Illegalized Immigration is a persistent topic in the global community and the number of ‘displaced persons’ is increasing, resulting in various forms of social conflict. The perception of migration seems to be impressed by images of refugees in packed fishing boats, public gatherings of people without official status, and posters of political parties referring to this issue. These images are the smallest, but due to their presence in the media most obvious part of undocumented migration. How do images shape the way in which illegalized immigration is perceived? Who creates these images? Under which conditions are they produced? And where do they circulate? How are they related to legal and political discourses?
The conference ‘Images of Illegalized Immigration’, held at the University of Basel, dealt with the visual ‘evidence’ of illegalized immigration. It brought into focus in what kinds of images these conflicts are presented and how political and theoretical frameworks as well as social movements transform these images. The conference critically questioned how distinctions can be drawn and new perspectives can be found amidst this plurality of images, and how persons are ‘de-legalized’ through the use of images. The conference was organized by Christine Bischoff, Francesca Falk and Sylvia Kafehsy and brought together historians, art historians, sociologists, cultural anthropologists, ethnologists, and experts on film studies and photography.
In the run-up to the conference, two films were presented in the ‘Neue Kino’, focusing on the situation of asylum seekers in Switzerland that are rejected by law. Nora Mathys moderated the screening. In the documentary ‘La Forteresse’ (Switzerland 2008, 100’) by the Swiss filmmaker FERNAND MELGAR a camera unrestrictedly enters into a Swiss reception centre for asylum seekers. It presents a human and bureaucratic gaze at a transition place, where 200 men, women and children are awaiting the state’s decision on their behalf. In the discussion, Melgar focused on the importance of portraying these people rendering visible their individuality, giving faces to their stories. The second documentary ‘Niemand nicht weiss’ (Switzerland 2008, 15’) by the Swiss filmmaker SEVERIN KUHN portrays the situation of two asylum seekers. They were not granted asylum, thus their sojourn remained illegal.
The conference was opened with the section ‘Images and Politics’, chaired by Jana Häberlein. In her paper ‘Illegal Migration and Asylum Abuses: Constructing New Figures of Speech in Political Posters’, CHRISTELLE MAIRE DE BELLIS explored the politicization of the ‘foreigner problem’ indicated by images in political posters in Switzerland. The posters she showed were produced by concerned political groups for national voting issues related with topics such as immigrant workers, asylum seekers, etc. She marked that every voting linked to migration and foreigners issues is the theatre of polarized debates and that each political group produces its own argument and conveys it through various communication tools. As one of them, posters become the site of a particular rhetoric. They bring to life representations that are produced by discourses and ideologies. She considered posters as media that contribute to creating the ‘common sense’ of citizens.
Speaking on ‘Imagined Spaces of ‘Illegal’ Migration - Representing Guest Workers and Refugees in West Germany, 1973-1980’ JAN-HENRIK FRIEDRICH explored the beginnings of a regime of representation that constructed the threat of immigration to West-Germany in terms of illegality and delinquency. Using the example of the coverage in the German weekly ‘Der Spiegel’ over several years he explained which discursive shifts enabled the receiving society to understand changing patterns of migration. Friedrich exemplified how the images of refugees in 1979/80 as illegal ‘aliens’ established a discourse that suspected immigrants in general of belonging to a network of delinquency, although they had been welcomed as guest workers years ago.
SYLVIA KAFEHSY talked about ‘Images of Victims in Trafficking in Women’. She depicted these images as an important register in the discourse of human rights that derives from universal ‘natural’ rights. The images she focused on seemed to abstain from making a stance with regard to actual politics. Kafehsy highlighted types of fictions and evidences these images create, and questioned how and why these images have become criticised. With the presentation of a video spot raising awareness of trafficking in woman in Switzerland that was shown in soccer stadiums during the 2008 European soccer championship, she pointed to the power and ambiguities of such strategies of visualisation.
In the paper ‘The Making of ‘Illegality’: Strategies of Illegalizing Social Outsiders’, CHRISTINE BISCHOFF asked how practices of social inclusion and exclusions are made visible through visual representation in the media. Focused on a media debate in Switzerland (‘Raser-Debatte’) she exemplified how migrants have been made an embodiment of the indistinct borders of nations, states’ legal orders and their contradictions. The discussion referred to the fact that the making of stereotypes – such as the ‘male speedster with Balkan background’ who became protagonist in the ‘Raser-Debatte ‘– is part of political strategies, thus impacting on the debate.
The second section, chaired by Martin Mülheim, focused on ‘Images and Border’. FRANCESCA FALK depicted in her paper ‘Invasion, Infection, Invisibility. An Iconology of Illegalized Immigration’ that migration can be considered as a violent conflict, even though this violence often remains invisible. She contrasted two photos of boat people where violence becomes visible differently, also through their iconographic references. She questioned what constellations of power are produced by these strategies of visibility. She also referred to the (in)visibility of violence of territorial borders when immigrants are put into deportation camps. Falk pointed out that these places are located in the periphery and pictures of these institutions do not circulate often in the Swiss media. The austere situation does not get a public ‘face’.
In his paper ‘Mimesis, Mimikry, Camouflage: The Aesthetics and Politics of Illegal Border Crossings’, MICHAEL ANDREAS related mimetic and disruptive camouflage and aesthetic phenomena creating visual confusion. Referring to the example of the Mexican-American Border and to Foucault’s term ‘heterotopy’, he described which aesthetics of (in)visibility the different forms of border crossing produce. The discussion centred on the relevance of broaching the issue of space when talking about illegal immigration, in addition to a discussion that refers to the status of individuals.
PAMELA SCORZIN pointed out a paradox in the use of images of illegalized immigration in the media world. Her central thesis was that people crossing borders illegally are shown in a double way: They are made highly visible in form of a stereotype cliché and at the same time they are made invisible as individuals and humans. Showing images of boat people in several contexts such as journalistic research, documentary, poetics and artistic she argued that a combination of these representations in a multidimensional portrait can contribute to a new perspective on the issue and essentially lives from the integrated sound parts. In the discussion of this paper, the important question came up if we can conclude that sound portraits the individual situation in a less stereotyped way?
MARC SCHONDERBEEK talked about ‘The Image versus the Map: Investigating Border Conditions in Ceuta’. Images of illegal border crossings and transgressions in Ceuta (Spain) were related to the investigation of the factual border conditions. He showed that the concept of the border cannot be seen as a closed wall, but rather a filter allowing for selective trespassing of goods and people. He suggested a new perspective on the understanding of borders as a zone consisting of a sequence of divisions that are unstable both in space and time and not as lines or zones in the traditional sense. Schonderbeeck concluded that borders are extremely subtle spatial devices with workings and influences stretching far beyond their localities. In the discussion, the participants wondered how a map of the mentioned borders drawn by the migrants would look like and if this map would be identical to official geographical maps?
The keynote address was held by WILLIAM J. THOMAS MITCHELL who is working on the power of images in relation to verbal representations in the context of social and political issues. His paper ‘Flying Checkpoints and Immoveable Walls: Images and Immigration in Israel/Palestine’ questioned how in Israel/Palestine legalization and illegalization can be created by images. He focused on a double transformation of a native people into a diasporic population and a diasporic people into a nativist society in Israel/Palestine and the role of laws and symbols in creating this transformation. The severity of the Israel/Palestine situation was defined within a broad survey of the general question of immigration, taking up issues such as the relation of natives and immigrants, the nature of forced emigration and ethnic cleansing, the spatial construction of displacement and confinement and laws of departure and return. Mitchell converged the topic of the conference into three fields, such as law, with its entire edifice of judicial practice and political philosophy, migration, as the movement and settlement of living things, especially humans, across the boundaries between distinct habitats and iconology, the theory of images across the media, including verbal and visual images, metaphors and figures of speech as well as visual representations.
The section ‘Images and Aesthetics’ was chaired by Fiona Siegenthaler. EVA KUHN presented and discussed ‘‘Border’ - the videographic traces by Laura Waddington as a cinematographic memorial’. Waddington’s video represents an artistic approach to the reality of illegal immigrants without showing faces creating abstract images that are not distanced but show the fragment of an action in a blurred videographic trace. The images are underlined with a voice-over by the artist, in which she tells fragments of her experience from a personal point of view. In the discussion, the question of the role of the voice for the aesthetic of this special film and in documentary films in general came up. Does the presentation of a voice give more impact to the situation shown in the video?
LAMBERT DOUSSON talked about the exhibition of ‘Bruno Serralongue at the Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration’ where a series of 45 photos was presented, entitled ‘Manifestations du Collectif de sans-papiers de la Maison des Ensemles 2001-2003’. Dousson aimed to contrast the artistic procedures of the photographer with the mechanism of the exhibition that tends to cancel their both political meaning and force through a special setting of the exhibition, and showed how they are captured within the ‘distribution of the sensible’ (Jaques Rancière) established by the aesthetics of French immigration policies. The main issue of the discussion referred to the question how and why the exhibition de-politicises the photos and if in general historical documents can lose their critical charge through repetition and circulation as works of art.
In their paper ‘Masking, Blurring, Replacing: Can the Undocumented Migrant have a face in Film?’, OLAF BERG and HELEN SCHWENKEN focused on how undocumented migrants cannot only speak, but also be visually present in films that try to create audio-visual representations of their protagonists, who for obvious reasons have an interest in not being recognized. In exploring four strategies of visual representation of undocumented migrants in independent documentary films - by the use of masks or special make-up, by substitution of images for their (illegal) working activities, or by visualizing the invisibility and not showing the invisible persons - Berg and Schwenken exemplified the difficulty of producing images that make a positive relation between viewer and undocumented migrants possible and at the same time respect their need to not be recognized.
In the last paper, ALMUT REMBGES talked about the experiences in an ongoing project she initiated in 2007, ‘Picture Service - an interactive photo-project for immigrants at the border of Switzerland’. In an area outside Basel, in between the Swiss-German Border and a refugee camp for asylum seekers, the artists collective ‘Practical Theory & Company’ offers a picture service for the inhabitants of the camp, who wait in the camp for months and are permanently under examination in order to get refugee status or to receive a verdict to leave the country. ‘Picture Service’ offers them a camera for one day and the possibility to mail the pictures home or keep them as a memory. In showing a selection of the pictures made in the context of this project that did not make visible ‘victims’, but active individuals with hopes and live plans, Rembges could explain why these pictures are a counterpart to the photos taken for the camp-archive. Finally she questioned why these pictures taken by the asylum seekers themselves transport such a different reality from the one that is constructed in the media and referred to the asylum-process in which they still have not given up hope.
The conference brought centre stage an iconography of the migrant in relation to ethical, political and aesthetic discourses. A discussion about the strategies, purposes and dangers to give persons without legal papers a ‘face’ was discovered as a fine red line in the conference, even if this approach had become complicated. The question of the representation of illegalized immigration can therefore never be separated from the aesthetic and political context of the image. The participants stressed that Illegalized Immigration is created through laws and mental and national borders. The naturalization of ‘illegal immigration’ is thus a strategy of legitimization: It hides the making of illegalized immigration through government regulation. A critical iconology may help us to understand these mechanisms. Furthermore, images representing migrants contribute to produce pity, sympathy or to assign blame. Images can make the violence which is connected to illegalization visible and thereby criticize the current policies regarding labour mobility. The question how to create images that inform today’s migrant society about the ‘reality’ of illegalized immigration is not only addressed at producers, but also at the consumers of these images.
Referring to this, a final topic in the discussion dealt with the task of scientific research. It brought into focus the danger of aiming to create the ‘real image of illegalized immigration’ and the problem that showing what is hidden can produce new forms of oppression. A publication is planned to stake out this field of research.
Conference overview:
Screenings
Moderation: Nora Mathys
Fernand Melgar: La Forteresse
Severin Kuhn: Niemand nicht weiss
Images and Politics
Chair: Jana Häberlein
Christelle Maire De Bellis: Illegal Migration and Asylum Abuses: Constructing New Figures of Speech in Political Posters
Jan-Henrik Friedrichs: Guest Workers and Refugees in West Germany
Sylvia Kafehsy: Images of Victims in Trafficking in Women
Christine Bischoff: The Making of ‘Illegality’: Strategies of Illegalizing Social Outsiders
Images and Border
Chair: Martin Mühlheim
Francesca Falk: Invasion, Infection, Invisibility. An Iconology of Illegalized Immigration
Michael Andreas: Mimesis, Mimikry, Camouflage: The Aesthetics and Politics of Illegal Border Crossings
Pamela Scorzin: Voice-over Image
Marc Schonderbeek: The Image versus the Map: Investigating Border Conditions in Ceuta
Keynote
Introduction: Roland Bleiker
W.J.T. Mitchell: Flying Checkpoints and Immoveable Walls: Images and Immigration in Israel/Palestine
Images and Aesthetics
Chair: Fiona Siegenthaler
Eva Kuhn: ‘Border’ - the videographic traces by Laura Waddington as a cinematographic memorial
Lambert Dousson: Bruno Serralongue at the Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration
Helen Schwenken and Olaf Berg: Masking, Blurring, Replacing: Can the Undocumented Migrant Have a Face in Film?
Almut Rembges: Picture Service - an Interactive Photo-Project for Immigrants at the Border of Switzerland
Summary
Stephan Meyer and Patricia Purtschert