Abstract
Contemporary visuality is woven into new digital devices for surveillance and control, which seek interpellation and participation, and are often deemed to inform a post-human politics of the image and the gaze. The border metaphor signals physical, cultural and economic divisions, but today it also marks the boundaries between the physical and the technological. Identities also reveal their border-like character in the liminal areas between the embodied human perception and the technological gaze of artefacts. Borders take on an interfacial dimension while, at the same time, interfaces become borders. Through these relationships between border, visuality and identity, it is possible to analyse how borders and archives are articulated. Borders share with archives the capacity to include and exclude, to hide and give visibility to bodies and affections and to practices and discourses. An important question then becomes how this articulation is rearranged within today’s contemporary visuality and the logic of digital visual technologies. Faced with the imperatives of surveillance, mobility and total visualisation, it is important to rediscover the heterogeneous complexity of the encounter with the others.
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Notes
- 1.
In his series of panoramic images “Heat Maps” (2016) and the film “Incoming” (2017) photographer Richard Mosse appropriates the capabilities of midwave infrared cameras to record and detect contours in heat (a technology used for military and border surveillance) to show displaced people trapped in borders and refugee camps. His images question the fluidity of global and transnational traffic, a discourse that is often articulated with the idea that digitisation and new media free us from the heavy burden of body and materiality. In these images, the heat dissipated by suffering bodies is an index that migration and displacement are bodily experiences shaped by material forces.
- 2.
On the cultural and historical significance of aerial visuality, see Mark Dorrian and Frédéric Pousin (2013).
- 3.
The works of artists such as Guillermo Calzadilla, Jennifer Allora, Marcos Ramírez ‘ERRE’, Guillermo Gómez Peña, Electronic Disturbance Theater, Antoni Muntadas, Javier Téllez, Joana Moll, to name a few, show a concern for the border both as a context for the exercise of political power and as a site to elaborate alternative mappings, as well as others forms of encounter, subjectivity and identification. Maybe the most outstanding example of a cultural initiative of this kind is inSite, which has commissioned and curated artistic interventions by international contemporary artists in the San Diego-Tijuana border since 1992. InSite promotes artistic practices committed to explore the complexity and diversity of the border as a site for negotiation and resistance, translation and activism. See http://insite.org.mx/wp/en/insite/. On the other hand, it is worth noting that, as Raul Gschrey (2011) argues, “while Border Art in the North American context has been produced and discussed for decades, larger bodies of artistic and academic work on Europe’s borderlands are only beginning to emerge in the new millennium”. According to Gschrey, this is because of the developing supranational structure of the EU and the establishing of supranational regimes of policing EU external borders, which is related to an intense reconfiguration of European identities.
- 4.
The usual approach to migration and border control is analysis through a spatial lens. However, “by hiding the temporal aspects of their spatially-dressed border and migration control strategies states and international law reveal that they are not yet ready to abandon the comfortable terrain of calculable and predictable absolute view of the space” (Yahyaoui Krivenko 2016: 340).
- 5.
Jacques Derrida argued that the concept of hospitality is aporetic. According to him, absolute hospitality before others is not a possible scenario as such. There is an internal and insoluble contradiction in the notion of hospitality since to be hospitable, it is necessary that one must be the master of the house, nation or country. Hospitality requires that one have the power to host by exerting control over the others who are being hosted. Multicultural tolerance is simply unable to recognise and rework this tension. See Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle (2000).
- 6.
On the significance of tears as a visual experience in Derrida, see Martin Jay (1993: 522–523).
- 7.
In the arché, in the archive and its law, the etymology of the arcane and of the secret also reverberates: the archive not only saves but also codifies, encloses and encrypts. On the relations between secret and archive, see Roberto González Echevarría (2000).
- 8.
A prominent example of critical visual practice in this sense is the work of Spanish artist Rogelio López Cuenca. In the context of the Straits of Gibraltar, López Cuenca has developed several artistic projects (El Paraíso es de los extraños (2001), Al Yazira Al Ándalus (2001), Dem Wunde®land Entgegen (2003), Walls (2006), Le Partage (2008)) on the border of Spain and Morocco as an identity conflict zone where imaginaries and bodies, fears and hopes, violence and border control systems, continually meet and collide. See Rogelio López Cuenca (2008).
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Martínez Luna, S. (2019). Borders and Archives Under the New Conditions of Digital Visuality. In: Scribano, A., Lisdero, P. (eds) Digital Labour, Society and the Politics of Sensibilities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12306-2_5
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