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What is the mainstream overarching narrative concerning undocumented migrants directed towards Europe? How is it manifested? What does it tell us?

How is the free movement of: certain people, money and rubbish (the by product of a globalisation) linked to the restricted movement of other people? How do these contradictions coexist?

 

Unit1 was majorly influenced by the travel research Scholarship I undertook thanks to the Peter Kirk Foundation between May and July 2013: Documenting Europe's Southren Borders. Malta and Lampedusa. Interest in this theme came as much from a personal feeling of frustration, as from growing out of a a skepticism towards media coverage. 

 

The problematics of undertaking research in this area as an artist started to arise even before I undertook my travels, what was my role in this situation? how can artistic practice make an intervention, when it is reliant on a pre conditioned value system of production and exhibition? My implication in the situation and the context became as important as the subject of the research. 

The writing of Franz Fanon, Michael Bakhtin (see extract below).

The artwork of Daniel Richter (image1), Bas Jan Ader (image 2),

Eva Leitof (Image 3) were anchors.

The term Undocumeted Migrant is used within this social politcal context to describe an individual who moves to Europe from a non European country without any offical documentation.

Futher reading:

 

An Interview with Mark Wallinger. Yve-Alain Bois, Guy Brett, Margaret Iversen, and Julian Stallabrass

 

Foster, Hal. "The Artist as Ethnographer," in The Return of the Real. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996

 

 

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