Transcript - "Crossed by the Border: Migration and the Crisis Imaginary"
September 22, 2022 -- CRG Forum Series
Listen to "Crossed by the Border: Migration and the Crisis Imaginary" with Debarati Sanyal , Cristiana Giordano and Rhiannon Welch.
LETI VOLPP: So good afternoon. Welcome to “Cross by the Border Migration and the Crisis Imaginary”. And I want to begin with the land acknowledgement.
We take a moment to recognize that Berkeley sits on the territory of Xučyun*, the ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenyo (Cho-chen-yo), the successors of the historic speaking Ohlone people the successors of the historic and sovereign Verona Band of Alameda County. This land was, and continues to be, of great importance to the Muwekma (Muh-wek-muh) Tribe, and other familiar descendants of the Verona band. We recognize that every member of the Berkeley community has and continues to benefit from the use and occupation of this land since the institution's founding in 1868.
My name is Leti Volpp. I'm the director of the Center for Race and Gender here at UC Berkeley, which has put on this event. I'm also a professor at the law school. We're really thrilled that you can be with us. It's amazing to see familiar faces and also meet new folks.
This event was organized by the Native immigrant Refugee Crossings Research Initiative of the Center for Race and Gender. Is co-ponsored by the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative and the Institute of European Studies. I want to alert you to another upcoming event on similar topics (inaudible) October 20, are “Archipelagos and Spectors Refugees: Settlers and Climate Refugees”. This is a conversation with Neel Ahuja, author of “Planetary Specters, Race Migration and Climate Change, and the 20 first Century”, and Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandh, author of “Archipelago of Resettlement: The Enemy's Refugee Settlers, and Decolonization Across Guam and Israel Palestine”. And that's gonna be online on October 20th at 4:00.
So today's event is a conversation among three amazing scholars. I'm just so happy that we've tried to actually have this happen for about two years, (laughter) and I'm so happy it's happening, so I'm going to introduce them in alphabetical order.
Cristiana Giordano is an associate professor of anthropology at UC Davis. She received her PhD in anthropology from UC Berkeley. Her main philosophy from the University of Pavia, Italy. She works on foreign migration, mental health with body and cultural translation, and contemporary. Her research addresses the politics of migration in Europe through the lens of ethnos, psychiatry and its radical critique of psychiatric, legal and moral categories of inclusion and exclusion of foreign others and through the lens of research on the human microbiome and micro migrant health in Europe, her broader research. Interests also engage the relationship between psychic life therapy, clinical sites and images. She is the author of “Migrants and Translation Caring in the Logics of Difference in Contemporary Italy”, published by UC Press in 2014. Which is the winner of multiple multiple awards. I will not read here.
Cristiana's other line of inquiry involves finding new ways and rendering ethnographic material into written texts and or artistic forms. She explores new ways in which anthropology can contribute to and learn from performative endeavors such as theater performance and installations. She's been training and devising theater techniques which draw from non theatrical source material to devise theater pieces on current events, collaborating, collaborating with playwright and director Greg Pierotti. Is one of the founders of Tectonic Theater project on new methodologies at this interstitial location, including one entitled be more on police violence in the US and one entitled on Stories on movement orders and the current so-called refugee crisis in Europe.
Second, we have the Debarati Sanyal, who is professor of French and director of the Consortium for Interdisciplinary Research, which is this really exciting entity that I think will be really made so vital through the Debarati’s directorship. She is affiliated with Critical Theory, the Center for Race and Gender in European Studies. Her research and teaching interests include critical refugee studies, aesthetics and biopolitics, human rights and humanitarianism. Post War French and Francophone culture, transcultural memory studies, Holocaust studies, Critical theory, 19th century French literature.
Debarati's first book, “The Violence of Modernity, Beaudelaire Irony, and the Politics of Form”, published by Johns Hopkins in 2006, reclaims Baudelaires aesthetic legacy for ethical inquiry and historical critique. Pursuing and later authors, including Rushil and de Ponce. Her second book, “Memory and Simplicity. Migrations of Holocaust Memory” published in Fordham in 2015. Addresses the transnational deployment of complicity in the aftermath of the Showa from Primo Levy, Albert Camu Allegheny and Jean Paul Sartre to Jonathan Little Asia, Jabbar Boylan Sansai and Georgia Abandon. She is completing a book now on migrant resistance, biopolitics and aesthetics in Europe current refugee crisis (laughter)
And finally we have Rhiannon Noel Welch, who is associate professor of Italian studies and affiliate faculty in Film and Media, the program in Critical Theory, and the Center for Race and Gender. Rhiannon works on modern Italian literature, film and critical theory. Her first book, “Vital Subjects Race and Biopolitics in Italy”, focuses on the years around Italian unification. And therefore, before the event of fascism, in order to demonstrate how race and colonialism have long been central to Italian modernity and national culture rather than a fascist aberration or contemporary phenomenon resulting from immigration. Her publications on 19th to 21st century Italian and post colonial cultural production explore Italy's racial and colonial imaginaries and resistance to them. Drawn broadly from literary, psychoanalytic and political theory, decolonial thought new materialism, feminist ecocriticism and black studies.
Her current book project explores aesthetic deceleration and anti-imperial or oceanic world, making as alternatives to the pervasive rhetoric and iconography of migrant crisis in the Mediterranean.
I am so excited. Thank you. And without further ado, let me turn it over to our three wonderful speakers.
(AUDIENCE CLAPPING)
RHIANNION WELCH: OK.
Thank you so much, Leti. Thank you, Ariana for that excellent organization. I want to make sure this thing is on is this device working OK? Great. It's wonderful to see you all here. Thank you for coming.
I'm going to start us off because we're planning to not talk for very long so that we can leave space for conversation. So I wanted to thank with you all today about something I've been thinking about a saturated media and the Mediterranean. So every year.
Of the past nine years, at the beginning of October commemorations take place across Europe and particularly in Lampedusa, in both public and in private, of the date October 3rd, 2013, which marked the then deadliest single shipwreck to date when a boat traveling. From Misrata, Libya, and packed with over 500 people, including children, caught fire and capsized less than a mile from its destination in Lampe. Some 368 people, primarily Eritreans and Somalis, died today. I want to focus on a short film made about October 3rd by Dagmawi Yimer, released in 2014, entitled Asmat, which is Tigrinya for names. Dagmawi is an Ethiopian born filmmaker who survived the traumatic crossing of Sudan and Libya across deserts and seas, arriving in Rome in 2006.
And he's arguably done more than any other filmmaker. I think working in Italy today to push back on the spectacle of border crisis, and I think this is something as as ladies introductions made clear that the three of us share an interest in texts and practices that interrupt, resist, scramble or in Christiana’s words exceed the rhetorics and temporalities of crisis that dominate the popular and media imaginaries of migration.
So today, taking my cue from a recent interview with Dagmawi, I wanted to reflect a little bit on saturated media.
So we could think about it in two ways. I think probably more figuratively, like Dagmawiin terms of the recurring repetitive topoi and narratives about orders and migration. So, for instance, viral videos and photos, memes about which we'll hear in a little bit.
And also what we sometimes just call border spectacles or the crisis imaginary? But we could also think. About it, literally and in this more literal take, it means thinking of elements, including the ocean as media. And I'm drawing this from a recent collection by Melody Jew and Rafique Ruiz on saturation that came out with Duke like last year. Two years. So this thinking about the ocean as medium, or relatedly, the sea as a site of historical inscription is a key aspect of black diasporic thought and poetry, both in terms of the long duray, as Derek Walcott's justly famous poem. Sort of evokes. And in terms of contemporary forms of anti black violence, such as the October 3rd shipwreck which is here in the poem on the right, commemorated by the poet R Salas Gurmai.
So I want to suggest that Dagmawi Yimer short film Asmat reflects on both of these water as medium and the sea as a site of inscription.
How specifically does it do this the first way I think is his preference for watercolor, so this is the opening shot of the film. Which is a view of Lampedusa from a boat, the perspective of a person from the approximate location of the shipwreck, and this is a really fascinating opening image that I'd love to talk more about.
And then next, so again with the watercolor water as medium Dagmawi's tendency to reinscribe. Photographic images, both documentary and more intimate photographs depicting scenes that are on the one hand, ubiquitous. Like the haul of ship in the crisis imaginary and less commonly seen right. So the person clutching the infant. And his tendency to do this through watercolor.
So the second way I'm thinking about Dagmawi’s work as producing the sea as a site of historical inscription is. Hey, Clark. Presenting names as a means of countering the anonymity list effect of mass drownings by drawing us into reflection, not on the moment of death. And here I'm thinking about the famous essay by Catherine Hetrick. on the death toll, as the source mathematics and blacklife, but to the moment of birth and naming as an origin of being in common, so readers of a Rant and Cavero will recognize this as mentality.
An extended sequence which takes up a full nine of the film's 16 minutes as a woman's voice recites the names of the victims and their English translations. My hope we wanted her joy, God's treasure. She is chosen. No one is like him. Each name is recited in its irreducible singularity, even in the cases of duplicate names. So for instance, at one point we hear the offscreen narrator's voice. Aman. Aman. Aman. Aman. Aman. Aman. He is peace. These are names that burst towards us, both kind of graphically and more figuratively. Through the 4th wall, indicating a refusal to be contained by the form used to commemorate them. Biopolitical capture the Biopolitical, capture border. Crisis iconography is thus multiply, undermined, refused and what viewers are asked to sit with instead are these irreducible singularities of lives in common for the simple fact that they were born.
That's it. Thank you.
(AUDIENCE CLAPPING)
CRISTIANA GIORDANO: So what I wanted to oops.
I have to do some work.
Thank you for being here and thank you for. Being so patient with all our life events and postponing the event so.
What I what I want to present is probably less polished this more like thinking aloud about some some things that I've been working on in the last a few years. Leti was mentioning that I've been collaborating with a theater maker, Greg Pierotti, for the last seven years.
So and we, and together we have been creating a methodology a way to render empirical ethnographic material into performances and in 20 from 2016 to 2018. Now we have been working with a group of students and colleagues in Davis with the the empirical material that originates from my research in Italy on questions of borders and and migration/
I've I've been working mostly in the South of Italy at ports of entry with a group of humanitarian with a group of doctors who organize, who are part of the humanitarian organization and they receive people who are rescued at sea.
So I I've been collecting material in the sites and together with Greg and a group of students in Davis, we have been, we devised two performances.
And the title of the performances is “Un stories”, and the idea was to think around the question of crisis of the refugee crisis, not about it and and and to unstored it right, we were thinking about stories as as forms of monolithic ways of describing migration of movement movement as a crisis so, but in fact we were interested in how crisis has become chronic.
Hence it doesn't really. It keeps happening. It's it has a longer, it doesn't really speak to its etymology of crisis as a. As a quick moment of cut, a moment that that that calls for for a form of redemption, we what we see is a constant recurring prices. And so we were interested methodologically to tap into those stories or minor stories that allow dealers that don't get captured by the discourse, the state discourse, but also the the academic discourse so often and so we use the technique of affect theater, which is what we have been inventing in the last seven years to tap into the ethnographic material through theater, therefore, through elements of the stage, through bodies, through movement.
And not and so not only the the written text, so it's in this context that I encountered a document which is called “The List”.
And I'm going to read some lines that we used in in our theatrical workshops to work with this particular document because part of our work is to work with non theatrical source material. So we work with ethnographic empirical material like documents, interviews, field notes, images and and we and from this kind of work we on Earth so attacks the together collectively. So it is also an analytical way of engaging with the empirical. Oh.
Found that the 2005 twelve number one name no name, gender, age more or less 30 men country of origin sub-Saharan Africa cause of death the body in advanced state of decomposition washed ashore of Lampung island, Italy. Source EFENNA.
Found dead 04/12 number six name no name. One man, five women. Country of origin unknown cause of death drowned reaching rescue ship after boat from by wire ran out of petrol in the Sicilia Channel. Source BBC.
OK. So this is. Us in a workshop setting, working with this document and the document itself is can you go to the other? The document itself looks like this. It's it's long. It's 50 page long. It's constantly updated. the IT. It is or it it it's published by United, which is United for Inter Intercultural Action, which is an European network of 500 and plus organizations that defend themselves against racism, fascism and nationalism.
And so we encountered. I encountered this document as part of my demographic work, and then I brought it to the to the collective, to the, to the collaborators. And at first we were struck by well. In fact, what are you struck by?
But just without thinking about it, just the the first associations that you have, when you hear the text and and you see this kind of layout.
AUDIENCE MEMBER 1: Bureaucratic.
AUDIENCE MEMBER 2: Tense.
CRISTIANA GIORDANO: Anything else?
AUDIENCE MEMBER 3: Clinical.
CRISTIANA GIORDANO: Clinical.
Clearly. Cool. Yeah. Yeah. So in fact, the the first reaction, my reaction and the reaction of the people who started working theatrically with this was to feel the dryness and the, you know, the the bureaucratic coldness of it and and and the fact that there is was a violence in the way in which the document tries to create, you know, a sense of order. And you know it's a it's called “The List”, but it has a title and its title is the list.
And so we were, you know, thinking about this like first affective reaction so.
And then we started actually working with it spatially and with voice. You know, I I just read the two of the entries, but we spent hours just reading the entries among ourselves. And then people also started to make theatrical episodes using objects, light.
Sir. And what came through was always this sense of the violence of the list. But we also started to become somewhat hypnotized by the rhythm of the repetition, by the the repetition of certain words, by the fact that each line has has the same kind of visual outline as well.
And and we also started to learn a little bit more about the history of of this list. The intention of this group of association is to actually compile this list to rehumanize the unnamed death in the Mediterranean.
And so in fact, there is a desire to do exactly, you know, to go against that sense of routinization and bureaucratization, you know what we what? What, what, what we see and what we perceive as the crisis.
But you know we, we, we we kept feeling that there was a desire to portray, you know, what happens in the crossing through the logic of the crisis. It's because there's also there's something monotonous, repetitious and hypnotic about the list. But there is also a wage in which it captures the sense of the the event, right? So it's it's an extraordinary event that needs to be discussed, that needs to go. The list also becomes a document that has a political balance because it brought to institutions it's it's it's it's brought, it's used by journalists and so on and so forth.
But we were interested about somewhat about the poetics of the list and what is what remains unsaid and what kind of what does it perform, the list. And so I was interested in in. You know what's in a list? What kind of stories can a list tell?
And so we were thinking, you know, with Pasolini's idea of the poetry of institutions, of the fact that there is something unsaid that is captured even by the the language of bureaucracy. Then we started thinking.
And so we we realized that within the orderliness of the document, there was also, that the document itself through language and numbers. Numbers that may seem to be pointing to crisis, crisis, crisis, but the document, through language and numbers, actually held space for other kind of associations to be possible. Associations there were nonlinear, there were non bureaucratic.
And that allowed us someone to get caught into what the list doesn't really tell, because there is also an attempt to translate the numbers into a biography. Because, you know, there are very small details that gestures that attempt at getting at the bio. If you don't never really grasp it.
And so we started thinking whether the the list may also be another form of cemetery, you know, the unnamed that is being held through language and numbers in a place that it's impossible to create spatially because many people don't find work that burial? Burial. But so does the list that provide that kind of of memory, which is not, and it's not a bearing witness. It's more like a kind of of memory and and a space where the list doesn't only perform orderliness and order, a sense of order and.
And we also like through, you know, working with it, performatively and theatrically. And we we started to think how. This way of talking about the tragic crossing relieves the reader of wanting to interpret because it it provides some kind of a description, and So what? What's there to interpret?
There is. So we wanted to go beyond the the desire to of interpret, to interpret, and to tap into a more affective experience of what it means to to be caught in a way you know, in, in, in what the the list that says without saying.
So in a way, what we were trying to get at and it's something that we did through a theatrical technique, but it's something that one can do also through Lance through through language and writing. Our experiment is to decentered text at the main form of reflection and and also academic and non academic sharing. But one can also do it through language.
But we wanted to go beyond the literality of of the document and we were thinking about the violence of literality, the violence of were cratic, literality and and and and how, if approached from a different angle, literality can actually become extremely generative and productive. And a site where one can free I'm. I mean I'm saying free associating, you know, in in a psychoanalytic way but can also be free associating in an analytical way that relates to these kind of documents at the level of the of the poetics, and not only of the political and the register of crisis. And so this is kind of some of the things that I'm thinking that that I'm thinking also with the.
The collaborate the collaborators with whom we have been approaching the we have been working with this material and I think there are. A lot of.
Because the list is the form of his inscription and the sea is also one of the medium through which the lived experience is is one of the medium you know it's about the crossing. And so how does the crossing? How does the sea get captured and inscribed in a list? What does that mean to inscribe in the way what kind of stories and can these kind of stories also help us go around. But I don't want to say beyond the question of crisis, because we're always dealing with the question of crisis, but to to work around it rather than on it.
(AUDIENCE CLAPPING)
RHIANNON WELCH: Oh yeah, yeah.
CRISTIANA GIORDANO: Ohh yes, also let me just say real quickly.
RHIANNON WELCH: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
CRISTIANA GIORDANO: Yeah, this list has been taken up by several artists.
So it does have, you know, a power of evocation inscribed in it. So this is the Liverpool Biennale. And the Turkish artist Banu Toku printed out the the various pages of the list. And put them on placards in in at the in the center of Liverpool and they were ripped. And so the the the organizers. You know, once they were ripped to put. Them back on. And they got ripped again, and then they put them on and they got ripped again. And then at that point, they decided to leave them, you know, in their ripped form because that you know itself performed the list and performed everything that the list evokes and and and mobilized.
And then it got picked up again by Italian artist in Rome Fabio Sakunami. Who did a collective installation entitled Lizella, The Island. And in this collective installation he started and then people and passerby then joined in, and the idea was to write to, to transcribe the parts of the list on stones on, you know, on the streets, on the pedestrians area/ And they used a type of paint that becomes visible only when it rains, when it's when it becomes wet. And so they were working on this idea of, you know, the visible and the invisible. And, you know, and how water, you know, becomes a medium and medium of both deaths and destruction, but also visibility.
And so you know, these are other you know. Where I I discovered all of this afterwards. I was just really drawn by the document in all its ambivalence, and that and, and these are just two. There are many other ways in which the list is being used and engaged through art.
DEBARATI SANYAL: Thanks. Just do that.
Hi everyone. Thanks for being here. Thanks. These are such beautiful papers and and they have so many resonances and I'm going to take this in a completely different, antithetical direction, I think in ways that will be interesting because I'll be talking a little bit about political caricatures and means that kind of look right on digital platforms and that actually, are completely undoing the irreducible singularity of a trace. For example, and are perhaps impoverishing means are a poor image, as artist Hito Sheryl has it. So it's the opposite of the evocation and the poetics of the list and and the affective charge of the name. So and and that sort of singularized testimonial power of list name biographical scraps.
So some looking forward to our conversation.
So as we witness images from Ukraine flicker on our screens and we also see waves of refugees welcomed at European borders, that until now have been hostile, if not deadly, for others fleeing war and devastation. We have indisputable evidence of the.
Racism encoded in every layer of Europe's border regime, right from out, the outsourcing of borders to Morocco to smart borders and biometrics built. Biases the racism coloring mainstream media's coverage of Ukraine has been amply documented, as I'm sure you've seen in the news AU Ukrainian official shared on BBC News. It's very emotional for me because I see you're seeing people with blue eyes and blonde hair being killed every day.
To the English anchor on Al Jazeera who clarified that these are prosperous middle class people. These are not people trying to get away from areas in North Africa. They look like any European family that you would live next door to. So there's evocation of kinship by neighborly proximity.
Kenyan cartoonist Patrick Athara's, personification of the West as a blonde haired Thatcher, come, Merkel, I think, illustrates his point quite boldly. Right invasions and occupations and barbaric elsewhere such as Syria or Afghanistan are the norm. But an aberration within the European continent. Indifference to Russian military intervention in the Middle East and pearl cluching when the violence is unleashed on western soil.
As we know, borders differentially filter bodies according to race and risk factor. They actually operate a species cut sometimes, as we see in the visualization of border crossing as crisis, so they borders black in certain populations and white and others.
While the Ukrainian exodus attests to Europe's capacity for sanctuary, it is also evidence if we ever needed any of such ethno cultural hierarchies. This evidence is also conveyed in means such as this one. This is probably familiar to some of you, right? And it's just been adapted to the most recent crisis.
Now I am no expert on the meme. I've just been kind of reading around it, but it is a punctual form of communication that compresses larger narratives about race and my.
You know, such as narratives about race, migration, nationhood into a visual and textual flash. As a replicable transmitter of cultural meaning. And. Happy to give. You, the and bits of cultural software that make up ideologies in their brevity and ephemeral appearance in the digital attention economy, memes can simply replicate and homogenize, thought and memory. But their compensations and displacements can also point out naturalized perspectives on race, nation and political existence. Some of what follows, I'm going to juxtapose the possumus mean defied destiny of Syrian child Alan Kurdi, whose photograph you likely you're likely to remember from 2015. And and like the.
This kind of designation of the refugee crisis, as far as I recall, in like in the European context, like the mediatization of it as crisis and you know along Kurdi, whose image really got mobilized in terms of the broad border crisis spectacle that both of you were Speaking of so eloquently, and I want to juxtapose that image and it's memefied destiny with means of children from Ukraine's unfolding exodus to kind of draw a tentative contrast between these child emblems of two distinct border crises, one at Mediterranean shores and the other right next door to the EU.
So it's not a subtle argument, just like the mems I'm going to show you so on September 2nd, 2015, the body of Syrian toddler named Alan Kurdi was found on Turkish shores. And you know, as you'll recall frame, he's framed by the initial press photos as tiny prone, pale body. He was deprived of life, movement, speech and in fact, of of a future. And so Alan Kurdi became the symbol of a universal refugee crisis and then joined this vast iconography of innocent children on whom the violence of history is is unleashed.
What is the fate of an iconic photograph in an era of digital memes? Contrary to common perception, when it goes viral and you know there's better than I do because I've just been kind of hacking my way into Instagram and such. But it doesn't just duplicate itself identically in its circulation on digital PAT platforms. Instead, it actually it's like an organic virus, right? It mutates and recombines and attaches itself to other bodies, other frames, other terrains, right.
So as distinct from my nieces, Menezes dissolves the original significance and contextual anchoring of an image once launched into a network of repetition and mutation. It quite the image quite literally takes on a life of its own. If it doesn't spread, it's dead. It's. A well known Jenkins definition of them.
So. The photograph of Alan Kurdi in death spread virally and gave rise to a huge number of remediations, such as drawings that intended to symbolically repair alike. That was irreparably lost to offer imaginative and imaginary care to serve as a funerary. You. Inscription you know, on the one hand, there was that series. On the other hand, it was also remediated in political cartoons such as these that denounced Fortress Europe's macro political board.
Alan Kurdi’'s figure was also in continues to be reconstructed in different settings, so this sculpture on Gaza Beach, for instance, was built of sand and padded into shape by anonymous collective hands. As I recall, it's a memorial that's, you know, subject to erosion, disappearance and forgetting, and it's a sculpture that's at once memorial and allegorical insofar as it was located a short distance from where a little over a year, one year earlier, an Israeli strike had killed four Gazan child.
So the Syrian boy of Kurdish descent who washed up on the shores of Bodrum Beach reemerges and adjuster to Palestinian children under a global regime of apartheid and and racialized violence.
So there's an inevitable tension between Alan Kurdi and mobilization and death and his posthumous global mobility. The photograph spread its viral figurally its figural virality sorry insofar as it spreads as a figure. So figural virality was accompanied by metamorphosis. And metaphorical of viral figural.
Alan Kurdi memification staged the tensions between ethics of Singularity, the kind of singularity that you're evoking this body, this harm, therapeutics of public mourning. We must actually, you know, perform some kind of collective repentance and repair through various symbolic solutions and an instrumental politics of memory and mobilization. Never forget, mobilize and resist. And so on and so forth.
But if this moment spectacular. polarized ongoing histories of forced displacement into a kind of crisis moment Alan Kurdi’s's death didn't open Europe. Doors to the exile as we know, and in fact, On the contrary, a mere two weeks after his death that you signed a deal with Turkey that actually outsourced borders and actually made the crossing. I mean, it turned the Aegean transit into a nightmare open air prison, right? Because, you know, people were stuck there waiting for their asylum claims to be processed in the mainland.
So, and this was of course, you know, touted as a humanitarian effort that would save untold lives from, you know, the perils of maritime crossings and smugglers and. So forth. So like an example of the, this is something I'm really interested in in the coercion and care that Tipton speaks of. So eloquent, you know, so.
In such an important terms at the borders, so a suffering or dead child triggers the asymmetries of humanitarian compassion rather than the far more threatening reciprocities of rights.
Alan Kurdi's innocence and passivity was sealed by his death. It made of him an exemplary victim, but also in some twisted logic, that I'm interested. And that also comes up in Lampedusa, an exemplary refugee, and, as I recall, I mean you'll be able to correct me and, you know, after the Lampedusa shipwreck that Rhiannon you talked about the Italian Government. As I recall, you know, thought about granting possum of symbolic citizenship to those who perished, and even though it was going to continue to criminalize those who had survived. So that there is this really twisted logic of protections coming to those who are dead on arrival, right?
So so to close, I want to evoke a contrasting image of the child refugee at Ukrainian borders. Ukrainian refugees currently fleeing into other European states, as we know, are primarily women and children. Since men are being mobilized for battle.
And the coverage of Ukrainian children and babies in particular, I want to suggest points to their induction into an iconography not of dead angelic passivity as we've seen in some of these other memefied representations of Alan Kurdi, but rather of living angelic agency that will eventually burgeon into heroic national resistance.
Consider the similarity of posture between the staged photograph of the Ukrainian baby and Alan Kurdi. Only the baby is lying on this pile of I mean military uniforms and framed by the Ukrainian flag that's planted into military combat boots.
And then consider this. The the 2015 drawing of a Alan Kurdi which has sea as a cozy blanket, and toys neatly stacked to build castles and not memorials to the dead. And then consider the next photo that I extracted very poorly from a TikTok video of compiled news footage of Ukrainian children set to music. Ukrainian children who are being welcomed at the Polish border by guards and NGO's and, you know, people wear the same uniforms that are that that, you know, that border guards who are spraying other migrants and children with tear gas at the Russian border or. Sorry, you know what? I'm. Trying to say right.
So. So these children who have crossed made it through, crossed the border alive and break into beaming smiles during a respite from their displacement, a respite that is just and good and necessary. Right.
So they were. I was looking through the comments. And, you know, they're designated and. And the comments I think were by international, you know, TikTok users, you know people from Poland. Who are actually? Kind of saying yes, Slavic unity, but also people from France and you know they were kind of sorry, close reading comments here, but they were actually designated as beautiful angels and simultaneously as the future of a strong, independent and vibrant Ukraine, the smallest of babes was envisioned as a plucky citizen who would eventually return to their country. Unlike children from further away Syrians, Afghans, Yemenis, Eritreans who, by virtue of their distance from barbaric and war-torn lands, were no longer citizens but merely human bare life to be saved or left to die when not pushed back.
The refugees from over there are hurled into what Hannah Arendt called the paradox of human rights, which is that the moment a person becomes stateless human and nothing but human, and requires the use of their inalienable rights, is precisely when they are deprived of the protection and enforcement of those rights.
So just to wrap up. In his first moments, the circulation of Alan Kurdi's photo seemed to open a breach in the calcified regime that casts racialized refugees as unwanted bodies and unbelievable lives. By contrast, Ukrainian life has been not only been grievable from the outset, but it has also been endowed with an imagined democratic future.
Pretty for all of the mutations we observe in the portrayals of Alan Kurdi's death and its global art afterlife, it's striking that the image has never been linked to the idea of a better future for Syria. Whereas Ukrainian life and death is inextricably bound up with the survival and desired triumph of Ukraine as a nation state.
So it seems true that that that what is true for lives is also true for wars. Some matter more than others. What these means staged so starkly is the racialized US and them of political life that border border regimes repeatedly produce the non-white others whose arrival is a threat to be managed, kept at bay, or expelled. And those who have in fact been a racialized us all along the white ones that matter.
So.
(AUDIENCE CLAPPING)
LETI VOLPP: We have a little time wait 13 minutes, 15 minutes for discussion. This is amazing. And I I love the correspondence between your papers and I'm really eager to hear also from everybody here. If they have comments and questions.
I'll just maybe start us off. Saying I was really fascinated to think about, see his memory, see his history and how we think of seeing relationship to not to time into space and sort of the idea of like these stats as natural and just see as a kind of maritime black hole legal black hole, right. And that's people refer to it. It's like nobody's responsible. These are just.
DEBARATI SANYAL: Hmm.
LETI VOLPP: Natural deaths and and the sea is kind of an empty space and anyway so I thought there might be something onteresting to think about there, I'm also so curious about their action. Is this is that the same ship that would I think was like the Swiss artist? Unearthed and brought to the beyond.
CRISTIANA GIORDANO: Right then.
RHIANNON WELCH: No, that was the subsequent one, yes. It's a different one location.
LETI VOLPP: OK, so different. But sort of. That artistic response. And then also I don't know if you know the Berlin based Center for Political Beauty. But they did this. This is pre in 2016, really interesting stuff about physically bringing dead bodies to Germany to say like this is the responsibility of of Germany, and sort of actually physically burying like at least one person on in Germans with to kind of establish that relationship. But yeah, just thinking about how we think about these kinds of artistic slash political responses and what's ethical and.
But. While you guys think about that, are there other comments, questions, reactions.
AUDIENCE MEMBER 4: So. I agree with you. About the tech that borders total bodies according to risk. I am just back from six months of Fulbright in Lithuania. And even though. It was not.
CRISTINA GIORDANO: We can't. I can't.
AUDIENCE MEMBER 4: I'm. I'm just back from six months. To go to Lithuania and. It was not in my duty. I volunteered in the camps, which are like prisons on the water with Belarus. Where they have mainly Muslims and have Saharan jail just because of who they are.
However, all the Baltic States, as of three days ago locked their borders to the Russians.
AUDIENCE MEMBER 4: While the Ukrainians spoke the same welcome that you're talking, they're even offered bilingual education in Russian and Lithuanian, and they're getting courses in Lithuanian. They have also signs popped up in the Baltic in Ukrainian language and English.
So how do you explain the fact that now white people, Slavic people are lining up to go to Finland and Finland does let them trickle in, but they cannot go to the Baltic, even though racially they are of the same? Kind of thing. And they share so much as far as like culture.
DEBARATI SANYAL: Thanks. That's a really interesting question. And I think that I think that. There is an actual operation that is taking place at borders that whitens or blackens so that someone who phenotypically appears as white can be black. And then we saw this for example in the differential treatment of say, you know Roma children who looked no different.
From Ukrainian children, you know, for example, at the Polish border, so that would be like one response perhaps to that question that these are unstable categories that that shift and and are inflected in in so many different ways.
AUDIENCE MEMBER 4: So, you're basically talking about an interplay between race as an essence and race as as a construction, and it keeps shifting. Is this OK?
DEBARATI SANYAL: Mm-hmm.
Yes, yes. But I wonder if I could also just kind of, you know, bring it back to because I also was thinking about the Center for Political Beauty and that that thing because it actually brings back these dead and decayed bodies, right. But then I think they make, which they've actually buried in front of official. Then, but then they actually did this sort of reconstruction, right? That was kind of, of course, it was really difficult to do and I can't remember if they were actually able to reconstruct biography.
RHIANNON WELCH: Do you know I don't know this story at all?
CRISTIANA GIORDANO: Yeah, yeah. I don't know. It's it's new to me too.
LETI VOLPP: They made this like a film, like a short film. Maybe somebody here knows more about it, but.
RHIANNON WELCH: I can send it to you.
LETI VOLPP: Yeah, and it was. I mean, and there was this thing too where they said like we're we're going to Berlin and we're going to start excavating, like excavating in the heart of Berlin and then the political mobilization. They were actually there was like toy like little diggers. And stuff. So it's. Like. What are you actually really doing?
From what I understand there was one. Widow, who gave his consent for. His former spouse to be very brought to Germany, and then he couldn't actually physically go to the burial because of the the like status he was on, which didn't permit him to leave like his local community in Germany but anyway.
So yeah, I. Just think this is just so interesting. Think about how do we mark these deaths and what feels. You know what helps people see things in ways that are productive and which ones seem Like maybe the Venice Biennale one like more problematic.
DEBARTI SANYAL: Because there you see like the the boat, the broken boat. Right. And it's just there like next to whatever.
CRISTIANA GIORDANO: Yeah.
I mean there. Is a huge proliferation of this kind of art around boats. The wreckage of boats or objects that have been washed ashore, like that's another. Another artist have been working with who would like collected the objects that were washed shore in in in Sicily. And then he re restaged them in a deconsecrated church in Syracuse on the outer and.
And So what? What does that mean, right? And also I think the question for me is. To whom it matters right that we are working with these numbers and making art or. You know.
I mean the the the question of the of the list which which started as a as a political instrument to mobilize a certain kind of awareness. Uh. So you know, it was the the the audience was, you know, policymakers, politicians. So the large public also to mobilize, you know, the intervention of certain humanitarian organizations. So. So that is one of the registers of the of the political.
And then there is also the register of the effective, but which is also political, and it's it's it's non verbal. And so I think some of the artistic dimension are trying to tap into that register of the of the political. So how to elicit a certain kind of response that is not non rational? But again, the question is who is the audience? Who is the public and for whom?
DEBARATI SANYAL: Mm-hmm.
CRISTIANA GIORDANO: You know who is you? Know for whom?
Because the dead become the dead become the characters of the stories about are they also the audience of the of the stories you know for whom these things are staged and list in in?
One of my. It would be interesting, but that's that. You know what you were describing about the the widow that would, it would be interesting to hear more about that story.
DEBARTI SANYAL: What's the addressee of the filmmaker? That you talk about?
RHIANNON WELCH: What's that?
DEBARATI SANYAL: Is there an addressee in the film?
RHIANNON WELCH: There is actually and it's nation states, right? So the the voice at the beginning, the woman's voice, her first name is Eddin. I can't remember her two last names, but. She start it starts with an denunciatory frame toward European nation States and compels. I think she says something like one day you will speak their endless names or we're going to compel you as nation states. To speak their endless names, the endless names of the dead.
CRISTIANA GIORDANO: (inaudible)
RHIANNON WELCH: I had a couple of thoughts in relation to some things that came up with Leti and that was the. The first was your observation about the the maritime as a legal black hole. And I just wanted to plug another really interesting use of of filmmaking.
As as non narrative filmmaking, experimental filmmaker, as evidence, and so so worked by Lorenzo Petsami and Charles Heller called “Liquid Traces”, and they do precisely this, they do. It's a multi screen video that conducts. Yeah.
Kind of. It's it's about a push back case. It's about a so-called left to die boat, right? So a boat that was left by various maritime jurisdictions to float out of their their maritime space in order to legitimate non intervention from various state actors and so this this was a kind of forensic archaeology. So it's our forensic architecture. So the idea that this is evidence is evidentiary and to track and to sit kind of in real time with geolocating the boat as it floats in and out of borders, and then in another smaller screen interviews with survivors of the of the left to dive boat. And and it was actually used in in order to get legal recognition, so that might be interesting/
But yeah, the question of objects I remember reviewing as reviewing somebody's book about about one of these object museums. And that was one of the questions that I asked the author was, you know, are cell phones used during the crossing. To whom are they meaningful affective objects and for whom are they kind of re traumatizing.
Like there's I would imagine there's a great deal of reluctance to engage with objects that were on one's person after surviving or not right after seeing loved ones die.
DEBARATI SANYAL: I wanted to plug another film that is similar. I mean, it wasn't. This wasn't a forensic architecture project, but was it anyway. So, Amel, Al Zaku, actually. Is took a migration, basically documented on her cell phone which is underwater the whole time.
I don't know if you saw this. One of those left to die boats and Richard Moss actually, who is a photographer, was doing improved photography and tracking it and that too. Was used like the forensic architecture people you know, in in a court of law. I think and and “Her Purple Sea” is basically you're you're actually following, you know, the cell phone that's underwater the whole time right recording and you're. The blood, blood. Blood.
And then at the end there is a listing of of names as well as I recall and. And so I think that her footage was used for a forensic architecture project. I could be wrong about that, but it was used for some kind of project in a court of law. But then she produced her own documentary that you can actually see in. You know, you know.
RHIANNON WELCH: Yeah, you can also see “Asmat”.
AUDIENCE MEMBER 5: I don’t know if you have questions. (Bell ringing) I have a question that I'm understanding all of your workers with attempt to combat.
But. (inaudible)And I'm curious. How? I wonder, in pursuit of justice, almost an anonymous justice, I wonder if there's tension with the appropriation of person group. And I wonder whether there are instances of families contesting such. (inaudible) Because. (inaudible) Or, like media and national international.
DEBARATI SANYAL: Am I did did your performance feel any discomfort around the potential appropriations around these scraps?
CRISTIANA GIORDANO: The thing is that we what what we we never got to perform what we actually you know the work that we were doing around the list it was something that we used in in the workshop itself but that particular moment we never used it and I don't know if you know we we we talked a little bit about it, but I you know I think there was some discomfort in actually turning it into an actual performance. So what I was describing it was more work that was done into a workshop but to experiment with the material. And see, you know what were some of the effects so that would merge from.
Because I you know, I I relate to your question. You know, are we up although I mean one could could also you know move your question on to the question of cultural appropriation which is also another big question. You know when working with with many different topics so, but you know in migration also there is that question of you know appropriate and I would turn that question from appropriation to relating to.
Rght, we find way what is working with this material. Always a form of appropriation, or is also. Or can also be a form of creating relations with this material. Because we live in a shared world, you know whether we share identities and racial for most forms of identification or not. So there is a sharedness and. And so. Yeah.
Why does it have to be necessarily a per patient? It can also be creating a space relational space where we don't say that we understand that we don't say that we grasp, but in fact we don't understand, but nonetheless that we acknowledge, right? So it's more like a form of acknowledgement that a form of appropriation, at least this is like, you know, the the kind of approach that I take and you know to this material.
And so I think the the question about appropriation and and there are ways in which these things get appropriated. But. But not always. I think it's. It might be a little more. Subtle than than just appropriation.
RHIANNON WELCH: I have a couple of thoughts in relation to that question which I I I have a couple of thoughts in relation to that question which I share a kind of healthy skepticism about right in relation to Dagmawi's work. I don't know. I don't know if families of victims have approached him to express ill content or anything about the work.
I know that he. Himself identifies very. And in his work as a survivor of the same crossing. And so in his case, I think that question is is unique. It should be, right?
Contextualized there the other question that it it made me think of when I was looking at the the Kurdi virality of course is like that famous Wei Wei staging that was that got a lot of pushback for precisely that reason, right. So an internationally recognized artist putting himself in the position of Alan Kurdi and and so anyway, I just wanted to raise that as one of the one of the flashpoints of another site of contestation.
DEBARATI SANYAL: Though it's so interesting is you have voluminous, racialized Wei Wei taking that position. So it was either like he says he it was just something he was moved to do that. But you know there is potentially a reading that could be offered where in fact it's pointing out that. Ohh look I'm this large racialized man who you know is is taking on this position. It's not what's shocking like you know and and and and pointing out how singularly mobilizing the figure of this child is, the child, right. As opposed to political dissident.
LETI VOLPP: So maybe we can hear from somebody who is. This is because we're. Running out of time and then. We'll close. So please.
AUDIENCE MEMBER 6: Just. Quickly part of it is connected to your earlier question. I think that the Baltic people interested you. See the ways in which racializing this versus emerge or not around?
DEBARATI SANYAL: Hmm.
AUDIENCE MEMBER 6: What Russians are for the kinds of. That's right. Things that you're talking about my question. I mean, with the juxtaposition. Of two very different kinds of lists. I just was struck by the role of voice. Right, and it was so moving about. Part of what you were talking about is that you're hearing the name right and. The list that you were working with, and I imagine the workshop had that you would this one could read that list in many different voices and I think you were kind of true to its affect list clinical, but there's something about when the inscription comes into voice that that seems kind of integral to.
What you're talking about? Or I'm just thinking of the stay there names, not read their names or look at their names that has to do with the power that you're you're devoting there.
CRISTIANA GIORDANO: Yeah. And in fact, now you're reminding me that there was another performance that happened in Moderna in Italy, where the list was taken and into a square. There and and the the citizens have spent a day and a half saying all the names, reading all the names and then 19 hours. They calculate it right? So they would take turn and and precisely because of the voicing of, you know giving form.
Yeah. Giving it another burial or another holding space which is not inscripted in on paper, but it's inscripted in sound. And so yeah, yeah.
AUDIENCE MEMBER 6: It's. So it was also really interesting in in relationship to the list. The examples that you showed, because of course those were examples where there was no name but the and I couldn't quite see the slide at the list. So I don't know if this was actually if this is actually part of the thought formatting of the list itself, the logic of the list.
CRISTIANA GIORDANO: Yeah. It is. It is a yes.
AUDIENCE MEMBER 6: So so it says name and then no name, but no name is capitalized and the other parts of the list are not capitalized and so it's. I mean it gets back to. You know, you were really, I think, zeroing in in such interesting ways on the ambivalence of the list and and the list, sort of the, the, the force of the list as just this accumulation of examples. But the desire at the same time to differentiate those examples and to provide because earlier you were asking you know what, what were our questions? I my initial impression was like this is not like narrative is at work in this like like narrative is not absent from this list right. So There are all these really interesting tendons and that capitalizing of the phrase no name right, which seems to at the same time acknowledge the lack of the name, but also want to render the phrase no name as if it were a proper name, right? It's really amazing.
CRISTIANA GIORDANO: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that was a. And rendering of the what's what's usually on one line, right. And so the list is, yeah, we, we I just put it. In a in a column but it appears in the line but the capital is. Yeah, yeah.
AUDIENCE MEMBER 6: Yes, there.
RHIANNON WELCH: I have only the most obvious like affirmation, like, yes, the voice, absolutely, and it's a it's the simplest jankiest read that I have right now. It's just the maternal voice. Right? So like, the the thing about the woman holding space. As you've been putting it, Cristiana. Four names. And that's the function of the repetition. As well, yeah.
DEBARATI SANYAL: Visual, poor image, voicelessness, I mean.
RHIANNON WELCH: Yeah, yeah, right.
LETI VOLPP: Well, I think we should wrap it up, but I wanted to thank our three amazing speakers so much. Thank you.