Artivism: Art, Politics Commitment

By Vincenzo Trione

Translated from the Italian

A new form of political art: artivism. The artivists question some of the urgent issues of our times. They open up pathways on the surface of current events. They engage in concrete, courageous, visionary acts. To imagine a different present.

Chapter 3: Migrant Imaginaries

pp. 68–70

The impossible routes taken by refugees are also at the heart of the work of Laura Waddington, nomadic observer who has a literary background and who lived as an illegal immigrant between Europe and the United States. Skilfully moving beyond reportage and a journalistic approach in her short films and videos, the English filmmaker focuses her gaze on the experiences of those “adrift”, in the Middle East, the Balkans and Kurdistan, portraying the exodus of an invisible, tortured and exiled humanity, who are in search of a place to live, to rebuild their dignity and find peace.

From these conditions emerged Border (2004). At the origin of the work, was Waddington’s stays in the countryside around the Red Cross camp of Sangatte, a small French town in Nord Pas de Calais. There, the artist followed Afghan and Iraqi refugees at close quarters as they tried to escape from the police and make their way across the Channel tunnel that links France to the United Kingdom. Working with a small camera, she recorder their nightly attempts to flee: the running through the fields, the spasmodic waits, the violent interventions of the police. We leaf, as if through an intimate diary, encountering word-visions that lead us through lights and glimmers. On one hand, we follow the trail of the “firefly-people”, who retreat into the night in pursuit of their freedom: faceless and undocumented men, who are claiming the right to exist and to be recognised, captured as they make their way in the dark towards an “unlikely horizon” – flashes, shades of light, sudden explosions. On the other hand, are the spotlights of the Kingdom: the beams of police torches and the rays of light emitted by a helicopter sweeping tbrough the darkness.²⁹

Shot in the dark, on the run, the frames are grainy, overexposed, blurred, flickering. Attentive and lucid, Waddington immerses herself in the drama of submerged and desperate lives which she films from up close, without ever ceding to realism. Intent on transgressing the modes of cinéma-verité, she does not observe the refugees from the outside: she moves with them, in the cold of the night; aligning herself with their anguish and their fears, undertaking an insecure negotiation with reality. She performs a total adhesion: seeking a visual cancellation of her own gaze, in order to become part of the fields, of the laboured breaths, of those attempts to run towards a more serene destination.

A poignant critical testimony, the filmic narrative is at turns fragmented and hallucinatory, shot through with “particles of humanity”.³⁰ They are “glare-images” which, as Georges Didi-Huberman has written, appear to be constantly on the verge of disappearance: dirty, battered, out of focus, grainy, lacking in clarity, recorded at an irregular rhythm, almost in slow motion, captured by a camera shutter open to its maximum. Conceived to “organise our pessimism”³¹, these endangered images evoke the violent alienation of existences on the margins, placed on the edges of society, accompanied by a voice-over, which similar to a background music or a continuous wave, is always the same and incessant: it is the voice of a young woman who tells her story and her encounters.

This respectful and restless encounter with reality transforms the documentation of a personal experience into an abstraction that stirs numerous questions within us. Chaotic and fragmented, the filmed material recounts specific human conditions, but without showing or exposing its subjects; the anonymous “actors” dissolve, so as not to be discovered. We breathe in the power of loss and the inaccessibility of the visible.³²

p. 185

How to avoid falling into the quicksand of moralism, anaesthetization and aestheticization? Among the artists we have met on our critical journey, some – such as El Anatsui, Steyerl, Hatoum, Alÿs, Waddington, Abdessamad, Paladino, Iñárritu, Balestrini, Björk, Saraceno and Eliasson – have suggested possible pockets of resistance.

Footnotes

• Didi-Huberman, Come le lucciole cit., p. 93.

• Ibid., p. 93.

• Ibid., p. 95.

• E. Marcheschi, Videoestetiche dell’emergenza, Kaplan, Torino 2015, pp. 89-92.

Source