Pushing Border Art’s Borders - session #4

Two talks on border resistance in art and creative initiatives.

Carolyn Defrin (University of Graz) : “Co-creating future imaginations of the border: artistic resistances in dehumanised migration landscapes”

Within the infamous ‘hotspot approach’ enacted along Europe’s southern border, a strategy of separation persists. From isolated, prison-like detentions centres to a complex set of tensions between asylum seekers, local residents, humanitarian aid and border security personnel several factors converge to keep people apart. While some integration programmes do exist, they often enact hierarchical ‘host’/’guest’ dynamics which perpetuate social inequities Focusing on how newcomers should assimilate, there is less consideration for ecological approaches to understanding how multi-cultural communities can learn from and care for each other. This presentation explores possibilities for co-creating narratives of connection and equity between these key border actors in two relevant contexts: Samos, Greece and Tenerife, Spain. Through a developing participatory arts practice, I will discuss how inter-relationships enacted through arts based methods (including storytelling, shared meals and speculative design) aim to counter present border narratives of fear, violence and division with future artistic visions of migration driven by human rights, empathy and connection. This work develops a concept of intra-vulnerabilities3 taking both Karen Barad’s intra-active agential realism4 and Roslyn Diprose’s5 reframing of generosity as multi-directional. Investigating how critical imagination and social creativity enable circumstantial vulnerabilities to entangle with vulnerable acts of listening, dialogue, and collaborative art-making, the research explores how ‘mutual entailments’ in social inequities can consider reparative narratives of care and connection within border contexts.

Carolyn Defrin (PhD) is a researcher, artist and facilitator originally from the US and currently based in Europe as a Marie Curie fellow at the University of Graz. Working between migration studies and the creative industries, her research is focused on how key border actors (including those from refugee and local communities as well as humanitarian aid, border personnel and policy making backgrounds) can co create migration futures. As a long-time resident in the UK, she has also researched the impacts of the UK’s hostile environment policies on migrant artists and produced artworks and publications in collaboration with other artists and activists to reflect this context. Favourite projects include co-founding Kissing Project, celebrating the uniqueness and universality of humans through stories that begin with a kiss, and a seasonal artist salon she runs in London for those yearning for creativity. Her work has been commissioned/presented across the UK, Europe, and the US. Visit publications and artworks here: carolyndefrin.com

Federica Mazzara (University of Westminster) : “Mocking the border: strategies of visual resistance in the mediterranean”

This paper is interested in identifying forms of creative visual resistance to a prevailing logic of border enforcement aimed at curbing undocumented human movement. These forms of resistance serve to underscore the porosity of borders and the irrational violence that increasingly defines their global management. This phenomenon is perpetuated through policies, rhetorical strategies, speech acts, and media narratives that contribute to a toxic discourse of exclusion, effectively immobilising movement. From the perspective of this paper, visual forms of resistance serve as a means to ‘mock’ the border, and to enact a form of carnivalesque resistance (Bakhtin) that subverts and liberates the functional meaning of borders, highlighting their inefficiency while transforming them into arenas of creative and critical resistance. The main case study analysed here consists of Tik Tok and Instagram videos taken during the crossing of the Mediterranean liquid border by young Harraga, ( الحراقة ) an Arabic word used in Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco that can be translated as ‘those who burn the borders’, and refers to those who move out of the Maghreb via unauthorised routes. These videos represent an attempt to subvert the narrative of the undocumented migrant as a criminal and to establish a new paradigm of self- determination and agency that reverse the logic of the border while transgressing it.

Federica Mazzara is Associate Professor at the University of Westminster, London. For the past 15 years, she has been researching and writing on migration and Border Art, during which she coined the term "Aesthetics of Subversion" (refer to her book, Reframing Migration). She is currently engaged in a new project titled 'Mocking the Border: Carnivalesque Resistance in Times of Migration', which investigates how art ridicules and resists the border and its triviality across three major borderlands: the US/Mexico border, the Mediterranean, and the Palestine/ Israel border. Additionally, she is an art curator; you can view the website for the exhibition on Migrant Deaths at Sea that she co-curated in 2019 in London (www.sinkwithouttrace.com).

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