Mediating mobility: visual anthropology in the age of migration

187 Pages·2016·7.486 MB·English

by  Köhn, Steffen

Mediating Mobility
Nonfictions is dedicated to expanding and deepening
the range of contemporary documentary studies.
It aims to engage in the theoretical conversation
about documentaries, open new areas of scholarship,
and recover lost or marginalised histories.
Other titles in the Nonfictions series:
Direct Cinema: Observational Documentary and the Politics of the Sixties
by Dave Saunders
Projecting Migration: Transcultural Documentary Practice
edited by Alan Grossman and Áine O’Brien
The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture
edited by Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas
Films of Fact: A History of Science in Documentary Films and Television
by Timothy Boon
Building Bridges: The Cinema of Jean Rouch
edited by Joram ten Brink
Vision On: Film, Television and the Arts in Britain
by John Wyver
Chavez: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised – A Case Study of Politics and the Media
by Rod Stoneman
Documentary Display: Re-Viewing Nonfiction Film and Video
by Keith Beattie
The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film
by Laura Rascaroli
Playing to the Camera: Musicians and Musical Performance in Documentary CInema
by Thomas Cohen
The Cinema of Me: The Self and Subjectivity in First Person Documentary
by Alisa Lebow
Killer Images: Documentary Film, Memory and the Performance of Violence
edited by Joram ten Brink and Joshua Oppenheimer
Documenting Cityscapes: Urban Change in Contemporary Non-Fiction Film
by Iván Villarmea Álvarez
Documents of Utopia: The Politics of Experimental Documentary
by Paolo Magagnoli
Mediating
Mobility
VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE AGE OF MIGRATION
Steffen Köhn
WALLFLOWER PRESS
LONDON & NEW YORK
A Wallflower Press Book
Wallflower Press in an imprint of
Columbia University Press
publishers since 1893
New York
cup.columbia.edu
Copyright © 2016 Columbia University Press.
All rights reserved.
Wallflower Press® is a registered trademark of Columbia University Press.
Cover image from Laura Waddington film’s Border (2004) © Laura Waddington.
A complete CIP record is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-231-17888-4 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-231-17889-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-231-85094-0 (e-book)
Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent
and durable acid-free paper.
This book is printed on paper with recycled content.
Printed in the United States of America.
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Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii
INTRODUCTION 1
Anthropology, Migration and the Moving image
ChapTeR ONe 30
Migrant in/visibility
ChapTeR TwO 53
Migrant Experience
ChapTeR ThRee 84
Migratory Spaces
ChapTeR fOUR 109
Migratory Times
CONCLUSION 138
Possibilities
NOTES 154
FILMOGRAPHY 157
BIBLIOGRAPHY 159
INDEx 173
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Acknowledgements
T
his book would not have been possible without the continuous support
of numerous individuals over many years. Fist of all, I wish to thank
Prof. Matthias Krings, Prof. Anton Escher and Prof. Karl N. Renner
for providing a stimulating work environment and for their continuous intel-
lectual and moral guidance and encouragement. I further want to thank Nanna
Heidenreich, Laurent van Lancker and Antje Weitzel for sharing texts, films and
knowledge with me; and Sandra Sievers for helping me obtain many of the films
I analyse throughout my work. In addition, I wish to thank my good friends
and colleagues Felix Girke, Judith Beyer, Gerd Becker, Laura Münger, Florian
Walter, Eva Knopf and Danilanh Lathnotha for reading chapters in their various
drafts and for providing insightful criticism and comments. The artists Sylvain
George, Raphael Cuomo, Maria Iorio, Bouchra Khalili, Elias Grootaers, Alex
Rivera, Ursula Biemann and Zineb Sedira (and her gallery Kamel Mennour)
were so generous as to share their work with me, and their unique approach
to filmmaking was a constant source of inspiration to me in my practical and
theoretical work. For friendship, collaboration (and the occasional distraction
when needed) I express my infinite gratitude to Johannes Büttner, Henrika Kull,
Leonardo Franke, Helge Peters, Lola Abrera, Barbara Breitenstein and Irina
Breitenstein. Thank you for being you!
I have presented versions of chapters at various international events. These
include the 12th EASA conference in Paris-Nanterre, the workshop ‘Mobile
Images – Images of Mobility’ at the University of Cologne, the ‘Arts with(out)
Borders’ conference at the University of Bern, the 17th IUAES world congress
in Manchester and the 35th DGV conference in Mainz. I am grateful to the
conference organisers, panel conveners and participants at these events for the
opportunity to test my ideas and for their engagement with them. This book
has evolved over many years. Parts of chapter three have been published as
‘Organising complexities: the potential of multi-screen video-installations
for ethnographic practice and representation’ in Critical Arts: South-North
Cultural and Media Studies 27:5 (2013). Another section of the same chapter
was included in ‘Screening Transnational Spaces’, Anthrovision 2:2 (2014). I
am grateful to the publishers and editors for their permission to reproduce this
material here.
vii
The fieldwork for this project was funded by the Research Unit Media
Convergence and the Center for Intercultural Studies at Johannes Gutenberg-
University Mainz, as well as by the Film and New Media Fund for Emerging
Filmmakers Rhineland-Palatinate and I wish to thank these institutions for their
support. I am especially grateful to Paola Calvo for creating such wonderful im-
ages and to my family for their enduring support, without which I could never
have completed this work. My deepest gratitude, however, goes to those people
that granted me so much insight into their lives and shared so many intimate
moments with me during the fieldwork and filmmaking on which this project
is based. Opara Onyekachi, Shahbaz Aakthar and Ilham Regadda in Melilla,
Halidi Yahaya Soidikh and Sitti Aboudou in Mayotte, and Serpil Çelik, Axel
Hartfiel, Mercedita de Jesus, Patricia Rendon and your families, may you cross
all the borders and overcome all the barriers you are faced with in your lives!
viii
INTRODUCTION
Anthropology, Migration
and the Moving Image
I
n June 2015, the performance art group Center for Political Beauty staged
their latest intervention right in the political heart of Europe. For The Dead
are Coming, they brought the corpses of illegalised migrants who drowned at
the continent’s external borders to the German capital Berlin in order to rebury
them at exactly the place where, according to the group, the most important
decisions against Europe’s humanity are taken. This public action was based on
intensive research the collective conducted on the harrowing conditions under
which the bodies of those who die on their way to Europe are treated at the
continent’s border regions. The group visited secret mass graves and cooling
chambers in Greece and on Sicily where they found the dead anonymously piled
up in trash bags. They were able to identify some of the victims and managed to
contact their relatives with whom they opened the humiliating graves, exhumed
the bodies and planned the reburial of the deceased migrants. Their transfer to
the German capital was not only meant to bring the migrants’ journeys to an
end but also to generate attention and put pressure on European leaders to make
them face a growing humanitarian crisis. The group first organised the burial
of a 34-year-old woman from Syria, who drowned near the Italian shores, in
an Islamic cemetery in Berlin’s south-western Gatow district. This happened
before the eyes of the international media but in the absence of her surviving
husband and three children, who are in Germany and seeking asylum but were
not allowed to travel to Berlin due to a law that prevents asylum seekers from
moving freely within the country while their applications are being processed.
A couple of days later, they gave the body of another 60-year-old Syrian a final
resting place in Berlin and then called for a ‘March of the Determined’ during
which they announced their intention to bury more bodies right in the forecourt
of Angela Merkel’s Federal Chancellery in the midst of the city’s government
district. With these burials, the Center also aimed to lay the foundations for
1