How to raise awareness of the most recent refugee crisis in the Mediterranean in a way that does not spectacularize human suffering? Beginning with Bouchra Khalili's The Mapping Journey Project, this essay addresses how the present crisis has manifested as image and has made its way, across a variety of methodological and ethical approaches, into works of art.
The Mediterranean Sea has long acted as the geographical embodiment of a paradox at the heart of Europe: On the one hand, Europe strives to separate itself politically and socially from its southern and eastern Mediterranean neighbors by using the sea as a border. On the other hand, Europe relies on the Mediterranean as a connector for much of what constitutes “European” cultural heritage. This double impulse is evident in the ongoing reactions to the most recent refugee crisis in Europe, which has cast refugee arrivals as both vulnerable individuals who the European Union is morally obliged to protect and as threats to the very existence of the European project. In today’s increasingly xenophobic political climate, it’s easy to forget that the Mediterranean, and Mediterranean migrations, are neither unprecedented nor extrinsic to Europe. They have, in fact, shaped European culture, history, and identity for centuries.
For most people in Europe and the West, the most recent refugee crisis in the Mediterranean has unfolded primarily as moving image. Video footage of refugee boats in the Mediterranean has been circulated all over the world by the news media and individual witnesses. It is perhaps unsurprising then that the topic of Mediterranean migration has become a dominant theme in contemporary art in Europe and the West more broadly. Works in film and video have especially taken the topic of migration and displacement in stride, with film critic Catherine Russell noting that movies “about people fleeing intolerable conditions, heading for promised lands of opportunity, have been flooding festival screens for at least the last ten years.”
One of the centerpieces of this “migratory turn” in contemporary visual art is Moroccan-French artist Bouchra Khalili’s The Mapping Journey Project (2008–11). The eight-channel video installation—part of The Museum of Modern Art’s collection—features the accounts of eight displaced persons, each of whom describes his or her journey (fig.1). The faces of the subjects are absent; what we see are their hands retracing their migration trajectories on a map using permanent marker. In the years since its completion, the installation has been exhibited in more than ten venues across four continents —undoubtedly helping propel its creator to worldwide recognition. Last year, Khalili was short-listed for the Hugo Boss Prize, the jury for which stressed the importance of each shortlisted artist’s “commitment to bringing art to the center of timely debates in society.”
Read the rest of the essay here