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In Blog, Blog 2024

Odyssey of oblivion: a chronicle of displacement from the Kerkennah Islands

rim harmessi
 

Was not the earth of God spacious enough for you to emigrate therein? [1]

  Since 2020, I have frequented Kerkennah Islands — my mother’s homeland — to document illegal migrants’ attempts to reach Europe and follow the traces of their journeys. As destitution drove migrants to a distant shore, the archipelago became a harbour for human trafficking and corpses tainted its beaches with the stench of death.[2]

The Kerkennah Islands

The Kerkennah Islands, located off the coast of Tunisia, have gained notoriety as a transit point for illegal immigration. African migrants converge here, united in the pursuit of a better life in Italy or Malta along the Central Mediterranean route (CMR).[3] The CMR claims hundreds of lives each year, accounting for more than 90 per cent of deaths in the Mediterranean in 2016.[4] Tunisia is bearing the brunt of this tragedy, with 729 deaths in 2023. The majority of which occurred off the coasts of Sfax (349) and Kerkennah (140).[5]

A different view on migration

Being from the island, it has always held a primal allure for me. I envision it as a place of genesis where generations of mothers reach back to the source: the first mother and universal woman. Instinctively, the only compelling commentary on what was taking place on its shores lay in the voices and experiences of women. And while the hardship of the crossing is shared by all who attempt it, the gender-based vulnerability makes it riskier for women, who make up half the world's refugees and are disproportionately susceptible to abuse. UN statistics reveal that 60 per cent of preventable maternal deaths occur in humanitarian settings, and an estimated one in five refugee or displaced women have endured sexual violence.[6] Personal narratives in the form of documentary photography have helped tackle migration issues. Images of people with distinct names and faces, crying mothers in the chaos of capsized vessels and lifeless babies washing ashore next to striped parasols are potent tools for fundraising and policy-reform appeals. But is there a different approach in the same medium, one that would resonate with equal force. My work explores the narratives beyond immediate emotional effects. The focus shifts from ‘the displaced woman’ as a singular entity to the concept of displacement and how women actually experience it. These faceless figures embody the collective experience, and the lack of identification reflects the marginalisation that migrants face as their identities are replaced with the ‘Migrant Persona’.

Imperfections as narrative

Analogue photography is the medium that gives this project its voice. Shot primarily in the Kerkennah Islands, the work embraces the imperfections inherent in 35mm film. Scratches, light leaks, missing frames, faded hues and occasional blurs all complement the themes of absence that permeate the narrative. Further amplifying this concept are deliberate technical and chemical manipulations. Double and triple exposures, premature stops, bleaching, burning, etc. emphasise erosion and erasure, implying a sense of discontinuity. This exploration extends beyond the captured image. Collage and textual footnotes are also visual elements suggesting that absences define the Mediterranean as a fluid border. My aim is to transcend mere documentation, for it is insufficient to understand the psychological complexities of flight. I aspire to unveil and reimagine the feminine migration journey from the islands where I took the photographs. In four chapters, each echoing a specific location, emotional state and pivotal step in this odyssey, the narrative unfolds in a linear fashion, mimicking a traveller's physical journey. A fixed point of departure contrasts with the open-ended unknown in every clandestine voyage.

Chapter 1 LAND: SCENES FROM THE ISLAND

The first chapter depicts the point of departure. Earthy tones dominate the scenes, evoking a sense of connection to one's roots. These are not the perfect vistas commonly associated with Kerkennah, the vibrant tourist destination. Instead, the focus shifts to the marginalised scenery, easily overlooked by those seeking the allure of orange sunsets and glistening waters. Here, amidst the seemingly ordinary, lies the hidden face of the place that bears the invisible scars of human exodus. Vast, empty and abandoned spaces (Fig. 01) symbolise the vacancy that coexists with the buzz on the island. They underscore the duality of presence and absence, the actual scarcity and perceived abundance, and reflect the substitution of the land's fertility with aridity.

Fig. 01: Abandoned car, Kerkennah (2020), 35mm colour film, digital scan.

Double and triple exposures (Fig. 02) are visual metaphors to convey coexisting yet contrasting realities. The serene island life, steeped in tradition and governed by the quotidian rhythms, contrast with the ‘criminal’ world that emerges mainly after dark.

Fig. 02: Shore , Kerkennah (2021), 35mm colour film, digital scan.

  Any sense of belonging is fleeting, a mirage shimmering in the desert. The land offers no solace, no promise of a future. This chapter serves not as a haven but as a crucible to steel travellers for the journey.

Chapter 2

WATER: FIRST CONTACT WITH THE MEDITERRANEAN

The second chapter explores what it means to be a woman on such a journey. This overflows with a feminine presence. The concept of vessel-like entities is explored through the philosophy of inner and outer spaces. The outward journey is mirrored by the physical vessel, the ship, braving the elements. The inward journey is embodied by the female form, a vessel carrying the weight of the unknown (Fig. 03). Both journeys converge towards a shared destination.

Fig. 03: Woman chained , Kerkennah (2021), 35mm colour film, digital scan.

I have further manipulated some film. Bleaching, for example, dissolves colour so that the bleached area appears white in the negative and black in the print (Fig. 04). This erasure reinforces the theme of absence, exploring the transit from a place where the migrant was once present to a void through a visual metaphor for disappearance. Infiltrating a new space blends into the act of vanishing from the old one. The profound loss created by these journeys is often overlooked. The physical absence from one’s home, the replacement of familiarity with fear and estrangement, the emotional void left behind for loved ones and the silencing of the harrowing migrant experiences all add another layer of absence. Migration itself becomes a catalyst for absence, the severing of ties to surroundings and social connections is a journey into a liminal space, a state of being neither here nor there. The origin leaves an echo in memory even after physical departure. It is not merely a geographic point but a nexus of experiences, emotions and histories.

Fig. 04: Bleached away, Kerkennah (2021), 35mm colour film , digital scan (Post processing: bleaching of the negative).

  While tension and anxiety permeate this chapter, the island is not as gloomy as the journey would suggest. Those not compelled to escape experience its vibrancy and charm with postcard-worthy sunsets and sunrises (Fig. 05). Not all enjoy that luxury. Postcolonial conditions, exploitation and discriminatory migration policies condemn entire regions to cycles of poverty and deprivation. For many women, the island could never be anything more than a sojourn. Philosophical meditations on absence take on a new dimension when juxtaposed with the harsh reality of the Mediterranean as a colonial sea.[7] Gaps and voids are geo-politically relevant, defining the experience of those who traverse it.

Fig. 05: Postcard series , Kerkennah (2021), 35mm colour film , digital scan.

 

Chapter 3

PILGRIMAGE: THE JOURNEY WITHIN AND AT SEA

  Traversing the central Mediterranean can take several days. This section examines the heart of the voyage. Fully in black and white, it reflects the sacred nature of this transformation as a testament of faith and resilience. Each soul will emerge renewed, irrevocably altered and absolved.

Fig. 06: Mother and Son (2022), Black & White 35 mm film, digital scan.

  Black-and-white photography detaches itself from reality by stripping away vibrant hues, and it feels surreal because we experience the world in colour. But in this narrative, such detachment is necessary for the metaphor to sink in. We witness not the singular struggle of one migrant, nor a solitary woman's plight. Instead, this chapter is about a cluster of migrant women from several backgrounds aiming at the same end. Therefore, we must transcend individual journeys, aiming instead for a global phenomenon encompassing the full range of roles women play from daughter to mother and everything in between (Fig. 06).

Fig. 07: Parts of a sum (2021), Black & white 35 mm film. Intentional light leaks, digital scan (in-camera processing, light leaking).

  The narrative embraces intentional light leaks while photographing, mimicking water effects (Fig. 07). Fragmented portrayals of the female form are deliberate, as their sum may allow reconstruction of the body that once left the shore.

Fig. 08: Sum of parts (2021), Black & white 35 mm film. Intentional light leaks, digital scan (in-camera processing, light leaking).

  The experience and the tragedy remain obscure from the outside, but we yet hope that the vessels reach their destination whole ( Fig. 08).

Chapter 4

THE GREAT BEYOND: ARRIVAL OR LACK THEREOF

 

Fig. 09: Blouse on shore, Kerkennah (2021), 35mm colour film , digital scan.

The seemingly straightforward concept of arrival gains complexity on this trip. What does this hard-won destination signify for the individual? And for those lost at sea, claimed by the fear that haunted their journey, arrival is a grim fulfilment of prophecy. How do the adventurer and the observer grasp this notion (Fig. 09)? From the European perspective, the Mediterranean remains a frontier, a line dividing ‘us’ from ‘them’.[8] Eurocentric narratives paint the region with a broad brush, privileging the protection-worthy global North over the struggling South. This fosters not only the erasure of entire cultures through continued colonial marginalisation, but also a stark dichotomy in the perception of the same absence, referring to the migrants’ absence as well as that of the destination’s inhabitants.

Fig. 10: Gaze (2022), 35mm colour film, digital scan.

  Even in the celebrated kind of arrival, a disquieting truth lingers. Crossing this fluid border disorients identity, expanding beyond measure the emotional rift caused by the severance of intimate ties with land, people and perhaps life itself (Fig. 10). This project began as a personal odyssey, a quest to grasp the complexities of womanhood, the trauma of displacement and the resilience of the migrant spirit. I sought to illuminate, through the lens of femininity, secret journeys across the Mediterranean Sea (Fig. 11). Ultimately, however, the exploration raised more questions than answers.

Fig. 11: Womanhood (2022), 35mm colour film , digital scan.

Yet a single question persists. And it is essential. And it is relentless: Where did she go? And what should we do about it?     [1] Quran. 'Surah An-Nisa [The Women] 4:97', in The Qu'ran: Arabic Text with Corresponding English Meaning, ed. and trans. Saheeh International (1997). [2] For more on this tragic pattern, see 'Four bodies recovered off Tunisia following migrant boat accident', 2022, accessed 15 May 2024, https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/45687/four-bodies-recovered-off-tunisia-following-migrant-boat-accident; 'Tunisia: Navy recovers seven bodies from Mediterranean Sea', 2023, accessed 15 May 2024, https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/51170/tunisia-navy-recovers-seven-bodies-from-mediterranean-sea; 'Tunisia recovers around 210 bodies of migrants', 2023, accessed 15 May 2024, https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/48625/tunisia-recovers-around-210-bodies-of-migrants. [3] Liska Wittenberg, Managing Mixed Migration: The Central Mediterranean Route to Europe (New York: International Peace Institute 2017). [4]  'Tunisia's Kerkennah Islands: A land for smuggling', The New Arab, 2018, accessed 2 June 2024, https://www.newarab.com/analysis/tunisias-kerkennah-islands-land-smuggling. [5] Riman Abouelhassan, Middle East and North Africa: Migrants Deaths [sic] and Disappearances in 2023,  (United Nations Migration, IOM, 2024). [6] 'Women refugees and migrants', UN Women, accessed 30 June 2024, https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/in-focus/women-refugees-and-migrants. [7] M. Borutta, & S. Gekas, ‘A Colonial Sea: the Mediterranean’, 1798–1956. European Review of History: Revue Européenne d’histoire (2012). [8] Michael A. Kozakowski, 'Making “Mediterranean Migrants”: Geopolitical Transitions, Migratory Policy, and French Conceptions of the Mediterranean in the 20th Century', Cahiers de la Méditerranée 89 (2014) 10.4000/cdlm.7776.
bibliography
Abouelhassan, Riman. Middle East and North Africa: Migrants Deaths [sic] and Disappearances in 2023: United Nations Migration, IOM, 2024. 'Tunisia's Kerkennah Islands: A land for smuggling'. The New Arab, 2018, accessed 2 June 2024, https://www.newarab.com/analysis/tunisias-kerkennah-islands-land-smuggling. 'Four bodies recovered off Tunisia following migrant boat accident'. 2022, accessed 15 May 2024, https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/45687/four-bodies-recovered-off-tunisia-following-migrant-boat-accident. Kozakowski, Michael A. 'Making “Mediterranean Migrants”: Geopolitical Transitions, Migratory Policy, and French Conceptions of the Mediterranean in the 20th Century'. Cahiers de la Méditerranée 89 (2014): 181-93. https://doi.org/10.4000/cdlm.7776. 'Surah An-Nisa [The Women] 4:97'. Edited and Translated by Saheeh International. In The Qu'ran: Arabic Text with Corresponding English Meaning, 1997. 'Tunisia recovers around 210 bodies of migrants'. 2023, accessed 15 May 2024, https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/48625/tunisia-recovers-around-210-bodies-of-migrants. 'Tunisia: Navy recovers seven bodies from Mediterranean Sea'. 2023, accessed 15 May 2024, https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/51170/tunisia-navy-recovers-seven-bodies-from-mediterranean-sea. Wittenberg, Liska. Managing Mixed Migration: The Central Mediterranean Route to Europe. New York: International Peace Institute 2017. 'Women refugees and migrants'. UN Women, accessed 30 June 2024, https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/in-focus/women-refugees-and-migrants.  
citation information
Harmessi, Rim, 'Odyssey of oblivion: a chronicle of displacement from the Kerkennah Islands', Ben Kamis ed. global dis:connect blog. global dis:connect, 24 September 2024, https://www.globaldisconnect.org/09/24/odyssey-of-oblivion-a-chronicle-of-displacement-from-the-kerkennah-islands/.
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24 September 2024
In Blog, Blog 2024

Picturing the sea of absence

florian bachmeier
  In my work as a documentary photographer, particularly in my reports on refugees and their escape and migration routes from the Mediterranean and the war in Ukraine, I have consistently explored the theme of absence. Initially perhaps unconsciously, and later more deliberately, this concept became a central motif. Photography is a powerful tool, capable of evoking profound emotional reactions and shaping narrative discourses. As a medium, photography has an inherently intimate relationship with the concept of absence. Absence in photography refers to the deliberate omission or lack of elements in an image that one might ordinarily expect to find. This approach can serve various conceptual purposes and is intentionally used to achieve a specific effect. By omitting certain elements, photographers can amplify the significance of the objects that are present, guiding the viewer's perception. Absence in photography thus also fulfils a narrative function. In documentary photography, for instance, the absence of people in a place that would usually be bustling with activity can powerfully comment on social, political and emotional states. This absence can evoke feelings of isolation, loss and emptiness, prompting deeper reflection. It serves as a blank space, a hint of what is not visible in the image. It challenges viewers to think about the unseen and the unspoken. The blank space metaphorically represents absence or what is past and transient. Absence in photography creates a potent aesthetic impact. The presence of absence is, in a sense, the full stop, the ‘sudden awakening’ in the sense of Roland Barthes,[1] in many of my photographs.

Fig. 1: The horizon stretches across the sea off Lesbos Island, embodying the profound absence left behind by those who once sought refuge on its shores. Lesbos, Greece, 2017 (Image by the author)

Since my stays and travels to the hotspots of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in the Mediterranean, I have been deeply engaged with these concepts as a photographer. Through my images from places like Idomeni, the transit camp in northern Greece, the Moria camp on the Greek island of Lesbos, warehouses in the Serbian capital Belgrade, refugee shelters in Bulgaria and the Spanish enclave Ceuta on the African continent, I strive to document and analyse absences. Absence here is not only the physical lack of something but also the emotional, social and cultural void created by flight, displacement and migration.

Fig. 2: Amid the barbed wire and bleak surroundings of Idomeni camp, the absence of certainty and stability hangs heavily over the refugees waiting at the closed border. Idomeni, Greece, 2016 (Image by the author)

The meaning of absence

Absence, at its core, is a state or feeling of lack. When one considers the inhumane conditions in the camps, this lack or absence, the shattered hopes and the associated pain become particularly visible. The absence or loss of home, security, family, belonging and identity. In the worst cases, it is the absence of any hope. These absences are tangible and experiential both physically and psychologically. Photography can capture and depict these absences profoundly. I think of the emptiness and hopelessness in the eyes of many individuals portrayed and the bleak, chaotic landscapes of camps like Idomeni or Moria, which seem to gnaw like festering wounds at their surroundings. Pieces of torn clothing on barbed wire fences and other obstacles, faded photographs of those left behind or deceased, abandoned belongings left by those who had no choice but to leave their previous lives behind. Possessions lost on the run or hoarded in a drenched tent. Traces of escape through hostile territory. Motifs that represent and symbolically condense absence, repeating themselves in varied yet similar forms, becoming a constant that runs through the situation of refugees and their flight.

Fig. 3: Empty blankets and drenched sleeping bags, painting a poignant picture of absence in the heart of the refugee camp. Idomeni, Greece, 2016 (Image by the author)

Susan Sontag argued that images, photographs, have the power to haunt us and elicit emotional reactions, something pure narrative storytelling often fails to achieve.[2] She describes the haunting quality of photographs that penetrate deeply into our consciousness, compelling us to reflect on what we see. I hope that my images from these camps and of the people I have been able to accompany on their journeys will ultimately serve not just as mere records but as windows into the reality of these people who otherwise remain largely invisible. They hopefully challenge viewers to confront the harsh reality of refugees and their flight, grasping the intolerable absences that shape their lives. Perhaps photography can thus serve as an alternative, complementary method to highlight, investigate and reflect on such dissociations and absences. Traditional sociological investigations rely on empirical and quantitative methods to collect and analyse data. But do these methods capture the deeper emotional and psychological dimensions of these existential human experiences? Here, photography as a medium can be a valuable complement. It can make the invisible visible, showing gaps and voids created by absences and document them. Camps like Idomeni or Moria are places where absence is omnipresent. The people who have to live in these camps have fled their home countries to escape war, persecution and poverty. They have left everything behind — houses, apartments, possessions. Often, they have lost loved ones. They have often experienced the unspeakable, carrying deep traumas with them. Arriving in one of these camps, they find themselves in a sort of limbo, a space between the past they have left behind and a future that remains uncertain. Many images from these contexts, including my own, depict people living in cramped spaces under often unbearable conditions, in cold, in extreme heat, without access to vital and basic services, without access to clean water, food and basic medical care.

Fig. 4: In the dim confines of a Belgrade warehouse, traumatised refugee Mohammed washes in freezing temperatures, the stark absence of safety and home evident in his solitary ritual. Belgrade, Serbia, 2017 (Image by the author)

Absences in refugee camps and other locations along migration routes refer pragmatically but primarily to the lack of resources necessary for a commodious life. There is often no medical care, injuries often remain untreated or are inadequately treated, chronic illnesses go untreated, and the lack of psychological support exacerbates the trauma many refugees have experienced and suffered. On migration routes and in camps, there is also a constant, often life-threatening lack of security. Extreme cold, constant rain and the outbreak of a fire like in Moria often have catastrophic consequences. Violence, abuse and exploitation are widespread. Security forces, where present, are often unable to adequately protect the residents. Women and children are particularly at risk and often suffer from sexual harassment and abuse. The sanitary conditions in the camps and informal settlements along migration routes are often catastrophic. There is no sanitation. As previously mentioned, there is a lack of professional psychosocial support and networks to provide mutual support. Conflicts between people of different nationalities often occur. All this exacerbates the burdens refugees already face. Many suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety disorders. These absences have serious impacts on individuals and communities. They undermine human dignity and worsen the already precarious living conditions of refugees and those in flight. In some of my photographs, I depict the architecture of makeshift, hastily erected shelters that often provide no protection. I show people who have to live in hiding, who must remain invisible. I show their sparse meals, their torn clothes, their injuries, the effects of violence and the hardships they endured during their escape. There are images of blankets, drenched sleeping bags, camps in inhospitable areas, pictures of worn-out children's shoes—a sad reminder of a childhood denied to the wearers of these shoes, likely to remain thus. Images that tell of a lives in a constant state of emergency in the sense of Giorgio Agamben,[3] particularly relevant in this context and these places: a situation where seemingly normal laws and rights are suspended in response to a crisis, creating a space where human rights are systematically suspended. Especially the camps exist in a state of lawlessness, operating as legal grey zones, and this state of emergency has long become the norm. Ideally, images evoke emotional reactions — this, at least, is my hope and drive as a photographer — and make the absence of normality, of safety palpable. They hopefully speak a clear language and show the deep scars caused by this life on the run. Can photographs, as visual stimuli, evoke affective responses? Can they compel viewers to engage with the situations they depict, to connect with the people in these images? Images are a bridge between viewers and refugees, who are otherwise only perceived as abstract numbers in statistics.   [1] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida. Reflections of Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981). [2] Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973). [3] Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
bibliography
Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Reflections of Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973.  
citation information
Bachmeier, Florian, 'Picturing the sea of absence', Ben Kamis ed. global dis:connect blog. Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, 10 September 2024, https://www.globaldisconnect.org/09/10/picturing-the-sea-of-absence/.
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10 September 2024
In Blog

Tears through the Red Sea

andrea frohne
 

Elsa Gebreyesus (Eritrean, born in Ethiopia, lives in Fairfax, Virginia, USA), Silenced V, 2010, mixed media on paper, 30” x 37”, photograph by Andrea Frohne.

Silenced V contains the front page of the newspaper Red Sea (ቀይሕ ባሕሪ), published between 1997 and 2001 in the Tigrinya language. The blue and green colours across the artwork represent the Red Sea along the coast of Eritrea and the Horn of Africa. Elsa Gebreyesus tore the newspaper’s masthead in half and pasted it onto the canvas.[1] Underneath, she inscribed the word ‘Silenced’. The artwork depicts a rift and disconnection from globalised processes in the country’s political and social fabric resulting from the suppression of free speech and access to information. In addition, the torn newspaper evokes the torn relationships among Red Sea maritime nations in the Horn of Africa. It connected countries through trade and cultural exchange for centuries. Yet the sea has also existed as a site of disconnection and regional conflict. Born in Ethiopia to an Eritrean family, Elsa Gebreyesus moved at age seven with her family to Kenya during the Ethiopian Revolution. After spending her youth in Kenya, she moved with her parents and siblings to the USA and then to Canada. Elsa Gebreyesus has dislocated or emigrated from homes and then reconnected to new countries five times. The first two departures, out of Ethiopia and Kenya, were from countries that were not native to her. The artist lived in Eritrea following a 30-year war for independence. She worked for five years in the 1990s with a women’s nonprofit organisation in Eritrea and fled prior to a governmental crackdown. Like many of her generation, Elsa Gebreyesus was caught up in the celebration of Eritrea’s independence from Ethiopia in 1991 after the Eritrean War of Independence, and she decided to move to Eritrea in February 1992, setting foot in the country of her heritage for the first time in her early twenties. Putting her management skills to work, she promoted gender equity for five years at a women’s nonprofit called the National Union of Eritrean Women.[2] Toward the end of her stay, Elsa Gebreyusus witnessed a vibrant free press for a brief time in Eritrea from 1996 until 2001. By 1997, several privately run newspapers would sell out every morning.[3] The atmosphere of freedom and optimism about Eritrea’s future impressed her and informed a series of artworks she developed 15 years later. By 1997, the government began implementing increasingly repressive measures. Even though in that year, a carefully written and debated new constitution that grew out of the fight for liberation was passed, it remains unimplemented to this day. The exhilaration and possibility of the newly independent Eritrean nation in 1991 had dissipated as another dictator had risen to power: Isaias Afewerki became president in 1993 and remains in power. Since the 1998 Ethiopia-Eritrea border war, the borders of Eritrea have been controlled or closed, with its inhabitants largely prohibited from crossing them. The nation-state’s disconnection from globalised processes is repressive. Elsa Gebreyesus eventually found it necessary to leave Eritrea in 1997, and she witnessed the continuation of the dictator’s takeover from her new diasporic home in the United States. Inspired by her observation of Eritrea’s free press from 1996 to 2001, she used her art to help her process Eritrea’s change of trajectory toward repression and global disconnection. The path to dictatorship in Eritrea occurred in a series of stages, reaching a culmination in 2001. The September 2001 state crackdown effectively distanced Eritrea from transnational processes, and it continues to this day. From the United States, Elsa Gebreyesus watched closely and anxiously as all independent newspapers in Eritrea were abolished, and all captured journalists were imprisoned in one fell swoop.[4] To this day, no one knows where they are imprisoned or whether they are alive or dead. The Guardian profiled each journalist in 2015 in a world-news article.[5] In contrast to the state newspaper, Elsa Gebreyesus’s collaged newspaper fragments for the Silenced series are from the independent, privately owned papers that existed in newly independent Eritrea during the few years of press freedom. The artist selected sections of newspapers with dates in order to mark the national liberatory moment, and she also chose articles related to mundane aspects of life.[6] The latter includes, for example, a bicycle race in Silenced V. Yet even such innocuous words have in effect been censored since these newspapers are not housed in libraries and institutional archives. The copies the artist used were smuggled out of Eritrea and given to her in the diaspora. Elsa Gebreyesus’s artworks reconnect the memory of these newspapers to her new African diaspora. It is only from her position in a diaspora that she possesses the ability to narrate this history. The disconnection or tear through the Red Sea produces tears of sorrow for many reasons. Yet within the artwork, the small pieces of newspaper remind us of the freedom to write.   [1] The naming tradition in Eritrea is to refer to a person by their first name. The surname is simply the first name of the person’s father. Because it would be awkward to refer to my artist as Elsa only, I take the naming convention that scholars follow, which is to always write the first and last name of the artist. So in my text, you will see ‘Elsa Gebreyesus’ throughout. [2] Elsa Gebreyesus, Telephone Interview with Andrea Frohne, 2 December 2015. [3] Gebreyesus. [4] European Asylum Support Office, EASO Country of Origin Information Report: Eritrea : Country Focus (Luxembourg: Publications Office, 2015), 22, https://www.easo.europa.eu/news-events/easo-issues-country-origin-information-report-eritrea-country-focus. Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in Eritrea; Report of the detailed findings of the Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in Eritrea. United Nations Human Rights Council (Geneva: 5 June 2015). https://www.ohchr.org/en/hr-bodies/hrc/co-i-eritrea/report-co-i-eritrea-0. A principal finding of the United Nations commission is that, ‘[F]ollowing the 2001 crackdown, there has not been any press freedom in Eritrea. At that moment, the Eritrean Government suppressed the emerging free press by closing down independent newspapers and silenced journalists by arresting, detaining, torturing and having them disappeared’ (148). [5] Abraham T. Zere, ‘“If We Don’t Give Them a Voice, No One Will”: Eritrea’s Forgotten Journalists, Still Jailed after 14 Years’, The Guardian, 19 August 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/19/eritrea-forgotten-journalists-jailed-pen-international-press-freedom. Abraham Zere is a journalist who publishes articles about Eritrea from beyond its borders. [6] Gebreyesus, Telephone interview with Andrea Frohne.
Bibliography
European Asylum Support Office. EASO Country of Origin Information Report: Eritrea : Country Focus. Luxembourg: Publications Office, 2015. https://www.easo.europa.eu/news-events/easo-issues-country-origin-information-report-eritrea-country-focus. Gebreyesus, Elsa. Telephone Interview with Andrea Frohne, 2 December 2015. European Asylum Support Office. EASO Country of Origin Information Report: Eritrea : Country Focus. Luxembourg: Publications Office, 2015. https://www.easo.europa.eu/news-events/easo-issues-country-origin-information-report-eritrea-country-focus. Gebreyesus, Elsa. Telephone Interview with Andrea Frohne, 2 December 2015. Report of the detailed findings of the Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in Eritrea. United Nations Human Rights Council (Geneva: 5 June 2015). https://www.ohchr.org/en/hr-bodies/hrc/co-i-eritrea/report-co-i-eritrea-0 Zere, Abraham T. ‘“If We Don’t Give Them a Voice, No One Will”: Eritrea’s Forgotten Journalists, Still Jailed after 14 Years’. The Guardian, 19 August 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/19/eritrea-forgotten-journalists-jailed-pen-international-press-freedom.
citation information
Frohne, Andrea, 'Tears through the Red Sea', Ben Kamis ed. global dis:connect blog. Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, 23 January 2024, https://www.globaldisconnect.org/01/23/tears-through-the-red-sea/.
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23 January 2024
In Blog 2023

‘Not only cast steel or chiselled stone; people can be monuments too’: an exploration of the Memory Person

cathrine bublatzky and franziska windolf

When we think of monuments, we think of statues, memories and events from the past. They are site-specific, solid, immobile. How can they represent cultural and collective memories that are remembered by many, often very differently, and that over time experience new readings? How can monuments installed by institutions, organisations and states speak to and for everybody?

What bodies can do the creative work of memory? How can the actual labour of memory be foregrounded, its training, sharing and transmission?[1]

 

These questions are relevant to agents in the fields of memory studies and memory production, such as artists, cultural practitioners, institutions, governments and, most importantly, for various communities and people in their everyday lives.

[It] … is on the ‘act’ of memory, … inquiring into the processes of making, constructing, enacting, transforming, expressing, transmitting cultural memory through art and popular culture. … The notion of ‘performing memory’ thus presupposes agency.[2]

 

The Memory Person (they/them), ongoing since June 2023, by artist Franziska Windolf offers a common form of memory production. The Memory Person performed memory as ‘an embodied and localised practice’[3] and was conceptualised in Munich during an artist residency at the Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect and in partnership with the ERC-funded METROMOD research project (Relocating Modernism: Global Metropolises, Modern Art and Exile at LMU Munich).

In their joint exploration, anthropologist Cathrine Bublatzky and artist Franziska Windolf explore how the Memory Person represented a striking tension between the concepts of memory, monument and performance.

A performative monument

The Memory Person strolled through the Giesing quarter, a former workers’ district in southeast Munich. The performance was enacted by different persons who embodied a variety of identities, genders and agencies. They were strikingly dressed, carrying several commemorative objects and memorabilia on their body. Each object has its own history, creators and memories. At the heart of the public artwork were ongoing and dynamic encounters between the Memory Person and passers-by, their lively and personal interactions, their shared stories and memories. The Memory Person was dedicated to creative people who have migrated or are living in exile, and anyone could participate.

Not only cast steel or chiselled stone; people can be monuments too.[4]

 

The Memory Person challenges the idea of ‘performing memory’.[5] As a performative monument, they work with what anthropologists call the agency of humans ‘to create and construct their own reality’ and to ‘collectively … shape themselves in their behaviours and beliefs’.[6] Performing the Memory Person entailed an uninterrupted metamorphosis in which their ‘form’ kept changing. Their performances merged practices of collecting, storing and re-narrating, all resulting in a changing monument.

The public artwork becomes and operates as a performance based on the material interaction and dialogue with people in the streets.

 

Those who encountered the Memory Person are diverse. Some have long lived in Munich, some have moved from another country, others have migrated or even fled war and other crises in their home countries. All have memories, often not shared with wider publics, as they are intimate and personal, sometimes even traumatic and frightening.

 

The Memory Person is a living monument that does not represent a particular memory or hegemonic narrative. They produced a host of memories of differently shared pasts in cities like Munich, shaped by migration and mobility.

A nomadic plinth celebrating diversity

The Memory Person is a practical invention. Due to the lack of publicly accessible knowledge about creative migrants, exiles and their work in greater Munich, memories and biographies must be actively sought out in order to become visible.

As a living monument, they stimulate an interplay of creative expressions and reflections. The collection of memories and memorabilia, and their endowment to people is open-ended.

 

The web of relationships between the memorabilia changed with each new contribution. The Memory Person decentralises and mediates whilst connecting shared memories with people. This flexible and responsive artistic form is open to renegotiation and emergent values. Their sharing and (re-)telling is on display, mediating memory culture as a lively, contested practice.

The Memory Person and their counterparts became ‘facilitators, knowledge producers, hosts and vision seekers’.[7]

 

The Memory Person as a performative monument is alive and constantly ‘becoming’.

But what is actually remembered in such unforeseen encounters?

Encountering the Memory Person

Often, curiosity and eye contact sparked encounters with the Memory Person. Their colourful, unconventional appearance, which defies stereotypical assumptions about a carnival or the Oktoberfest, attracted attention and made people wonder what the Memory Person was all about. Once they grasped the goal of the performance, many started to talk about their connections to Giesing and other residents, artists and migrants. They referred to creative people and places. Upon a second, deeper encounter, they contributed personal commemorative objects as fragments of their memories.

The creativity of the monument is very broad and includes music, tinkering, crafting, knitting, cooking, graffiti, etc.

 

Thus, the Memory Person addressed as many people as possible. Their objective was to raise awareness of the lack of memorials for migrants and creative people in the neighbourhood. Everyone was invited to celebrate and honour the creativity and work of past and present exiles and migrants by participating.

The initial performances of the Memory Person in June and July 2023 were a curated city walk to sites of exile in Giesing, revealing their continued relevance with a pre-selected audience. The spectators accompanied the Memory Person and witnessed their encounters and interactions with passers-by. Participants were invited to carry the memorabilia with the Memory Person and to contribute a wish for a future monument, a memory or a memento of a creative migrant who once lived or moved to Giesing.

The performances in August and September 2023 were more frequent, focussing only on encounters with residents and passers-by. The route through the district was more improvised, with time and space to revisit people and businesses, play table tennis, etc. On these occasions, the Memory Person collected memorabilia and commemorative articles devoted to creative exiles and migrants from anyone who wanted to commemorate.

How the Memory Person embodies the monument and interactions with participants in the artwork is shaped by three elements:

  1. The Memory Person opens encounters by approaching passers-by during a curated city-walk (June/July 2023) whilst strolling through the neighbourhood without a pre-selected audience (August/September 2023);

  2. Alternating subject positions between the Memory Person and passers-by/audience;

  3. Evolving artwork when the artwork is relationally produced with participants.

 

All three registers played out in each Memory Person performance. But the performances in June/July 2023 were less dynamic and open, as the Memory Person held a fixed position as the ‘guide’ to explain and share knowledge during the curated walk. The material contributions to the performative monument were largely predetermined (written notes on textile/foam rubber prepared by the artist).

The evolution of the artwork is produced more ‘by’ than only ‘with’ the participants.

 

By contrast, the performances in August/September 2023 provided more space for give and take, including returning moments and memorabilia. Due to the spontaneity of the encounters, the Memory Person and the passers-by had more freedom to participate and exchange objects.

Ethics of dialogue/‘commoning’

‘Commoning’ refers to art that is produced by, not only with, the participants. The Memory Person is the formation and interplay of relationships and their material effects that shape social space and animate memory cultures.

‘The wider challenge here is that of finding new ways of understanding forms of being-in-common that refuse or exceed the logic of identity, state, and subject. In other words: how to be in common without creating a community?’[8]

 

If ‘commoning’ is when people in a community or neighbourhood become equal in sharing their diverse memories, how does the prescribed content balance with individual conceptions of the monument?

The more reciprocal insights, the more equitable the dialogue and the more shared reflections and relationships can emerge.

 

Individual identities and property rights don’t apply, as is evident in the ‘materiality’ and ‘objecthood’ of the performative monument. The focus lies on togetherness and the common production of a new monument, whilst the particularities of each person involved gain space to express themselves.

‘The more reciprocal insights, the more equitable the dialogue and the more shared reflections and relationships can emerge.’[9]

 

The monument belongs to no one, though the objects the monument comprises signify belonging, which inheres in ‘commoning’.

Amanat

All memorabilia engender the dialogues. They resemble amanat, which is a Persian word meaning something that one gives to another person as a custodian. This requires awareness and trust – a sense of the reciprocal capacity and will to build a meaningful relationship.

The object becomes a signifier of a shared moment of remembrance and a common (emotional) value that represents other things such as the conversation, a memory, a loss or a personal or communal journey.

 

The amanat contributes and ‘transforms’ the world, memories, exile and identification.

The emerging performative monument becomes a common gift to creative exiles and society from all participants.

The different materialities of the performative monument speak for the coexistence of different voices and situations to which the artwork responds or is created within.

 

The silver brooches, for example, are given away, so they should be as durable as possible. The Memory Person provides a platform for (re)composing and (re)evaluating the objects. Objects converse with each other and provide a ‘language’ for often ineffable stories. There is no definite way of ‘reading’ them.

Diversity is the core of the performative monument, representing an anti-hierarchical, even decolonising understanding of what the Memory Person as a ‘living monument’ embodies.

 

The actual labour that needs to be done when underrepresented/invisible knowledge is sought out emerges. Contrasting the glorious surfaces of conventional monuments, the Memory Person allows for the contradictions, detours and failures that occur when people are building relationships. The Memory Person responds to recent decolonial debates and demands for monuments and statues of a contested, colonial past to fall.

The past is created by and about participants’ voices. The Memory Person performs it without repeating it.

[1] Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik, Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 2013), 2ff.

[2] Plate and Smelik, Performing Memory, 3.

[3] Plate and Smelik, Performing Memory, 5.

[4] Sebastian Adler, Spectator of the performance, 24 June 2023.

[5] Plate and Smelik, Performing Memory, 7.

[6] Plate and Smelik, Performing Memory, 7.

[7] Vera Hofmann et al., Commoning Art — Die transformativen Potenziale von Commons in der Kunst (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2022), 34. https://www.transcript-verlag.de/media/pdf/f2/e6/9e/oa9783839464045.pdf. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are by the authors.

[8] Harry Walker, ‘Equality without equivalence: an anthropology of the common’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 26, no. 1 (2020): 148, https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13183.

[9] Walker, ‘Equality without equivalence’, 147.

bibliography

 

Hofmann, Vera, Johannes Euler, Linus Zurmühlen and Silke Helfrich. Commoning Art — Die transformativen Potenziale von Commons in der Kunst. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2022. https://www.transcript-verlag.de/media/pdf/f2/e6/9e/oa9783839464045.pdf.

‘global dis:connect’. Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, 2023, www.globaldisconnect.org.

Plate, Liedeke and Anneke Smelik. Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture. London: Routledge, 2013.

‘Relocating Modernism: Global Metropolises, Modern Art and Exile (METROMOD)’. METROMOD, 2023, www.metromod.net.

Walker, Harry. ‘Equality without equivalence: an anthropology of the common’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 26, no. 1 (2020): 146-66. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13183.

citation information:
Bublatzky, Cathrine and Franziska Windolf, ”Not only cast steel or chiselled stone; people can be monuments too’: an exploration of the Memory Person’, Ben Kamis ed. global dis:connect blog. Käte Hamburger Research Centre global disconnect, 12 December 2023, https://www.globaldisconnect.org/12/12/not-only-cast-steel-or-chiselled-stone-people-can-be-monuments-too-an-exploration-of-the-memory-person/.
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12 December 2023
In Blog 2023

Nomadic Camera: revisiting a workshop on photography and displacement at gd:c

sophie eisenried

Figure 1: Erich Stenger, Die Geschichte der Kleinbildkamera bis zur Leica, (Wetzlar: Umschau Verlag, 1949), 16.[1]

  From 13 June to 15 June 2023, a hybrid international workshop bearing the title Nomadic Camera. Photography, Displacement and Dis:connectivities took place at the Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect in cooperation with the Brandenburg Centre for Media Studies (ZeM) Potsdam. Nomadic Camera was dedicated to processes of migration, exile and flight and their visualisation, perception and dissemination through photography. The workshop explored the technical, medial and aesthetic relationship between photography and contemporary migration, historical exile and flight as a central discursive setting in which specific forms of mobility are negotiated from the mid-19th century to the present. The interdisciplinary workshop was organised by Burcu Dogramaci (Munich), Jens Jäger (Cologne), Winfried Gerling (Potsdam) and Birgit Mersmann (Bonn). The workshop kicked off with the gd:c annual lecture given by T. J. Demos (Santa Cruz) on the topic of Weaponized Environments. From the Migrant Image to the Media of Causes.

Annual lecture, 13 June 2023

In his lecture, T. J. Demos talked about the dynamics and aesthetics of migratory images and probed the representational regimes of refugees. He described the mobility of images of migration and problematised the migrant as a representational subject. He noted that images of migration became mobile screens onto which all kinds of content can be projected by liberal and right-wing media alike. Demos concluded that such projection is driving the rise of epistemic inaccuracies in images and their lack of documentary potential, which themselves are due to visually simplifying image regimes and resulting political interests. He described this development as a photography of faces, whereby subjects are reduced to their physiognomy. As a result, migrants have been dramaturgically and racially limited to their stories (of flight), and no critical reporting takes place. Demos then proposed a shift from a photography of faces to a photography of causes, asking what aesthetics and image regimes were necessary to legitimise this shift. For him, the answer lies in linking the concept of figure with that of ground, not considering environments as neutral contexts but rather asking how images and subjects are connected. He proposed forensic research as well as politically comprehensive analyses to paint a clear picture of political and economic antagonisms and to show networks of power by challenging racialised images in media.

Figure 2: Annette Vowinckel introducing Noemi Quagliati (photo by the author).

14 June 2023

Nomadic Camera began with processes of migration and flight after 2015 and their representation, perception and dissemination through photography. The participants examined the relationship between photography and contemporary migration in technology, media and aesthetics as well as historical exile and flight as central discursive settings. Reflections on creating places and belonging, ruptures between life and work in the past and present, experiences of loss and challenges of beginning were prominent topics. As a concept, nomadic camera focuses on:  
  • how dislocations relate to the technical development of photography as a mobile medium;
  • how camera technologies presuppose and influence the visual formulation of experiences of exile, migration and flight;
  • what changes in the aesthetics and style, methods and practices of photography imply for temporary mobility, geographical displacement and resettlement.
  The first panel was dedicated to the topic of techniques and technologies. Beyond discussing the camera as an artificial object, the participants also considered how perspectives of shooting and their results have changed concepts of photography. Svea Bräunert (Potsdam) connected techniques and technologies of nomadic cameras to the fact that the 21st century is hardly imaginable without accounting for the digital. For her, ‘the digital’ refers to migrants’ (as she referred to them) use of smartphones to plan their escape routes and stay in touch with their social networks as well as to the virtual fortification of borders through surveillance, biometrics and other technologies. She described migrant aesthetics as a ‘moving stream’, in which movement is central in determining the connection between the digital and migration. She concluded that films can no longer be clearly distinguished from photographs. While films have slowed, now containing abstract-looking still images, photography has become a stream always consisting of multiple images. As well as exemplifying what Nathan Jurgenson described as ‘social photos’,[2] the latter also defines smartphone photography, where one image is synthesised from many shots and motion is routinely added. Florian Krautkrämer (Lucerne) took a different tack, asking what dangers and responsibilities participatory techniques of filmmaking entail in the context of flight and migration. He pointed out that the participatory often makes use of the pain, fear and worries of others. The question of who films what for whom arose. Referring to, Wu Wenuang's China Village Self-Governance Film Project, which captures the public and political life of Chinese villages through the lens of their inhabitants, Krautkrämer emphasised that it is important to distinguish between the handed-over and the given camera. The handed-over camera reduces people with specific goals to human tripods. With the given camera, on the other hand, not everything is predetermined; the nature of the camera is important to the outcome. Although no political conflicts can be solved by the given camera, the filmed person can receive a hearing and attention. Thus, Florian Krautkrämer claims that the given camera is more politically open. The second panel was dedicated to bodies, agents and performativity. The discussion focused on the importance of the context of images/photographs and drew attention to the performative character of photography and a theorisation of the term agency. Burcu Dogramaci asked how the concept of the performative relates to migrant photography. Lara Bourdin (Montreal) addressed that question by talking about Notícias de América, a performance by Paulo Nazareth. The Afro-indigenous Brazilian artist pictured himself alone and together with anonymous people holding a cardboard sign. One of the signs, for example, bore the inscription: ‘I am not migrating to the USA’. The surrounding elements, however, suggested otherwise. With his simple clothes and dirty feet, Nazareth recalled the stereotypical figure of the *Latin American migrant* that circulates in Western documentary photography.[3] By developing an imaginary migration story, a re-enactment of real migration stories of people and bodies took place, whereby the performance is a direct, political intervention that exposes forms and racialising processes of photojournalism. Evelyn Runge (Cologne) took a step back from the performative and asked about agency. She examined the ethics and agency of digital images and photojournalistic experiences with the help of the actor-network-theory.[4] She found that ethics and agency are strongly intertwined and asked whether the nomadic digital represents the new ‘normal’. She attested to the participatory nature of the digital image through mechanisms such as reposting on social media and describes this process as nomadic. Afterwards, T. J. Demos asked whether the term nomadic is not inflationary and whether the nomadic is falsely equated with precarity and migration more generally.

Figure 3: The workshop participants enjoyed an evening viewing at the Arena Cinema in Munich (photo by the author)

 

15 June 2023

At the beginning of the third panel, devoted to media narrations and narratives, Birgit Mersmann pointed out that photo stories contribute to the narrative of migration and that, with the advent of new media and the resulting storytelling possibilities, narratives of migration have undergone a techno-social change. She probed the connections between media historiography, the nomadic camera and new narratives photography is producing. She noted that means of displacing and interrupting narratives can be analysed and distinguished in photographs. Anna Messner (Düsseldorf) added that there is a contradiction between what is seen/displayed and the actual event, referring to how objects can oscillate between visibility and invisibility — appearing, disappearing then reappearing — depending on the context in which media like photo albums are viewed. Subsequently, Ainslie Murray (Sydney) discussed narrative interruptions in her own art project called Registry of Itinerant Architectures — a dynamic online registry of wild, mobile, temporary and inventive forms of architecture associated with contemporary nomadic life. She talked about how her project began, about her walk through the wilderness in central Australia on the Larapinta trail from May to October 2022 during the Covid-19 pandemic. She referred to her preparations, initially hiking in a group and then deciding to continue her journey alone. The fears and worries that repeatedly interrupted her journey were captured through artistic/photographic methods in her art project. But besides creating images of interruptions, the images show improvised scenes of place-making and offer insights into the intense physical and psychological dimensions of mobility, characterised by risk, repetition, interruptions and failure where the landscape played an important role, as in the search for shade. The fourth panel dealt with circulation, archive and memory. Jens Jäger asked what and how we think about the term circulation and what forms of knowledge production play a role. He suggested the archive as a place where knowledge is stored and ascribes it to a tradition of reliving biography. Memory is the constant movement of experience. The archive also shapes ideas about and memories of migration and is therefore significant to nomadic cameras. Helene Roth (Munich) reflected on the archive by discussing her analyses in the ERC project Relocating Modernism: Global Metropolises, Modern Art and Exile (METROMOD). In recent years, the team has developed an interactive digital archive of emigrant artists in the six METROMOD cities of Bombay, Buenos Aires, Istanbul, London, New York and Shanghai. The archive not only contains archive entries, but also locates home and work addresses on city maps. The archive also provides important research-based insights. Roth investigated photographers who emigrated to New York in the 1930s and 40s, asking who inscribed themselves in the city's history and how. How are the emigrant photographers (in)visible on the city map? In what contact zones, networks and specific neighbourhoods did they work and live in New York? How were transcultural networks between the METROMOD cities created by migration movements? Roth described the challenges of handling of fragmentary information, which in turn is connected to media like photography. However, the digital archive lends itself to visualising fragmentary and nomadic knowledge through, for example, maps. Afterwards, Zeynep Gürsel (New Brunswick) mentioned that every archive contains certain temporalities. She looked at the effects of the ghostly presence of photographs in an archive of the Ottoman Empire, from which those photographed and captured had left the country without a chance to return. Zeynep Gürsel traces the circulation of 393 individuals and photographs to examine mobility, nationality, archives and the construction of individual and collective memories. She found that each image contains two temporalities: that of the Armenian past and the future of the homeland to-be. Elizabeth Edwards (Leicester) contextualised thoughts on memories with a historiographical intervention on the archive. She used Zygmunt Bauman’s term liquid times, which refers to the uncertainties in contemporary society, in which mass migration and the fluid definition of ‘home’ are essential features.[5] She asked how photographs produce strong histories, as she named them, and suggested that this is only possible because of their fluidity, in that their power structures and political and social agency change depending on what one inscribes on the image. However, images are used/understood as witnesses as well as legitimators of existences around which we, as humans, construct our realities, make new connections and thus create a tapestry of history and reality. The final discussion, beyond those sadly not mentioned here, was devoted to defining the term nomadic camera and, more broadly, what the nomadic might be. It quickly became clear that there is no one exclusive definition of nomadism, let alone the nomadic camera. It is much more important, as numerous discussions and lectures have confirmed, to refer to the political in the nomadic, recalling Demos’s lecture about the danger of romanticising the nomadic as boundless travel and thereby overlooking the fact that the less privileged are excluded from this freedom.[6] Hence, it is necessary to recognise and analyse technologies, agents, narratives and archives of nomadic cameras, without forgetting that nomadic does not inevitably mean freedom and that freedom remains a fantasy for many.   [1] Erich Stenger, Die Geschichte der Kleinbildkamera bis zur Leica (Frankfurt am Main: Wetzlar, Leitz, 1949). [2] Nathan Jurgenson, The Social Photo: On Photography and Social (London/New York: Verso, 2019). [3] I refrain from further explaining or exemplifying the stereotype of the *Latin American Migrant* in order to avoid reproducing racist representations. [4] Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). [5] Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000). [6] T.J. Demos, The Migrant Image The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013).
bibliography
Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000. Demos, T.J. The Migrant Image The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. Jurgenson, Nathan. The Social Photo: On Photography and Social. London/ New York: Verso, 2019. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Stenger, Erich. Die Geschichte der Kleinbildkamera bis zur Leica. Frankfurt am Main: Wetzlar, Leitz, 1949.  
citation information:
Eisenried, Sophie, 'Nomadic Camera: revisiting a workshop on photography and displacement at gd:c', global dis:connect, 19 September 2023, 2023, https://www.globaldisconnect.org/09/19/nomadic-camera-revisiting-a-workshop-on-photography-and-displacement-at-gdc/.
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19 September 2023