(Un)Documented: The discourse of lack
Patricia Chan

This article examines the construction of the ‘migrant’ and ‘refugee’ as central organising metaphors in the visual arts against the dominant discourse of immigration, where migrants are invariably defined in negative terms. In order to narrow the scope of this article, this brief investigation will focus on the aesthetic and discursive strategies of Swiss artist Ursula Biemann (b. 1955), looking specifically at ‘Remote Sensing’ (2001) and ‘X-Mission’ (2008). Respectively, these works attempt to capture the ideological and discursive construction of the marginalised subject.
One of the concerns about immigration arises from the notion that there are too many immigrants for a country to accommodate. Immigration and anti-immigration discourse, according to Christopher Hart, is based on the metaphor of ‘containerisation’. Hart explains that the container concept reveals ‘our encounter with containment and boundedness [as] one of the most pervasive features of our bodily experience.’ In this turn, immigrants are delineated as a metaphorical, nameless, and unidentified mass or flow. The ubiquity of the ‘flood’ metaphor in political discourse as well as everyday discourse is problematic in that migration is conceptualised as an ongoing event. In addition, it is represented as a mass event, a single moving entity.

In the book ‘Acts of Citizenship’ Peter Nyers points out howterms of description for migrants are invariably linguistic marks not just of difference, but also of absence ‘lack of documents (“undocumented”), lack of established travel arrangements (“irregular migrant”), lack of visibility (“clandestine workers”), lack of social status, (“shadow population”), lack of security (“precarious status”), lack of humanity (“alien”).’ Presented in such a way it becomes apparent that difference is reiterated not only in official and academic discourses, but is pervasive in all discourses on immigration. It also limits the possibility of an alternative language, given the dominance of the channels of distribution: television, newspapers, and electronic media. This is not meant to prove the prevalence of modern media through technology, but simply to acknowledge that the framework through which such a discourse circulates is far from neutral and that it is the same framework that determines whether new questions are to be asked.

Situated in some of the most contested border spaces of our times, Biemann is concerned with visualising the space of migration as sites where individual and collective desires are refracted through technology. From the diverse range of discourses surrounding Biemann’s video work there emerges a fine thread of consensus. Running through academic areas such as feminist theory, art criticism, cultural studies, studies of globalisation and capitalism, to activist networks, is the view that Biemann’s visual practice displays a political awareness which dissolves the powers that generate and sustain borders.

Utilisingdiverse aesthetic strategies, Biemann’s video practice seeks to materialise these highly abstract relations through an examination of representation itself. Images, text, and moving image are either produced by the artist during fieldtrips or taken from digital sources. The method in which this information is then combined and manipulated in post-production insists that the viewer recognise the conditions of its making. Still, much of the work directly responds to actual events. Biemann states that migrants are often represented in such a certain way by the media that they end up in a ‘defence and segregation’ scenario which is played out in the various identification apparatuses: identity cards, police frame-ups, prison mug-shots, newspaper pictures of fugitives, CCTV monitors and digital identification software. Identifying a paradox of visibility in these practices, Biemann states her disinterest in re-articulating the border through the usual visual means, which invariably focus on the migration as a site of conflict, corruption and violence.

For Biemann, ‘The aesthetic-political task of the day is not to capture an image that best symbolizes our times; it is no longer to posit the ultimate image but to intervene effectively in current flows of representations, their narratives and framing devices.’ In this sense, questions concerning reflexivity are of high importance here since the process of constituting subjectivities is ultimately subjectively articulated. But as Alfredo Cramerotti rightly asks, ‘Are artists and filmmakers, who adopt archive research, interviewing and documentary, able to counter-balance the effect of media manipulation, using the same mechanisms?’ or is it inevitable that the use of the same technological structures produced by neoliberal globalisation must somehow reproduce the power relations they seek to dispel?

A work that explores the ethical lacuna in modern technology systems is ‘Remote Sensing’ (2001), which examines the centrality of the gendered body within the (infrastructural, technological, and economic) networks of neoliberal globalisation. For Biemann, the net cast by mapping and visualisation technologies discriminates in what it chooses to show. As such, the video focuses on the ways in which the trajectories of sophisticated mapping technology such as NASA satellites fails to register the issue of forced labour and trafficking of migrant women. In order to address this gap and to implicate powerful states and their scientific and military institutions in the exploitation of economically disadvantaged women around the world, ‘Remote Sensing’ utilises the gaze of the satellite to zoom into the geographical routes undertaken by women from Vietnam across the Thai border, Czech over German, from Burma to Thailand. Using digital satellite images sourced from the Internet as well as original footage, ‘Remote Sensing’ constructs a narrative of technology’s facilitation of illicit practices. Stepping away from the immediate issue of positionality for the moment, this approach seems to propose that forms of social dysfunction flourish in the places that escape the direct gaze of technology.
In interview with Biemann, Ingrid Hoofd questions the concrete relation between new technologies and the trafficking of women in ‘Remote Sensing’, suggesting that it obtains a ‘godlike manner’. Elsewhere Hoofd suggests that the compulsion to view communication technology as a level playing field from where social transformation can happen is illusory. Instead she sees it as an effect or symptom of the neoliberal drive for progress and speed arguing that the ‘cry for “activism” and the interpellation of the subject to “play”, be “active”, and “creative”, becomes ever greater in an information society [but] the consideration of the effectiveness of action rarely enters cultural net–activist texts — parody, imitation, appropriation, and play are merely considered as somehow subversive in and of themselves.’ For Hoofd, a central paradox emerges where ‘being politically active, in particular through the Internet, then means less and less being politically effective.’
‘X-Mission’ (2008) engages with the representation of Palestinian refugee camps around the world - suggesting a use of media that connects the production of the camp with the global distribution of power. To reflect these relations, Biemann uses several visual strategies. Digital footage is overlaid with floating grids, text, music and arrows, all of which eliminate the possibility of a linear narrative, forging a multiplicity of perspectives and paradigms within a unified space. The video is conceived in seven episodes, each of which deals with the different narratives which constitute the camp including the ‘juridical, philosophical, urban planning, mythological, and post-national.’ Each episode is levered by the inclusion of expert opinion which is intended to equalize any discursive hierarchies in the larger critique of the discourses which constitute the camp.
To underline this I refer to episode two, ‘X-Mission: There is a clause in the statue [sic]’. As Susan Akram, professor of International and Human Rights Law at Boston University explains the link between the United Nations and the camps, a tag bearing the designation ‘The Lawyer’ appears at the bottom of the screen. The particular strategy is used again in the final episode, ‘X-mission: Someone who used to own many acres of land’, which puts into perspective some of the issues discussed above.
The clip shows Shaadi Abu Zarqa, a hooded man positioned above an urban scene in Deheishe Camp near Bethlehem, West Bank. The accompanying subtitle to this clip reads ‘A Palestinian Refugee speaks’ but his voice is replaced by a female voice. There is a transition from the first to third person,
‘I’ becomes ‘he’. All of which seems to seek to dismantle the rhetoric of realism and to emphasize the relationality of the discourses that construct the ‘refugee’. These particular relations are curiously mirrored in the ‘Clandestino Project Final Report: Undocumented Migration: Counting the Uncountable’, a report carried out by the European Commission in 2007-2009. It was produced to support policy makers in implementing policies regarding undocumented migration. In the section which discusses the ethical and methodological issues concerning the collection of data by interview, it states that the interviewee is not required to give any form of identification, even though ‘obtaining informed consent is ethically required for any research.’ It further states that ‘in case of irregular migrants any request of written consent will normally be met with suspicion by the interviewee because it potentially undermines anonymity and safety and could deter them from participation.’ Whether the resistance comes from the migrant is unclear but the question that arises is how might reliable data be collected especially in relation to motivation? Returning to the discussion of the use of rhetorical strategies in the interview format in ‘X-Mission’, the comprehension of it almost entirely depends on the viewers knowing that a refugee is already encoded as Other.

Notwithstanding the humanist underpinnings in Biemann’s video work, the use of diagrams, arrows, floating text boxes, classical music, and subtitling as an aesthetic strategy prompts the question of efficacy. Combined with the particular subjects that Biemann is frequently drawn to; the spatial relations of labour, gender, migration and the places that exhibit those relations; camps, borders, frontiers, this question is thrown into sharp focus. Although enlarging the scope of the investigation to include different narratives allows for a clearer picture of the power relations involved in the production of knowledge, what is of relevance here is that the layering of expert opinion, personal impressions, scientific and theoretical material, might contribute to the homogenisation of marginalised subjects. The disjunction between the visual and textual, what is simulated and what is un-manipulated in ‘X-Mission’ dissolve each other, creating a void where the voices of authority in the field become reified into a disguise. In addition, the dubbing of the voice of ‘The Refugee’ reveals an adjacent reification of what Agamben terms ‘bare life’.

In his examination of the manifestation of conflict through the built environment and landscape in the contested territories of Israel/Palestine, Eyal Weizman describes it as ‘Escher-like, a territorial hologram,’ alluding to the notion that complexity can itself be propagandistic. These works seek to make visible oppressive spatial relations but they also illustrate the difficulties in negotiating the overlapping boundaries in which these relations are located. Taken together the different discourses surveyed above represent a complex set of theorisations on borders which invariably describe relations of power and of cultural practices, preferences, and priorities being played out on visual terms. But it quickly becomes obvious that a world conceived of as a series of networks will fail in advancing the social project of integration or even in describing how societies influence each other. If we begin from the perspective of borders as a series of nodes in a network, it quickly becomes apparent that we are far from being able to create a picture of completeness or comprehensiveness.
Rather than trying to represent the space of flows of the networked economy, which is something vast and infinitely subjective, J.J. King suggests that what we can try to do is acknowledge this incompleteness and focus on ‘how one node relates to another; with whom each interacts and why.’ And this might mean allowing for the possibility, or perhaps inevitability, that while these works allow the channels between art practice and research to open up, they must also reproduce the politics of exclusion and cultural elitism they claim to challenge.