Category Archives: borders

Silent Storm

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So this is how the season of migrant occupations in Bologna finally ends: in utter silence.

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After the spectacular evictions of ex-TELECOM and Via Solferino over the last two weeks, which -together with Atlandide‘s- was already considered a serious blow to the city’s autonomous movements, occupants have silently started leaving their rooms in via XXI Aprile, in the former dental clinic Beretta -fearing an imminent attack by the police. This means literally hundreds of migrants from Africa (Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia, Ghana, Marocco) and Europe’s new member states are left out in the streets.

In the heath of the moment, the Bologna city council -through the voice of its social councillor, Amelia Frascaroli– promised temporary accommodation for the 280 inhabitants of ex-TELECOM. But the transfer to Galaxy, a temporary outlet that costs the city council over 200.000 euro a year, has already caused rising protest by inhabitants who say it will bring criminality to the neighbourhood. In the midst of this chaotic transition, other migrants have preferred to travel on, testing their chances within the closing web of European asylum quotas. They organise their journey among the so-called transitanti, onward travelling migrants whose movement is tolerated -even facilitated- by some of Europe’s more lenient border police -a movement against which the Bologna city government says it cannot and does not want to agitate.

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Bologna is of course not the only city that has had to deal with evictions over the last year. Similar actions have been taken in Milan, Turin and Rome in particular (some of them are reported on in this extensive blog). Even Churches don’t open their gates as easily any more, as this new report by Fabrizio Gatti reveals. The change of attitude in Bologna is intriguing because it appears to come primarily from the new head of police in town and his refusal to communicate with the city council on presumed security matters. Ignazio Coccia, who has a background in intelligence, special operations and anti-terrorism, already preordained his plans when taking position in April this year. He said Bologna is certainly a “complex city but I like tough challenges.”

When meeting Frascaroli in front of police headquarters last week, she told me “something has been broken.” Yesterday during a longer interview she explained that these broken ties simultaneously involve her relationship with police and Bologna’s social movements, where she herself emerged. Today’s situation in Bologna is exceptional in the sense that the national government and police are trying to show their muscle with respect to a model of negotiation that was to some extent unique, because it tried to implement coercion within a logic of the overall protection of individuals, she said. So in this sense the evictions have brought about a fracture at an institutional level, too. Rather than an open battle between political forces though -besides the attempt to create a grand coalition on the Left during the last few days in another social centre threatened with eviction, LABAS– it appears for now that the major blow has been suffered by the hundreds of migrants who have increasing difficulties getting a place to sleep, eat and make a living. With the winter knocking at the door, their lack of residency will certainly become one of the major problems ahead.

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The colour line

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Further to my earlier comment a few weeks ago, which critically assessed Matteo Renzi‘s personification of people smugglers in Libya as the slave drivers of the twenty-first century, I to add two fresh posts that further explore the reasoning behind Europe’s bordering business. On Africa is Country, Enrique Martino interestingly writes how representing people on the move as easy prey for unspecified bands of ruthless traffickers is also a colonial script, because it portrays migrants as ignorant and passive. But their itineraries are also driven by an imperialist history of white people moving deep into the African continent.

And yesterday, opendemocracy.net published a letter signed by 300 slavery  and migration scholars, which criticises the EU’s unfolding naval campaign against ‘human traffickers’ in the Mediterranean along the same lines:

[Comparing human traffickers to the slave traders of the 21st century] is patently false and entirely self-serving. (…) [W]hat is happening in the Mediterranean today does not even remotely resemble the transatlantic slave trade. Enslaved Africans did not want to move. They were held in dungeons before being shackled and loaded onto ships. They had to be prevented from choosing suicide over forcible transportation. That transportation led to a single and utterly appalling outcome—slavery.

As I also wrote in the same post, human rights abuses rather occur in the many outsourced host and detention centres, where migrants risk to wither away in oblivion, or worse, are subjected to violence and torture (as has been the case in Libya, but also in Germany and Italy, as of lately).

In two additional posts, Nick De Genova and Harald Bauder reiterate that there is fact nothing natural about migrant’s illegality, but that their illegalization entails an active process of denied protection, involving often intensified efforts to increase migrant’s vulnerability. In other words, governments are complicit in the strategy to deny rights to migrants, resulting in a self-fulfilling spectacle of the border that excludes them from participating in the economies they sustain with their very lives.

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children of sharecroppers, US (around 1900)

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day labourers, Europe (around 2015)

As if by accident, Sandro Mezzadra’s public lecture on W.E.B. Du Bois‘ concept of the colour line -a lecture he gave at the annual KritNet conference on Borders, Migration -and Race, was just published online on Voice Republic along with the interventions from Juliane Karakayali and Vassilis Tsianos, Patrizia Putschert and Klen Nghi Ha.

There is a need to broaden the geographical, conceptual debate on the migratory regimes ‘in the crisis’…

Interesting terms that turn up in Mezzadra’s speech are the verticality and the temporality of the border (picking up on the work of Vicki Squire, Robert Latham and others), and the colour line…

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Ghetto

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I signal a publication by Pietro Floridia, Alicja Borkowska, Rachel Shapiro, Louise Glassier and others, which just came out one Europe’s new ‘ghettos’. The collection is the outcome of an artistic project I participated in during 2013-2015 in seven European cities, and which explored the meaning of ethnic and political closure in Europe’s multicultural urban societies.

At the heart of the project was a desire to redefine the concept ‘ghetto’ in Europe today -a hazardous but also a necessary exercise, as the term continues to occupy a central place in the construction of European, and migrant, identities.

What meaning do we ascribe to the ‘ghetto’? What role does the term play in delineating inclusion and exclusion in Europe’s urban spaces? And how can one narrate people’s intricate -and often contradicting- daily experiences of living in the ghetto in valuable ways?

By using ‘dramatic traces‘ and artistic installations as the method of choice, the project took some distance from the classic sociological studies on the subject. Instead it tried to create an ethnographic & theatrical counterpoint to the often stigmatising and dehumanizing representations that commonly populate public (and academic) discourse. It did so by emphasising the polysemic, subjective and embodied experience of b/ordering processes that characterise citizenship practices in Europe today. To find spaces of freedom, and windows of creativity -despite being enclosed in a seemingly locked space, provided an interesting reflection that emerged from this consciously ‘marginal’ perspective we adopted throughout the project.

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Using a series of black pipes of various measures and lengths as props in our workshop, participants could experiment, within a kind of ‘human-sized’ ghetto, the dialectical relationship between enclosure and windows, the art of finding ways out where all seems blocked.

The publication as well as additional material are available here.

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Visible/Invisible

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Two images, two realities: one, a child hidden in a trolley, on the checkpoint at the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. The other, an artistic picture, by photographer Seba Kurtis.

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On 7 may Guardia Civil agents noticed that a 19-year-old woman, reluctant to pass through border controls, was hiding a young child in her trolley. When guards opened the bag, the boy emerged from the suitcase scared and confused, telling authorities that his name was Abou, he was eight years old and from the Ivory Coast.

Seba Kurtis instead is an Argentinian photographer who spent most of his life as a clandestine migrant working on Spanish and Italian construction sites. His pictures are inspired by research he did on the surveillance systems that are used on Europe’s borders, similar to the one that took Abou’s image. Using infrared film, Seba dilated his exposure to metaphorically depict the period people hold their breath inside the container trucks to avoid detection. Migrants wrap their heads inside nylon bags, the kind that people use for their shopping. But other machinery has been installed to intercept their heartbeats, and the X-rays detect any living body traveling across the border.

The caption of a popular newspaper under Abou’s picture was also telling: ‘collapse’ -quoting police forces who claim to be unable to handle the incoming migrant flows.

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Europe’s bordering business

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While the corpses of migrants who died during Sunday’s boat disaster are still washing ashore together with few survivors, and a special EU council meeting today debates ever more repressive border controls across the Mediterranean, media reports the arrest of a ruthless racket of human traffickers that is apparently tearing a gaping hole in Europe’s border control policies. An enquiry into the business of migration.

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Detained Voices

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After the suspended lives of Berlin and Milan (see previous post), this time a call arises from the more secluded spaces of Europe’s asylum system, as hundreds of people are on hunger strike in over half of the UK’s immigration detention centres – the biggest uprising against Britain’s racist detention system for a decade. Two blogs record their detained voices on this worldpress site and on this Facebook page. They are calling for solidarity protest and international support.

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From: Undocumented: The Architecture of Migrant Detention by Tings Chak (2014)

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Suspended

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Watching Theo Angelopoulos’ movie To metewro vhma tou pelargou (The Suspended Flight of the Stork) the other night, Mustafa Dikeç’s comment about the ‘where of asylum’ came back to mind (see previous post: Where is the Law?).

This rather less recent movie (it dates form 1991) tells the story of a famous Greek politician who disappears to a village on the border with Albania (it is the first of a trilogy on borders by Angelopoulos). The village acquired the nickname ‘Waiting Room’ since the refugees the Greek government placed there, are waiting for their visas for elsewhere. But after years that ‘elsewhere’ acquires a rather strange meaning, the journalist, who inquires about the politician’s disappearance, notes in the movie.

Greece and the Mediterranean have changed much since these early days after the end of the Cold War. Many ‘Waiting Rooms’ have emerged now within Europe’s national borderlines: in Athens’ Exarcheia neighbourhood, in Tel Aviv’s Lewinski Park, in Milan’s Porta Venezia, on Berlin’s Oranienplatz, migrants flock together to confront experiences and plan their onward journeys -often accompanied by activist networks. Next to the constant tensions their experiences and hopes generate in Europe’s internal border zones, these ‘waiting rooms’ are also often liminal places, characterized by a creative energy and re-constellation of identities that have the potential to transform social and political relationships.

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By way of example, I mention two documentaries, Asmarina by filmmakers Alan Maglio and Medhin Paolos about Porta Venezia, and Lampedusa in Berlin, by Mauro Mondello, which narrate these emergent realities of Europe’s liminal ‘waiting rooms’.

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how many borders I must cross to feel at home? (from Angelopoulos: To metewro vhma tou pelargou)