approach. At Ellis Island there are no personal stories, nor national or ethnic groupings of immigrants arriving at Ellis Island; they are regarded as masses, flows of diverse people passing through the America’s gate to become Americans and contribute to the shaping of America’s identity and society. Personal stories, when seldom they appear during the exhibition, suddenly dissolve into the overall story-telling, as they are meant to be representative of wider dynamics. Their value is not in their specificity or peculiarity but rather in their ability to stand for similar vicissitudes and contribute elements to a monumental, shared national story. A similar approach characterises the relationship with the historical site in which the museum is located. Although the exhibition unfolds into the original spaces of the main building that directly link to a large part of the story told, the exhibition objects, the exhibition design and the spaces themselves barely interact. In most cases, the different rooms of the American Federal Immigration Station merely host an exhibition that is not built to relate to them, nor are there references to the physical spaces in the display – for example, texts or objects referring to them – in either architectural or aesthetic terms. The exhibition design, indeed, is mainly based on two solutions: standalone display elements or interior exhibition lining. The first consists in common, functional, modern and standardised cases with a simple squared shape and an anonymous grey-green colour, which are used to display a mixture of graphics and texts, usually directly printed onto them, together with a few historical objects behind protective glass (fig. 6). These elements are freely positioned in the space – usually simply at the centre of the room – with no reference to or interference with it, and without touching the walls of the room, which are painted an unobtrusive pastel varnish. In other cases, an interior lining has been set up to create a room within a room; panels cover the walls and they are used as surfaces for exhibition texts and graphics, to embed or support display cases, hang exhibition items and host and hide technical equipment. In those rooms where this

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Fig. 6 | Standalone display elements in the exhibition Through America’s Gate, Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration, New York City

solution has been adopted, the final effect is de‑contextualising (or, rather, recontextualising), as the dark colours of the panels, the new parquet floor and the dramatic spotlights focused on display cases and curtains on the windows guide visitor attention toward the exhibition, while the sense of historical physical context disappears (fig. 7). Alongside these are other spaces that are not used to host the exhibition but are themselves exhibits. Some spaces have been restored and museumised with accurate reconstructions, labelled and closed behind glass walls as outsize exhibition objects. This is the case with the dormitory and the hearing room, where it is unclear whether furnishings are original or replica (fig. 8). Some other spaces have been left empty as meaningful fulcrums of the exhibition path, both in terms of the spatial layout and symbolic meaning. These are the Baggage Room and the Registry Room, the entrance and the core of the museum. To extend Baur’s term, they are containers within the container (figs. 9–10). Through the museum project, the Ellis Island Main Building becomes, literally and symbolically, the place where different migration experiences converge and in some ways merge. As the different personal stories blur into a unifying master narrative, the space is an important but not an emerging voice of the story. It provides background, the ‘here and there’, but visitors learn little about the building and its history. Building and display are held apart. The museum informative materials, the tour and even the specific exhibitions on Ellis Island history and restoration

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Fig. 7 | One of the rooms in the exhibition Peak Immigration Years, Ellis Island National ­Museum of Immi­ gration, New York City

Fig. 8 | The Registry Room, Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration, New York City

Francesca Lanz and Christopher Whitehead

Fig. 9 | The Baggage Room, Ellis Island National ­Museum of Immigration, New York City

imply that the Ellis Island Main Building has been restored and museumised, perhaps adapted but fundamentally little altered. This is not entirely true. Of about 40 buildings on the island, including the hospital, the detention centre and the psychiatric hospital, only the Main Building is open to the public.7 It has been restored and converted into a museum to take it back to the narrow and carefully selected timeframe of 1880–1924. As Joanne Maddern points out: “patriotic versions of history at Ellis Island have […] been dependent on a careful use of imagery in the museum and strategic aesthetic manipulation of the historical landscape in order to police the meaning extracted from the site” (2017, 391). At Ellis Island, a series of “deliberately encoded aesthetic erasures” (ibid.), operated by the design project for the historical building, serve to deter uneasy visitor questions about immigration restrictions, or the “multitude of purposes”8 for which 7  From October 2014, the former Ellis Island Immigrant Hospital opened to the public as part of a smallgroup guided hard hat tours of Ellis Island including the hospital, infectious and contagious disease wards, kitchen and the mortuary and autopsy room and the laundry. The tour needs to be booked in advance, with a supplementary – and quite expensive – ticket. 8  From Ellis Island Foundation website timeline. https://libertyellisfoundation.org/ellis-timeline. Accessed 8 September 2018.

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Ellis Island was used after 1924, including as a prison, or for the treatment, detention and deportation of immigrants. At the Tenement Museum, the whole visit takes place in the tenement’s spaces, where nothing else is exhibited: no display cases, no informative panels, no digital projections, sounds or objects. A typical apartment tour unfolds in the few, narrow rooms of the original flats. Here, visitors are mainly told about the family’s life; they can walk around and ask questions. The visit ends in a bare room arranged with simple chairs, where the guide shows hard and digital copies of documentary materials, such as newspapers and archive sheets, audio and video documents and historic pictures, enlarging the narrative scope from the inhabitants’ stories to wider issues, before possibly concluding the visit with a short debate involving all the visitors. The architectural space is the main object on display, exploited for both its documentary nature and its emotional and immersive capacity. The tenement was abandoned and left to decay – sometimes squatted in – before it was turned into a museum. The choice of the curators was not to restore it: its spaces have been made safe for visit but left as found, showing the traces of changing use or degradation, the different layers of wallpaper and paining, worn-out wooden floors, and marks left by soot, damp and fire. A few rooms on each floor have been restored and set up as they were when inhabited by the family presented in the tour. This is informed by re-

Fig. 10 | The Hearing Room, Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration, New York City

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search undertaken by architects and conservators on their original status, including investigations of wall varnish and furniture. The overall visit experience is highly engaging. The choice to have small-group guided tours – dictated also by the limited space – fosters personal interaction among the visitors, with the guide and with the spaces themselves. The personal stories are often poignant and stimulate an emotional involvement that is further amplified because they are told in the very spaces where they took place. An example is the vicissitude of the Moores, an Irish immigrant family who moved into 97 Orchard Street in 1869 with their children. They lived here for some years, struggling to survive on a low income, facing painful events such as the death from starvation of one their daughters and fighting against prejudice while celebrating their Irish identity in nineteenth-century New York. Their story is narrated by the guide walking through in the few rooms of their apartment, partially abandoned and marked by the passing of time, partially restored, as it was when they were living there. Such an emotional and empathetic engagement is a declared intention of the museum visit, as it is seen as the starting point for reflection on current issues (Abram 2002). The exhibition design strategy and the architectural intervention in the pre-existing space indeed support this aim: period rooms have historical nuance providing a sense of stepping back in time, while unrestored spaces create a suggestive environment, building on an idea of a ‘haunted’ house that does not make for any drift towards voyeurism but rather communicates through the valorisation of traces and indices of the past.

Final thoughts: ‘vuoti di memoria’, or memory blanks [In order] to give value to space as a powerful element of suggestion […] to resort to spatial solutions rather than to plastic ones, there is a need to create architectural spaces or to underline those that [already] exist, connecting them in absolute unity with the works on display. It is my opinion that it is precisely the voids that it is necessary to build … (Albini 1982, 416–423, our emphasis)

Franco Albini, a twentieth-century master of exhibition design, talks of ‘voids’ (‘vuoti’) here in physical terms. Light and air, he explains, are as much materials of construction as cement, brick, plaster or indeed exhibition furniture. Albini’s major works were art museums and exhibitions, frequently involving architectural reuse, and his comments about “absolute unity” here superficially resemble a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk. Yet they concern his preoccupations with the poetics of display, the making of invisible and yet apprehensible and resonant connections and networks of meaning through the spatiality of the exhibition. Migration museums are not art museums (although they may contain art), but they are not without their aesthetics and the opportunity for poetic meaning-making, especially in configurations, objects and spaces that are a staging for profoundly affecting stories. In the often difficult and potentially discombobulating psychic space of migration history, spatialised and reified in the museum, we can take Albini’s vuoti and give them another set of meanings concerning the relation between the visible and the invisible, or the tangible and intangible, to use the language of heritage. We mean here the cuts into memory involved in effacing the architectures of migration as physical reminders of the past. We can speak here of ‘vuoti di memoria’, or the memory blanks and failures that result from the desire to render a historic building a museum, through which the past is

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made sufficiently amenable for visitors to simulate a ‘return’ to it, but with severe losses in translation that are not incidental but should rather prompt us to think about an ethics of care for the past. As already stated, migration museums are relatively young institutions in Europe and most of them have much in common with respect to their focus, mission and curatorial practices as well as in the matter of display and exhibition design. This is partially due to the fact that many of them, especially the first ones established, are largely modelled on their overseas counterparts, even though their premises and contexts differ. Upon closer analysis, their strongest correlation relates to the language used and the exhibition design solutions adopted rather than to the messages and narratives displayed. Among these, the choice of and relationship with the physical museum venue is critical. Where these museums are located in sites of migration history, the confused relationship between container and contained deserves closer critical analysis. As the two examples analysed in this essay illustrate, the site provides not only a more‑or-less historically significant venue for the museum, but also has the potential to interact with its contents and to frame, affect and shape the visitor experience. The architectural context can indeed resonate with the display in manifold ways. It can back up the museum messages with its aura of authenticity and provide a historically original backdrop to the exhibits. It is a highly suggestive environment that can amplify exhibitionary communication and its impact on visitors, eventually contributing to their emotional engagement by creating a feeling of re‑enacting the experience of migration and allowing visitors to play the time travel game, as if they were ‘stepping back in time’. The Ellis Island and the Tenement Museum demonstrate how, despite being rooted in the same context and based on a singular master narrative, two museums can develop a completely different relationship with their architectural site, implying not only a different exhibition design but also, and above all, a different visitor experience. This is coupled with different curatorial approaches that expand to involve considerations and choices related also to the ‘use’ of the site as an element of the display. For this reason, we argue, a more sensitive approach to the overall museum’s architectural and curatorial design, including those physical changes and exhibition arrangements required for the reuse of the building as a museum, should be developed from the earliest stages of the museum project itself. This is needed to avoid a superficial and pre-determined adaptation of the historical site, which results in its use as either a mere shell or a mono-sign of migration history, emptied of its specificity, stories and particular resonances. Such insensitivity in transforming historic sites of migration into museums can result in a crass simplification or even erasure of the complex of architectural, political and human histories that the buildings embody. It is, in some ways, analogous to what is already happening to many of the other iconic objects that characterise exhibitions on immigration, such as passports and luggage, which overuse turns from valuable multilayered communication tools into stale, prosaic clichés (Poehls 2011). Furthermore, immersive and ‘realistic’ settings, and the invitation to play with place and project oneself backwards in time with the help of a physical referent, often embed a certain level of gamification: this can result in a fair-like, sensation-heavy affective experience that leaves little space for personal and critical reflection, not least because immersion requires a kind of completeness or coherence in the imagination of place that is unambiguously definite and singular (Whitehead/Lanz 2019).

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At the same time, as we have pointed out elsewhere, in these cases, in a superficial sense, the building has not moved, the place is the place, the map is the territory, except insofar as it has been readied for visitor attendance and consumption. However, the process of museumisation brings with it more or less hidden ontological changes that are tantamount to reassemblage, even if at the physical level there may seem to be little changes between then and now, other than the odd security barrier or the addition of a shop, a café, staff, and other museal apparatus. (ibid.)

This means that we must recognise that the transformation of a historical site into a museum involves architectural choices whose meaning goes beyond ‘mere’ design implications: this is a matter of selecting and framing, and working to determine both what visitors are directed to look at and what not. It means determining what should be voided at the mnemonic level, which cuts should be made into the past, and which signs emptied of their meaning. We need also to recognise that there might be “potential tension between the historic site at which and around which the history of immigration is told and the intended narrative itself” (Baur 2017, 350).9 Indeed, a common problem in such museums is the sanitisation of place, erasing the serious consequences of difference, iniquity and prejudice towards others that are, sometimes, embedded in the very physicality of the building, that resonate in its history, and that can be recaptured through documentary research. As Pendlebury, Wang and Law argue, the moment of changing from one function to another is a critical moment in making decisions over what to keep and what to discard in terms of both the material fabric of buildings and in terms of how they are to be narrated, both of which have profound effects on how the past of buildings are subsequently received and understood. (2018, 224)

The reuse of historic sites of migration as migration museums implies a choice of ‘strategic forgetting and selective remembering’ that encompasses the stories told, how and why they are displayed, appeals to audience and the politics of managing the sometimes troubling resonances of historical migrations in the present.

References A Tenement Story: The History of 97 Orchard Street and the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, exh.-cat. Tenement Museum, 1999. Abram, Ruth J. “Harnessing the power of history.” Museum, Society, Inequality, edited by Richard Sandell, Routledge, 2002, pp. 125–141. Albini, Franco. “Le funzioni e l’architettura del museo.” Architettura. Spazio primario, edited by Carlo De Carli, Hoepli, 1982, pp. 416–423. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso, 1983. Baur, Joachim. “Il museo dell’immigrazione.” Nuova Museologia, no. 22, 2010a, pp. 2–8. 9  An example might be as well the case of the Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration, one of the first immigration museums in Europe, which is hosted in the Palais de la Porte Dorée, a beautiful late Art Deco palace, built to mark the 1931 International Colonial Exposition held in Paris in 1931. Here, the museum collection and mission, aimed at representing recent immigration phenomena in France, promoting dialogue and mutual understanding, are faced with a building whose spaces, architecture, history and decorative apparatus were designed as representative of a colonial rhetoric and are permeated by colonial history.

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Exhibiting Voids –. “La rappresentazione della migrazione.” Nuova Museologia, no. 22, 2010b, pp. 27–34. –. “Commemorating Immigration in the Immigrant Society. Narratives of Transformation at Ellis Island and the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.” Enlarging European Memory. Migration movements in historical perspective, edited by Mareike König and Rainer Ohliger, Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 2006, pp. 137–146. –. “Staging Migration – Staging the Nation. Imagining Community at Immigration Museums.” Between Memory Sites and Memory Networks. New Archaeological and Historical Perspectives, edited by Reinhard Bernbeck et al., Edition Topoi, 2017, pp. 341–357. Cimoli, Anna Chiara. “Migration Museums in Europe: Narratives and their Visual Translations.” European Museums in the 21st Century, edited by Luca Basso Peressut et al., Politecnico di Milano, 2013, pp. 313–407. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. Destination Culture. Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. University of California Press, 2018. Lanz, Francesca. “Staging Migration (in) Museums: A Reflection on Exhibition Design Practices for the Representation of Migration in European Contemporary Museums.” Museum & Society, vol. 14, no. 1, 2016, pp. 178–192. Maddern, Joanne. “The ‘Isle of Home’ is Always on Your Mind: Subjectivity and Space at Ellis Island Museum.” Global Mobilities; Refugees, Exiles, and Immigrants in Museums and Archives, edited by Amy K. Levin, 2017, Routledge, 385–402. Mallgrave, Harry F. L’empatia degli spazi: Architettura e neuroscienze. Raffaello Cortina Editore, 2015. Mason, Rhiannon, et al. “Experiencing Mixed Emotions in the Museum: Empathy, Affect, and Memory in Visitors’ Responses to Histories of Migrations.” Emotion, Affective Practices, and the Past in the Present, edited by Laurajane Smith et al., Routledge, 2018, pp. 124–148. Moreno, Barry. “Ellis Island Chronology Timeline (1674–2001).” National Park Service, Ellis Island Library, 2001. Pendlebury, John, et al. “Re‑using ‘uncomfortable heritage’: The case of the 1933 Building, Shanghai.” International Journal of Heritage Studies, vol. 23, no. 3, 2018, pp. 211–229. Pallasmaa, Juhani. The Eyes of the Skin. Architecture and the Senses. John Wiley, 2005. Poehls, Kerstin. “Europe, Blurred: Migration, Margins and the Museum.” Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research, no. 3, 2011, pp. 337–353. Tzortzi, Kali. Museum Space: Where Architecture Meets Museology. Routledge, 2015. Whitehead, Christopher, et al. Placing Migration in European Museums. Politecnico di Milano, 2012. –, et al., editors. Museums, Migration and Identity in Europe. Ashgate, 2015. –. “Why Analyze Display?”, 2016. CoHERE Website, http://cohere‑ca.ncl.ac.‌uk/#/grid/56. Accessed May 2018. –, and Francesca Lanz. “Museums and a Progressive Sense of Place.” Museums and Communities: Diversity, Dialogue and Collaboration in an Age of Migrations, edited by Jenny Walklate and Viv Golding, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019. –. “‘Only Connect’: the heritage and emotional politics of showcasing the suffering migrant.” Connecting Museums, edited by Mark O’Neill and Glen Hooper, Routledge, 2019. Zumthor, Peter. Atmospheres: Architectural Environments, Surrounding Objects. Birkhäuser, 2006.

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BEYOND MIGRATION POST-MIGRATORY CONCEPTS AND STRATEGIES

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WHEN MIGRATION TURNS FROM THE SPECTACULAR TO THE ORDINARY Postmigrant Inflections of Analytical Categories and Concepts of Migration Postmigration is a new term in migration studies, in Anglophone contexts in particular. It is a term, concept, condition or perspective that is rapidly developing and has proved to change the ways in which the phenomenon of migration is framed and studied in relation to Western societies. The term itself originated outside academia, around the turn of the millennium, in art circles in Germany, with Berlin as the epicentre. Artists weary of being categorised as ‘minority’ or ‘migrant’ voices and their work as ‘migrant literature’ or ‘immigrant film’ or ‘second generation’ art, began provocatively to label themselves and their art as ‘postmigrant’ to signal an end to their categorical exclusion from the presumed norm of a born-and-bred national culture, art and literature. They wanted to signal their participation in shaping German art and culture, and the collective national self-image, which no longer (if ever) fitted the idea of a white, rooted and historically homogenous demos. Today ‘postmigration’ is a fairly common term in the public debate in Germany. It owes much to the Berlin director Shermin Langhoff, often referred to as the inventor of the term (e. g. see Foroutan 2016, 230), who popularised it in 2006 by launching the Postmigrantisches Theater as a distinctive brand for new productions at the innovative Berlin theatre Ballhaus Naunynstraße (she has developed this approach further at Maxim Gorki Theater since 2013). Subsequently, ‘postmigration’ has become a central concept in German (im)migration research, although its meaning is hotly discussed. It is sometimes used to describe the second and third, etc., generations of immigrants, who have no experience themselves of migrating from one country to another – a use of the term that can be traced in Anglophone research, too (e. g. see Baumann/Sunier 1995). This is the least exciting conception of the term, and it is also frequently rejected as yet another exceptionalising categorisation. A more progressive use understands ‘postmigration’ as a concept that describes not a specific part of the population but a condition for the whole population in its entirety. ‘Postmigration’ describes a new social condition in which migration constitutes a founding and permanent circumstance in shaping the nation and its collective ‘we’. The prefix ‘post’ does not signify an end to migration in this use of the term, nor to all the social problems connected with migration. Quite the contrary, it signifies the crossing of an empirical and cognitive threshold, the point at which migration has grown to become a central and crucial dynamic in social, cultural, imaginative and intellectual change. If anything has ended, it is the idea and the discourse of migration as something exceptional or socially peripheral. Naika Foroutan is one of the leading scholars in the research on Germany as a ‘postmigrant society’ (Foroutan’s term). She defines the ‘postmigrant society’ as a society that is fundamentally

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formed by historical and ongoing migratory movements (see Foroutan 2016, 231; see also Foroutan 2015). Still, as is currently evident all over Europe, there may be quite a gap between a society that is empirically (demographically) postmigrant, on the one hand, and politically postmigrant, on the other. The latter requires a wide public consensus, and political and institutional recognition of migration as something that centrally constitutes the population and collective experience, or the narrative or image of the ‘national we’ that is collectively shared. In this connection, Foroutan contends that a society is not politically postmigrant until it publicly recognises itself as an immigrant nation (as attempted by Schröder in 1998 and Merkel in 2015 when they announced Germany to be an immigrant nation) and institutionally (as attempted by Tate Britain with the 2012 exhibition Migrations: Journeys into British Art, which reviewed British art and identity as “fundamentally shaped by successive waves of migration”) (see Foroutan 2015, 2; Tate 2012, n. p.). A public recognition like this depends on a refutation of the romantic myth of the nation as constituted by a culturally and racially pure and harmonious people organically growing out of its bordered ground – a myth that precisely, and only, upholds itself by the suppression of the historical reality of movement, migration, cultural (ex)change, hybridity and heterogeneity. In line with this, several researchers deploy the overall concept of ‘postmigration’ as an analytical category that re‑launches migration and sociocultural diversity as a state of normalcy – of commonplace and universal relevance and consequence – and something that defines and includes all members of society, regardless of individual background. As an analytical category, postmigration in this way makes the collective experience of cultural heterogeneity visible (discursively and historically) and how the (once) marginalised – or the (continued) politically and imaginatively marginalised – is indeed a central driving force within the nation’s social reality and everyday life (e. g. see Yildiz 2015, 22; see also Schramm et al. 2019 for a detailed account of ‘postmigration’ as an evolving academic term). Yet, at the same time, and although highlighting migration as an essential social fact, the ‘post’ in ‘postmigration’ also marks a distance from certain tendencies in the established studies of migration. By rejecting identity markers such as ‘foreigner’, ‘migrant’ or ‘second’ or ‘third generation immigrant’, the term discontinues the discursive repetition in migration studies of migration as an exceptional matter of otherness and minority politics. The term in this way dissolves binary distinctions between the migratory and the non-migratory, and between immigrants and non-immigrants; this, in itself, generates new explorations of what the collective national ‘we’ is or is on its way to becoming. Regina Römhild, another important figure in the ‘postmigrant turn’ in Germany, has expressed the core implication of the term’s revision of migration studies. In her view, postmigration may overcome the widespread practice in migration research of focusing narrowly on migrants (a practice that repeats the binary distinction between the migrant and the presupposed norm of a non-migrant identity). This is a practice that needs to be turned on its head, she says: research in migration needs to be ‘de-migratised’ (entmigrantisiert) in order to ‘normalise’ migration and allow migratory issues to be analysed not as an exception but as an integral part of everyday social reality. The other way around, and for the same reasons, social and cultural studies (in general) need to undergo a ‘migratisation’ (Migrantisierung). In this manner, she argues, we arrive at a research perspective from two sides in which migration is no longer the object of research but its very point of departure (Römhild 2015, 44). An analytical practice that has its cognitive base in migratory movement and cultural multiplicity as an empirical norm

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comes to replace a longstanding practice in migration, cultural and social studies of examining everything with a presupposed sedentary and homogeneous cultural norm as its (politically unconscious) starting point. In Germany, the study of migration has only recently moved from the social sciences into art studies (e. g. see Dogramaci 2013; Dogramaci/Mersmann 2013). The same applies to the concept of postmigration, in spite of the fact that it originated in art circles. The most substantial research has taken place in the social sciences, and the concept has only been gaining ground in art studies within the last five to six years, where scholars have begun to speak of ‘postmigrant theatre’, ‘postmigrant film’, ‘postmigrant literature’ and a certain ‘postmigrant aesthetic’ (e. g. see Sharifi 2011, 2015; Peters 2012; Geiser 2015; Heidenreich 2015; Schramm et al. 2019; see also Dogramaci 2017 for the term ‘post-exile’ or ‘post-emigration’ in German art). Yet, as my colleagues and I argue elsewhere (see Schramm et al. 2019), using ‘postmigration’ as a term that denotes a subgenre does not take us any further than existing categorisations such as ‘immigration art’ or ‘migration literature’, etc. It is more productive to speak of ‘postmigration’ not as a vehicle of identification or categorisation (save a general historical condition) but as an analytical perspective that may be employed in the exploration of any given work of art – much in the same way that a postcolonial perspective may be employed in readings of works by Turner or Shakespeare without their works being viewed as postcolonial works in themselves. The question is what a postmigrant analytical perspective looks like – what does it do and how does it work? The answers are yet to be discovered, though, as a starting point, I would argue that the contours of a postmigrant analytical perspective may emerge if we look at the ways in which the premises of the concept of postmigration change the usual concepts from migration studies that we typically employ in studies of art reflecting migration and cultural multiplicity, i. e. concepts such as belonging, race, identity, hybridity, multiculturalism, othering, ethnicity, etc. If we follow Römhild’s point of normalising migration as a commonplace yet essential element of the social life and self-image of a nation (and the transnational blur of its boundaries), one of the interesting things that happens is that any issue of migration will achieve a dual status: as crucially significant and trivially banal at one and the same time, as something whose significance appears and disappears concomitantly. Arguably, then, it is the dual status of migration – as significant and banal at once – that affects analytical concepts or provokes them to change, and, if we are dealing with works that already more or less explicitly address or reflect migratory issues and realities (e. g. works of a certain multicultural resonance), it is the ‘de-migratising’ dynamic of the postmigrant perspective that becomes most noteworthy – i. e. the ‘normalisation’ of migration or the disappearance of the exceptionality of migration into everyday life. To give an example, a concept such as ‘identity’ comes to be inflected by a whole range of everyday affects generated by a complexity of social, cultural, economic, psychological and bodily conditions that are not unique to a first-hand migrant experience or necessarily hail primarily from the experience of a migratory family heritage. The analysis of identity in relation to a work of art changes accordingly. The dissolution of clear distinctions between (uprooted) migrants and (rooted) non-migrants gives way to the analysis of multiple subject positions and social interrelations in which the significance of a biographical migrant experience or immigrant background (near or distant) may appear and disappear in different contexts. Easy categorisations such as ‘native identity’ and ‘migrant identity’, or idealisations of a particular ‘migrant subjectivity’, lose

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currency as terms that easily overwrite a far greater complexity of contradictive and shifting individualities within complex social and existential contexts.1 This article leaves no space to engage with postmigrant inflections of all of the major concepts from migration studies – this is a huge task and one still to be done (and to be registered as more and more postmigrant readings of art come into being). For the sake of a little more detail, I will offer a few theoretical reflections on how the concept of belonging may change in a postmigrant frame of analysis, before moving onto a brief illustrative case study of London-based Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings. The analysis of belonging in Yiadom-Boakye’s art is interlinked with the concept of race. Although racialisation continues to be an issue in milieus where the presence of multiple cultures and skin colours has become an everyday norm, I will show how a postmigrant analysis of art may be sensitive not only to the continuance, but also to the contradictive and anticipatory disappearance of any social magnitude or dissension attached to skin colour. In the latter respect, postmigration causes the concept of race to enter into close proximity with (controversial) concepts such as ‘post-race’ and ‘post-othering’. In migrant analyses of art and literature, the question of belonging is mostly viewed in terms that have to do with the act of migration. Typically, belonging is looked at in terms of national, ethnic or cultural affiliation only, and sharply contrasted with sensations of national, ethnic or cultural unbelonging. Roots and uprooting are recurrent metaphors, and analyses have traditionally been concerned with nostalgia or the loss of ‘roots’ and the struggles to ‘re-root’ depicted in migrant art, film and literature, if not soaring into a (now much criticised) celebratory discourse of transnational nomadism, the work depicting a deconstructive or weightless condition of ‘belonging nowhere and everywhere’. In all cases the analysis of belonging singles out a ‘migrant’ identity or subjectivity as distinct from a ‘native’ or ‘non-migratory’ position or context. To describe how the concept of belonging is de‑migratised in a postmigrant analysis, we may borrow and further develop a metaphor from Roger Bromley. With reference to Raymond Williams, Bromley speaks of belonging as a structure of feeling. The diasporic discourses of new and distant homelands typically rely on mytho-poetic images of rootedness, uprooting and re‑rooting, and may accordingly be characterised in terms of a ‘vertical’ structure of feeling: it is a structure of feeling, or, we might add, an analytical orientation, governed by the more or less finite implications of national, ethnic or cultural attachment – a root metaphysics mystified by the root metaphor’s iconicity. Yet, according to Bromley, the ‘vertical’ structure of feeling is increasingly replaced by a

1  As for an important concept such as hybridity, I refer to my book Migration Literature and Hybridity: The Different Speeds of Transcultural Change (2010), which may offer one possible outset for exploring de‑migratisations and re‑migratisations of hybridity as an analytical concept. Using Bakhtin and Deleuze (among others), the theoretical chapter of the book offers tools to differentiate between several forms and modes of hybridity and hybridisation. It describes Bhabha’s postcolonial-migratory notion of a ‘third space’ as a case of ‘intentional hybridity’ that highlights hybridisation as a critical and productive force of cultural difference and instability. In Römhild’s terms, Bhabha’s form of ‘intentional hybridity’ translates as a migratisation of the concept of hybridity and a deliberate deployment of the concept to challenge sedentary presumptions of cultural stability and homogeneity. Next to intentional hybridity, the book develops Bakhtin’s concept of ‘organic hybridity’ (and related theories) as a tool to make visible a form of cultural hybridity, or a slow and inconspicuous form of intercultural change, which is disappearing, or ‘de-migrating’ into the experience of a (changing) sameness in everyday life.

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‘horizontal’ structure (Bromley 2011, n. p.). He explains horizontality as multiple simultaneous feelings of attachment to cultures and places on a local and international level that may be far more important than any narrow national sensation of belonging. Horizontality is a suitable metaphor to describe the way belonging as an analytical concept changes in a postmigrant frame of analysis, yet, in a postmigrant deployment, the horizontal orientation in feelings of belonging – or the horizontal orientation in the study of feelings of belonging – would incorporate more than Bromley proposes. Horizontality in a postmigrant analysis would include Bromley’s attention to sub- and supranational feelings of belonging (along with ‘vertical’ feelings of national, ethnic or cultural belonging), but the advantage of horizontality would not relate only to a multiplication of cultures and places of attachment – it would relate to a multiplication of modes of attachment or ways in which feelings of belonging (or unbelonging) are produced. The latter includes the production of feelings that are not particular to or necessarily related only to a migrant experience, and so not to any galvanising myth of national, ethnic or cultural naturalisation, but to everyday material practices and relations, where feelings of (un)belonging are produced in sometimes unpredictable or very small and inconspicuous ways, but definitely and always in contradictory ways. As the particularity of migratory issues dissolves into an everyday social life that is crucially and banally shaped and produced by migration, the analysis of belonging begins to spread out and split up large-scale (and many times abstract) concerns with national, ethnic or cultural (up)rootedness with questions of how a work may reflect feelings of belonging and unbelonging within a multitude of minute everyday processes and shifting, incomplete and contradictory sensations of detachment and attachment. In this mode of analysis, feelings of meaningful attachment may be studied as products of shifting social, economic and individual psychological and bodily conditions and contextualities. They may be studied as contradictory sensations of attachment and detachment generated by shifting everyday contexts of socialisation and self-inventions, by intimate relationships and arbitrary encounters, and even by different emotional responses to the same thing from one moment to the next or transitory bodily sensations of emplacement or displacement (conscious and subconscious). The modes in which sensations of belonging or unbelonging are produced in a work multiply in this perspective, and questions of national, ethnic or cultural attachment or detachment (distant or near) come to form but one line of inquiry, immersed and incomplete as they are within a complexity of other incomplete socio-psychological, emotional, bodily and existential circumstances. In short, a key analytical concept in migration studies such as belonging is made to engage with a greater and more complex matrix of life issues and changing contextualities than the exclusive attention to cultural and national rootedness or uprootedness may call for.

A postmigrant analysis of Yiadom-Boakye’s portraits Moving on to the case study of Yiadom-Boakye, it should be noted that the changes that have been going on in German art circles since the early 2000s share many overlaps with developments in black British art and studies. Many British artists also distance themselves from patterns of cultural identification (a process that gathered speed in the 1990s). Likewise, themes and formal experimentations continue to expand in ways that cause the relevance of categorisers such as ‘migrant’ and ‘black’ to wax and wane. Leon Wainwright describes the change in the

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British context as a general shift away from the ‘Black Art’ period of revisionism from the 1970s to the early 1990s that was characterised by strongly identitarian oppositions and continuous struggles for institutional visibility. He sums it all up as a change away from the feeling of being ‘black in Britain’ towards a feeling of becoming ‘black British’ (Wainwright 2006, 170). The postmigrant perspective (and its post-race and post-other appendages) may be seen as an extension to this line of thinking. Without erasing continued feelings of being ‘black in Britain’ or becoming ‘black British’, the concept also adds the possibility of analytical perspectives in which a categoriser such as ‘black’ melts entirely into the categoriser ‘British’, i. e. ‘black British art’ becomes ‘British art’ (where the category ‘British’, and this is very important, already in itself presupposes multiple positions, cultures and skin colours). In relation to this, an inspiring term that has cropped up in the study of belonging in recent black British literature is ‘ease of presence’ (e. g. see Upstone 2010, 88, who also credits Darcus Howe for the term) which is employed to describe an increasing disappearance in contemporary British literature of the kind of race-related anxieties of unbelonging and social exile that marked 20th-century literature – and 20th-century art, as in for example Tam Joseph’s UK School Report (1984) and Marcia Bennett’s Between a Rock and a Hard Place (1992) (figs. 1 and 2). As we shall see in the analysis of Yiadom-Boakye, ‘ease of presence’ may help to describe a post-racial sentiment in which sensations of displacement and unbelonging caused by racialisation and internalised racial identifications appear to be disappearing, or, at least, to have lost the power over the subject they once had. The analysis will also show how ‘ease of presence’ is a term that goes very well with a horizontal analysis of belonging, as a ‘de-migratised’ alternative to terms such as rootedness and uprootedness. Not only does the term mark a shift away from the heavy focus on migrant experiences that fills up such root metaphors, ‘ease’ and ‘unease’ also appear to call for a far more expansive and embodied mode of analysis than ‘rooted’ and ‘uprooted’ when it comes to describing the heterogeneous and entangled mesh of (fleeting and more enduring) affects that create or thwart sensations of belonging.

Fig. 1 | Tam Joseph, UK School Report, 1984, acrylic on canvas

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Yiadom-Boakye’s art is often categorised as ‘diasporic art’ (with reference to her Ghanaian descent), in spite of the fact that she was born in London (in 1977) and that migration or issues of national, ethnic or cultural displacement, unbelonging or re‑rooting really seem to have vanished out of her pictures. Her paintings (e. g. figs. 3–5) look like conventional portraits, but they are not. Yiadom-Boakye (who is also a writer) is a painter of fictive subjects. The faces and bodies in her pictures are not images of real people, but assemblages of bits and pieces from photos and magazines, live models and her own inventions. One of the most striking things about her art in this regard is not only the way in which it opens itself completely to the viewer’s interpretation (something that is of course not uncommon in visual art), but the way it does so while inviting something similar to a literary mode of reading. As introduced in the catalogue for one of her solo exhibitions, Yiadom-Boakye’s pictures depict “fictional subjects who inhabit a world purposefully left open to the projected associations and inferences of the viewer” (Jack Shainman Gallery 2012, n. p.). As we shall see, this is important for the way in which a concept such as (racial) identity is set in motion by the pictures.

Fig. 2 | Marcia Bennett, Between a Rock and a Hard Place, 1992, mixed media

Another feature that invariably captures her audiences is the fact that the faces, heads and bodies in her pictures are almost exclusively black. She responds to this in a manner that both emphasises and trivialises that aspect of her art: “People are tempted to politicize the fact that I paint black figures, and the complexity of this is an essential part of the work. But my starting point is always the language of painting itself and how that relates to the subject matter.” In another context, she says: “Race is something that I can completely manipulate, or reinvent, or use as I want to. Also, they’re all black because […] I’m not white” (cit. in Jack Shainman Gallery 2012, n. p.). In a postmigrant frame of analysis, Yiadom-Boakye’s art would be recognised on one level as a manifestation of how the UK is fundamentally shaped by migration. As her ‘portraits’ people the walls of galleries and museums, they contribute to the contemporary mirror – or, in fact, narra-

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tive – of the collective ‘we’ as a multicoloured, multicultural product of historical and contemporary migration. In extension, her canvases work as a postcolonial/migratory corrective to the general history of the black body in white European art, i. e. its common presence, historically, as an exotic or menacing peculiarity and its general absence, historically, in descriptions of a shared heritage and the commonplace of everyday life (in spite of exceptions to the rule, also in European portrait painting, such as Jan Mostaert’s Portrait of an African Man (c. 1525–1535), William Henry Hunt’s Portrait of a Black Boy with a Slate (c. 1840) or Astrid Holm’s Rose Sets the Table (1914), to mention but a few). But as much as a postmigrant analysis would illuminate how the images speak in the context of a recent and deep migrant and postcolonial history, it would also be sensitive to how any migratory (or ‘diasporic’) exceptionality is disappearing in her art. If compared to Joseph’s UK School Report and Bennett’s Between a Rock and a Hard Place, Yiadom-Boakye’s fictive portraits do not explicitly thematise questions of belonging, for instance, or anxieties regarding racial identification or ethnicity or heritage. There is no anxiety either of national or social exile, or any sense of her subjects representing a minority or in any way a peripheral status. Any deliberate framing of migratory and racial exceptionality has vanished altogether, replaced, it seems, by everyday situations and themes. Yiadom-Boakye’s figures relax, read, think, wait, daydream or linger in unselfconscious emotional states. We may (at least in that regard) speak of an ease of presence radiating from her fictive figures. Yiadom-Boakye states herself that they are “suggestions of people […]. They don’t share our concerns or anxieties. They are somewhere else altogether” (Nathan 2010, n. p.). Although “somewhere else altogether”, their presence is undeniable: “That emphasis on a strong presence is really important, and I’m always looking for a strong line, a strong curve or a strong look. They should never appear to shrink away” (Yiadom-Boakye 2015, n. p.). Withdrawal and strong presence seem to occur at the same time. This, I would like to think, may be due to the possibility that what we are in fact encountering in her pictures is a strong presence of the ordinary or the banal – only spectacle and exceptionality withdraw. The commonplace or the ordinary is certainly one of the prominent features when looking at Yiadom-Boakye’s canvases. With only a few exceptions, her subjects are all plainly dressed, in everyday loose and baggy T‑shirts, blouses, pants and simple dresses, touching on the characterless and nondescript. Ordinariness is sometimes further underlined by titles such as 11am Monday (2011) or 4am Friday (2015). Schwabsky touches on the gist of it when he says that her subjects are individually unique, but they do not “exteriorize or dramatize their individuality” (Schwabsky 2011, 36); nor, as we shall see, do they exteriorise or dramatise any particular racial identity. If Yiadom-Boakye’s images were brought into the context of a postmigrant (horizontally oriented) analysis of belonging, they would be noted for the absence of any symbolic drama of ‘diasporic’ uprooting, re‑rooting or uncertainties of national inclusion. In a work such as A Culmination (fig. 3), for instance, analytical attention would have to be redirected from an exclusive (and vertical) discourse of (racial and cultural) roots to a tracing of sensations of ease or unease as they flicker across the faces and bodily poses – states of ease or unease which may be caused by a complexity of factors. At a first glance, a sense of belonging or an ease of presence emanates from the group on an emotional and bodily level, which seems to originate precisely from the display of everyday ordinariness. A casually gathered group of young men, all dressed in the same green coloured suits, are blending in with the green of the background, leaving the impression of some kind of unproblematic emplacement in an outdoor and presumably public

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Fig. 3 | Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, A Culmination, 2016, oil on canvas

space. Yet the vagueness of time and place and the absence of any symbolic content push the viewer to entertain explanations for the apparent ease of presence within a range of possibilities, as suggested in the physical appearance of the four figures. The men stand close, their bodies touching, as if bound together by the intimacy of familiarity, or by some occasion, perhaps a cultural ritual (all being dressed up), or perhaps their familiarity is due to a shared experience on the basis of age or gender, or class. They seem to be the same age, to be fairly relaxed in their own all-male company, and, like most of Yiadom-Boakye’s figures, or, indeed, characters, seem to enjoy the social and economic ease that comes with some level of middle-class security. Their apparent familiarity may of course also derive from a shared experience of racialisation. A postcolonial or migrant reading may look at the picture with the assumption of the group being encircled by a larger white space. A reading like that would squeeze the men together and confine the apparent effortlessness of their social emplacement to that of a limited racial group and space. It is possible, yet nothing in the picture itself suggests it. On the contrary, their apparent ease of presence seems also to apply to the appearance of skin colour in the picture (as in all Yiadom-Boakye’s pictures): “It’s as if they’ve never been made to feel that their race could count against them […] one could call them ‘postblack,’ to use the term coined a decade ago by Thelma Golden.” (Schwabsky 2011, 36) If we bracket race (and other group designations), singularity and individuality are allowed to take over the picture. Our attention moves to different emotions and states of mind as they

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run across the faces and bodily positions in the picture, which may both unsettle and confirm the sense of a shared belonging that the group engenders at an initial glance. Only one character confirms the group visually by looking inward, towards it, and his eyes and conversational smile are in fact only addressed to one other person, who appears inattentive, casting a sideways glance at something outside the group. The only smile in the picture also has a note of uncertainty quivering in the corner of the upper lip, and on the opposite side we encounter a slightly worried expression, or perhaps it is absentmindedness to judge by the glazed-over look in the eyes. The character is withdrawn and somewhere else in thought, slipping out of his presence within the group. The last character is semi-transfixed on something in the direction of the audience (or looking the audience in the eye). He might be confirming the group behind him through the confrontation with an outside or outsider, but his eyes also seem about to form a question that has yet to find its focus. In this manner, individual states and fleeting emotional expressions shimmer back and forth in the picture in ways that produce an inconclusive quivering of the impressions the picture may give to questions of emplacement, belonging or fitting in. Yiadom-Boakye has said about her figures that “[t]hey have no roots, no origin other than their skin colour – which is not actually presented as a strong sign of identity” (Grau 2014, 41). When the concept of belonging meets with art in this way, it is forced into a horizontal mode of inquiry where metaphors of ‘rootedness’ give way to questions of how belonging is produced indistinctly by a multiplicity of coinciding factors, such as class, age, gender, bodily life, cultural practices and individual situations and circumstances. Ethnicity and race, too, become relative and inconclusive factors in the horizontal analysis. The ease of presence Yiadom-Boakye’s black characters generally impart – the apparent absence of feelings of unbelonging or displacement caused by (internalised) race identifications – may be explored from another angle, one that causes the issue of racial identity (or difference) to disappear altogether. Wainwright is right in observing that black British art (and ‘migrant art’, we can easily add) has always suffered from “an unfair reputation for making art solely around cultural identity debates”, which, he says, “has probably held back a more sophisticated reception” (Wainwright 2006, 155). Added to that, “[t]he linguistic and textuality paradigm” of the 1980s and 1990s “would suppose that art objects have the ability to codify narratives, or to offer a didactic ‘voice’ in a wider political struggle” (ibid., 157). In the end, works of visual art “have been made into signifiers, named as cultural products, transformed and translated into signs and representations” at the expense of attention to the material dimensions of the work, “the tactile and visually-apparent physical ones […] textures and colours” (ibid., 157). Against this backdrop, Yiadom-Boakye’s pictures seem almost as if they want to obfuscate, if not entirely inhibit, any allegorical or semantic reading – on both the formal and the content level of the works: there is an absence of symbolism and the works are deliberately framed conceptually as fictions with no clear or legible meaning or narrative, not even in the peculiar and obviously literary titles, which often remain opaque and mysteriously inexplicable and mostly seem to have no apparent connection with the image displayed, e. g. A Culmination or The Cream and the Taste (fig. 4). For the sake of moving away from reading images as “interpretable texts without sensory diversity”, Wainwright encourages a renewed sensitivity to the “diverse phenomenological performances” that are central to the visual arts, such as the material dimensions of tactility, texture, composition and colour (Wainwright, quoting Barbara Stafford, 2006, 158). Appreciating the

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Fig. 4 | Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, The Cream and the Taste, 2013, oil on canvas

“phenomenological performances” of Yiadom-Boakye’s art is not isolated in the sensory diversity and vivacity of the materiality of colour, paint and canvas, however. Materials, colours, forms and subject matter all converge in the sense that the vivacity of the paint itself interchanges with the vivacity of the represented figure. Paint, to Yiadom-Boakye, is “alive, fleshy and unpredictable” (Yiadom-Boakye 2015, n. p.), and so are the characters in her paintings. They are precisely not legible identities and they are not symbols or images that scale the individual onto a representational responsibility larger than themselves – ‘migrant’, ‘native’, ‘black’, ‘ethnic’. They emerge as arbitrary, heterogeneous and volatile subjectivities. Reading them is difficult. The figures are expressions of moods and emotions of ordinary people, but they are momentary, often incipient emotions and almost unnoticeably dramatised in the fleetingly subtle curves and twitches of facial flesh and muscles (a tremble by the eye) and expressive bodily gestures and postures (a slight slant of the head). Other than that, they reveal nothing by themselves. “Rather than a statement of affirmations” or any “explicit narrative”, they qualify, like poetry, as “suggestions” (Grau 2014, 37). Accordingly, the viewer’s reading of the characters will always be incomplete. The limits of any linguistic or semantic – or textual – mode of inquiry that may be brought into the picture by various contextualisations are made clear and exceeded by the sensory and visual performance of the subject matter. The visual aspect of the faces – determined by no premeditated specificity of meaning – provokes bodily felt sensations and intuitive emotional interpretations of human

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Fig. 5 | Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Wrist Action, 2010, oil on canvas

communication as shaped in fleshy matter. That is what Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings may ultimately draw their viewers into: the depths of an incomplete empathetic activity of intuiting the inner world or emotional state of another human, which always withdraws from absolute knowledge or identification, and, in turn, unsettles our own position as rationally detached and informed ‘interpreters’ or ‘identifiers’. Race disappears, accordingly, in Yiadom-Boakye’s art, along with any anxiety of racial unbelonging or maginalisation, not only in the attention the paintings draw to their own creation and materiality – the vivacity of the brushstrokes (made visible by their sloppiness and urgency) – but in the attention they call to the vivacity and multiplicity of emotional nuances and in the very ordinariness of the subjects. Broadly comparing Yiadom-Boakye with different tendencies in black art, Karen Rosenberg notes the following: Where painters including Barkley L. Hendricks, Kehinde Wiley and Mickalene Thomas have taken a celebratory, triumphant and sometimes showy approach to the black subject, Ms. Yiadom-Boakye makes it nearly invisible. She favors a dark, near-monochromatic palette and loose, even sloppy brushwork. Faces are inchoate, bodies phantomlike. (Rosenberg 2010, n. p.).

Yet, in a postmigrant reading, race does not disappear in Yiadom-Boakye’s art because her faces and bodies withdraw into a “dark, near-monochromatic” space or become “inchoate” and “phan-

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tomlike”. It disappears precisely in the abundant visibility of black faces and bodies, and, crucially, in the mode of their abundant visibility. The skin colour of Yiadom-Boakye’s characters is visible, abundantly so in its repetition on canvas after canvas, but it is not made visible in any lyrical or symbolic mode; it is made visible in a mode of everyday ordinariness and commonplace spontaneity – in gestures, moods and demeanours that are widely if not universally familiar. In this way, Yiadom-Boakye’s subjects come to belong to a cognitive space that white bodies and faces have seamlessly inhabited in European art for centuries: the representational space of the human, not of racial identity but of universal faces and bodies in which the reflection of human feelings becomes the main issue, drawing their viewers (regardless of their skin colour) into an empathic play of emotional questioning and discernment – if not simply into the intuitive social and intersubjective sympathy produced by the automatic reflexes of neural mirroring. All of this does not place Yiadom-Boakye’s art in a naively post-critical or post-political position in relation to the question of migration and race. “It always stuns and worries me when people say, ‘Oh, but you’re not political’, because I am,” she says, “It’s just that there are many ways to skin a cat” (Yiadom-Boakye 2015, n. p.). Yiadom-Boakye’s works are imbued with “historical consciousness”, but they avoid “the academic and histrionic”, as Schwabsky puts it (2011, 37), which makes them political on a level that is more embedded than overt, digging deeper into the nebulous depths of interhuman relations and interdependences – the shared but strange depths of human emotion that makes any finite identity or identification impossible and the instinctive somatic and empathetic reflexes by which the self momentarily loses itself in the thought of the other. Accordingly, the political charge of the paintings is perhaps most effective when it disappears from view.

Conclusion Almost twenty years ago Kobena Mercer announced that migration and multiculturalism were finally moving into a state of normality in Europe: To the extent that the postcolonial vocabulary, characterized by such terms as ‘diaspora’, ‘ethnicity’ and ‘hybridity’, has displaced an earlier discourse of assimilation, adaptation and integration, we have witnessed a massive social transformation which has generated, in the Western metropolis, what could now be called a condition of multicultural normalization. (Mercer 2000, 234, emphasis in original)

A postmigrant perspective takes its point of departure in “the condition of multicultural normalization” and the consequent displacement of normative assumptions of cultural and racial homogeneity implicated in traditional uses of concepts such as assimilation, adaptation and integration. It is an analytical perspective that migratises the study of society and shared narratives of the collective ‘we’, but at the same time it de‑migratises the study of migration. The latter, I have argued, is particularly visible if we consider the de‑migratisation of analytical categories and concepts such as identity, belonging, race, multiculturalism, othering, ethnicity, etc., through which the study of migration has continued to exceptionalise migration as something other than a social norm. I have sketched a few examples of how such concepts are changing as migration changes from the spectacular to the ordinary and how, from that angle, we may begin to draw the con-

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tours of a postmigrant frame of analysis for the study of multicultural and multicoloured works of art: how a de‑migratised use of concepts such as belonging and race opens up greater complexities in, for instance, the study of identity in relation to the work – complexities that are likely to escape analyses that rely on migratory binaries of rootedness and uprootedness or narrow national, cultural or racial notions of belonging and unbelonging. Yet, as stated, the work of developing a postmigrant frame of analysis in relation to the arts – what it looks like, what it does and how it works – has only just begun. The methods, shapes and effects are bound to be multiple. Another possibility that this article has not touched upon at all is the entire re‑migratisation of the study of works that remain entrenched in presumptions of a pre-migratory and ethnically and racially homogeneous national past: what interesting postmigrant studies lie ahead of, say, Caspar David Friedrich’s or John Constable’s landscapes?

References Baumann, Gerd, and Thijl Sunier, editors. Postmigration Ethnicity: De‑Essentializing Cohesion, Commitments, and Comparison. Het Spinhuis Publisher, 1995. Bromley, Roger. “Lost and Found in Translation: Recognition, Belonging and Diaspora.” Unpublished keynote lecture accessed from author. Held at the ESRC Seminar Series: Diasporic and Transnational Youth Identities: exploring conceptual themes and future research agendas, 2011, no page numbers. Dogramaci, Burcu, editor. Migration und künstlerische Produktion. transcript, 2013. –. “After Exile – Remigration as Artistic Return.” Neue/Alte Heimat. Emigration von Künstlerinnen und Künstlern nach 1945, edited by Dorothea Schoene, Kunsthaus Dahlem, 2017, pp. 36–57. –, and Birgit Mersmann. AG Kunstproduktion und Kunsttheorie im Zeichen globaler Migration, 2013, https:// www.ag-kunst-migration.de/english/. Accessed 27 October 2017. Foroutan, Naika. “Postmigrantische Gesellschaften.” Einwanderungsgesellschaft Deutschland. Entwicklung und Stand der Integration, edited by Heinz Ulrich Brinkmann and Martina Sauer, Springer, 2016, pp. 227–255. –. “Die Einheit der Verschiedenen: Integration in der postmigrantische Gesellschaft.” Kurzdossier nr. 28: Focus Migration, Institut für Migrationsforschung und Interkulturelle Studien (IMIS) der Universität Osnabrück, 2015, pp. 1–7. Geiser, Myriam. Der Ort transkultureller Literatur in Deutschland und Frankreich. Deutsch-türkische und franko-maghrebinische Literatur der Postmigration. Königshausen & Neumann, 2015. Grau, Donatien. “The Meaning of Restraint.” Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, edited by Naomi Beckwith and Donatien Grau, Prestel, 2014, pp. 29–43. Heidenreich, Nanna. V/Erkennungsdienste, das Kino und die Perspektive der Migration. transcript, 2015. Jack Shainman Gallery. “All Manner of Needs.” Jack Shainman Gallery, Exhibitions, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, All Manner of Needs, 13 September‑13 October 2012, jackshainman.‌com. Accessed 5 April 2017. Mercer, Kobena. “A Sociography of Diaspora.” Without Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall, edited by Paul Gilroy et al., Verso, 2000, pp. 233–244. Moslund, Sten. Migration Literature and Hybridity: The Different Speeds of Transcultural Change. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Nathan, Nadine Rubin. “Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s Fashionable Eye.” New York Times Magazine, 15 November 2010, culture blogs, tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.‌com. Accessed 10 February 2017. Peters, Laura. Stadttext und Selbstbild. Berliner Autoren der Postmigration nach 1989. Universitätsverlag Winter, 2012. Römhild, Regina. “Jenseits ethnischer Grenzen. Für eine postmigrantische Kultur- und Gesellschaftsforschung.” Nach der Migration, edited by Marc Hill and Erol Yildiz, transcript 2015, pp. 37–48.

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When Migration Turns from the Spectacular to the Ordinary Rosenberg, Karen. “Portraits of Phantoms, Struggling to Stand Out. Lynette Yiadom-Boakye at Studio Museum – Review.” New York Times, 16 December 2010, nytimes.‌com. Accessed 4 April 2017. Schramm, Moritz, et al. Reframing Migration, Diversity and the Arts: The Postmigrant Condition. Routledge (forthcoming). Schwabsky, Barry. “Margins of Modernism.” The Nation, 23 May 2011, pp. 34–37. Sharifi, Azadeh. “Postmigrantisches Theater. Eine neue Agenda für die deutschen Bühnen.” Theater und Migration. Herausforderungen für Kulturpolitik und Theaterpraxis, edited by Wolfgang Schneider, transcript, 2011, pp. 35–45. –. “Moments of Significance: Artists of Colour in European Theatre.” The Culture of Migration: Politics, Aesthetics and Histories, edited by Sten Pultz Moslund et al., I. B. Tauris, 2015, pp. 243–256. Tate Britain. “Migrations. Journeys into British Art.” Tate.org.‌uk, 31 January‑12 August 2012. Accessed 31 January 2017. Tresadern, Molly. “Ten black British artists to celebrate.” Art UK.‌org, 23 November 2016. Accessed 9 February 2017. Upstone, Sara. British Asian Fiction: Twenty-First Century Voices. Manchester University Press, 2010. Wainwright, Leon. “Canon Questions: Art in ‘Black Britain’.” A Black British Canon?, edited by Gail Low and Marion Wynne-Davies, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, pp. 143–167. Yiadom-Boakye, Lynette. “Paint Is Alive, Fleshy and Unpredictable.” Interview by Louisa Buck. The Art News­ paper, June 2015, theartnewspaper.‌com. Accessed 10 February 2017. Yildiz, Erol. “Postmigrantische Perspektiven. Aufbruch in eine neue Geschichtlichkeit.” Nach der Migration, edited by Marc Hill and Erol Yildiz, transcript, 2015, pp. 19–36.

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MIGRATION AND POSTMIGRATION AS NEW FRAMEWORKS FOR ART THEORY Revisiting the Concepts of Identity, Difference and Belonging

The concept of migration has only begun to surface within the field of art history in recent decades, lately joined by its conceptual offspring, postmigration. Both terms designate historical changes and conditions which present huge challenges to contemporary societies. Thus, it is not surprising that, in a relatively short space of time, these concepts have created a need for, and themselves proved to be indispensable to, the development of new analytical frameworks tailored to the particularities of art and the broader field of visual culture. Although groundbreaking studies have been published, particularly since the mid-2000s, art history still has a shortage of critical terms for analysing how global migration, transnationalisation and transculturation have transformed art production in only a few decades. These processes are obviously not new, but they have intensified to the point where they have changed the structures and workings of the so‑called global art world and affected the practice and self-perception of many artists, especially those whose lives now resemble those of migrant workers in their pursuit of international careers. Perhaps most importantly, globalisation and migration have impacted on the topics and histories artists choose to engage with, the media and materials they use, the way they perceive and interpret the world, and on how their identities (artistic, social, ethnic, gendered, sexual, religious, etc.) are negotiated transculturally as they move (or are prevented from moving) across borders. Migration and postmigration are compelling concepts through which to explore such changes, and they both carry considerable descriptive, theoretical and interpretive weight. The concept of migration is discussed in the first part of this book, and the concept of postmigration unpacked in Sten Moslund’s chapter, so a brief clarification of these concepts will suffice, as the aim of this chapter is not to elaborate further on their origin, meaning and use, but to consider migrant and postmigrant perspectives on artistic engagements with and representations of identity, difference and belonging.1 Both migration and postmigration refer to the movement, circu1  My colleagues and I explore these and other aspects of postmigration in a forthcoming co‑authored volume: Schramm, Moritz, et al. Reframing Migration, Diversity and the Arts: The Postmigrant Condition,, Routledge, forthcoming (2019). See also Petersen, Anne Ring, and Moritz Schramm. “Postmigration. Mod et nyt kritisk perspektiv på migration og kultur.” Kultur & Klasse. Themed issue: Kulturkritik nu (‘Culture critique now’), no. 122. 2016, pp. 179–98. http://ojs.statsbiblioteket.dk/index.php/kok/issue/view/3548 (accessed 6  January 2017). Like the book, this chapter springs from the collaborative research project, “Art, Culture and Politics in the ‘Postmigrant Condition’” (Funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research 2016–2018, project ID: DFF – 4180–00341). As it is not possible to draw clear lines between the contributions of the individual participants to a collaborative process, I would like to acknowledge the inspirational influence of the whole

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lation and resettlement of people, objects and ideas across material and imagined borders and boundaries. The term migration tends to emphasise the very act of moving, including the process of uprooting and regrounding, which supposedly results in a liminal existence ‘in-between’ host country and home country. Or as Sarah Elsie Lookofsky has phrased it, “[t]he immigrant, then, is characterized not as someone who once entered, but as someone who is linguistically confined to the status of perpetual entry” (Lookofsky 2009, 152). The concept of postmigration, on the other hand, provides a ‘local’ focus on the receiving country – signalised by Naika Foroutan’s idea of the “postmigrant society” (Foroutan 2016; Foroutan et al. 2015). However, a postmigratory approach also requires attention to the transnational and transcultural interconnection of the local with the global. ‘Postmigration’ thus connotes an engagement with the impact of past and ongoing migration on society, and with the resulting ‘super-diversity’ and multilateral connectivity of its heterogeneous population (Vertovec 2007). It also functions as an analytical perspective sensitive to the antagonisms, ambiguities, alliances, hierarchies and struggles for recognition and an equal share of the pie at the core of the postmigrant society, understood as a “society of negotiation” (Foroutan et al. 2015, 19). Perhaps most importantly, the idea of postmigration conflates an empirical description of processes in society with a normative claim that the increased pluralism resulting from migration and the far-reaching changes in the Western understanding of identity categories require cultural producers, scholars and politicians to develop new approaches to register this. Thus, postmigratory thinking may serve as a vehicle for the development of a non-binary understanding of the relationship between majority and minorities, as characterised by entanglement. Potentially, this understanding may help end the perpetual and stigmatising ‘migrantisation’ of people of foreign descent and people of colour in European countries. As Regina Römhild has pointed out, this widespread migrantisation is paradoxically perpetuated and strengthened by the dominant perception of migration studies as a field concerned with migrants and ethnic minorities ‘outside’ majority society, a perception which simultaneously co‑constitutes and consolidates the migrants’ “supposed counterpart: the society of white, national, sedentary non-migrants” (Römhild 2015, 39).2 Moving the concern with ‘the migratory’ from the margins to the centre of society, ‘the postmigratory’ becomes something that should concern all members of society, including the so‑called white, sedentary majority. Considering the pervasiveness of binary and segregationist ways of thinking both in and outside academia, it is paramount to understand that there is no clear-cut distinction between migration and postmigration. The boundaries of the two concepts are fluid, and there are obvious overlaps in meaning. I suggest, therefore, that they are best thought of as a continuum, not as distinct categories and mutually exclusive analytical frameworks, despite the differences. Notably, although they both entail an engagement with issues of identification and belonging, the lens of migration tends to zoom in on uprootedness, suspension in existential in‑between spaces and ‘integration’ as a one-sided process, the duty of the immigrant. Conversely, the lens of postmigration focuses on entanglements between minority and majority groups, the variegated group on my work on postmigration: Moritz Schramm, Mirjam Gebauer, Eva Jørholt, Sten Pultz Moslund, Hans Christian Post, Sabrina Vitting-Seerup and Frauke K. Wiegand. 2  Quotations from German sources have been translated by the author.

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forms of individual identity formation, integration as the shared responsibility of all members of society, and the recognition of those who are defined as (apparent) ‘migrants’ or ‘postmigrants’ as members of the national community. A postmigrant lens may thus activate many of the same terms as a migrant lens (e. g. ‘racism’, ‘hybridisation’ and ‘difference’), but it inspires other questions and other answers because it involves a different understanding of what the important issues are. In short, it shifts the emphasis from ‘migrants’ as minority outsiders to processes of migration as integral to society at large. It is impossible to say at which point in the process of transculturation ‘migration’ transmutes into ‘postmigration’, and migrants can become postmigrant citizens, just as citizens can become migrants, either by choice, or because they have been forcibly displaced by such circumstances as war, persecution, destitution or disaster. In other words, there are significant overlaps between the issues at stake in studies of migration and postmigration. Identity, difference and belonging are among them. It is with this fluidity of boundaries and the open-endedness of identity formation in mind that I propose that the theoretical terms and analytical framework considered below can be productively deployed in both migratory and postmigratory studies of art production and visual culture.

Outlining a (post)migratory analytical framework Art history and visual studies can contribute specialist knowledge to the research into the aesthetic, cultural, social and political implications of (post)migratory phenomena only if their existing sets of theories and methodologies are expanded. Revisions may start from new terms and frameworks emerging from within the field itself; or they may spring from self-reflective appropriations of concepts and approaches borrowed from neighbouring fields, for example, migration studies, postcolonial studies, gender and feminist studies, and the broader fields of cultural studies and German Kulturwissenschaft (study of culture). I will opt for the latter approach, as I consider interdisciplinary exchange and dialogue with other fields to be key to the opening up of art history as a specialised field. However, when analysing artworks (and cultural representations) as an expression of identity and belonging, we must remember to distinguish between the ‘migrant’ or ‘postmigrant’ subjects (i. e. the subjects so named by discourses of migrancy) as material subjects, and as a symbolic category. It is as the latter that (post)migrant subjects make their entry into cultural representations (Ponzanesi 2002, 207). As the modern Western notion of art is linked to the ideas of subjective expression and the individual, a range of issues of identity are implicated in art production and discussions about art. Thus, I contend that most studies of art and artists are concerned, either implicitly or explicitly, with questions of identity – be it on an individual, cultural, local, national, transnational or cosmopolitan level. This rings even truer when the interrelationship between art and (post)migration is the subject under discussion because, more often than not, identity politics is involved. The aim of this chapter is, therefore, to explore what perspectives and concepts could be of use to those who wish to study representations of identity and artistic identities which have been shaped by migration or postmigration, as well as to avoid the tendency ingrained in art-historical discourses to exclude or depreciate anything that has not been produced by white male artists with connections to one of the major Western art scenes. Do such migratory and postmigratory

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phenomena require approaches that differ from the study of the representation of ‘monocultural’ national identities, i. e. cultural productions emerging from populations that have historically been relatively homogeneous and settled, or, at any rate, ideologically constructed as unitary and territorially bounded communities? And if so, what might these approaches be? To provide possible answers to this question, this chapter revisits three key concepts and problematics which surface frequently in the discourses on migration-related identity formation and identity politics: identity, difference and belonging. These are all contested concepts, ones that have been widely used, perhaps even so over-used that it has become almost impossible to imagine how they may spur fresh perspectives. As Stuart Hall has pointed out, many concepts are no longer “good to think with” in their original, essentialist form and thus need to be reconstructed, but since there are no other, entirely different concepts to take their place, we can only continue to think with them in their deconstructed forms (Hall 1996, 1–2). Hall uses identity as his example, but his point applies to difference and belonging as well. Like identity, they are core concepts that can no longer be understood in the conventional way, yet without them, or without their revised and renamed offshoots, it is impossible to address certain key questions. I wish to suggest that art history could benefit from adopting a set of concepts coined to address the same problematics from innovative perspectives: Stuart Hall’s, Amelia Jones’s and José Esteban Muñoz’s theories of identification and disidentification, Sara Ahmed’s theory of strange encounters and Marsha Meskimmon’s experimental concept of the worldmaking denizen may provide us with a reconceived framework for analysing the formation and representation of identity, difference and belonging in the context of migration and postmigration. What I have in mind is not just a passive adoption of existing concepts. As Moslund points out, postmigration – and migration, we may add – give a new ‘inflection’ to existing concepts because they transform the theoretical and historical framing of cultural analysis. As we shall see, this inflection is in various ways prepared for by the scholars I draw on. Their work on issues of identity is not about ‘migrants’ or ‘postmigrants’ as specific categories of citizens, as is the case with some of the sociological work on postmigration (Foroutan 2010, 11; Yildiz 2010, 329–330). These scholars do not conceptualise the identity formation of migrants and their descendants as exceptional and inherently different from that of so‑called sedentary individuals; rather they seek to provide non-normative, dynamic understandings of identity formation that may potentially encompass all kinds of individuals and account for both migrant and non-migrant identifications and life stories. A case in point is Meskimmon’s use of the term denizen to rethink citizenship beyond the nation-state. She uses the term to denote a long-time resident who has developed a mutable, but enduring sense of belonging to a new country and community through processes of worldmaking, but who may not hold legal citizenship in the receiving country or cut all ties with her or his country of origin, e. g. an expat, an exile or a refugee. In the following sections, I first turn to feminist and queer scholars, in particular to Jones and Muñoz, who have paved the way for a critical rethink of the key category of identity. I adopt their intersectional understanding of identity, even if it is not easy to adapt intersectional analysis to works of art because they are not open-ended processes (as Jones and Muñoz understand identity formation to be), but commonly associated with material stasis (most works of art are objects or projects completed at a specific moment in time). Next, I address the issue of difference so central to the discussion of the identification, representation and racialisation of people of mi-

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gration backgrounds. Here, I draw on Rosi Braidotti and use Ahmed’s theory of strange encounters to rethink how ‘difference’ and ‘otherness’ are produced in postmigratory contexts. Finally, I turn to Meskimmon in order to shift the perspective on belonging. Belonging is often believed to be an unchanging affiliation that one ‘has’, an authentic bond to one’s country of birth and ethnic community. However, in her recent writings on ‘worldmaking’ as an ethically responsible engagement with and remaking of the world as we know it, Meskimmon has developed a dynamic understanding of belonging as a creative process of continually building and rebuilding one’s ties to place, community and nation (Meskimmon, 2017, 26; Meskimmon 2011, 191).3

From identity to identification The battle over identity and recognition is central to what has been termed ‘postmigrant’ or ‘postmigratory’ (postmigrantisch) in German debates, but similar identity battles are being fought under different names all over Northern Europe. ‘Multiculturalism’ and ‘cultural diversity’ are perhaps the most commonly used blanket terms in the sphere of politics. In the art world, curators have coined new concepts, such as ‘post-other’ (Soh Bejeng Ndikung and Römhild 2013) and ‘post-black’ (Golden 2001), gesturing towards a not-yet-realised state of recognition of minoritised and racialised people, though without forgetting the discrimination and violence which characterise the present. What cuts across the different contexts and variegated local struggles over identity is an increasing awareness of the profound changes that migration after the Second World War has brought about on all levels of European societies. Leading to both welcoming and defensive reactions, ranging from nationalist populism to cosmopolitan conviviality, these historical changes have also led to a growing understanding that all cultures are shaped by the interplay with others through an ongoing process of exchange and mixing, and that the boundaries of identity (both individual and collective) are permeable and constantly reconfigured through interaction and hybridisation. Among other things, this understanding has generated attempts to rethink the established notions of what it is to be a person, i. e. subjectivity, and how we describe ourselves to each other, i. e. identity. This chapter draws its preliminary circumscription of the latter from Stuart Hall, who understands identity, in particular cultural identity, to be a matter of becoming as well as a matter of being. It connects us with the past but also with the future, as it weaves elements of iteration and continuity together with elements of disruption and change. In addition, there are two sides to it. The term refers both to the different ways in which we are being positioned by external structures and agents, and also to the ways in which we situate ourselves in various contexts and in relation to the past and the future (Hall 2000, 23). This is particularly important to remember where artistic and cultural representations are concerned, because they are often deployed for exactly these purposes.

3  The following reflections on identity, identification and intersectionality draw on two previous studies: my book, Petersen, Anne Ring. Migration into Art: Transcultural Identities and Art-making in a Globalised World. Manchester University Press, 2017, and a co‑authored book chapter, Petersen, Anne Ring, and Sabrina Vitting-Seerup. “Identity and cultural representations in the postmigrant condition.” Reframing Migration, Diversity and the Arts: The Postmigrant Condition, edited by Moritz Schramm et al., Routledge, forthcoming (2019).

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Below, the term identification is used to refer to the dynamic and complex interaction between the subject, other people and societal structures. How we are identified or perceived by others, and how we build an identity around identifications with others are integral to identity formation. Identification in this double sense refers to the performative ways in which individuals represent themselves to others and seek recognition of their acts of self-representation from others. As Judith Butler has explained, the subject’s sense of self hinges on the reciprocal recognition that is integral to the encounter between self and other, but it also depends on a third factor: the mediation of the exchange by socio-cultural structures and practices. I contend that cultural practices and representations, including art, are instrumental in the layering, as well as the transformation, of this third factor. Referencing Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Butler asserts that the subject is transformed by encounters with the other: [R]ecognition becomes the process by which I become other than I was and, therefore, also, the process by which I cease to be able to return to what I was. […] there is no staying inside. I am compelled and comported outside myself; I find that the only way to know myself is precisely through a mediation that takes place outside of me, exterior to me, in a convention or a norm that I did not make […]. We are not mere dyads on our own, since our exchange is mediated by language, by conventions, by a sedimentation of norms that are social in character. (Butler 2001, 23, emphasis in original)

It is as such mediating factors that art and cultural representations exert their influence on the work of the imagination as a social practice. Collective perceptions of particular groups gain material existence in artistic and cultural representations (images, narratives, metaphors, tropes, etc.). When widely disseminated, these representations may have a powerful mediating effect on the exchange between self and other. This is seen, for instance, in the way in which images and narratives of the Islamist terrorist have injected fear into everyday encounters of Westerners with Muslim co‑citizens in the post‑9/11 period, and in the way in which homogenising ethnic or ‘migrant’ group identities are ascribed to subjects who may not necessarily identify with the groups in question. Such ascriptions are typically initiated by external agents, either deliberately or unwittingly, or they are produced by a classification or labelling induced by ‘society’ (e. g. by institutional policies, a social system of customs, or by racialisation and stereotyping in political, media and popular discourses). This understanding of external ascriptions as mediated by intersubjective and collective processes of recognition structured by “a sedimentation of norms” tallies with Hall’s observation that public discourse and naturalised identity categories may reduce individuals to group stereotypes (Hall 2003, 257–259, 62–64). Such ascriptions of a simplified, predefined identity to an individual may overwrite, and thus potentially negate, the subject’s sense of self and (inter)subjective agency to change. Opposing such reductionism, Jones, Muñoz and Meskimmon have spearheaded the development of a dynamic and open understanding of identity formation in the fields of art history and performance studies. Their exceptionally nuanced writings can provide us with some of the cornerstones needed to build a postmigratory framework for studying how identities are articulated and negotiated in art and culture. Although the complexities of individual and collective identities and belonging have taken centre stage in the public debates at large, such issues are often articulated with a particular poignancy in the arts. It is not my point here that art constitutes a sphere of exceptionalism, shielded from the conventions, strictures and myopia of soci-

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ety. On the contrary, its ‘imaginative practices’ have a strong role to play in society, both when art is used to reinforce norms, ideologies and the ruling views of the world, and when art contests them or is used to experiment with alternative visions of and ways of being in the world. As Meskimmon has suggested, “art can materialize spaces in which it becomes possible to engender forms of embodied and participatory worldmaking that challenge the limits of exclusive and normative citizenship” (Meskimmon 2017, 25). The spaces that art produces are public, politicised and potentially critical spaces that enable empathic engagement, affective encounters, cross-­ boundary dialogues and sometimes activist work to take place across collective and individual differences. The concept of identity has often been criticised for leading to the misunderstanding that identity is a property or stable entity at the core of a unified subject. Both Jones and Hall have therefore proposed that we should speak of identification, or better identifications, because this term suggests not only process and agency, but also that the formation of the subject’s self-perception is dependent on the subject’s changing relations with others on an intersubjective as well as a collective level (Hall 1996; Jones 2012). José Esteban Muñoz has developed this understanding of identification into a theory of disidentification. He sees the act of disidentifying as a strategy that minoritised subjects can use to negotiate a hegemonic public sphere that either stigmatises or punishes those who do not conform to the normative models of citizenship, gender, race, heterosexuality, majority cultural identity and so on. Muñoz understands disidentification to be “a way of shuffling back and forth between reception and production” (Muñoz 1999, 25), which replaces identification and counteridentification – and their common corollaries assimilation and anti-assimilation – with a third way (Muñoz 1999, 18). Disidentification thus signals different strategies of performing, perceiving and situating the ‘self’ within representational systems that exclude minority subjects (Muñoz 1999, 26). According to Muñoz, disidentification is not about abandoning socially prescribed identity constituents; it is about reusing and renegotiating established meaning to question and expand the range of possible identifications. In (post)migratory identity politics and practices of representation, the interlinked processes of identification and disidentification can become part of a strategy for negotiating an unwanted ascribed identity. For individuals hitherto perceived as non-normative subjects, disidentification can become a means to express both belonging and estrangement at the same time; this can be done by, for instance, simultaneously identifying and disidentifying with the ‘migrant’  – as was the case with the protagonists of the self-declared Postmigrant Theatre in Germany, who brought the term into circulation in the first place (Sharifi 2015). In other words, individuals and groups may unsettle and open up the naturalised category of the migrant, thereby expanding the connotations of the category without trying to negate the existing ones (in this case, the term’s factual reference to different kinds of immigrants to Germany). In feminist studies, the term ‘intersectionality’ is used to describe theoretically how multiple oppressions and sometimes ambivalent identifications are experienced, and to account for the social position of the individual. Contrary to the masculinist doctrine of the objectivity of an all-seeing scientific vision, feminist intersectional analysis foregrounds the idea that a situated gaze, situated knowledge and situated imagination determine differently how individuals and groups see and experience the world. Moreover, it enables the analyst to prioritise any facet or

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category of social difference and treat them as mutually constitutive (Yuval-Davis 2011a, 3–4). Intersectionality thus provides a conceptual way of considering how everybody is simultaneously positioned in different social categories that intersect with one another in ways that produce complex, multifaceted identities, possibly limited by structures of oppression in some respects (for example, economy or race) and with a scope for self-realisation, emancipation and the enjoyment of privilege in others (for example, gender and sexuality). The concept also allows the examination of ‘unmarked’ positions, such as ‘whiteness’ and ‘masculinity’, as well as ‘marked’ positions, such as ‘femininity’ and ‘blackness’/‘people of colour’ (Phoenix 2006, 21–30, 22). Furthermore, it permits recognition that some social structures are deeply ingrained – for instance, the demarcation of the boundary between sedentary and migrant communities, and the normative heterosexual organisation of sexualities. However, within those relatively fixed structures there is also a scope for individual agency and transformable identifications. If the latter is emphasised, as I will do below, intersectionality can be used to conceptualise individual agency. Hall’s, Jones’s and Muñoz’s theories gesture towards a more complex understanding of identity formation as a dynamic, intersectional process which is subjected to a heterogeneous range of social restrictions but which may also generate individual agency and new identifications. Interestingly, similar understandings surface in contemporary art and cultural representations, allowing for multiple and unsettled identifications to coexist within a single representation. A fascinating example of this is the commemorative sculpture I Am Queen Mary, initiated by Copenhagen-based artist Jeannette Ehlers. At a late stage in the process of conceptualisation, it developed from a single-authored work into a collaboration with the artist La Vaughn Belle, who is based in Christiansted, Saint Croix – one of the three islands that made up the colony of the Danish West Indies until 1917. When Denmark sold the islands to the United States in 1917, they were renamed the United States Virgin Islands. In 2017, the centenary of this transfer was extensively commemorated both in the Virgin Islands and in Denmark, one of the key artistic manifestations being the inauguration of Ehlers and Belle’s temporary memorial. At the time of writing, the monument (unveiled in 2018) had materialised only as project descriptions, sketches, a model and artist talks. I will thus explore the preparatory works below, not the actual monument. The daughter of a Danish mother and a father born in Trinidad, Ehlers is herself a remote descendant of enslaved West Indians. Her identification with the Caribbean has impelled her to examine the history of slavery. This attachment also helps explain why Ehlers, a Danish citizen who was raised in her mother’s country of birth, decided to transform I Am Queen Mary into a transnational collaborative work. In her artistic practice, Ehlers engages postcolonial and decolonial approaches in order to articulate an alternative perspective on national history – that of the colonised. It is well known that the Kingdom of Denmark-Norway shares responsibility for colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade. However, until recent years, official Danish history writing has represented the Kingdom of Denmark-Norway as a ‘benevolent’ coloniser, stressing its ‘enlightened’ role in the abolition of slave trade and slavery, with little mention of its involvement in the atrocities of chattel slavery. Many of Ehlers’s works aim to increase the recognition of this colonial past, and they testify to the complex mix of identification and repudiation undergirding her relationship to Denmark and the country’s dark heritage of slavery and racism. Her works also convey, I suggest, a deter-

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Fig. 1 | Jeannette Ehlers, C‑print from recordings of the performance Whip It Good in the Royal Cast Collection, Copenhagen, 2014

mination to position herself at the centre of the debates about and in Denmark by adopting a strategy of disidentification. Again, disidentification is not about rejecting identity constituents (such as Ehlers’s Danish citizenship, her Western art education at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, her close affiliations to other Danish artists, and her leading position on the Danish art scene). It is about reconfiguring encoded meaning in order to challenge and widen the range of possible identifications. Thus, the title I Am Queen Mary does not encourage viewers to empathise with Danish royalty (although Mary is also the name of the Danish crown princess). In the Caribbean, ‘queen’ became an honorary title of the powerful women who were the heads of the social life on the plantations. Ehlers and Belle’s memorial pays tribute to Mary Thomas, one of the four women who led the 1878 rebellion of plantation workers in Saint Croix, where conditions had improved very little since the abolition of slavery in 1848. The so‑called ‘Fireburn’ rebellion left half of the

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city of Fredriksted and many plantations burned to the ground. It was brutally quelled by the local Danish authorities, and the four women instigators were sent to a prison for women in Copenhagen until 1887, when they were sent back to serve the rest of their life sentences in Saint Croix (Schmidt 2016). Today, they live on as legends in the history of the Virgin Islands (Scherfig/ Weis Damkjær 2016). The compositional model for I Am Queen Mary is a self-portrait of Ehlers from 2014, used to advertise her solo exhibition in Copenhagen that year (fig. 1). In retrospect, the portrait can be read as a staging of the artist as a Caribbean queen. Ehlers sits enthroned in a large wicker chair, wearing the costume for her performance Whip It Good (first performed in 2013), in which she re‑enacted the slavery era’s brutal punishment of the enslaved by flogging a white canvas (Danbolt 2016). In the photo, she is holding the whip in her raised hands instead of the European royal regalia of sceptre and orb. The pose alludes to a famous photo of Huey P. Newton, the African American activist and co‑founder of the Black Panther Party, in which he is shown posing like a warrior in a similar chair, spear in one hand, rifle in the other. By allusion, Ehlers subtly stages – and identifies – herself as an heir to the black revolutionary movements. Notably, she is referring to

Fig. 2 | Jeannette Ehlers, computer-generated sketch for Queen Mary, 2015, 3D drawing by Daviid Ranløv

both black and white male figures (Huey Newton, the white overseer of slaves), thereby blurring the distinctions of both gender and race. In the first proposal for the sculpture, Ehlers literally and metaphorically embodied a heroine of the Caribbean slave and worker rebellions. Here, the idea was to let Jeannette become Mary, and Mary become Jeannette (fig. 2). However, the intersections between gendered, national and racialised identities, as well as between past and present, become even more complex in the collaborative project. Not only have Queen Mary’s insignia,

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Fig. 3 | Jeannette Ehlers and La Vaughn Belle, I Am Queen Mary, 2017, fusion of 3D scans of the artists’ ­bodies, 3D body scan and 3D sketch by 3D Printhuset, Copenhagen

Fig. 4 | Jeannette Ehlers and La Vaughn Belle, I Am Queen Mary, autumn 2017, ­plaster cast model. 180 × 290 × 550 mm, printed by 3D Printhuset, Copen­hagen

torch and machete been substituted for the whip, but the female figure itself has also been transmuted into a hybrid of the two artists’ physical appearance, generated by morphing 3D images of their bodies (fig. 3). Later cast in polystyrene, the figure was coated to look like a classical bronze sculpture, as is also evident from the plaster cast model of the sculpture (fig. 4).

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At this juncture, the interconnection between the postmigratory and the postcolonial should be stressed. It has been subjected to discussion (Mecheril 2014, 17), but what is important here is that artists of colour whose work articulates a postcolonial critique and gestures towards decolonial emancipation often open a postmigrant perspective on society, too. Both ‘post‑’ terms carry deconstructivist connotations of ‘after and against’, and are used to criticise and disclose the repressive structures of European colonial, postcolonial and national systems. However, they engage with different aspects of repression. In postcolonial critique, the transnational conflict between coloniser and colonised takes precedence, whereas the discourse on postmigration centres on marginalisation and struggles over ‘diversity’ internal to so‑called white nations. I wish to propose that Ehlers and Belle’s projected sculpture can be read as a staging of a colonial and postcolonial encounter where the ‘two’ cultures of Denmark and the Danish West Indies/The United States Virgin Islands meet and merge through a performative and identificatory process of hybridisation involving the bodily and symbolic morphing of Ehlers and Belle – a process that transforms each ‘one’. In addition, the figure merges the artists with their spiritual ancestor, Mary Thomas. I Am Queen Mary commemorates the rebellion against Danish colonial rule, but the projected sculpture also seems to gesture towards an expanded postmigrant ­notion of the national ‘we’ capable of encompassing citizens with different ethnic backgrounds, dual or multiple national affiliations and, as a result of this, different perceptions of history, too. As a work of art in public space, a revision of history and an object of identification, I Am Queen Mary is intended to make space for people of colour and to open up the possibility for new narratives of belonging to be included into the white history and public space of a ­European country that is beginning to realise that it needs to learn how to live with cultural diversity.

The stranger and the denizen I Am Queen Mary is a figure, or a figurative sculpture, in the common art-historical sense, but I propose that it is also what Rosi Braidotti has termed a figuration. In Braidotti’s feminist-materialist understanding, a figuration is a trope that enables an experimental, imaginative and self-consciously situated way of thinking about a question that Braidotti considers crucial for the 21st century: “the point is not to know who we are, but rather what, at last, we want to become, how to represent mutations, changes and transformations, rather than Being, in its classical modes” (Braidotti 2002b, 2). A figuration is an interpretative tool to answer this question and to engender “creative theoretical alternatives” and “schemes of representation” for the kinds of hybrids we are in the process of becoming. Figurations are articulations of what Braidotti calls a “decentred and multi-layered vision of the subject as a dynamic and changing entity” which also “outlines our own situated perspective” (Braidotti 2002b, 2). The medium through which Braidotti’s figurations materialise is written language, but as Meskimmon’s analyses of artworks and the preparatory works for I Am Queen Mary confirm, artworks are eminently capable of materialising experimental figurations and articulating multi-layered reflections on the subject. In other words, an art object has the potential to become what Mieke Bal has termed “a theoretical object”, or “art that thinks” and “speaks back” to theory by enriching, diverting or complicating it, as I Am Queen Mary does (Bal 2006, 159; Bal 2002, 45).

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Sara Ahmed and Marsha Meskimmon have developed figurations of their own with subtlety and determination to enable a change in the way we think about identity, difference and belonging. Both Ahmed’s “stranger” (Ahmed 2000, 36, 84) and Meskimmon’s “worldmaking denizen” (Meskimmon, 2017, 25) are figurations that bend the notion of the national citizen in new ways by underscoring how the subject comes into being through performative dynamics and intersubjective relations to others. As Judith Butler has pointed out, “in all the talk about the social construction of the subject, we have perhaps overlooked the fact that the very being of the self is dependent not just on the existence of the Other – in its singularity,” but also on the possibility of questioning the impersonal “normative horizon within which the Other sees and listens and knows and recognizes” (Butler 2001, 22). While Ahmed is primarily concerned with the socio-cultural boundaries and pressures generated by the normative horizon, Meskimmon explores how particularly art in public spaces can call this horizon into question and broaden it, which is why I think that their figurations complement each other well. Ahmed’s figuration of the stranger can be seen as a contribution to the postcolonial discourse on difference, exclusion and racism. Historically, the late-modern crisis of the classical Western idea of subjectivity coincided with the emergence of poststructuralist, postmodernist and postcolonial discourses. According to Braidotti, these discourses marked the return of “the ‘others’ of modernity” as counter-subjectivities: “woman, the sexual other of man; the ethnic or native other of the Eurocentric subject; and the natural or earth other of technoculture” (Braidotti 2002a, 166). As a result of this proliferation of discourses on ‘others’, which unsettle the ascription of values and identity markers according to self/other dichotomies, ‘differences’ can no longer be fitted into the familiar model of binary oppositions (Braidotti 2002a, 167). The German debate on postmigration reflects on how this unsettlement and confusion of values and ascriptions may forge new alliances and identifications. As Riem Spielhaus has explained, in Germany the adjective postmigrant stands not only for the phase after the act of migration, but also for a pervasive ‘obsession’ with long completed immigration. Those affected by this obsession comprise not only immigrants and their descendants, “not only those who are marked as others and as not belonging to German society”, but also the people with whom they are acquainted: their friends, partners, colleagues and neighbours, that is to say, “much greater parts of society” (Spielhaus 2014, 97). As Spielhaus’s observations suggest, the notion of difference is as central to the German discourse on postmigration as it is to the discourse on migration. At the same time, difference seems to be coupled with a new emphasis, not on sameness, but on what we have in common and on that which binds us together. I wish to propose that Ahmed’s and Meskimmon’s figurations can help us bring these two aspects together as interconnected concerns of a postmigrant analytical perspective. It needs to be stressed, though, that the development of such perspectives is a very recent scholarly endeavour, so these perspectives will have to evolve and be tested as we go along, which is why the following considerations should not be considered a ready‑to-use toolbox but a work‑in-progress. Sara Ahmed has introduced the concept of “strange encounters” and the figuration of the stranger to examine how racial difference and social exclusion are produced by processes of recognition in situations of proximity (Ahmed 2000). Contrary to the common intuition that a stranger is somebody you do not know, Ahmed proposes that strangers are products of tech-

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niques of recognition: strangers are those whose bodies are recognised as “being out of place”, such as black and brown bodies in spaces marked as white, as many spaces are in societies with a white majority. Ahmed explains that these techniques enable us to differentiate between strangers and the people who belong in a given place, such as fellow inhabitants and neighbours, and to draw the boundaries of ‘our’ place and community. Strangers, explains Ahmed, are not simply those individuals who are not known in the neighbourhood, but “those who are, in their very proximity, already recognised as not belonging, as being out of place”; thus, recognition becomes a technique for identifying people who are considered to be alien, and for demarcating and upholding “the boundaries of ‘this place’, as where ‘we’ dwell” (Ahmed 2000, 21 f., emphasis in original). Directing her attention to contemporary societies, Ahmed notes that not all people of colour are excluded as strangers, only some. She suggests that globalisation, migration and multiculturalism operate as a particular historical mode of proximity that produces the figure of the stranger as the “outsider inside” (Ahmed 2000, 3). Ahmed takes Australian multiculturalism as her example, but her analysis of the outsider inside also has some bearing on the marking of differences and strangers in postmigrant North European societies, which are characterised by increasing demographic heterogeneity, transculturality and a widespread “invasion complex” or fear of immigration from Africa and Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East (Papastergiadis, 2017, 13). Although they have not to the same degree developed official multicultural policies, they struggle with multiculturalism in a situation of resurgent racism and nationalism, requiring a shift in emphasis “from the issue of differences between cultures to that of differences within the same culture” (Braidotti 2002a, 168, emphasis in original). The figure of the “outsider inside” marks out today’s boundaries of communities, dwelling and belonging, asserts Ahmed. In doing so, contemporary encounters with ‘strangers’ reopen prior histories of encounters with the stranger’s body. These histories predefine the parameters of recognising some bodies as different from the familiar body, which translates, in Ahmed’s own case studies, into either a local white community or the ‘we’ of the nation (Ahmed 2000, 13, 21 ff., 50 f., 95 ff.). Historical perceptions of and demarcations between groups thus continue to inform bodily encounters between people in the present. However, Ahmed makes a point of stressing that these encounters are not fully determined by the past, thereby opening the possibility for change. Ehlers and Belle’s work may give us an idea of how art can actualise such change. In 2018, I Am Queen Mary was installed on the Copenhagen harbour front, in front of the West Indian Warehouse, formerly used for storing colonial goods produced by enslaved Africans. Since 1984, it has stored the white plaster casts of canonised Western sculptures that constitute the Royal Cast Collection, which was founded in 1895 when European countries were still colonial powers. As a female companion piece to the bronze copy of Michelangelo’s sculpture David, placed in front of the Warehouse to signalise its present use, Queen Mary puts into perspective the ideal of beauty canonised in Western art history (fig. 5). Although he will be surpassed by her in size, David’s body represents the norm by which Mary’s body will be measured: the Caucasian features, male gender and idealised proportions turn David into the perfect body at home: the privileged, unmarked white body that simply belongs in this place (Ahmed 2000, 46). This, in turn, will allow us to recognise Queen Mary as a body out of place, suspended

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Fig. 5 | Jeannette Ehlers, computer-generated installation view of I Am Queen Mary at the Harbour Front outside the West Indian ­Warehouse, Copenhagen Harbour. The estimated height of the sculpture is 7 metres, approximately the same height as the copy of ­Michelangelo’s David to the left, which measures 7.2 metres. 3D drawing by Daviid Ranløv, 2015

ambiguously between belonging and unbelonging. Yet one could imagine that the very encounter and contrast between the two sculptures will be able to initiate a reshuffling of the terms that govern the humanly recognisable, with the possibility of expanding the boundaries of who is recognised as belonging to the national community and history following from that negotiation (Petersen 2018).

Remaking the world Ehlers and Belle’s projected sculpture is a counter-monument to Danish colonialism, but it also reflects back on contemporary society. With its many references to forced and voluntary journeys across the ocean,4 it reminds us how central notions of uprooting and regrounding, belonging and unbelonging are to today’s discourses on migration and postmigration, and how these terms have been used to articulate how identities are transformed in migration. As Moslund observes, migrant studies of art and literature have typically emphasised how the act of migration cuts migrants loose from their national, ethnic and cultural moorings, and how life in the receiving country is permeated by sensations of unbelonging. Conversely, postmigrant approaches emphasise activities of belonging and homing. As Nira Yuval-Davis has noted, ‘identity’ and ‘belonging’ are connected. Individual identity is not only affected by identity markers such 4  The forced voyages of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean, the journeys of Danish colonisers and merchant ships between Denmark and the West Indies, as well as those of Mary Thomas, La Vaughn Belle and Jeannette Ehlers between Copenhagen and Saint Croix.

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as gender and ethnicity, but also by the communities and shared stories to which the individual experiences a sense of belonging. Collective identity narratives often constitute a resource for individual narratives, and both individual and collective narratives provide people with “a sense of order”, i. e. a sense of continuity and agency that enables change within the identity boundaries of the individual and/or collective subject (Yuval-Davis 2011b, 14). Intersubjective activities of belonging are integral to the process of finding one’s place in the world, and they are central to how Meskimmon figures the worldmaking denizen as an open-ended, embodied and situated coming into being which involves “intersectional identifications and transversal dialogues across difference” (Meskimmon, 2017, 33). Adopting a feminist-materialist perspective that sees denizenship as a process rather than a status (which would restrict the meaning of ‘denizen’ to its legalistic reference to naturalised or resident persons with lesser rights than citizens), Meskimmon insists that the denizen and the world are not preformed  – they “emerge in mutuality” (Meskimmon 2017, 26). Meskimmon draws on Nelson Goodman’s understanding of building a “world” as always beginning from what is already there: “the making is a remaking” (Goodman 1978, 6). In Goodman’s understanding, a world is a conceptual and discursive rather than a given physical reality, even if it always materialises. Moreover, a world can evolve at different levels (individual, collective, the nation, the world community) and in different spheres, for instance in that of art. Works of art, argues Meskimmon, have an extraordinary potential for making worlds that activate “the ‘possibilising’ force of imagining” that can open up the past and the present to future change (Meskimmon 2013, 40). The figure of the migrant operates according to a binary logic as it co‑constructs its own antithesis, the community of white, non-migrant nationals. Conversely, in Meskimmon’s understanding, the denizen is an inclusive category that rejects dualist thinking. It is a bridging trope. Meskimmon suggests that all members of society, irrespective of their social and legal status, and their descent, should be seen as engaged in postmigratory worldmaking, and hence as denizens: “In our worldmaking and our postmigratory dwelling, we are all of us denizens whether cast as ‘citizens’ or ‘migrants’” (Meskimmon 2017, 33). As an experimental figuration, the denizen thus enables us to explore how works of art and cultural representations articulate postmigratory experiences of the “condition of togetherness‑in-difference” (Ang 2001, 17). Worldmaking can materialise in works of art as the invention of new forms of being and of making oneself at home in the world. As I Am Queen Mary demonstrates, worldmaking may also involve a reclamation of a place and a voice for subjects hitherto excluded from the history, narrative and public space of the nation. Although I Am Queen Mary appears to be at odds with traditional statues of named individuals (embodying an exclusivist and homogenising ideal of the national citizen), the figure does represent something exemplary that has to do with the coalitional way it engages three black women – each of them embodying a particular, intersectional subject position – in a dialogue across time and space. Both Mary Thomas and Jeannette Ehlers have felt themselves to be ‘strangers’ or ‘bodies out of place’, and Belle’s artistic practice testifies amply to her estrangement from the dominant Danish perspective on colonialism and her desire to tell the story from the perspective of the descendants of the enslaved. Mary Thomas reacted by rioting, Jeannette Ehlers and La Vaughn Belle by taking a decolonial stance, continually stressing the intertwinement of black and white histories which has contributed to making Denmark and the US Virgin Islands what they are today. A static sculpture does not lend itself

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easily to an analysis that takes intersectionality to be a process of agency, unfolding in time (Meskimmon 2017, 20–29), but if intersections are taken to be qualities that specific subjects embody at a particular moment in time, then it becomes possible to read I Am Queen Mary as a ‘snapshot’ of intersecting subject positions. Although the three women are differently positioned as regards nationality, class and racialising ascriptions, they are also joined by generational commonalities: at the time of the ‘events’ (Fireburn and the creation of the sculpture project), they were all mothers, about 40 years of age, and, one might imagine, engaged in making the world a better place for the next generation. Figuratively morphed into one in the model of the sculpture, they present themselves to us as a figuration, a worldmaking denizen and heir to the long black struggle against injustice and inequality, seeking to remake the world and replace the Eurocentric understanding of the world with a more inclusive one based on migrancy and far-reaching transnational relations. The purpose of this chapter has been to develop a postmigratory analytical framework and to put into circulation some new concepts that may help us reconceive the basic concepts of identity, difference and belonging. Taking Ehlers and Belle’s I Am Queen Mary as my example, I have argued that art can also contribute to this endeavour: its ability to activate “the possibilising force of imagination” (Meskimmon 2013, 41) may help us to move beyond the binary ways of thinking and essentialist notions of identity and belonging which are so often activated in the discourses on art, identity and (post)migration.

References Ahmed, Sara. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. Routledge, 2000. Ang, Ien. On Not Speaking Chinese: Living Between Asia and the West. Routledge, 2001. Bal, Mieke. “Metaphoring: Making a Niche of Negative Space.” Metaphoricity and the Politics of Mobility, edited by Maria Margaroni and Effie Yiannopoulou, Rodopi, 2006, pp. 159–180. –. Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide. University of Toronto Press, 2002. Braidotti, Rosi. “Identity, Subjectivity and Difference: A Critical Genealogy.” Thinking Differently: A Reader in ­European Women’s Studies, edited by Gabriele Griffin and Rosi Braidotti, Zed Books, 2002a, pp. 158–182. –. Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Polity Press, 2002b. Butler, Judith. “Giving an Account of Oneself.” Diacritics, vol. 31, no. 4, 2001, pp. 22–40. Danbolt, Mathias. “Striking reverberations: beating back the unfinished history of the colonial aesthetic with Jeannette Ehlers’s Whip It Good.” Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories, edited by Amelia Jones and Erin Silver, Manchester University Press, 2016, pp. 277–294. Foroutan, Naika. “Neue Deutsche, Postmigranten und Bindungs-Identitäten. Wer gehört zum neuen Deutschland?” APUZ, no. 46–47, 2010, pp. 9–15. –. “Postmigrantische Gesellschaften.” Einwanderungsgesellschaft Deutschland, edited by Heinz Ulrich Brinkmann and Martina Sauer, Springer, 2016, pp. 227–54. Foroutan, Naika, et al. “Deutschland postmigrantisch II. Einstellungen von Jugendlichen und jungen Erwachsenen zu Gesellschaft, Religion und Identität.” Second edition. Berliner Institut für empirische Integrations- und Migrationsforschung, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 2015. Golden, Thelma. “Post …” Freestyle: The Studio Museum in Harlem, edited by Christine Y. Kim and Franklin Sirmans, The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2001, pp. 14–15. Goodman, Nelson. Ways of Worldmaking. Hackett Publishing Company, 1978.

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Migration and Postmigration as New Frameworks for Art Theory Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Diaspora and Visual Culture. Representing Africans and Jews, edited by Nicholas Mirzoeff, Routledge, 2000b, pp. 21–33. –. “Introduction: Who Needs ‘Identity’?” Questions of Cultural Identity, edited by Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, Sage Publications, 1996, pp. 1–17. –. “The Spectacle of the ‘Other’.” Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, edited by Stuart Hall, Sage, 2003, pp. 223–290. Jones, Amelia. Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts. Routledge, 2012. Lookofsky, Sarah Elsie. “No Such Thing as Society: Art and the Crisis of the European Welfare State.” Art History, vol. PhD, University of California, 2009, http://escholarship.org/uc/item/4mz626hs. Accessed 4 May 2017. Meskimmon, Marsha. “From the Cosmos to the Polis: On Denizens, Art and Postmigration Worldmaking.” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, vol. 9, no. 2, 2017, pp. 25–35, doi: 10.1080/20004214.2017.1343082. –. “Making worlds, making subjects: contemporary art and the affective dimension of global ethics.” World Art, vol. 1, no. 2, 2011, pp. 189–196. –. “The Precarious Ecologies of Cosmopolitanism.” Humanities Research. Special issue ‘The World and World-Making in Art’, vol. xix, no. 2, 2013, pp. 27–46. Mecheril, Paul. “Was ist das X im Postmigrantischen?” Sub\urban. Zeitschrift für kritische Stadtforschung, vol. 2, no. 3, 2014, pp. 107–112, http://zeitschrift-suburban.de/sys/index.php/suburban/article/view/150. ­Accessed 6 January 2017. Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Papastergiadis, Nikos. “Does Philosophy Contribute to an Invasion Complex? Sloterdijk the Antagonist and the Agonism of Mouffe.” Journal of Aesthetics  & Culture, vol. 9, no. 2, 2017, pp. 13–24, doi: 10.1080/ .2017.1343083. Petersen, Anne Ring. Migration into Art: Transcultural Identities and Art-making in a Globalised World. Manchester University Press, 2017. –. “The Place of the Black Body in White History: Jeannette Ehlers’s decolonial interrogation of ‘the darker side of Western modernity’.” Perspective, December, 2018: no page numbers, http://perspective.smk.dk/en/ place-black-body-white-history-jeannette-ehlerss-decolonial-interrogation-darker-side-western. ­Accessed 3 March 2019. Petersen, Anne Ring, and Moritz Schramm. “Postmigration. Mod et nyt kritisk perspektiv på migration og kultur.” Kultur & Klasse. Themed issue: Kulturkritik nu (‘Culture critique now’), no. 122, 2016, pp. 179–98, http:// ojs.statsbiblioteket.dk/index.php/kok/issue/view/3548. Accessed 6 January 2017. Petersen, Anne Ring, and Sabrina Vitting-Seerup. “Identity and Cultural Representations in the Postmigrant Condition.” Reframing Migration, Diversity and the Arts: The Postmigrant Condition, edited by Moritz Schramm et al., Routledge, forthcoming (2019). Phoenix, Ann. “Interrogating intersectionality: Productive ways of theorising multiple positioning.” Kvinder, køn & forskning, no. 2–3, Special issue on Intersectionality, 2006, pp. 21–30. Ponzanesi, Sandra. “Diasporic Subjects and Migration.” Thinking Differently: A Reader in European Women’s Studies, edited by Gabriele Griffin and Rosi Braidotti, Zed Books, 2002, pp. 205–220. Römhild, Regina. “Jenseits ethnischer Grenzen. Für eine postmigrantische Kultur- und Gesellschaftsforschung.” Nach der Migration. Postmigrantische Perspektiven jenseits der Parallelgesellschaft, edited by Erol Yildiz and Marc Hill, transcript, 2015, pp. 37–48. Scherfig, Albert, and Nicklas Weis Damkjær. “Kvinderne i Danmarks største arbejderopstand.” Friktion. Magasin for køn, krop og kultur, October 2016, no page numbers, https://friktionmagasin.dk/kvinderne‑i-danmarks‑st%C3%B8rste-arbejderopstand-fc8cbcdc158b. Accessed 26 May 2017. Schmidt, Gudrun Marie. “Skulptur skal give de slavegjorte stemme.” Politiken, 27 December 2016. Schramm, Moritz, et al. Reframing Migration, Diversity and the Arts: The Postmigrant Condition. Routledge, forthcoming (2019). Sharifi, Azadeh. “Moments of Significance: Artists of Colour in European Theatre.” The Culture of Migration: Politics, Aesthetics and Histories, edited by Sten Pultz Moslund et al., I. B. Tauris, 2015, pp. 243–256.

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Anne Ring Petersen Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Bonaventure, and Regina Römhild. “The Post-Other as Avant-Garde.” We Roma: A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art, edited by Maria Hlavajova and Daniel Baker, BAK, basis voor actuele kunst 2013, pp. 206–225. BAK Critical Reader Series Utrecht. Spielhaus, Riem. “Studien in der postmigrantischen Gesellschaft: Eine kritische Auseinandersetzung.” Kongressdokumentation 4. Bundesfachkongress Interkultur, Hamburg 2012, edited by Marius Koniarczyck et al., Kulturbehörde der Freien und Hansestadt Hamburg, 2014, pp. 96–100, https://www.bundesfachkongress-interkultur-2012.de/dokumentation/. Accessed 20 February 2017. Vertovec, Steven. “Super-diversity and its implications.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 30, no. 6, 2007, pp. 1024– 1054, http://dx.doi.org/10.80/01419870701599465. Accessed 4 May 2017. Yildiz, Erol. “Die Öffnung der Orte zur Welt und postmigrantische Lebensentwürfe.” SWSRundschau, vol. 50, no. 3, 2010, pp. 318–339, http://www.‌sws-rundschau.at/html/archiv_abstract.‌php?language=​de&id=​ 237&heft=​62. Accessed 12 June 2017. Yuval-Davis, Nira. Power, Intersectionality and the Politics of Belonging. FREIA Feminist Research Center, 2011a. FREIA Working Paper Series, vol. 75. –. The Politics of Belonging: Intersectional Contestations. Sage, 2011b.

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POSTMIGRANT PRACTICES OF LIVING AS RESISTANCE

Introduction Discourse on postmigration has recently gained new relevance in German-speaking areas. This is not a new ‘discipline’ of some sort but a mental attitude, a resistant counter-practice in knowledge production  – in other words, a perspective ushering in an epistemological turn in the context of migration. Migration is no longer viewed as a special object for research or a peripheral phenomenon in society. Instead it has shifted to front and center stage, becoming the point of departure for further analyses (see Bojadžijev/Römhild 2015, 10 f.). This paper seeks to illuminate this idea and its conceptual relevance for critical migration studies and social analysis. Since there are parallels and points of contact with post-colonialism, I initially look at that interface. Then the focus turns to key aspects of postmigration discourse.

From post-colonialism to postmigration discourse Initially, there are certain striking parallels with post-colonial discourse, which that for several years now has also received a broader reception in German-speaking areas (Castro Varela/Dhawan 2015). Even if the ’post’ analogy in the two terms as formulated may initially appear disconcerting to some, at second glance there are indeed points of contact.1 Colonialism created a specific historical consciousness of time and a certain way to narrate and construct historical continuities. Over time, certain constructs about “The West and the Rest” (Hall 1992) have gained currency; concepts such as the “Asian mentality,” “European thinking” and “Western modernity” have become normal, even though analytically they remain hard to define and grasp (Said 1991, 17 f.). European modernity developed its self-understanding as Western modernity grounded on the schematic division of the world into Western/progressive and non-Western/backward. Moreover, it appears impossible for European thinking to manage without this comparison with and distancing from the colonized world (Nassehi 2003, 43). The fundamental idea of post-colonial discourse was thus to question the historiography of European colonialism, to free historical narratives from Eurocentrism and Western dominance, to overcome established dualisms, and conceptualize developments in new and different ways. Through this perspective, awareness was focused on new interconnections, shared narratives, ruptures and marginalized vantages that clearly deviate from the dominant narrative par1  Drawing on the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, one could ask: “Is the post- in postmigrant that same as the post- in postcolonial?” (cf. Appiah 1991).

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adigms. In other words, history and the present are narrated from the perspective and experience of the formerly colonialized, and thus the majority of the world’s population. This leads to a “critical interruption into that whole grand historiographical narrative” (Hall 1996, 250); it is precisely this “critical interruption” that could prove to be a theoretical advantage. In order to designate this shifted focus, Homi Bhabha uses the metaphorical concept of the “Third Space.” He argues for taking “the cultural and historical hybridity of the post-colonial world” as the “paradigmatic place of departure” (Bhabha 1994, 20). This direction in thought questions the classic image of identity and culture as a homogeneous structure and breaks with the logic of categories of difference such as black/white, native/foreigner, self/other. Only the fundamental critical encounter and debate with the premises of a hegemonic world view previously considered self-explanatory can open up new perspectives on the world and make other readings of it visible. Bhabha’s concept of the “in‑between” appears precisely characteristic of (post)migrational situations where there is a break with unambiguous positionings and where the focus shifts to discontinuities. This break radically questions polarizing patterns of thought about ‘us versus them’ that previously functioned as signposts for social perception. Instead it turns its focal beam on productive and creative splits, multiple modes of belonging and mobile biographies.

Migration as a perspective and point of departure The ‘post’ in ‘postmigrant’ does not simply designate a temporal condition of ‘after’ but rather an overcoming of thought patterns, a new thinking about the entire sphere in which migration discourse is embedded. In this sense, what we have here is an epistemological turn, a radical rupture with the basic premise of received customary migration discourse and its categorical division between migrant and non-migrant, migration and sedentariness. This brings into question traditional conceptions of difference. If migration becomes the paradigmatic point of departure, and ideological discourses about migration and integration are deconstructed, the focus turns to previously marginalized kinds of knowledge. This calls for a radical revision of normality as defined historically. At the same time, it means that we have to rethink as interrelated and intertwined phenomena developments and stories that were previously seen as isolated from one another, and also have to keep other phenomena apart that were previously equated. The idea of telling stories from the experience and perspective of migration, rendering visible marginal and largely ignored knowledge in the process, points to a resistant practice of central importance for postmigrant thinking: a “contrapuntal reading” of social relations and conditions.2 Migration is conceived in a new and radical way; it is understood as a force that can move society, reshaping its contours. Creative re‑interpretations, re‑inventions or theoretical discourses, ever more of which have appeared recently under the ‘postmigrant’ umbrella – postmigrant art (Dogramaci 2013), postmigrant theater (Sharifi 2011; Jäger 2016), postmigrant literature (Geiser 2015),

2  In order to analyze and at the same time undermine the relations between constructs of Orient and Occident, Edward Said (1993, 32, 52, 66) proposed a contrapuntal analysis. For the topic of migration, this ‘reading against the grain’ entails looking at social relations of dominance from the perspective and experience of migration.

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postmigrant urbanity (Yildiz 2015, 32 f.) and designs for living (Yildiz 2013) and Deutschland postmigrantisch3 – signal this new view of things. A postmigrant approach in migration research means bidding adieu to an ethnically oriented theory and turning the gaze toward society in its entirety. In other words, it means liberating migration research from its previous special role and establishing it more broadly as a valid mode of social analysis. Regina Römhild (2015) argues for postmigrant research where migration is conceived of as a perspective or point of departure, not an object of inquiry. One consequence of such a vantage point is that migration is moved from the margins to the center and is viewed as constitutive for all spheres of European societies. “What is lacking is not still more research on migration, but rather a reflective perspective preceding from it that can generate new insights into the contested sites ‘society’ and ‘culture’” (Römhild 2014, 263). What is postmigrant thus functions here as an analytical category for social situations of mobility and diversity, rendering ruptures, ambiguity and marginalized memories visible that should not be sited at the margins of society but rather express central social conditions. Through its disconcerting impact, this new approach also creates a critical confrontation with social relations of power. The ‘postmigrant’ is seen as a battle cry against the ‘migrantizing’ and marginalizing of persons who see themselves as integral components of society. It is a battle cry raised against a public discourse that continues to treat migration stories as specific and ‘exceptional’ phenomena, positing a separation between indigenous normality and migrant problems.

New narrative of the history of migration Individuals who came in the early 1960s as so‑called ‘guest workers’ to Germany, Austria or Switzerland should, as older documentation readily suggests, be viewed as pioneers of transnationalization. Due to their precarious living conditions, they saw themselves as compelled to venture in new directions – or to take detours – in order to position themselves in the new society they had arrived in. Over time they developed ties and strategies arching over boundaries, and they accumulated knowledge about mobility that could be applied in specific situations within their processes of social localization. Give the public devaluation of their living circumstances, nothing else remained to them but to seek an orientation extending over and beyond their local limitations. The train stations where migrants met in the 1960s hoping to see new arrivals straight from their own home towns and to hear news from their families and neighbors changed into interface points of intersection of transnational connections. Encounters took place there; new ties and new spaces of communication came into being. New infrastructures crystallized, forms of mobility and informal networks that facilitated the reunification of families. With the help of ties extending over borders and boundaries, transnationalization processes arose, driving a globalization from below. Such

3  In 2014 and 2015, two quantitative studies were carried out at the Berlin Institute for Empirical Research on Integration and Migration, directed by Naika Foroutan, entitled “Deutschland postmigrantisch” (see Foroutan et al. 2014; 2015).

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narratives about mobility are now related anew by the descendants of the guest-worker generation, linked with experiences and visions associated with the families. These are intermediary spaces where worldwide cross-links run together, condensing into everyday contexts. They could be called “transtopias” (Yildiz 2015, 32 f.), real and imaginary places comprised of spaces of both origin and arrival. Such practices of localization unfold an innovative power with particular relevance for the biographical and spatial orientation of those affected. The following biographical example demonstrates this.4 Bilal, 43 years old, was born and raised in Maintal, a small town near Frankfurt am Main in Germany. His grandfather, parents and other family members stem from a village in Anatolia and came to Germany as guest workers at the beginning of the 1970s. He says his parents were simple people deeply steeped in traditional ways. He explains that it was customary in the villages of Anatolia to send the two or three oldest sons only to primary school, and after that, like their parents, they had to go work “in the fields.” Only the youngest were able to attend a secondary school. After completing a degree in architecture in Darmstadt, Bilal moved to London for six years. Since 2011 he has been living with his German wife in Istanbul. He says that London had over time become too expensive, and so spending the next chapter in his life in Istanbul was thus for him an easy and convenient decision. He was familiar with the city from vacation trips and said he had always liked it. Bilal’s family owns real estate in Istanbul, which now also offers him a sphere of activity for his work as an architect. He says that many guest-worker families back then had purchased apartments and plots of land in Istanbul. After having lived for so many years in Germany, a number of them could no longer imagine the prospect of later returning to an Anatolian village, and people felt greater affinity with the metropolis of Istanbul. The apartments and parcels of land owned by the first guest-worker generation are now being used by their descendants. He answers an emphatic ‘yes!’ to the question whether in Istanbul he was ever called Almanci5: “You’re even conspicuous if you don’t open your mouth. You’re just already identified as one of them. From the way you walk, your gestures, facial expressions. And from the way you dress too. Just from the whole impression you make, you’re either thought of as a tourist or as something ‘different’. You don’t need to fool yourself in that regard.” However, that does not faze Bilal. He says he never felt the need “to be categorized as a guy 100 % from Istanbul or a Turk. […] Often when I’m out on the street, I still get addressed by people in English or some other language, and when I reply in Turkish they say they’re sorry, beg my pardon. Although I don’t exactly understand at all why they feel so ashamed. But apparently these people feel as though they’ve insulted me for not having recognized me as a Turk. I don’t have that problem.”

4  I conducted this interview in Istanbul in the summer of 2015 within the framework of a research trip investigating the “postmigrant generation.” 5 From Alman (“German”), someone of Turkish origin who lives in Germany; the term has a negative connotation of being arrogant or rude.

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In everyday situations, shopping at the market, in bargaining for a purchase, he also sees the advantages in this: “Then, like you can also be German again and say: ‘OK, no thanks, I’ve changed my mind.’ I’m much more direct in some such situations. Like I just say something then.” Responding to whether he had had any negative experiences in Germany due to his family background, he says: “I was a foreigner both there [in Germany] and also here [in Istanbul]. But here I never felt so strongly I was a foreigner. I feel here nevertheless at home. Back there, despite my perfect knowledge of German and my biography, I actually always felt like a foreigner, like I didn’t belong. There were countless examples where people tried to make clear to me that I didn’t belong there. In every phase of your life you were very much made to understand that. […] After all, in most of the countries in northern Europe and the very developed economies there […] there’s a kind of attitude that all the other countries are so underprivileged, or underdeveloped, and also culturally underdeveloped. Or that people look down a bit on other countries that economically are not so strong. And then they feel they also have a need to educate the people from those regions. And that’s the unpleasant thing, and in Germany, well, that was always especially strong. You often get bad-mouthed a bit, put down.” He says that this berating, getting dressed down, can begin on the stairway or out in the street. “Maybe it’d be better if people would leave each other a little more in peace.” He gives an example of this kind of constant paternalistic critiquing: “Like when children are out playing, see, and they all have dark hair, then always they don’t just make an ‘educational’ comment of some kind. No, they also say: ‘Do you act like this in your own country too?’ Then always what you get is a mixture of an educational comment (like about behavior) plus the added regional humiliation. Now if they were all blond kids, people would only say: ‘OK, try to be a little quieter,’ or something like that. But then what comes is always this small remark added on, this little morsel of hatred of the foreigners.” Responding to the question as to how he spent his time in London, he says: “In London, I actually felt more like I belonged, in any case, more than in Germany. Because in London it’s simply, well, it’s genuinely very multicultural. Like, I mean, almost everyone’s a foreigner.” Bilal comments that in public offices, in the police or at banks you’d see people from all kinds of different backgrounds. “There are no regulations about how and what you mustn’t do.” He says he especially liked the fact that even in banks, a woman in a headscarf could work “in a pretty relaxed way.” He says his sister in Germany was heavily discriminated against because of her headscarf, and had been more frequently followed on the street, by “psychopaths or right-wingers.” But he also comments on the ‘well-meaning’ kinds of discrimination: “Like then there’s also […] discrimination by women’s rights activists who think they have to liberate the women wearing a headscarf, and they put them under such compulsion and pressure at school that they come home in tears. And maybe the teacher means well, thinking she’s helping her and liberating her from the pressure of the family. But it was this person’s own decision herself to wear the headscarf. We’ve even had legal disputes because of that. We took the school to court over this. We no longer had any parents who were ordering her to do something. She just wanted to wear a headscarf.” He goes on to talk about how his sister was an enthusiastic basketball player, but that her female teacher simply would not tolerate her in the group because of the headscarf. “That’s where I have the feeling then that the people sometimes are a bit too militant in their views

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about their own educational values and how they think they have to force them on others. That they say: ‘My culture, my values of democracy and freedom are the only ones, there can’t be another kind of democracy.’ That’s already just so politicized.” In conclusion, he says that he continues to maintain ties with relatives in other countries, part of his family is in Germany, France, and other countries. “Also, it can’t be ruled out that in future maybe I’ll go back again to Germany.” The typically Turkish question is: “Have you come back forever?” In respect to that, Bilal does not want to commit himself. His future and that of his children later on could lie in Germany or somewhere completely different. He could also imagine living in two different countries. However, he expresses his worries and concerns about the increasingly negative mood against refugees and migrants in Germany, about attacks on refugee hostels or the activities of extreme right-wing groups. He thinks the government is doing too little to combat this. “I’ve always had the feeling that the danger that something’s going to happen to a person is the greatest in Germany.”

Postmigrant strategies In the minds of the descendants of the guest-worker generation – born and raised in the countries of migration – the neologism ‘migration background’ has come to be an accepted term in recent years. Those who are so labeled often react with anger and do not wish to be simply reduced to this category. There is a constant debate about this practice of labeling, which associated implicitly with questions of insufficient belonging, and thus perceived as an imposition by those it is applied to. Aziza A., who lives in the Kreuzberg area of Berlin and works as a musician, sees the situation in this way: “People are constantly being called upon to define themselves: are you more this or that? This certainly has some impact on you if you’re constantly confronted with that. You’d have to have a pretty darn thick wall around yourself not to be affected by this” (cit. in Maier 2006, 21). Many share Aziza’s experiences. They are repeatedly confronted by ‘native locals’ posturing as self-appointed experts on matters of origin; they stubbornly ask about people’s ‘real origins,’ as if they want to pin down who they ‘really’ were, instead of accepting answers that may not have been in keeping with their expectations. When someone whose parents or grandparents were immigrants says they are a ‘native’ of Cologne or Frankfurt because that is the town they grew up in, that statement is often rejected by the native locals as an attempt at an excuse or some kind of irony. The second or third generation repeatedly find themselves facing such interrogations: “Where do you come from?” or “Don’t you feel comfortable here?” Or they hear a surprised question, “You live like us, don’t you?”, perhaps also with a touch of added praise: “But you speak German so well!” People right from the start are viewed as the representatives of their supposed culture of origin. In such “dialogues about origin” (Battaglia 2000, 185), the interlocutor is in fact being told that he or she ‘actually’ belongs somewhere else. Feridun Zaimoglu has a scornful approach to such questions about supposed origin, countering: “My clan stems originally from Crimea, it belongs to the people of the warlike Tartars. The next generation, that of my parents, was born in Turkey. And I’m an Oriental German” (Zaimoglu 2000, 18).

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Derision, irony and parody are postmigrant strategies with a subversive impact. The group name “Kanak Attak” signals this in a special way – a loose alliance between the second and third generation in Germany, a kind of social movement that uses the swear word Kanake (“someone who looks like they come from southern Europe or parts of the ‘Orient’”) to form a positive self-definition via ironic re‑interpretation.6 Spaces of resistance are created through such re‑interpretation, aiming at a creative critical deconstruction of the predominant knowledge. Kanak Attak rejects all attributions and forms of identity politics springing from a hegemonial practice of naming. For her, the alliance is a question of attitude and not of origin (Dogramaci 2017).7 The weblog “Migrantenstadl” can also be considered an example of the undermining of official attributions by means of ironic re‑interpretation. The self-understanding of the authors can be expressed as: When we say we live in a migrant city or say we tell stories from the Migrantenstadl8 [migrant barn], then those are narratives straight from society here & now. For the Migrantenstadl, the term ‘migrant’ ultimately stands for an oppositional figure who contradicts the dominant logics of thinking and functioning. (Önder 2013, 367)

The postmigrant theater in Kreuzberg named Ballhaus Naunynstraße sees itself within the local theater landscape more as a fracture point and alternative concept to traditionally accepted ideas of high culture.9 It views itself as a trans-local theater seeking creative innovations and expansions of horizons; it is interested in biographical upheavals and marginalized memories. Shermin Langhoff,10 who has left her stamp on the self-understanding of the postmigrant theater in Berlin, has commented: “The categories we open up are more progressive than those in real existence. That’s simply not migrant theater, which sounds like Migrantenstadl. There is an awareness of language, associations, but there’s also a mode of empowerment – we take for ourselves the power to define.”11 She understands the term “postmigrant theater” as referring mainly to the stories and perspectives of those who have no experience of migration in the classic sense, but

6  On the slang term Kanake, see Amirpur 2005, n. p. 7  See “Manifest Kanak Attak” under http://www.kanak-attak.de/ka/about/manif_deu.‌html. Accessed 31 January 2018. For an analysis of the manifest, see Burcu Dogramaci, “Von Kanak Attak zum Manifest der Vielen” (Dogramaci 2017). 8  In its original meaning, the term Stadl refers to a haystack or a barn. The concept Musikantenstadl is appropriated here and ironically reinterpreted, a kind of “transcoding” in the sense of Stuart Hall (1997). 9  In 2008, the Ballhaus on Naunynstraße in Kreuzberg was reopened under the artistic direction of Shermin Langhoff as a “postmigrant theater.” Since then, this term has gained in popularity and the Ballhaus functions as a platform for postmigrant ideas (see www.ballhausnaunynstrasse.‌de). The following sentences from a conversation in the newspaper Die Zeit clearly express the notion of a postmigrant theater: “A theater for a society that, in the best case scenario, does not gaze at itself through the glasses of differing origins and religions, a prism burdened by stereotypy, but rather acknowledges the complexity of a postmigrant space and learns to accept the respective subjective perspectives. A utopia that no longer, as was so long the case, first has to be propagated by politics but rather is to be put to the test in the theaters of the Republic.” (Langhoff im Gespräch mit Trotier, Die Zeit, 14 July 2011) 10  Shermin Langhoff was appointed artistic director of the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin in 2012, where she is continuing with postmigrant theater. 11  Interview with Shermin Langhoff on postmigrant theater, 4 October 2012, der Freitag, https://www. freitag.de/autoren/mdell/minus-minus-plus. Accessed 31 January 2018.

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who possess a migration background as knowledge and cultural capital. In the dramas and skits staged in the Ballhaus, there is conscious play with clichés and stigmatized patterns of interpretation. New images and readings emerge, and postmigrant strategies are understood as a means of empowerment. A new scene of young writers, cabaret performers, artists and filmmakers has been developing for some time now. They are recounting the experiences and stories of migration anew from their point of view, without necessarily calling them ‘postmigrant.’ In the comedy Almanya – Willkommen in Deutschland (2011), the director Yasemin Şamdereli raises questions in a humorous vein about homeland and belonging in a family of Turkish extraction in Germany over three generations. This film can be seen as an example of how classic attributions can be questioned in a humorous manner and how one can play with long-familiar clichés. There is a parody of stereotypes, clichés are staged ironically and binary contrasts are turned upside-down, because meanings can never be finally determined and controlled. Such strategies of reversal of negative attributions and their ironic re‑interpretation, as they are expressed in the examples above, have been termed “trans-coding” by Stuart Hall (Hall 1997, 270).

Transtopias as utopias made reality The fact that human beings in the globalized world have multiple modes of belonging, and from this matrix can design and draft their spaces of experience and biographies is something that methodical nationalism cannot envision. Instead, such biographies are viewed as ruptured and thus automatically interpreted as problematic. From a postmigrant perspective, however, it is precisely this in‑between that constitutes their practices of positioning and designs for living. Such spaces in‑between are loci of transition and rethinking, to a certain extent transtopias, in which national and ethnic classifications forfeit their power of conviction, yielding to new orientations and relations. Transtopias should be seen as spaces where stories and social developments are written anew and interconnected with one another in differing ways. They point to the positive potential of utopias that can be implemented, made reality in a globalized world marked by mobility and diversity. Transtopias as hybrid spaces for translation liberate thinking from polarization and dualisms; they offer other options for interlinking and transition. They imply forms of creative dis-location and new positioning, configuring in this way a topography of multiplicity, which has only become possible in the first place through the migration of persons and ideas. Transtopias can be places of transition, where marginalized actors and kinds of knowledge move to the center stage of observation, are privileged, and in part also cultivated. They are points of locus where dominant norms are questioned and a different sense of what is natural or matter‑of-fact is created. Transtopias can in a figurative sense designate spaces of thought, virtual places and postmigrant life plans, as the examples above illustrate.

Conclusion: transculturality from a postmigrant perspective In German-speaking areas, thought and research continues to make use of the paradigm of integration. This approach is based on a specific understanding of culture predominant in the

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context of migration: cultures are thought of as unified blocks, and in the process, more or less explicitly, a separation is made between migrant cultures and the indigenous majority culture. This also appears to be a dilemma for intercultural pedagogy: often the received image of closed, clearly separate cultures continues to be reproduced and passed on, even if only implicitly or subconsciously.12 By contrast, the postmigrant – or contrapuntal – interpretation of social developments requires a deconstructive take on such basic assumptions. Instead of ethno-cultural concepts, such an interpretation is based on a dynamic, open conception of culture corresponding to the notion of transculturality. Attention is then focused on ‘spaces in‑between,’ those that lie beyond binary attributions, on cultural overlappings and interweavings in which the most varied global and local elements combine, generating new hybrid forms. Cultural phenomena previously looked at separately are then understood as located within a matrix of linkages, ties and interlacing.13 Seen from this vantage point, migration means not just spatial but also mental and biographical mobility. Such movements are combined by individuals and transposed by them into everyday practice in their own respective contexts. Postmigrant life plans exemplify how stimuli arching over boundaries and global interconnections are adapted, shaped and utilized locally. They likewise exemplify how new spaces of thought and action, which I have termed transtopias, arise. Transculturality in this connection is an everyday practice. But to make it visible as such, what is necessary is a relaxed attitude of pragmatic realism, which focuses on lived diversity, making possible insights conscious of and attuned to difference over and beyond traditional polarizations. Looking at life realities locally then also encompasses what has previously been left unsaid, invisible and marginalized. As a result, the exclusionary logic of established concepts of order according to the pattern ‘us’ and ‘them,’ ‘we’ versus ‘the others,’ is radically disrupted. Initiatives such as Kanak Attak, the Migrantenstadl and the Postmigrant Theater are representative here of many others. They open a window onto social diversity and stimulate critical thinking. As scientific or artistic forms of expression, they help to inspire people by dint of their new and surprising ways of seeing and their fresh outlook; they open up spaces for new options, combining in this way localities with the world. Translated from the German by William Templer

References Amirpur, Donja. “Sprachvariationen in deutschen Ghettos.” Migrationspolitisches Portal, edited by the Heinrich Böll Foundation, 18 November  2005, https://heimatkunde.boell.de/2005/11/18/sprachvariatio­nendeutschen-ghettos. Accessed 29 June 2016.

12  In recent years we can observe a certain shift toward transculturality and/or diversity in this sphere (see Lutz-Sterzenbach et al. 2013). 13  Mark Terkessidis has developed similar ideas regarding interculture. Building on cultural studies and postcolonial approaches, he defines the concept anew. In his eyes, interculture has no ethnic meaning, nor is it about “mutual respect.” Interculture is rather a “culture in‑between” (2010, 10).

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Erol Yildiz Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?” Critical Inquiry, vol. 17, no. 2, 1991, pp. 336–357. Battaglia, Santina. “Verhandeln über Identität. Kommunikativer Alltag von Menschen binationaler Abstammung.” Wer ist fremd? Ethnische Herkunft, Familie und Gesellschaft, edited by Ellen Frieben-Blum et al., Springer, 2000, pp. 183–202. Baumann, Gerd, and Thijl Sunier. Post-Migration Ethnicity. De‑essentializing Cohesion, Commitments and Comparison. Het Spinhuis, 1995. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994 (retrieved from https://goo.gl/Eob0aY, 29  June 2016). Bojadžijev, Manuela, and Regina Römhild. “Was kommt nach dem ’transnational turn’? Perspektiven für eine kritische Migrationsforschung.” Berliner Blätter, 65. Vom Rand ins Zentrum. Perspektiven einer kritischen Migrationsforschung, Panama Verlag, 2015, pp. 10–24. Castro Varela, María do Mar, and Nikita Dhawan. Postkoloniale Theorie. Eine kritische Einführung. Second revised edition. transcript, 2015. Dogramaci, Burcu. “Manifeste der Migration. Von Kanak Attak zum Manifest der Vielen.” “Clear the Air”. Künstlermanifeste seit den 1960er Jahren. Interdisziplinäre Positionen, edited by Burcu Dogramaci and Katja Schneider, transcript, 2017, pp. 231–248. –, editor. Migration und künstlerische Produktion: Aktuelle Perspektiven. transcript, 2013. Foroutan, Naika, et al. Deutschland postmigrantisch II. Einstellungen von Jugendlichen und jungen Erwachsenen zu Gesellschaft, Religion und Identität. Berliner Institut für empirische Integrations- und Migrationsforschung, 2015. Geiser, Myriam. Der Ort transkultureller Literatur in Deutschland und in Frankreich. Deutsch-türkische und frankomaghrebinische Literatur der Postmigration. Könighausen & Neumann, 2015. Hall, Stuart. “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power.” Formations of Modernity, edited by Stuart Hall and Bram Gieben, Polity Press, 1992, pp. 275–320 (retrieved from http://goo.gl/g33m4A, 29 June 2016). –. “The Spectacle of the ‘Other’.” Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, edited by ibid., Sage Publications, 1997, pp. 223–290 (retrieved from https://goo.gl/ImNMKH, 29 June 2016). –. “When was the ‘post-colonial’? Thinking at the limit.” The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons, edited by Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti, Taylor & Francis, 1996, pp. 242–260 (retrieved from http://goo.gl/AkU5iA, 29 June 2016). Jäger, Nadine Ninette. Postmigrantische Theaterpraxis in Berlin. Verhandlungen über Identität, Zugehörigkeit und Repräsentation am Ballhaus Naunynstraße. Süddeutscher Verlag für Hochschulschriften, 2016. Lutz-Sterzenbach, Barbara, et al., editors. Bildwelten remixed: Transkultur, Globalität, Diversity in kunstpädagogischen Feldern. transcript, 2013. Maier, Julia. Doppelter Boden: Deutsche Türkinnen zu Hause. Brandes  & Apsel, 2006 (“Interview mit Aziza,” pp. 21–31). Nassehi, Armin. Geschlossenheit und Offenheit. Studien zur Theorie der modernen Gesellschaft. Suhrkamp, 2003. Önder, Tunay. “Was sind Migrant/-innen anderes als babylonische Botschafter des Paradieses? Migrantenstadl 2.0.” Migration und künstlerische Produktion. Aktuelle Perspektiven, edited by Burcu Dogramaci, transcript, 2013, pp. 361–368. Römhild, Regina. “Jenseits ethnischer Grenzen. Für eine postmigrantische Kultur- und Gesellschaftsforschung.” Nach der Migration. Postmigrantische Perspektiven jenseits der Parallelgesellschaft, edited by Erol Yildiz and Marc Hill, transcript, 2015, pp. 37–48. –. “Diversität?! Postethnische Perspektiven für eine reflexive Migrationsforschung.” Kultur, Gesellschaft, Migration. Die reflexive Wende in der Migrationsforschung, edited by Boris Nieswand and Heike Drotbohm, Springer, 2014, pp. 255–270. Said, Edward W. “The Politics of Knowledge.” Raritan: A Quarterly Review, vol. 11, no. 1, 1991, pp. 17–31. –. Culture and Imperialism. Vintage, 1993. Sharifi, Azadeh. Theater für alle? Partizipation von Postmigranten am Beispiel der Bühnen der Stadt Köln. Peter Lang, 2011.

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Postmigrant Practices of Living as Resistance Terkessidis, Mark. Interkultur. Suhrkamp, 2010. Yildiz, Erol. “Postmigrantische Verortungspraktiken: Ethnische Mythen irritieren.” Migrationsforschung als Kritik? Spielräume kritischer Migrationsforschung, edited by Paul Mecheril et al., Springer, 2013, pp. 139–156. –. “Postmigrantische Perspektiven. Aufbruch in eine neue Geschichtlichkeit.” Nach der Migration. Postmigrantische Perspektiven jenseits der Parallelgesellschaft, edited by Erol Yildiz and Marc Hill, transcript, 2015, pp. 19–36. Yildiz, Erol, and Birgit Mattausch, editors, Urban Recycling. Migration als Großstadt-Ressource. Birkhäuser, 2009. Zaimoglu, Feridun. “Planet Germany.” Spiegel reporter, no. 2, 2000, pp. 18–27.

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THE POSTMIGRANT CONDITION IN ­FASHION, CULTURE AND FASHION THEORY

We have come to avoid wars, to avoid political oppression, to escape from poverty, to find opportunity for ourselves and, more important, for our children: with the hope of finding justice within a capitalist society. Strictly speaking we have left the problems of post-coloniality [ … ] only to discover that the white supremacist culture wants to claim the entire agency of capitalism – re‑coded as the rule of law within a democratic heritage – only for itself. (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason 1999, 398, emphasis in original) We are the children of engineers that drove your taxis. We are the sons of surgeons that served your tables, and we are the daughters of diplomats that held open your elevator doors. In spite of their genius our parents were bedeviled by the black magic of bureaucracy and backward immigration policies. But not us. We are the future that their hardwork and discarded dreams foresaw. (Ikiré Jones, Born Between Borders, Fashion Collection Spring Summer 2017)

Critique of the postcolonial reason and the post/-colonial-/ migrant condition In Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1999) puts a remarkable paradigm shift into effect. Witnessing at the turn of the millennium that in the course of transnational financialization the “postcolonial migrant” (ibid., 256) had become the norm, Spivak argues for a repositioning of the “postcolonial” into the frame of the “new immigrant” (ibid., 391) and with that in the stage of postcolonial migration. For her, the “new immigrant” is the key figure, who in a “real-time-hard-copy” (ibid., 394) experiences the transnational financialization process as the central mode of global production. Simultaneously, Spivak (ibid., 394) conceptualizes the “new immigrant” as a pivotal figure to encourage imagination and to remold the impossible into an experience without relapse into reverse-ethnic sentimentality. Interestingly enough, her reframing of postcolonial critique comes along with a harsh critique of postmodernity in the shape of postmodern fashion. Fashion, for her, is not only the signifier of a contemporary “rampant neo-colonialism” (ibid., 400) but also a paragon for the “implicit working of the axiomatics of imperialism in the vocabulary of radical critique” (ibid.). Unraveling the hierarchies of global labor within the neo-imperial world trade, Spivak argues for a terminological change of perspective from fashion to textiles and textility, which is interwoven in her realignment of the postcolonial condition in the presence of the post-/colonial-/migrant. Transferring these paradigmatic changes on a meta-level, this chapter examines the social and aesthetic condition of the postmigrant in‑between the concepts of the postcolonial and the

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postmodern, both active strands in the turn from the study of migration towards postmigration studies. Stumbling within Spivak’s shattering critique of fashion and going beyond it from a contemporary fashion studies perspective, the subsequent paragraphs exemplify that notions of the ‘postcolonial postmigrant’ condition are interrelated with the discourse on the post-black and how they actuate the work of contemporary fashion designers as well as of fashion theorists. Interlinking the debates on the postmigrant and the post-black diasporic condition in art, aesthetic and culture with contemporary fashion design practices, the article further carves out the three major strands that at present shape and represent the structures of postmigratory strategies in fashion theory and terminology: the shift from fashion to style (Hebdige 1979) towards “Fashion-Style-Dress” (Tulloch 2010); the debate on fashion, religion and (trans)ethnic global identities which has been shaped by the term modest fashion (Lewis 2013); and the topic of global labor, class and migration as drivers of the neoliberal fashion industry, as proposed by Spivak’s (1999) focus on the textile and textility.

The social and aesthetic evolution of the postcolonial postmigrant The paradigm of the postcolonial migrant as well as the term postmigrant have both evolved around the critique, the circumvolution and further the entanglement with postcolonial critique as well as postmodern knowledge. After Spivak (1999) had proposed the figure of the postcolonial migrant to resituate postcolonial critique beyond the “wave of academic-cultural ‘postcolonialism’” (ibid., 258) of elite migrants in Europe, European migration studies derived the concept of the ‘postmigrant’ from the postcolonial discourse to rethink migration beyond cultural essentialisms from a transnational, postethnic point of view.1 In countries such as Germany or Austria, where postcolonial migrants were small in number while mass migration due to labor and armed conflicts has taken place for a long time after the Second World War, the academic turn towards a “post-migrant migration research” (Römhild 2015, 39) was driven by the formula that migration research should be “de‑migrantisised”, whereas the research on society and culture had to be “migrantisised”. Drawing upon the postmodern framework of Foucault’s genealogy as well as on postcolonial theories, the term “post-migration” – as coined by Erol Yildiz and Marc Hill (2015, 2017, 2018), Regina Römhild (2015) and Naika Foroutan (2016, 2018) – points at a deconstructive view of the concepts of society and migration and aims at retelling the history of migration beyond the hegemonic discourse. Following Homi Bhabha’s (1994) notion of the ‘in-between’ as the unambiguous location of the postcolonial world, postmigrant research goes beyond the ethnic-­national paradigm and keeps thresholds, places of transition and movement in mind (Yildiz/Hill 2017, 276). The term unfolds its power on an empirical, analytical as well as normative level. Foroutan (2018, 20) elucidates that the ‘post’ in postmigrant relates to the empirical moment after the migration and in an analytical perspective points behind migration to social conflicts of class, gender inequalities or racism. On its normative level, postmigration is a moral-philosophical approach aiming to develop models for an inclusive society beyond the 1  Yildiz and Hill (2015, 19) note that the term appears for the first time in 1995 in Gerd Baumann and Thijl Sunier, Post-Migration Ethnicity, Het Spinhius, 1995. While Yidiz and Hill also use the hyphenated form of the term, this chapter follows the spelling ‘postmigration’, as in Langhoff et al. 2013 and Foroutan 2016.

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Fig. 1 | GmbH, SS 2017

established duality of migrants and non-migrants. In summary, the notion of the postmigrant condition is a travelling concept, one that itself migrated in the course of the 1990s from the repositioning of postcolonial studies through the field of activist artistic and cultural production – such as Shermin Langhoff’s ‘postmigrant theater’ (see Langhoff et al. 2013) – of the 2000s to an academic debate on postmigrant migration studies in sociology, cultural anthropology and pedagogy in the course of the 2010s, at a time when it also started to influence contemporary fashion design practices. In Berlin the notion of a contemporary postmigrant fashion design had been tacitly taken up in 2016 by the fashion duo Benjamin Alexander Huseby and Serhat Isik. By naming their label GmbH, after the abbreviation for the German corporation, the Norwegian-Pakistani photographer and the German-Turkish fashion designer appropriate and de‑code the bulky bureaucratic, economic and legalistic term. Casting mainly models from the Middle East and from Arab countries, who are friends or people from the neighborhood or the street, the GmbH is recoded as postmigrant merger and simultaneously emotionally charged as a model of friendship (fig. 1). Designers and models stage themselves as a clique of friends, an urban club-cultural tribe and as a queer group tied together by the strong bonds of solidarity, the feelings of closeness and the

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Fig. 2 | GmbH, SS 2018

expression of interconnectedness. GmbH creates the image of a new kind of urban community and with it a notion of what the discourse on postmigration has outlined as “transtopias”, new ways of living or “partially realized utopias in a world shaped by mobility” (Yildiz/Hill 2017, 279). They are spaces in which boundaries are traversed, where ambiguous and contradictory elements, both local and global, are linked with each other and condense to form urban structures and modes of communication are places of transition, where marginalized actors and types of knowledge come into view, places in which dominant norms are questioned and a new kind of urban identity becomes possible or even is already being lived. In the broadest sense, transtopias are also thinking spaces, virtual spaces and mobile models for ways of living. (ibid., 279 f.)

GmbH’s postmigrant transtopia definitely has its roots in their queer gender community and in the way LGBTs create new families. For the design of techno-club-cultural appearances, GmbH mixes massive patent leather trousers, the look of 1980s skiing and sportswear, elements of working clothes and biker outfits, complemented by elegant suits made from shiny material in subtle colors (figs. 2 and 3). GmbH and their crew are called Berlin’s answer to Demna Gvasalia’s fashion label Vetements, mixing postsoviet Normcore, Berghain look and 1990s anti-fashion into an antithesis of luxurious high fashion (Titton 2016, 71). The Gvasalia brothers, who fled as teen-

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Fig. 3 | GmbH, FW 2018

agers from the civil war in Georgia to Germany in 1993, have also become known for slogans such as “Queers Still Here”, “Not Your Resident” and the reproduction of ID cards from different countries as show invitations (Vetements FW 2017). Acting as a five to fifteen-headed group of designers named after the French word vêtements for “clothing”, their team is, like GmbH, aligned to a generation of young fashion designers who appear as a design collective without a leading star designer, casting their “own tribe of people” (Mower 2018). Design strategies are characterized by the perfecting of ready-mades as well as by modes of cultural appropriation with the “undertone of social upheaval” (Menkes 2017). Vetements had become famous as well as highly criticized for their replicas of old Margiela designs, of sportswear pieces from Champion and the appropriation of the flashy DHL-tee. Their oversized shapes of hoodies, raincoats, jackets and step-hemmed jeans, as well as their ubiquitous use of floral peasant dresses, had become very successful ahead of the market collaborations with brands including Eastpak, Levi’s, Comme des Garçons, Reebok and Stilo. After Demna Gvasalia rose to the post of creative director of Balenciaga in 2016 and Vetements had moved from Paris to Zurich, the label began to produce a much broader cross-sectional image of its community: from the banker in front of a Swiss life insurance

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company to the shop assistant in the front of a grocery store, to men in the middle of the police parking space or the red-light district, up to teenagers, students, tourists, families and retirees (Vetements FW 2018) (figs. 4–5). Nevertheless the ‘de-migrantization of migration’ and the ‘migrantization of culture and society’ seem to be active in these image productions as well as in Gvasalia’s first collection for Balenciaga in 2017, which has been highlighted by the media for bringing the ‘migrant look’ and ‘refugee chic’ to the Paris catwalks.

After migration: post-black conditions From the late 1990s onwards and approximately at the same time when the notion of the post-migrant condition of a new ‘postethnic’ habitus evolved, in the USA the political mission and the longing to exist without the categorizations of race or ethnicity led to the new category of the ‘post-black’, aiming “to banish from the collective mind the bankrupt, fraudulent concept of ‘authentic’ Blackness” (Touré 2011, 68) – though post-black does not mean “post-racial” (Touré 2011, 70). Created by Thelma Golden, curatorial director of the Harlem Studio Museum in New York, and the African-American artist Glenn Ligon in the late 1990s within the exhibitions Freestyle (2001), Frequency (2005) and Flow (2008), the term applies to contemporary

Figs. 4–5 | Vetements, SS 2018

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Fig. 6 | Ikiré Jones, After Migration, FW 2016

African American art of the post-Civil Rights generation (Tulloch 2010, 282). Post-black, as fashion theorist Carol Tulloch explains, “positions individuals of the diaspora who seek exploration of what it means ‘to be’ now through style narratives and who place themselves in the center of a vortex of historical, social, and cultural renderings of black and blackness and the constituent tropes of meaning” (ibid., 283, emphasis in original). The term ‘post-black’ names the search for a new aesthetics beyond the ethnicizing images and beauty philosophies of the Black anti-racist movements and marks a break-away from any identification that reaffirms the hegemonic classifications of black- and whiteness. “We are in a post-Black is beautiful discursive space where ‘post’ points to the waning of old paradigms without their supersession by anything new,” Shirley Anne Tate (2009) says. “What we can say though is that the ‘Black’ in Black beauty has become part of the axes of difference which provide overlapping lines of identification, exclusion, and contestation over beauty paradigms.” (ibid., 53) Although the post-black debate negotiates the aesthetic politics of body, beauty and style, Tulloch highlights that the terms black and blackness are still very much at the fore in considerations of visual, design and critical studies (ibid). At present, US‑Nigerian fashion designer and licensed attorney Walé Oyéjidé programmatically interweaves the discourses of post-black and postmigration. After Migration, the first title (FW 2016) of this series of collections for his fashion label Ikiré Jones was dedicated to the “uncelebrated roles of Sub-Saharan immigrants in Western society” and was presented in response

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to the world’s largest flight and migration wave, of 2015, at the Generation Africa Show during Pitti Immagine Uomo 89 in January 2016. Organized by the United Nations Ethical Fashion Initiative, the show was intended to ethically shape public responses to migration and forced displacement through fashion. Internationally the show attracted significant attention as well harsh critique for its decision to feature three asylum seekers on the runway. Oyéjidé on his side emphasized that the asylum seekers would represent his philosophy that fashion could foster ideas of equality and promote discussions on migration perfectly. His look book After Migration features the three immigrant models, Gitteh, Abdoulay and Madi, staged as contemporary pan-African dandies in elegant suits textured by wax prints, monochrome tribals and trendy black-andwhite graphics in the picturesque alleys of Florence (fig. 6). Thereby After Migration works on and with different levels of the prefix post and the postmigrant condition. On the one side, the Sub-Saharan immigrants are reminiscent of Arjun Appadurai’s (1996) “ethnoscapes”, defined as a landscape of persons who constitute the contemporary shifting global world: “tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers and other moving groups and individuals. They constitute an essential feature of the world and appear to affect the politics of (and between) nations to a hitherto unprecedented degree” (ibid., 33). On the other side, After Migration draws on a determined post- and decolonizing point of view, encompassing the “myriad routes and connections, flows and tensions” of the African diaspora styles shaped by Africa and the groups that followed the Atlantic slave trade, colonialism and imperialism (Tulloch 2016, 5). Oyéjidés silk prints – montages of 18th-century European tapestries where the white aristocratic profiles are replaced by brown face – relate to the transformative power of Adire Oloba textile designs and the way Yoruba women created alternative histories to represent black royalty in history and to evoke shifts in colonial power relations (Rice 2015). Celebrating “perspectives of unheralded people of color” (Ikiré Jones 2016), the After Migration campaign creates decolonizing, entangled histories and as James Clifford (2013) explains, “There is no longer a place from which to tell the whole story (there never was)” (ibid., 23). According to Walter Benjamin (1999), “the eternal, in any case, is far more the ruffle on a dress than some idea” (ibid., 463) – an idea expressed by Oyéjidé when post-colonial/migrant histories appear in the shape of a silk shoulder scarf or as a sequence of titles for his fashion collections. The titles of his sequencing collections propose an unfinished narrative of migration that unfolds itself not only in the condition of postmigration within postblack diasporas, but also as an ongoing decolonizing process in‑between nations and locations, as in Born Between Borders (SS 2017). In Twende Rafiki! (Massai for: Let’s go friends!) shifting grounds come to the forefront, while Awake & At Home in America (FW 2017) emphasizes the homeplace and After Migration II the iteration loops within migration processes.

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The postmigrant condition in‑between postcolonial critique and postmodern knowledge The postcolonial, via the postmodern in theory, art and post-dramatics, through to the notion of the post-black that come together in the concept of the postmigrant condition share the prefix “post”, and with it a temporality that ranges between after, in‑between up to the unfinished. As Stuart Hall (1996, 247) has pointed out, it was the shift from the formation of difference to the concept of the differánce that came up with the ‘post’ and entailed a theoretical and political ambiguity for the forms of politics and subject formations. The “post-colonial” as a decisive, hyphenated temporal marker within the general process of decolonization is a highly problematic yet still useful concept to describe the shifts in global relations Hall reinforced in 1996, as it not only frames the “(necessarily uneven) transition from the age of Empires to the post-independence or post-decolonization movement” but also provides the theoretical framework “to identify […] the new relations and dispositions of power which are emerging in the new conjuncture” (ibid., 246). Historically, postcolonial critique is characterized by the dialectic between Marxism, on the one hand, and poststructuralism and postmodernism, on the other (Gandhi 1998, viii). Since the end of the 1970s this has caused mainly contradictions and incompatibilities between the postcolonial and the postmodern lines of thought, but also overlaps (Ashcroft et al. 1995, 117). This follows Lyotard’s notion of postmodern knowledge postmodernist thinkers aimed at deconstructing the centralized, logocentric master narratives of Western cultures. Side by side, postcolonial key thinkers who dismantled the center-margin binarism of the imperial discourse also deployed the critique of European knowledge predominantly poststructuralist discourse and literary analysis to this end (Gandhi 1995, 117). Postmodernism and postcolonialism also share an emphasis on the significance of language and writing in the construction of experience, as well as the employment of subversive strategies such as mimicry, parody or irony (Ashcroft et al. 1995, 118). Beyond that, postmodernism is politically ambivalent and, as Linda Hutcheon (1995) has characterized it, “its critique coexists with an equally real and equally powerful complicity with the cultural dominants within which it inescapably exists” (ibid., 130), Kwame Anthony Appiah (1991), who at the beginning of the 1990s raised the question “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?”, summarized that they both are bonded by a space-clearing gesture (Appiah 1995, 119), although the concept of postmodernity has been constructed by the annihilation of the postcolonial condition, as it is grounded on terms which a priori refuse to turn “the Other into the Same” (During 1995, 125) and thereby more or less intentionally wipe out the possibility of post-colonial identities. Nevertheless, Western postmodernism has had an undeniable effect upon the rest of the world, and with it the imperial process of eurocentrism has been in force. In the light of this, Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin (1995) summarize: We are hardly likely ever to find that we live in a ‘Post-colonial Age’ because the ‘post’ in post-colonial is not the same as the ‘post’ in postmodernism. Postmodernism, whether it is the cultural logic of late capitalism (as Frederic Jameson claims) or not, doesn’t appear to be the primary framework within which most of the world’s population carries out its daily life. (ibid., 118)

This area of tension in‑between the logics of postcolonialism on the one hand and postmodernism on the other has also shaped the theoretical framework of fashion and postcolonial migra-

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tion and postmigration, which goes along with the revelation of the historical bonding of fashion and colonialism, the struggle for postethnic identities versus religious identities and the investigation on the rise of the neo-colonial fashion industry.

From fashion to style towards fashion – style – dress The premise that fashion is a phenomenon that could only emerge in the “civilized” urban West while the “Colonial Other” – and its revenant figure of the migrant – is assigned as traditional is the epistemological basis of modern (sociological) fashion theories. In this hierarchically shaped geography of fashion, Victoria Rovine (2009) argues that “fashion serves as a measure of cultural attainment” (ibid., 46) and as a strategy of cultural superiority: “Who has, and who does not have fashion is politically determined, a function of power relations” (Niessen 2003, 245 cit. in Rovine 2009, 46). Instead of fashion therefore the Birmingham Center for Cultural Studies advanced the term style, emphasizing that the history of migration had its “visual corollary in dress” (Hebdige 1979, 43). In Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979), Dick Hebdige, who had studied under Stuart Hall at the Birmingham Center for Cultural Studies, interprets the history of post-war British youth culture in relation to the different Windrush generations “as a succession of differential responses to the black immigrant presence in Britain from the 1950s onwards” (ibid., 29). His chapter on Reggae and Rastafarianism elaborates style as a “living record of a people’s journey – of the passage from slavery to servitude” and a semiological term that reverses “the historical sequence of migrations (Africa-Jamaica-Great Britain)” (ibid., 31). Coincident with this, Hebdige presupposes that the whole rhetoric of style within post-war British youth culture is a “dialogue between black and white most subtly and comprehensively recorded, albeit in code” (ibid., 45). Style as a term is based on the premise that it narrates the structures of rejection and assimilation between “host and immigrant communities” and gives “an oblique account of the exchanges which have taken place between the two communities” (ibid.). Hebdige therefore summarizes: “We can watch, played out on the loaded surfaces of British working-class youth cultures, a phantom history of race relations since the War” (ibid., 29). With good reason, Hebdige’s concept of style has been criticized as a ‘Resistance through style paradigm’ projecting Marxist notions of resistance on youth cultures as well as a loud postmodern overestimation of the plane. When Carol Tulloch developed the cultural studies concept further by conceptualizing the tripartite term “StyleFashion-Dress” for the study of the African diaspora, she emphasized the idea of the quiet revolution without “aggressive evocations of what it means to be black in specific geographical spaces and time” (Tulloch 2016, 5). Outlining style as agency in the construction of the self “through the assemblage of garments and accessories, hairstyles and beauty regimes that may, or may not be ‘in fashion’ at the time of use” (ibid., 4), Tulloch (2016) defines “style narrative” as a process of autobiographical self-telling through the relationships and its routes of (forced) migration. At the same time, the concept is deeply choice of clothes (ibid., 5). Tulloch’s (2010) concept, set out in the article “Style-Fashion-Dress: From Black to Post-Black”, bridges a gap between postcolonial studies and postmigration studies by encompassing the “myriad routes and connections, flows and tensions that originate from the analytical frame of Africa and its diaspora” (ibid., 5). The amalgam of the three terms “Style-Fashion-Dress” is indicative of the hyphenated identities of diaspora connected to ideas of post-blackness and postethnicity; these have to be

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considered thoroughly “with regard to specific use, contemporary relevance, or past-present connections” (Tulloch 2010, 273). With the umbrella term “Style-Fashion-Dress”, Tulloch refers to the “whole-and-part” (2010, 275) and the hierarchical lines within dress studies, proposing a critical framework for new research directions on dress associated with the African diaspora, suggesting methods of “de‑archiving” and “re‑archiving” (2016, 5), as well as the methodology to call into question “so‑called historical truths, cross-cultural connections, social, cultural and political issues” (ibid.). In view of the fact that “Style-Fashion-Dress” marks a paradigmatic change within the study of dress it could become a key concept for the study of postmigrant societies, groups, their construction of self and the use or production of garments in that process. Since Western assumptions about what constitutes “fashion” have dissolved, Eurocentric narratives of style have faded, and in the context of globalization critique new questions have emerged. Similarly, Susan B. Kaiser proposes the term “Style-Fashion-Dress” in Fashion and Cultural Studies (2012) as a new fashion studies concept as well as mode of articulation and methodology to open up new understandings of global contexts (ibid., 29).

Modest fashion – fashion, faith and globalization During the past three decades debates have increased about the visible presence of religious clothing. In Europe and North America especially, this relates to Islamic dress as a self-chosen, visible, fashionable declaration of identity and faith in the course of postcolonial (im)migration and postmigration. The special double issue of the journal Fashion Theory on Muslim Fashion (Moors/Tarlo 2007), ethnographic research “to lend insight into the complexities and nuances of visibly Muslim appearances” (Tarlo 2010, 12) and titles such as Islamic Fashion and Anti-Fashion (Tarlo/Moors 2013, Lewis 2015) reflect the fact that within Western postmigrant societies after 9/11, terms, political debates, the public ‘othering’ and the stereotyping of migration have shifted. Following the debates on migration exemplarily in the UK they moved from a ‘concern’ with “color” in the 1950–1960s, to “race” in the 1960–1980s, to ethnicity in the 1990s, and from the millennium onwards to religion – and most specifically to Islamophobia (Peach 2006, 631 cit. in Lewis 2015, 44). In many European countries this has culminated in prohibitive laws on the public wearing of headscarves, veils, burkas and hijabs as in France (2004/2011), Belgium (2010), the Netherlands (2015), Germany (2003/2016), the UK (2016), Austria (2017) and Denmark (2018) (Weaver 2018). The politics of racism, classism and other power relations, Kaiser (2012, 213) states, remind us that there are always hegemonic forces that make ethnic as well as religious vestimental articulations a continual site of cultural struggle. After the 1980s the Turkish textile industry was a driver for the commercial development of Islamic-covered fashions; during the 1990s a global Islamic fashion-scape emerged, when designers, entrepreneurs, consumers, internet and media users and makers developed distinctive styles by selecting, altering and re‑combining elements of mainstream fashion with different types of regional dress and head covering (Lewis 2015, 69–108; Tarlo 2010, 219). Since the mid2000s and after bloggers and the market began to call this modest fashion, fashion theory too started to build upon this term, universalizing modesty as a connection across the faiths of the major world religions – Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism – and within the overarching question of how much and what parts of the body should be covered (Lewis 2013). Modest fashion

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since then has advanced as bracket term; on the one side distinctions of ethnicity and nationality have become of little account, whereas on the other transnational signifiers of portable modesty have become part of the global fashion system. From the debut of the Modest Fashion Week (London/Dubay 2017), to hijab and abaya collections from luxury fashion brands such as Dolce&Gabbana, Chanel or Gucci, to Vogue Arabia cover stars such as the Somali-American model Halima Aden, who was born in a Kenyan refugee camp, to the Ramadan and modest fashion collections of fast fashion brands, the global modest fashion market is already worth hundreds of billions (Day 2018).

Textile and textility – (im)migration as a workforce for the global ­fashion industry Spivak’s Critique of Postcolonial Reason and her reframing of the postcolonial condition in the persona of the postcolonial migrant is highly engaged with a harsh critique of postmodern fashion, which for her seems a pars pro toto for the postmodern annihilation of the postcolonial as well as the neo-colonial economy itself. Close to Jean Baudrillard’s (1976/2017) theory of fashion as “the completed form of political economy” (ibid., 277), Spivak (1999) argues that even postmodern “alternative” fashion design discourses would remain “as asymptotic to radical theory as is the garment industry to fashion” (ibid., 341). Furthermore, she explains the way fashion narrates “the story of the production of the dominant self-representation of the clamorous ‘individual subject’” (ibid.), which itself is staged simultaneously in a theatre of exploitation and imitation and provides “‘the individual (female) subject’ a model to imitate” (ibid., 412). To overcome this aporia, Spivak focuses on the “textile of the social” and the “social folds of textile” and argues for a material turn (ibid., 356) that connects the dynamics of the neo-imperial world trade and its global scale of production based on the labor of (new) subaltern woman (ibid., 67). Till today the global fashion industry has heavily relied on (often undocumented) immigrant labor, and deterritorialization is one of the central forces that brings laboring populations into the lower-class sectors and spaces (Appadurai 1996, 37). Historically, the model of the sweatshop as it was established in the USA at the end of the 19th century was genuinely built on “immigrant workers, mainly young women, [who] slaved for long hours over their sewing machines in cramped and unsanitary factories, for very low wages” (Bonacich/Appelbaum 2000, 3). Edna Bonacich and Richard P. Appelbaum (2000) point out that it was (im)migration that at the turn of the millennium that again played a vital role in the re‑emergence of sweatshops by providing both the workforce and the entrepreneurship to run the contracting shops (ibid., 108). To weaken organized labor and to disenfranchise the immigrant working class at that time US government policies started to support offshore production and contracting out (ibid., 16). In Bangladesh, where in 2013 the Rana Plaza collapse, the worst accident in fashion history and “mass industrial homicide” (Safi/Rushe 2018), with the deaths of 1,134 garment makers and the injury of 2,500, took place, internal migrants from rural areas, mostly poorly informed about working conditions, often started their work in firms with higher wages but worse working conditions (Boudreau et al. 2018).2 This is different to the apparel 2  Laura Boudreau et al. (2018) also state that, on the other hand, migrant workers in Bangladesh have higher mobility than locals and later move toward firms with better conditions.

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industry in the USA, as in Los Angeles, which is mainly based on a system of transnational border migration. Taking Spivak’s concept of the textile as the framework for global workforce migration, the social folds of migration are not only polarized along the geographies of industrialized hubs and peripheries and their hierarchies of former colonial centers and contemporary postcolonial countries, but also along class lines with clear racial and ethnic structures and hierarchies (Bonacich/ Appelbaum 2000, 20). At its bottom in the USA, there is mainly Latino immigrant labor, especially from Mexico and Central America, and a minority of Asian immigrants. The wealthy immigrants at the top are almost all of European extraction; in the middle, there are “the entrepreneurs who run the contracting shops that employ the workers, and who are mainly immigrants from Asia (and, to a lesser extent, from Mexico and Central America)” (Bonacich/Appelbaum 2000, 20). More than other producer countries within the global fashion industry at present Turkey capitalizes on refugees and undocumented immigrants who entered the country due to the war in Syria and conflicts in the Middle East (Clean Clothes Campaign 2014, 65). The Stitched Up Report in 2014 deconstructed the label “Made in Europe” by revealing how post-socialist European countries operate as the cheap labor sewing backyard for Western European fashion brands and retailers (Clean Clothes Campaign 2014, 65). In the context of global labor migration Spivak’s (1999) framework of the textile not only offers a loom for a political economy analysis of the mass production of garments and fast fashion, but also provides the background for a historical and social inspection of the ages, stages and concepts related to the postcolonial that at present form the texture of “our culture” – from the colonial to the postcolonial and from the postmodern and hybrid to the subaltern and the new immigrant (ibid., 356).

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Burcu Dogramaci, Toward a Migratory Turn: Art History and the Meaning of Flight, Migration and Exile Fig. 1: Archive of Burcu Dogramaci; Fig. 2: © Estate of Jussuf Abbo; Fig. 3: http://www.spatialagency. net/database/whole.earth.catalog. Accessed 2 March 2018; Figs. 4–6: © Simona Koch; Figs. 7–8: © Silke Markefka/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019; Fig. 9: © Silke Markefka, Nikolai Vogel/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019; Fig. 10: Morgan O’Hara with Susan J. Hewitt. “Formal records of the use of time and movement through space. A conceptual and visual series of artworks.” Leonardo, vol. 16, no. 4, 1983, p. 269. Mieke Bal, Close Encounters: Producing Mutual ‘Integration’ Figs. 1–9, 11: © Mieke Bal; Fig. 10: Photo: © Astrid van Weyenberg. Sudeep Dasgupta, Fuocoammare and the Aesthetic Rendition of the Relational Experience of Migration Figs. 1–5: © Gianfranco Rosi, Fuoccamare, 2016. Marie-Hélène Gutberlet, Paths Walked Twice Figs. 1–2: Courtesy Tamara Grcic; Figs. 3–4: Courtesy Guy Woueté; Fig. 5: Courtesy Kemang Wa Lehulere and Stevenson Gallery, Johannesburg; Figs. 6–7: Courtesy Santiago Sierra and Lisson Gallery, London. Maggie O’Neill, Women, Art, Migration and Diaspora Fig. 1: © Fahira Hasedic and Karen Fraser; Figs. 2–3: © Aria Ahmed. Birgit Haehnel and Sascha Reichstein, On Nomadic Textile Forms – The Aesthetic of Nomadic Textiles Figs. 1–5: Courtesy of the artist; Fig. 6: Courtesy of MoMA, New York; Fig. 7: Collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Fig. 8: Archive CSROT, Historic Textile, Tapa, & Headdress Collection at the Stichting Egress Foundation, Amsterdam; Fig. 9: Courtesy of the artist; Fig. 10: Courtesy of the artist. Rachel Lee, Cosmopolitan Nodes and Vectors: Otto Koenigsberger’s Exilic Networks in India Figs. 1–2: Otto Koenigsberger’s Private Archive; Fig. 3: Author’s collection; Fig. 4: © The British Library Board, W+AK Johnston’s Map of India, Civil Divisions, 1935/Cartographic Items Maps 52430.(47.) 6;

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Image Credits

Fig. 5: Churchill Archives Centre, The Papers of Professor Max Born, BORN 6/1/27; Fig. 6: Otto Koenigsberger’s Private Archive; Fig. 7: TIFR Archives; Fig. 8: Otto Koenigsberger. Jamshedpur Development Plan. Tata, 1945; Fig. 9: Marg; Fig. 10: Otto Koenigsberger’s Private Archive. T. J. Demos, Climates of Displacement: From the Maldives to the Arctic Fig. 1: © Guillaume Collanges/Argos Collective; Fig. 2: © Laurent Weyl/Argos Collective; Figs. 3–4: © Subhankar Banerjee. Silvia Naef, From Baghdad to Paris and Back: Modernity, Temporary Exile and Abstraction in the Arab World Fig. 1: Jamil Hamoudi: Texte de André Parinaud. Éditions Universitaires, 1987, fig. 1, p. 18; Fig. 2: Nizar Salim. Iraq Contemporary Art, Vol. I, Painting. Sartec, 1977, p. 207; Figs. 3–4: Image courtesy of Barjeel Art Foundation. Kathleen James-Chakraborty, The Place of Faith: Accommodating Religious Minorities in the German and the Irish Cityscape Fig. 1: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/85/St._Matthäus-München.‌jpg. Author: CineAmigo; Fig. 2: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neue_Synagoge_Bochum#/media/File:Bochumer_Synagoge,_Juni_2008.JPG. Author: Maschinenjunge; Fig. 3: Courtesy of Michael Pegum; Fig. 4: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cd/DITIB-Merkez-Moschee_Duisburg_IMGP0009.‌jpg. Photo: ani; Fig. 5: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Koelner_Zentralmoschee_Januar_2013.‌jpg. Author: Pappnaas666; Fig. 6: https://commons.wikimedia.org/ wiki/File:Moschee_Penzberg_(13919162057).‌jpg. Photo: Akif Şahin; Fig. 7: Photo: Carla Briggs; Fig. 8: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Durga-puja-koln-2009‑1.JPG. Author: Wiki‑uk; Fig. 9: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri-Kamadchi-Ampal-Tempel#/media/File:Hamm-Tempel-Farbgestaltung2014‑11-02‑13-07.‌jpg. Author: Rainer Halama; Fig. 10: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Düsseldorf_-_Brüggener_Weg_-_EKO-Haus_-_Japanischer_Garten_%2B_ Glockenturm_%2B_Tempel_01_ies.‌jpg. Author: Frank Vincentz. Burcu Dogramaci, The Migratory Living Room: Dwelling and Furnishing in a Foreign Land Figs. 1, 2, 8: Archive Burcu Dogramaci; Fig. 3: http://magazin.spiegel.de/EpubDelivery/spiegel/ pdf/40606185; Fig. 4: © Herlinde Koelbl/Agentur Focus; Figs. 5–6: DOMiD Archive, Cologne; Fig. 7: We have made every effort to inform all copyright owners. However, if some have not been notified, please contact us; Fig. 9: Vlassis Caniaris/DOMiD Archive, Cologne; Fig. 10: Günay Ulutuncok/DOMiD Archive, Cologne; Fig. 11: © Manfred Vollmer. Kerstin Pinther, Of Inner Cities and Outer Space: (African) Futurism and (Utopian) Migration Fig. 1: © SMOKING DOGS FILMS; Courtesy Lisson Gallery; Figs. 2–3: © Gerald Machona, Goodman Gallery; Fig. 4: © Daniel Halter; Figs. 5–6: © Stary Mwaba; Fig. 7: © Thomas Splett; Fig. 8: © Christian Hanussek. Cathrine Bublatzky, Memory. Belonging. Engaging. Artistic Production in a Migration Context Figs. 1–7: © Parastou Forouhar.

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Image Credits

Monica Juneja, Migration, Dispossession, Post-Memorial Recuperations: An ‘Undisciplined’ View of the Partition of the Indian Subcontinent Fig. 1: Courtesy of the artists and Green Cardamom; Fig. 2: Courtesy of the artist; Fig. 3: From Duplaix, Sophie, editor. Nalini Malani. La rebellion des morts, exh.-cat. Centre Pompidou, Paris, Hatje Cantz, 2017; Fig. 4: Courtesy of the artist; Fig. 5: Paris, Musée du Louvre, public domain (Wikimedia Commons). Melanie Ulz, Migration on Display: Curatorial Concepts and Artistic Approaches in France and Germany Figs. 1–4, 7–8: Photo: Melanie Ulz; Fig. 5: Photo: Melanie Ulz. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019; Fig. 6: Photo: Jens Ziehe. Courtesy Halil Altındere und PİLOT Gallery, Istanbul. Francesca Lanz and Christopher Whitehead, Exhibiting Voids: Displaying Migration and the Role of the Built Environment Fig. 1: Anna Chiara Cimoli. “Migration Museums in Europe: Narratives and their Visual Translations.” European Museums in the 21st Century, edited by Luca Basso Peressut et al., Politecnico di Milano, 2013, p. 365; Fig. 2: Photo Archivio Galata Museo del Mare; Figs. 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10: Photo by Francesca Lanz, May 2018; Fig. 4: http://npmaps.com/statue‑of-liberty-ellis-island/. Accessed 12 September 2018. Sten Pultz Moslund, When Migration Turns from the Spectacular to the Ordinary: Postmigrant Inflections of Analytical Categories and Concepts of Migration Fig. 1: © Tam Joseph. Courtesy of the artist, Tam Joseph Art Management. Image supplied by Museums Sheffield; Fig. 2: © Marcia Bennett. Courtesy of the artist; Figs. 3–5: © Lynette Yia­domBoakye. Courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, and Corvi-Mora, London. Anne Ring Petersen, Migration and Postmigration as New Frameworks for Art Theory: Revisiting the Concepts of Identity, Difference and Belonging Fig. 1: Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Casper Maare; Fig. 2: Courtesy of the artist; Figs. 3–5: Courtesy of the artists. Elke Gaugele, The Postmigrant Condition in Fashion, Culture and Fashion Theory Fig. 1: GmbH ©Alexander Husbey, http://gmbhgmbh.‌eu/; Figs. 2–3: GmbH © Giovanni Giannoni, http://gmbhgmbh.‌eu/; Figs. 4–5: Vetements © Demna Gvasalia, http://vetementswebsite.com/ fashion-show/spring-2018; Fig. 6: © Ikiré Jones. Photo Credits Neil Watson, https://ikirejones.com/ fw16-after-migration/.

413

BIOGRAPHIES OF THE AUTHORS

Mieke Bal is a cultural theorist, critic, video artist and curator. She was co‑founder and the first director of ASCA (Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis). She works in cultural analysis, literature and art, focusing on gender, migratory culture, psychoanalysis and the critique of capitalism. Her 38 books include a feminist trilogy on the Hebrew Bible and a trilogy on contemporary political art. Her video projects, A Long History of Madness and Madame B, both with Michelle Williams Gamaker, and Reasonable Doubt, on René Descartes and Queen Kristina (2016), are widely exhibited. In 2017, Madame B was combined with paintings by Edvard Munch at the Munch Museum in Oslo. www.miekebal.‌org Cathrine Bublatzky is Assistant Professor of Visual and Media Anthropology at the Heidelberg Centre of Transcultural Studies. She is the speaker of the scientific network “Entangled Histories of Art and Migration: Forms, Visibilities, Agents” (DFG, 2018–2021). In 2017 she was awarded a grant by the Elite PostDoc Program of the Baden-Württemberg Foundation. Her reserach foci include visual cultures, contemporary art and photography, museum and exhibition studies, and migration and urbanity in South Asia, the Middle East and Europe. Her monograph Along the Indian Highway: An Ethnography of an International Travelling Exhibition is published in the Visual and Media Histories series, edited by Monica Juneja, Routledge India, 2019. Sudeep Dasgupta is Associate Professor in the Department of Media Studies, the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA) and the Amsterdam Centre for Globalization Studies (ACGS) at the University of Amsterdam. He was the Marie Jahoda Visiting Professor at Ruhr Universität Bochum (2011). His publications focus on the aesthetics and politics of displacement in visual culture, from the disciplinary perspectives of aesthetics, postcolonial and globalization studies, political philosophy, and feminist and queer theory. Publications include Constellations of the Transnational: Modernity, Culture, Critique (Rodopi, 2007), the co‑edited volume (with Mireille Rosello) What’s Queer about Europe? (Fordham University Press, 2014) and “The Aesthetics of Indirection: Intermittent Adjacencies and Subaltern Presences at the Borders of Europe.” Cinéma et Cie, vol. 17, no. 28, 2017, pp. 41–50. T. J. Demos is Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture, University of California, Santa Cruz, and Founder and Director of its Center for Creative Ecologies. He writes widely on the intersection of contemporary art, global politics and ecology, and is the author of numerous books, including The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global

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Biographies of the Authors

Crisis (Duke University Press, 2013) – winner of the College Art Association’s 2014 Frank Jewett Mather Award, Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and Political Ecology (Sternberg Press, 2016) and Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (Sternberg Press, 2017). Burcu Dogramaci is Professor of Art History at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich. She is the co‑founder of the working group “Art Production and Art Theory in the Age of Global Migration” established in 2013, and a member of the scientific network “Entangled Histories of Art and Migration: Forms, Visibilities, Agents” (funded by the DFG, 2018–2021). In 2016 she was awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant by the European Research Council. Her research areas are: exile, migration and flight, urbanity and architecture, photography, fashion, sculpture, and live art. Publications include Kulturtransfer und nationale Identität. Deutschsprachige Architekten, Stadtplaner und Bildhauer in der Türkei nach 1927 (Gebr. Mann, 2008), Heimat. Eine künstlerische Spurensuche (Böhlau, 2016), Passagen des Exils/Passages of Exile (edition text + kritik, 2017, ed. with Elizabeth Otto) and Fotografie der Performance. Live Art im Zeitalter ihrer Reproduzierbarkeit (Wilhelm Fink, 2018). Elke Gaugele is Professor for Fashion and Styles at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. She is project leader of the Austrian Center for Fashion Research (ACfFR) and a researcher in the scientific network “Entangled Histories of Art and Migration: Forms, Visibilities, Agents” (DFG, 2018– 2021). As a cultural anthropologist, writer, curator and researcher, she works internationally on postcolonial fashion studies and the ethics and politics of fashion. She was awarded a Lise Meitner habilitation scholarship (2005/06) and a Maria-Goeppert-Mayer Professorship (2004). Her publications include Aesthetic Politics in Fashion (Sternberg, 2014), Critical Studies. Kultur- und Sozialtheorie im Kunstfeld (VS, 2016, edited with Jens Kastner) and Fashion and Postcolonial Critique (Sternberg, 2018, edited with Monica Titton). Marie-Hélène Gutberlet is curator, researcher and writer. She earned her MA in art history and her doctorate in film studies from the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. Much of her work appears as process-based research and exhibition projects: she co‑founded “Migration & Media” in 2006, curated Shoe Shop (Johannesburg, 2012) and The Space Between Us (Berlin & Stuttgart, 2013–2014), and co‑curated Visionary Archive (Berlin, Bissau, Cairo, Johannesburg, Khartoum, 2013–2015), Cours, cours, camarade, le vieux monde est derrière toi – The Cinema of Med Hondo (2017–2018), and (currently) Women on Aeroplanes (Berlin, Lagos, Bayreuth, London, Warsaw, 2017–2019). Recent publications include Die Kunst der Migration (transcript, 2011), Shoe Shop (Jacana, 2012) and The Space Between Us (Kerber, 2013). Birgit Haehnel is Professor of Textile Studies, University of Osnabrück. She received her doctorate in art history from the University of Trier, and has been member of the working group “Art Production and Art Theory in the Age of Global Migration” since 2013. Her research areas are fashion theory, postcolonial, critical whiteness and gender studies, migration, and high-tech textiles and art. Her publications include Stoffe weben Geschichten. Textile Kunstmaterialien im trans­ kulturellen Vergleich, a thematic issue of the journal FKW – Zeitschrift für Geschlechterforschung und visuelle Kultur (open journal, 2011, co‑editor) and Dressed Up! Transcultural Fashion, a thematic issue of the journal Querformat (transcript, 2013, co‑editor).

415

Biographies of the Authors

Kathleen James-Chakraborty is Professor of Art History at University College Dublin. She earned her BA in art history from Yale and her MA and doctorate in art history from the University of Pennsylvania. A historian of modern architecture, she is a former Vincent Scully Visiting Professor in the Yale School of Architecture. Her books include German Architecture for a Mass Audience (Routledge, 2000), Architecture since 1400 (Minnesota, 2014) and Modernism as Memory: Building Identity in the Federal Republic of Germany (Minnesota, 2018). Monica Juneja is Professor of Global Art History at the University of Heidelberg. Her research and writing focus on transculturality and visual representation, the disciplinary practices of art history in South Asia, the history of visuality in early modern South Asia, and the heritage and architectural histories of South Asia in transcultural perspective. Her recent publications include Universalität in der Kunstgeschichte?, a thematic issue of the journal Kritische Berichte (2012, edited with Matthias Bruhn and Elke A. Werner), Contextualizing Choices: Islamicate Elements in European Arts, a thematic issue of the journal The Medieval History Journal (2012, edited with Vera Beyer and Isabelle Dolezalek), Kulturerbe Denkmalpflege transkulturell: Grenzgänge zwischen Theorie und Praxis (transcript, 2013, edited with Michael Falser), Disaster as Image. Iconographies and Media Strategies across Asia and Europe (Schnell & Steiner, 2014, edited with Gerrit Jasper Schenk) and EurAsian Matters. China, Europe and the Transcultural Object (Springer, 2018, edited with Anna Grasskamp). She is currently preparing a book entitled Can Art History be made Global? A Discipline in Transition, based on the Heinrich Wölfflin Lectures which she delivered at the University of Zurich. Monica Juneja edits the series Visual and Media Histories (Routledge), is on the editorial board of Visual History of Islamic Cultures (De Gruyter), Ding, Materialität, Geschichte (Böhlau), History of Humanities (University of Chicago Press), The Medieval History Journal (Sage) and Heidelberg Studies in Transculturality (Heidelberg University Publishing) and is co‑editor of Transcultural Studies. Francesca Lanz is a lecturer in Interior Architecture and Exhibition Design in the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies at Milan Polytechnic. Her research interests are, in particular, museums and heritage, with a focus on museography and exhibition design. In recent years she has been contributing to several research programmes, including the EU‑funded projects “MeLa: European Museums in an Age of Migrations” (2011–2015) and “TRACES: Transmitting Contentious Cultural Heritages with the Arts” (2016–2019). Her publications on museums and migration include "Staging Migration (in) Museums." Museum & Society, vol. 14, no. 1, 2016, "City Museums in a Transcultural Europe." Museums and Migration (Routledge, 2014) and "Museums and a Progressive Sense of Place." Museums and Communities (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019, with Chris Whitehead). Rachel Lee is a post-doctoral researcher at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich. Her urban and architectural historical research focuses on exile and migration at its intersections with gender, heritage and transcultural practice in South Asia and East Africa. Her publications include “Otto Koenigsberger, Transcultural Practice and the Tropical Third Space.” OASE, no. 95, December 2015, Things Don’t Really Exist Until You Give Them a Name: Unpacking Urban Heritage (Mkuki na Nyota, 2017, edited with Diane Barbé, Anne-Katrin Fenk, and Philipp Misselwitz) and “A Transna-

416

Biographies of the Authors

tional Assemblage.” AA Women in Architecture, 1917–2017, edited by Elizabeth Darling and Lynne Walker (AA Press, 2017). Marco Martiniello is Research Director at the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (FRSFNRS). He teaches the sociology of migration and ethnicity at the University of Liège (Belgium), where he is the director of the Center for Ethnic and Migration Studies (CEDEM) and vice-dean for research in the Faculty of Social Sciences. He has been visiting scholar or visiting professor at various universities, including CUNY and the University of Geneva. His publications include Multiculturalism and the Arts in European Cities (Routledge, 2014), An Introduction to Immigrant Incorporation Studies. European Perspectives (Amsterdam University Press, 2014) and Villes connectées. Pratiques transnationales, dynamiques identitaires et diversité culturelle (Presses Universitaires de Liège, 2016). Birgit Mersmann is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Duisburg-Essen. She is the co‑founder of the working group “Art Production and Art Theory in the Age of Global Migration” established in 2013 and a researcher in the scientific network “Entangled Histories of Art and Migration: Forms, Visibilities, Agents” (DFG, 2018–2021). Her research focuses on image and media theory, visual cultures, modern and contemporary East Asian and Western art, global art history, art and migration, the history of Asian biennials, new museums in Asia, visual translation, interrelations between script and image, documentary photography and photobooks. Recent monographs and edited books include Transmission Image. Visual Translation and Cultural Agency (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009, edited with Alexandra Schneider), Schrift Macht Bild. Schriftkulturen in bildkritischer Perspektive (Velbrück, 2011, edited with Antonio Loprieno and Carsten Knigge-Salis), Schriftikonik. Bildphänomene der Schrift in kultur- und medienkomparativer Perspektive (Fink, 2015), Kunsttopographien globaler Migration, a thematic issue of the journal kritische berichte (Jonas, 2015) and The Humanities between Global Integration and Cultural Diversity (DeGruyter, 2016, edited with Hans G. Kippenberg). Sten Pultz Moslund is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU). He is part of the collective research project “Art, Culture and Politics in the ‘Postmigrant Condition’” funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research and the newly established SDU-based research programme “Culture and Migration – Postmigrant Perspectives in Europe”. His research focuses on postcolonial and multicultural literature and theory, including hybridity theory, racialization, migration and postmigration. His books include Migration Literature and Hybridity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), the co‑edited volume The Culture of Migration. Politics, Aesthetics and Histories (I. B. Tauris, 2015) and the co‑written work Reframing Migration, Diversity and the Arts: the Postmigrant Condition (Routledge, forthcoming). Silvia Naef is Professor at the Arabic Studies Section, University of Geneva. She was the principal investigator of the research project “Other Modernities: Patrimony and Practices of Visual Expression Outside the West” (2013–2017), funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Her research focuses on modern art and visual representations in the Arab and Islamic world; she is also interested in gender issues. Her publications include A la recherche d’une modernité arabe (Slat-

417

Biographies of the Authors

kine, 1996, Arabic translation, Agial, 2008), Y a‑t‑il une question de l’image en Islam? (Téraèdre, 2015) and “Visual Modernity in the Arab World, Turkey and Iran: Reintroducing the ‘Missing Modern’.” Asiatische Studien/Etudes Asiatiques (2016, edited with Elahe Helbig). Thomas Nail is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Denver. He is the author of Returning to Revolution: Deleuze, Guattari and Zapatismo (Edinburgh University Press, 2012), The Figure of the Migrant (Stanford University Press, 2015), Theory of the Border (Oxford University Press, 2016), Lucretius I: An Ontology of Motion (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), Being and Motion (Oxford University Press, 2018) and Theory of the Image (Oxford University Press, 2019) and is co‑editor of Between Deleuze and Foucault (Edinburgh University Press, 2016). His publications can be downloaded at http://du.academia.edu/thomasnail. Maggie O’Neill is Professor in Sociology at the University of Cork. She is an ethnographer who researches the areas of cultural criminology, critical theory/feminist theory, biographic, participatory and arts-based/walking methods, specifically in relation to sex work and (forced) migration. She co‑founded the “Sex Work Research Hub” and the “North East Race, Crime and Justice Network”. Her recent books include Transgressive Imaginations (Palgrave, 2012) and Advances in Biographical Research: Creative Applications (Routledge, 2014). Imaginative Criminology of Space (Policy) is forthcoming with Lizzie Seal. Nikos Papastergiadis is Professor at the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. His sole-authored publications include Modernity as Exile (Manchester University Press, 1993), Dialogues in the Diaspora (Rivers Oram Press, 1998), The Turbulence of Migration (Polity, 2000), Metaphor and Tension (Artspace, 2004), Spatial Aesthetics: Art Place and the Everyday (Rivers Oram Press, 2006), Cosmopolitanism and Culture (Polity, 2012) and Ambient Perspectives (Lyon Housemuseum, 2013 and 2015). He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and Visiting Professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Anne Ring Petersen is Associate Professor at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Her research focuses on installation art, transculturality in contemporary art and the interrelations between art, migration, postmigration and globalisation. Her recent publications include the co‑edited anthology The Culture of Migration: Politics, Aesthetics and Histories (I. B. Tauris, 2015), the monographs Installation Art: Between Image and Stage (Museum Tusculanum Press, 2015) and Migration into Art: Transcultural Identities and Art-Making in a Globalised World (Manchester University Press, 2017). Kerstin Pinther is Professor at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, an art historian and an art anthropologist. She is member of the scientific network “Entangled Histories of Art and Migration: Forms, Visibilities, Agents”, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Her research focuses on contemporary art, architecture and design practices in Africa. She also works as a curator and is currently making a film on architecture and design in Bamako, Mali (with Tobias Wendl). Her publications include New Spaces for Negotiating Art (and) Histories in Africa (Lit Verlag, 2015, edited with Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi and Berit Fischer), “Artists’ Archives and

418

Biographies of the Authors

the Sites of Memory in Cairo and Algiers.” World Art Studies, vol. 6, no. 1, 2016, pp. 169–185, and Flow of Forms/Forms of Flow. Design Histories between Africa and Europe (transcript, 2018, edited with Alexandra Weigand). Sascha Reichstein is an artist and Senior Lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and the University of Osnabrück, among others. She lives and works in Vienna (Austria). Her artistic work and research deals with questions of cultural displacement and the relation between tradition and modernization. Reichstein’s photographs, films and installations focus on regional Western contexts and examine their global expansions, connections and transitions. Her exhibitions and films are shown internationally. Her publications include Be my Guest (Fotohof Edition, 2006) and Daily Production (Edition Angewandte, De Gruyter, 2015). www.saschareichstein.‌net Daniella Trimboli is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakin University. She was jointly awarded her PhD in cultural studies by the University of British Columbia and the University of Melbourne under the Universitas 21 programme. Her first book, Mediating Multiculturalism (working title) is due to be published in late 2019 (Anthem Press). Trimboli has taught Cultural Studies, Tourism and Australian Studies, and worked for the Yunggorendi First Nations Centre at Flinders University. In 2016–2017, she was a Research Fellow in the Research Unit in Public Cultures at the University of Melbourne. Digital and artistic representations of migrant identity are frequently the sites for her research into multiculturalism, critical cosmopolitanism and diaspora studies. Trimboli is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Intercultural Studies. Melanie Ulz is Visiting Professor at the University of Osnabrück. Since 2012, she has been a member of the “Institute of Migration Research and Intercultural Studies” (IMIS, University of Osnabrück) and, since 2018, co‑speaker of the working group “Art Production and Art Theory in the Age of Global Migration”. Her main fields of research include transcultural art history, and postcolonial and gender studies; they range from battle painting and the visual history of slavery to the visualization of migration. Her recent publications include Migrationsforschung und Film, a thematic issue of the journal IMIS-Beiträge (2015, edited with Christoph Rass), Die Szenographie der Migration in stadt- und regionalgeschichtlicher Ausstellungspraxis, a thematic issue of the journal IMIS-Beiträge (2017 edited with Marcel Berlinghoff and Christoph Rass) and Migration ein Bild geben. Visuelle Aushandlungen von Diversität (Springer VS, 2018, edited with Christoph Rass). Christopher Whitehead is Professor of Museology at the Universities of Newcastle (UK) and Oslo (Norway). He is currently working on political uses of the past, time and place, and contested histories and heritages, especially where these relate to contemporary social tensions, division and conflict. He has conducted extensive EU‑funded research into museums and migration and European heritage and identity, on which he has published widely, alongside monographs on the 19th-Century Art Museum (Ashgate, 2005), Museums and the Construction of Disciplines (Bloomsbury, 2009) and Interpreting Art in Museums and Galleries (Routledge, 2012).

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Biographies of the Authors

Erol Yildiz is Professor of Migration and Education at the University of Innsbruck. He is Director of the “Research Center for Migration and Globalization” at the University of Innsbruck. His research areas are critical migration research, postmigration, migration and urbanity, and migration and education. His publications include Die weltoffene Stadt. Wie Migration Globalisierung zum urbanen Alltag macht (transcript, 2013), Nach der Migration. Postmigrantische Perspektiven jenseits der Parallelgesellschaft (transcript, 2015, edited with Marc Hill) and Postmigrantische Visionen. Erfahrungen – Ideen – Reflexionen (transcript, 2018, edited with Marc Hill).

420

INDEX

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. A Abbo, Jussuf 19, 21, 21 Abram, Ruth J. 337 Adams, Ansel 210 Aden, Halima 407 Adnan, Etel 219 Adorno, Theodor W. 11, 104, 105, 108, 132–136 Agamben, Giorgio 198 Ahmed, Aria 139, 140 Ahmed, Safdar 49 Ahmed, Sara 369, 370, 378, 379 Akerman, Chantal 121 Akin, Fatih 72 Akomfrah, John 121, 263, 264, 264 Albers, Anni 156 Albini, Franco 344 Al-Droubi, Hafiz 217 Al Said, Shakir Hassan 217, 219, 220, 223, 224, 224, 225, 225–228 Al-Sayyab, Badr Shakir 219 Altındere, Halil 325, 326, 326 Al-Wasiti, Yahya ibn Mahmud 220, 223, 226 Alÿs, Francis 121 Anand, Mulk Raj 172 Anderson, Robert 170 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 48, 120, 385, 404 Araeen, Rasheed 48 Argos Collective [Collectif Argos] 192–194, 195, 196, 196–198, 200, 201, 209, 210 Arias, Guillermo 179 Arp, Hans 151 Ashcroft, Bill 404 Attia, Kader 323, 324, 324, 325 Auerbach, Erich 106 Aziza A. [Alev Azize Yıldırım] 390 Azzawi, Dia 219

B Bach, Johann Sebastian 166 Badger, Gerry 190 Baere, Bart De 41, 46 Baghdad Group for Modern Art [Jama’at Baghdad lil-Fann al-Hadith] 218, 219, 223, 226 Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich 354 Bal, Mieke 79, 81, 82, 83, 86, 87, 89, 91, 93, 94, 95, 96, 98, 305, 377, 414 Balta, Paul 220, 226, 227 Banerjee, Subhankar 192, 202–205, 205, 206, 206–211 Bartana, Yael 102 Batley, Claude 166 Batous, Afraa 121 Baudrillard, Jean 407 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb 80 Bayer, Raymond 220, 221, 226 Baziotes, William 33 Beckett, Samuel 96 Begg, Zanny 49 Belle, La Vaughn 373, 374, 376, 377, 379, 380, 381, 382 Belling, Rudolf 18, 19 Benhabib, Seyla 136 Benjamin, Walter 17, 23, 29, 132, 133, 135, 136, 302, 303, 403 Bennett, Marcia 356, 357, 358 Bergson, Henri 57, 67 Berkeley, George 95 Berlage, Hendrik Petrus 241 Bernstein, J.M. 104 Bhabha, Homi J. 169, 169–174 Bhabha, Homi K. 42, 120, 294, 354, 386, 397 Bhabha, Jamshed 171 Bhatt, N.B. 168

421

Index Bichler, Peter 149 Biederman, Matthew 204 Billimoria, J.P.J. 172 Bird, Jamie 139 Black Audio Film Collective 263, 264 Bodomo, Frances 272 Boeck, Filip De 275 Böhm, Dominikus 238 Böhm, Gottfried 238, 239 Böhm, Paul 239 Boketshu, Dicoco 275 Bokungu, Boketshu 276 Bonacich, Edna 407 Bonaparte, Napoléon 149 Boonstra, Marjoleine 181 Borchardt, Ludwig 160, 162, 165 Born, Max 162, 164, 165, 169, 172, 173 Botticelli, Sandro 227 Boudart, Bo 207 Boudreau, Laura 407 Boxer, Barbara 207, 208 Brand, Stewart 24, 25 Brecht, Bertolt 134, 135 Breton, André 220 Breuer, Marcel 22, 160 Brinitzer, Walter 166, 167 Bromley, Roger 354, 355 Bruggen, Arnold van 180 Büchel, Christoph 309 Bunnell, Tim 48 Burgon, Ruth 119 Bürkle, Stefanie 258 Bush, George W. 207 Butler, Judith 302, 371, 378 Butler, Octavia E. 263 Butt, Danny 48, 49 Bywater, Jonathan 48 C Cadava, Eduardo 206 Caniaris, Vlassis 257, 258, 258, 259, 327, 328 Cantwell, Wilfrid 236, 236, 237 Castles, Stephen 58 Cave, Nick 265 Certeau, Michel de 17, 31 Chandrasekhara, C.S. 172 Chirac, Jacques René 319 Chitale, L.M. 172 Chomette, Guy-Pierre 193, 194 Christensen, Miyase 45 Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn 303

422

Cimabue 227 Cinema Suitcase 87, 89, 93, 94 Clifford, James 317, 403 Clinton, George 263 Cmielewski, Leon 197 Cohen, Steven 270 Collanges, Guillaume 195 Coney, John 264 Connelly, Heather 139, 140 Constable, John 364 Corneille, Pierre 311 Cornish, Harriet 244 Cornish, Peter 244 Cortez, Yuri 179 Crang, Mike 45 Cresswell, Tim 59 Cromwell, Oliver 246 Cuddon, John Anthony 186 Cunliffe, Alma 139 Czaplicka, John 292 D Dadi, Iftikhar 301, 301, 302, 307 Dagher, Charbel 217–219, 226 Das, Veena 299, 302, 303, 305 David, Jacques-Louis 310, 310, 311 Davis, Natasha 132, 137 De la Fuente, Eduardo 139 Delany, Samuel R. 263 Deleuze, Gilles 22, 80, 92, 96, 106, 145, 354 Denderen, Ad van 179–181 Denis, Claire 125 Deolaikar, G.B. 172 Desai, Anita 162 Desai, Lady Kishwar 299 Descartes, René 95, 227, 414 Deuser, Patricia 319 Didi-Huberman, Georges 23 Djerassi, Dale 207 Draeger, Christoph 197 Drew, Jane 173 Duplaix, Sophie 305 E Eastwood, Wardell 197 Edwards, Elizabeth 286, 287 Ehlers, Jeannette 373, 374, 374, 375, 375, 376, 377, 379, 380, 380–382 Eichhorst, Heinz-Rainer 243, 243 Elden, Stuart 58 Emerson, Caryl 87

Index Entekhabi, Shahram 81, 82 Enwezor, Okwui 48, 308, 309 Eshrāghi, Léuli Māzyār Luna‘i 43 Eshun, Kodwo 263 Esmay, Katherine Linda 31 Ettinghausen, Richard 218 F Fabian, Johannes 81 Farbotko, Carol 196, 199 Faris, Muhammed Ahmed 326, 326 Farroukh, Moustafa 217, 218 Fayazuddin, M. 172 Fenton, Natalie 45 Fernández, Horacio 190 Fischli, Peter 121 Fitze, Sir Kenneth 164 Flechtheim, Alfred 22 Flusser, Vilém 249 Folie, Sabine 29 Fontcuberta, Joan 176 Forouhar, Dariush 283 Forouhar, Parastou 281, 282, 283, 284, 285, 286, 286, 287, 287, 288, 288, 289, 289, 290, 290, 291, 291, 292, 292–296 Forouhar, Parvaneh 283 Foroutan, Naika 351, 352, 367, 387, 397 Foucault, Michel 125, 397 Fourie, Abrie 124 Fraser, Karen 132, 133, 133 Friedrich, Caspar David 364 Fry, Maxwell 173 G Gabo, Naum 22 Gallagher, Ellen 264 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand [Mahatma Gandhi] 164, 170, 303 Gannibal, Abram Petrovich 87 Garvens-Garvensburg, Herbert von 21, 22 Gaussi, Jeanno 33 Gayoom, Maumoon Abdul 200 Gebauer, Mirjam 367 Geertz, Clifford 294 George, Edward 263 George, Walter 172 Gerst, Alexander 25 Gielen, Pascal 46 Giotto [Giotto di Bondone] 227 Glissant, Édouard 117, 120 GmbH 398, 398, 399, 399, 400, 400

Goldberg, Jim 179, 180 Golden, Thelma 359, 401 Goldsmith, Michael 200 Goldstraw, George 166 Golikov, Ilya 206 Gomis, Alain 117 Goodman, Amy 209 Goodman, Nelson 381 Gopal, Bissano Ram 166 Gopaul, Lina 263 Gore, Al [Albert Arnold Gore Jr.] 196 Grafe, Frieda 119, 120 Grcic, Tamara 120, 121, 122, 129 Green Cardamom 307 Griffiths, Gareth 404 Grohmann, Will 19 Gropius, Walter 160 Gsaenger, Gustav 233, 233 Guattari, Félix 22, 145 Guha, Ranajit 13 Gujral, Satish 300, 308 Gupta, Shilpa 307–309 Gursky, Andreas 210 Gvasalia, Demna 399–401 H Hall, Stuart 42, 323, 369–373, 391, 392, 404, 405 Halter, Daniel [Dan] 270, 271, 271, 272 Hamann, Paul 19 Hamilton, Elizabeth 265 Hamilton, Peter 187 Hamoudi, Jamil 217, 219–221, 221, 222, 222, 223, 226–228 Handlin, Oscar 18 Harris, Bernard Anthony Jr. 263 Harrison, Stephan 41 Hasedic, Fahira 132, 133 Hashmi, Salima 308 Hashmi, Zarina 300 Hassan, Faiq 217 Hebdige, Dick 405 Hecker, Zvi 235 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 57, 58, 135, 227, 371 Heilig, Robert 166, 167 Hellio, Eléonore 275 Helmhold, Heidi 154 Henda, Kiluanji Kia 277 Hendricks, Barkley L. 362 Herzfeld, Michael 295 Hirsch, Marianne 300, 307

423

Index Ho, Elaine Lynn-Ee 48 Hobbs, Rosie 139 Höfer, Candida 257 Hohaia, Te Miringa 48 Hollande, François 319 Holm, Astrid 358 Holzfeind, Heidrun 197 Horkheimer, Max 105 Hornstra, Rob 180 Howe, Darcus 356 Hunt, William Henry 358 Huseby, Benjamin Alexander 398 Hussein, Saddam 139, 223 Hutcheon, Linda 404 Huyssen, Andreas 300, 305 I Idriz, Benjamin 239 Ikiré Jones 396, 402, 402, 403 Ingersoll, T.G. 158 Iosseliani, Otar 125 Isik, Serhat 398 Iskin, Ruth E. 18 Ismail, Dewan Mirza [Sir Mirza Muhammad Ismail] 164, 164, 165 Isou, Isidore 218, 227, 228 Isuma Productions 204 J Jackson, Michael 271 Jacobson, Anita 337 Jafari, Murtaza Ali 49 Jameson, Frederic 404 Janniot, Alfred Auguste 320, 322, 323 Jasarevic, Alen 239, 240 Jazbec, Ciril 180 Joglekar, S.K. 172 John Radcliffe Studio [Daniel Castro Garcia & Thomas Saxby] 179 Johnson, Avril 263 Johnson, Linton Kwesi 72 Jones, Amelia 369, 371, 372 Jørholt, Eva 367 Joseph, Tam 356, 356, 358 K Kabir, Ananya Jahanara 300 Kafka, Franz 125, 135, 199 Kagal, B.R. 172 Kahiu, Wanuri 265 Kaiser, Susan B. 406

424

Kalifoo Ground 74 Kamrowski, Gerome 33 Kanak Attak 391, 393 Kane, Cheikh Hamidou 117 Kaneko, Ryuichi 190 Kant, Immanuel 30, 40, 48, 63–66, 80, 81, 106, 135, 227 Karode, Roobina 305 Kasinitz, Philip 70 Kaur, Rajkumari Amrit 160 Kay, Tamara 187 Keaton, Buster 96 Kench, Paul 194 Kermani, Navid 179 Kessels, Erik 190 Ketemu Project 48, 49 Khalili, Bouchra 32, 33, 127 Khaliq, Abdul 301 Khoj 307 Khullar, Sonal 309 King, Rodney 265 Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig 152 Kispert, Matthias 135 Kister Scheithauer Gross [ksg Architekten und Stadtplaner] 235 Kiwanga, Kapwani 277 Kler, Dharam Singh 172 Klöfkorn, Michel 123 Koch, Simona 25, 26, 27 Koelbl, Herlinde 252, 253, 254, 255 Koenigsberger, Käthe 161, 162, 165–167 Koenigsberger, Otto H. 158, 159, 159, 160, 160, 161, 161–163, 165–168, 168, 169, 170, 170–174, 416 Koenigsberger, Renate 172 Kohl, Helmut 259 Koolhaas, Rem 45 Kraemer, Brigitte 261 Kramer, Fritz W. 268 Kramrisch, Stella 166 Kristina, Queen of Sweden 414 Krumbiegel, Gustav Hermann 167 Kunuk, Zacharias 204 Kurdi, Alan 61 Kureishi, Hanif 72 Kushner, Tony 136 Kuster, Brigitta 118, 129 L Landshoff, Hermann 33 Lange, Dorothea 177, 178 Langhammer, Walter 172

Index Langhoff, Shermin 351, 391, 398 Laprade, Albert 320 Lasker-Schüler, Else 20, 21, 21 Law, Andrew 346 Lazrus, Heather 199 Le Corbusier [Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris] 152 Léger, Fernand 152 Le Pen, Jean-Marie 319 Levi Strauss, David 176 Levy-Deinhard, Hanna 22 Leyden, Rudolf [Rudy] von 172 Lezmi, Frederic 190 Ligon, Glenn 401 Lind, Maria 46, 47 Livy [Titus Livius Patavinus] 311 Local Time 48, 49 Lokhandwala, Arshiya 308 Long, Richard 119, 120, 122 Lookofsky, Sarah Elsie 367 Lorch, Wolfgang 235 Loumpet-Galitzine, Alexandra 83, 86, 87, Loumpet-Galitzine, Vera 84–86, 86, 87, 87–89 Lucretius 57, 417 Lukács, György 106, 107, 134 Luste Boulbina, Seloua 125 Lyotard, Jean-François 186, 404 M Machona, Gerald 266, 266, 267, 267–270, 277 Maddern, Joanne 342 Madianou, Mirca 45 Malani, Nalini 102, 301, 301–303, 304, 304, 305, 306, 312 Malaquais, Dominique 276 Manickam, T.J. 172 Manto, Saadat Hasan 304, 307 Marie, Zen 89 Markefka, Silke 27, 28, 28, 29, 30 Marker, Chris 125, 126 Marle, Félix Del 221 Marx, Karl 57, 66, 405 Massoudy, Hassan 217 Mathieu, Georges 218, 227 Matisse, Henri 152 Matta [Roberto Sebastian Antonio Matta ­Echaurren] 33 Matvey, Nikolayev 206 Mauro, Ian 204 Mayer, Albert 173 Mayhew, Alan 158 Mavroudi, Elizabeth 178

McCallum, Robyn 186 McKee, Yates 206, 208 McLagan, Meg 208 McQuaid, John Charles 236 Medd, Henry 166 Meisner, Cardinal Joachim 241 Melitopoulos, Angela 118, 119, 129 Mendelsohn, Erich 236 Mendoza, Irene de 190 Mercer, Kobena 18, 363 Merkel, Angela 32, 241, 352 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 65 Messer, Guido 328 Meštrović, Stjepan Gabriel 136 Meza Torres, Andrea 317 Mgudlandlu, Gladys 123, 124, 129 Michael Collins Associates Architects 240, 241 Michelangelo [Michelangelo Buonarroti] 379, 380 Middel, Cristina de 272 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 19, 160 Mikhailevna, Osennia Dariya 206 Miles, Elza 124 Miliband, Ralph 46 Miller, Daniel 45 Mills, C. [Charles] Wright 136 Milner, Maggy 132 Miró, Joan 152 Mishra, Sudesh 43 Mistry, Minoo 172 Mitchell, W.J.T. 189 Mitha, Alnoor 301 Mofokeng, Santu 124 Moholy-Nagy, László 22 Molenaar, Arnoud 195 Monteith, Alex 48 Moradveisi, Mona 49 Morelli, Naima 49 Morgan, Jennifer 201 Mostaert, Jan 358 Motherwell, Robert 33 Mountbatten, Louis [1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma] 172 Mowoso 275, 276, 276, 277 Mpe, Phaswane 269 Mukendi, Jean Katambayi 273, 274, 275 Mukhtar, Mahmoud 217, 228 Mulji, Huma 307 Munch, Edvard 414 Muñoz, José Esteban 369, 371–373 Murkowski, Frank Hughes 207, 208 Mwaba, Stary 272, 273, 273, 274, 275

425

Index Mwamba, Martha 272 Myers, Misha 141 N Nadar [Gaspard-Félix Tournachon] 210 Nadaradjane, Soundirassane 327 Nagel, Caroline 178 Nakqashuk, Charlie 204 Nanga, Bienvenu 275 Nasar, Hammad 302, 307 Nasheed, Mohamed 193 Nasiri, Rafa 219 Nehru, Jawaharlal 159, 160, 167, 172 Nelson, Alondra 263 Newton, Huey P. 375 N’Hada, Sana Na 126 Nichols, Nichelle 263 Nicholsen, Shierry Weber 136 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 134 Nkoloso, Edward Makuka 265, 272 Noiriel, Gérard 319 Norton, Gale A. 207, 208 Ntombela, Nontobeko Mabongi 124 O Obama, Barack 74 Obama, Decry 209 Oels, Angela 198 O’Hara, Morgan 29–31, 31 Oliva, Achille Bonito 309 Omar, Madiha 218, 219, 226 Ouwerkerk, Louise 166 Oyéjidé, Walé 402, 403 P Pahlavi, Farah 287 Pahlavi, Mohammad Reza [Mohammad Reza Shah of Iran] 287 Papacharissi, Zizi 45 Parasher, Sardari Lal 300 Parinaud, André 222 Parr, Martin 190 Peljhan, Marko 204 Pendlebury, John 346 Perivolaris, John 138 Petrešin-Bachelez, Nataša 47 Picasso, Pablo 135, 152, 223 Pieterse, Edgar 269 Pijnappel, Johan 303 Plato 63, 64 Plutarch 311

426

Poddar, Sandhini 312 Poelzig, Hans 158 Polanyi, Michael 154 Pollock, Jackson 33 Posener, Julius 160 Post, Hans Christian 368 Prakash, Gyan 168 Prasad, Vishwanath 172 Pratt, Mary Louise 120 Presley, Elvis 268 Prince Khurram 309 Pushkin, Alexander 86, 87, 87 R Ractliffe, Jo 124 Radcliffe, Sir Cyril 302 Raffarin, Jean-Pierre 319 Ramadan, Khaled 197 Raman, C.V. [Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman] 162, 164, 165, 166, 169 Raman, Lady 162, 165 Rana, Rashid 308, 309, 309, 310, 311 Rancière, Jacques 11, 40, 41, 104–106, 110, 111, 114 Rangarao, Shanti 166 Ranger, Terence 149 Ranløv, Daviid 375, 380 Rao, B. Shiva 167 Rao, Sir M.N. Krishna 166 Rao, V. Narahari 166 Rao, Venkoba 162 Raphael [Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino] 227 Raymond, Noémi 151, 153 Raza, Nada 307 Reichstein, Sascha Regina 145, 146, 146, 150, 151, 419 Richter, Peter 256 Riis, Jacob August 177 Riggins, Stephen Harold 256 Rinpoche, Orgyen Tobgyal 244 Rinpoche, Sogyal 244 Ritchie, Andrew 19 Robertson, Natalie 48 Robertson, Shanthi 48 Robinson, Mary 239, 240 Rose, Gillian 134 Rosenberg, Karen 362 Rosi, Gianfranco 103, 107, 108, 109, 111, 113, 114 Rovine, Victoria 405 Ruangrupa 48–50 Ruskin, John 40 Ryan, Marie-Laure 177 Rybczynski, Witold 252

Index S Sack, Manfred 253 Sadako [Empress Fujiwara no Teishi] 126 Şahin, Cavit 237, 238 Said, Edward W. 106, 166, 386 Salgado, Lélia Deluiz Wanick 180 Salgado, Sebastião 179–183, 185–190 Salim, Jawad 217, 223, 226 Saman, Moises 179 Şamdereli, Yasemin 392 Sarabhai, Vikram Ambalal 166, 169, 172 Sarkozy, Nicolas 319 Schaden, Markus 190 Scheherazade 95 Schlesinger, Emmanuel 172 Schmitz Architekten 235 Schmitz, Peter 235 Schopenhauer, Arthur 227 Schröder, Gerhard 352 Schwabsky, Barry 358, 363 Sedira, Zineb 33 Sekgala, Thabiso 124 Selle, Gert 252, 255, 261 Senghor, Léopold Sédar 152 Serra, Richard 128, 129 Seth, K.L. 172 Shaftesbury [Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury] 81 Shahid, Abdullah 197 Shakespeare, William 353 Sheikh Hamdan bin Rashid Al Maktoum 239 Shōnagon, Sei 126, 127 Shonibare, Yinka MBE 265 Sidibé, Malick 121 Siegenthaler, Fiona 281 Sierra, Santiago 121, 124, 125, 127, 129 Silva, Anil de 172 Silva, Minnette de 172 Simon, Francis [Franz] Eugen 169 Simone, AbdouMaliq 269 Sinha, Gayatri 308 Sissako, Abderrahmane 125 Smith, W. Eugene 182 Sood, Pooja 307 Sopoaga, Enele 200 Spielhaus, Riem 378 Spinoza, Baruch de 97 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 43, 147, 396, 397, 407, 408 Spratt, Philip 166 Stafford, Barbara Maria 360

Starrs, Josephine 197 Steichen, Edward 187 Stephens, John 186 Stoller, Paul 268 Strongbow [Richard de Clare, 2nd Earl of Pembroke] 246 Sun Ra [Le Sony’r Ra] 264 Sunstrum, Pamela Phatsimo 266, 277 Sykora, Thomas 89 Szokolay, Steven Vajk 158 Szörényi, Anna 188, 189 T Tagore, Rabindranath 166 Tall, Papa Ibra 152 Tata, Dorab [Sir Dorabji Tata] 170 Tata, J.N. 168 Tata, J.R.D. 171 Tata, Meherbai 170 Tate, Greg 263 Tate, Shirley Anne 402 Taut, Bruno 158 Tawadros, Gilane 325 Taylor, Paul 177 Téchiné, André 121 Teii, Tavau 200, 201 Terry, John 172 The One Dimension Group 219 Thomas, Mary [Queen Mary] 374, 375, 377, 379–381 Thomas, Mickalene 362 Tiffin, Helen 404 Titian [Tiziano Vecellio] 227 Tobolewska, Bea 132 Triscott, Nicola 202, 204 Tulloch, Carol 402, 405, 406 Turner, J.M.W. [William Turner] 353 U Ulutuncok, Günay 259, 260 Undrawing the Line 48, 49 Urry, John 180 V Vetements 399–401, 401 Vinci, Leonardo da 227 Virdee, Jari Singh 172 Visvesvaraya, Sir Mokshagundam 164 Vitting-Seerup, Sabrina 367, 370 Vogel, Nikolai 27, 28, 30 Vollmer, Manfred 260, 261

427

Index W Wa Lehulere, Kemang 121, 123, 124, 126, 129 Waheed, Nadine 197 Wainwright, Leon 355, 360 Wandel-Hoefer, Rena 235 Wang, Qingsong 38 Wang, Yi-Wen 346 Warburg, Aby 22, 23, 64 Ward, Gary 89 Warner, Koko 192 Warnke, Martin 254 Watson, Jim 179 Watson, John Forbes 153 Webb, Floyd 263 Weiss, David 121 Weyl, Laurent 196 Whitlock, Gillian 48 Wiegand, Frauke K. 367 Wiley, Kehinde 362 Wilken, Rowan 45 Williams, Raymond 354

428

Williams Gamaker, Michelle 83, 86, 87, 89, 414 Wilson, Fred 86 Wilson-Goldie, Kaelen 223 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 23 Wölfflin, Heinrich 416 Wohlwill, Gretchen 19 Woueté, Guy 121, 122, 122, 123, 129 Wright, Peter 166 Wright, Stephen 41, 49 Y Yardi, S.R. 172 Yiadom-Boakye, Lynette 354–359, 359, 360, 361, 361, 362, 362, 363 Yuval-Davis, Nira 380 Z Zaimoglu, Feridun 390 Zenderoudi, Charles Hossein 226 Zitzewitz, Karin 307

This publication was generously supported by Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich (LMU), University Duisburg-Essen and Freiwillige Akademische Gesellschaft Basel.

ISBN 978‑3‑11-047600‑2 eISBN (PDF) 978‑3‑11-047667‑5 Library of Congress Control Number: 2019938536 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.‌de. © 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Layout and typesetting: LVD GmbH, Berlin Editorial assisting and index: Maya-Sophie Lutz Copyediting: Edward Street Cover illustration: Adrian Paci, Centro di Permanenza temporanea, 2007, color photograph, 105 × 186.5 cm (41 3/8 × 73 3/8 in.), framed. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich Printing and binding: Beltz Grafische Betriebe GmbH, Bad Langensalza www.degruyter.‌com