Crafting an Event, an Event on Craft. Working Together to Represent Migration Experiences

Abstract

The following text aims at analysing a posteriori the organisation of a public gathering on international migration which took place in Marseille in 2018, and brought together scientific, artistic and militant practices. We first describe the craft of this event. Then, we reflect upon the theme of this book section - collaboration. We ask to which extent hybrid practices, that is the de-compartmentalising of social sciences, art and activism, enable the deconstruction of sensational and de-humanised representations of migrations. Finally, we question the limits for these collaborations, when power hierarchies may reactivate.

1 Introduction

We are concerned. We are three early-career researchers in the field of international migration and we are concerned. This concern arises from our respective fieldwork. On the one hand, we witness a politics which toughens eligibility to asylum and makes the access to reside in a foreign country precarious. On the other hand, we are witnesses of an ever more polarised discourse induced by an emergency-like and securitised management of migration flows. European policies aiming at controlling migration routes favour exclusion (erections of walls, multiplication of hotspots’ logics) and death (in the last 25 years, IOM estimates account for 40,000 humans who died or disappeared on migration routes, with 6000 in 2016 only). These migration policies are the result of a selective amnesia: only certain striking figures, facts and images participate in their production. Secondly, our concern grows while we witness a lack of circulation between scientific knowledge and measures adopted at a political level: our researches’ results are too often confined to the scientific sphere. And if there are bridges between scientific production and migration policies, in our opinion, they are hardly taken. Thirdly, this concern is confirmed through the few professional perspectives offered to early-career scholars today. Competing for the rare positions that exist, facing a growing precarity, to invest ourselves in the field of international migration leads to questioning our responsibility: to which project shall we dedicate our time? How do we better disseminate our research findings and do so to a larger audience? How do we work with others to better distribute the few existing resources? In general, the three concerns we have evoked engage our deontological and personal liability.

In such a context, how do we participate in the construction and restitution of knowledge, how do we engage (Sartre, 1948) in this necessary reflexive and collective reflection? In his essay, The Responsibility of Intellectuals, Noam Chomsky (1967) affirms: “It is a moral imperative to find out and tell the truth as best one can, about things that matter, to the right audience.” The audience which Chomsky refers to seems to be an essential element of the implementation of a response to our three concerns. Scientific gatherings are often elitist, reserved to a circle of initiates. Nevertheless, we believe that this format ought to be challenged in order to make our research results available, but also to engage in a reflexive and collective manner in the public sphere. It seems that there is an injunction to open the debate to others who share similar concerns.

It is obvious that scientific gatherings hold an important function to structure knowledge. These events are often milestones in the construction of a particular field of study, such as the ones which enabled the definition of the discipline of visual anthropology through the creation of “communities of practice” (Pink, 2006, p.4). Yet there are - to our knowledge - few studies on their constitution, implementation or on the impact of such events. Among the ones we came across, Feldman (2012) carried out a “non-local” ethnography of Metropolis conference and of its importance in defining migration policies. At a much more local level, Golden (1998, 2002) carried out an ethnography of conferences and workshops organised in Israel after a large number of Former Soviet Union immigrants settled in the country. These gatherings are places of tension between “integration” policies pushed forward by the Israeli State, and the aspirations of immigrants who participate. Art events were also subjected to analysis (Becker, 1974; Zebracki & Palmer, 2017). For instance, the collection of essays edited by Zebracki and Palmer (2017) interrogate the impact of art performances on larger political questions such as citizens’ participation, surveillance or ecology.

How can we explain the lack of scientific interest in these events, although they are regulated by rigid norms? Who participates, who makes her voice heard, on which issue, how the lecturer presents, how the audience reacts … all these elements form an “exchange culture” (Badouard, Mabi, & Monnoyer-Smith, 2016) or a “public culture” (Cefaï, 2007) which grants a quasi-sacred character to the scientific event. The objective of this chapter is not to call scientific gatherings into question. However, we wish to question the public and political dimension of these gatherings: how can we organise an event of which the objective is to provide an alternative to the hostile and inhospitable environment to a “larger political community” (Cefaï, 2013)?

The first meeting we organised around such issues, which will be the topic of this chapter, was meant to enlarge the audience. With this in mind we thought of three primary objectives, namely: mobilising artistic projects; unveiling the craft involved in their production; and gathering people from diverse social worlds, including the university, the arts and activism. These three objectives answer one central hypothesis. For us, artistic practices enable an embodied experience which engages our senses and our interpretation, hence catching our attention in a stronger manner; whilst opening up the borders between science and art enables more collaborations and produces new modalities of representation. During the organisational stage, we already had in mind to analyse the meeting and to disseminate the results in a form or another. During the event itself, we collected different data to support the analysis: we took notes and met every morning of the event to confront them and discuss them; we shot pictures and videos of every activity; and we recorded sound bites. At the moment, these data are not yet accessible, but the aim is that it would be stored under the common licence Attribution-Non Commercial-Non Derivative.

The following text aims at analysing a posteriori the organisation of a public gathering on international migration, which brought together scientific, artistic and militant practices. In the first part, we will describe the craft of this event. In the second and third part, we will answer more directly to the theme of this book section - collaboration. Indeed, we will ask to which extent hybrid practices, that is the de-compartmentalising of social sciences, art and activism, enable the deconstruction of sensational and de-humanised representations of migrations. Finally, we will question the limits for these collaborations, when power hierarchies may reactivate.

2 Genesis, Craft of the Event and Dissemination

This first part has the ambition to render, a posteriori, the steps and stakes of the craft of the event “Migrations: nos voix, nos chemins de traverse. Rencontre entre arts, sciences et militances”, which took place in Marseille from 24 to 26 October 2018. For this to happen, we have established a partnership with Dr. Mickaëla Lemeur, representative of the NGO le Tamis Anthropologies Créatives. The event took place in four Marseille associative places, which graciously let us use their venues. Three French research institutes partially funded the event: Migrinter (Université de Poitiers), Telemme (Université de Aix-Marseille) and Institut des Sciences Sociales du Politique.

2.1 Genesis and Craft of the Event

In the introduction, we have explained that the event’s organisation stemmed from a collective reflection.

We have agreed on three fundamental objectives which we constantly reminded ourselves of during the organisation and realisation of the project. We wanted to gather in one event diverse artistic projects addressing migration, including films, plays, photo exhibitions, literary pieces or sound shows. However, the event was not only about showing their results, but rather about debating their craft, that is, the contexts of their production, the circulation of the pieces and their impacts. Along these different moments of production, we wanted to encourage scholars, artists or activists to share the methodological, ethical and deontological questions and dilemmas they had faced. Lastly, this event intended to bring together actors outside of the academia. We wanted to invite participants from different social worlds (while thinking of these social worlds as porous i.e. an artist could be an activist) to be involved, favouring notably multi-voice communications, enabling a bigger diversity. We invited people who have either created or are associated with artistic and research projects; social workers, activists and citizens who want to bring to light their actions and mobilisations, but also the people they engage with daily; artists, including comedians, writers, poets, painters, illustrators, filmmakers and musicians, who want to reflect on an experience or a project done by, with, for persons who have experienced migration; and social scientists from a wide range of disciplines whose work focuses on migration-related issues, and who question the possible relations between artistic production and migration studies.

2.2 Concrete Construction of the Event

At the outset, we met with Marseille actors whose work related to international migration. We presented our project to popular education organisations, cultural organisations, applied research, counselling and advocacy organisations and art exhibition venues. This step enabled us to get criticism and to recentre our objectives, as well as to identify spaces which could host the projects we would eventually select, and discuss funding. This exploration was necessary to project ourselves in the different venues and imagine more clearly what the event would be like.

After that, we built a partnership with Dr. Mikaela Lemeur, anthropologist and member of le Tamis. Le Tamis is an applied research organisation, where scientific and artistic activities across the social sciences and humanities, arts, and popular education-based techniques are organised for a large public. Its general objectives are (1) to spread knowledge in social sciences and humanities between specialists and the public, and (2) to bring scientific methods and analytical tools to daily use.

The choice of the city of Marseille as the scene of our event is not trivial. We turned to municipal and regional institutions as we thought they will support such an initiative to enhance the city’s cultural actors and places. Secondly, we wanted to contact donors who support civil initiatives and wish to highlight experiences related to citizenship and participation. With the support of Mikaela Lemeur, we therefore wrote several proposals for fundraising, so as to support the transport, accommodation and logistical needs of the participants. We approached the regional council Région PACA and the municipality of Marseille - even though we were warned by colleagues that projects including migration-related issues were not granted funding. We also submitted applications to support mechanisms for citizen initiatives, such as Fondation Audiens Générations, PIEED or projets étudiants d’Éducation à la Citoyenneté et à la Solidarité Internationale. Finally, we approached our three research units as to obtain institutional support, Migrinter, Institut des Sciences Sociales du Politique and Telemme).

It seems important to highlight that, following these applications, institutional actors that were solicited – at city, region and state levels – rejected the proposal. The city was the only one which provided informal feedback: we were told that it would have been necessary to obtain the back-up of a local politician to ensure that our proposal would be considered. In general, rumour had it that the issue addressed - international migration - led to suspicion. Our research units partially addressed our demands, probably because of the hybrid character of the event.¹ We only managed to raise a small amount of money, which enabled to partially reimburse six of the 49 participants at the event, as well as to provide a hot meal for all every night of the three-day event. The free and voluntary time invested in fundraising is not proportionate with the little amount we have raised. These experiences were often shared by partners and participants to the event (similarly working on migration-related issues) who face a financial and institutional vacuum, compromising the implementation of their activities. This precarity is translated by overwork, fatigue and frustration. In contrast, this absence also generates solidarity and cooperation between activists, artists and scholars.

2.3 Dissemination of the Call and Reception

As we aimed to break free from the standards weighting on university events, we aspired to bring together a community of ideas and praxis that could help us go beyond our usual limits. When it came to selecting the projects, we didn’t want to build a programme based on our ideas and directly invite identified authors of artistic projects on migrations but rather write a call for proposals and disseminate it to avoid being among ourselves once again.

Old habits die hard: we scholarly wrote a three-axe call for proposals. The first axis, entitled “the creative dimension of migration studies: a way, for scholars to break free of the lab?” questioned more particularly the artistic practices of migration studies’ scholars. Art can be a method to produce data, artistic production in itself can be an object to analyse, art work can support intellectual thinking, or art can enable to restitute findings. The second axis was entitled “the transformative function of arts”. Here, we suggested that those who rely on artistic practices and productions to express themselves on “migration” can weigh on social action and transform representations. We wonder: are those productions more effective than scientific productions to understand and raise awareness? The third axis, “how to do with” asked the question of the “collective intellectual” brought forward by Pierre Bourdieu (2001) and encouraged participants to think of the effectiveness of cooperation to strengthen the critical position against mainstream discourses, but also to think of their constraints and limits. The call for proposals was long. We decided to write a second one, targeting a non-scientific public, so as not to “scare” (Fig. 12.1).

Fig. 12.1

Short version of the call for proposals

Following the dissemination of both these calls, we received 70 proposals. The authors identified themselves as follow: PhD students and scholars in social sciences (demography, geography, psychology, sociology, political science, anthropology and law) and the humanities (cinema, literature, media, plastic arts, architecture and history), filmmakers, artistic directors, musicians, dancers, singers, plastic artists, videomakers, photographs, poets, stage directors, comedians, biographers, illustrators, urban planners, writers, journalists, social workers, activists, exiles, activists, therapists and family counsellors. We think that the partnership with le Tamis and with associative spaces associated with artistic and activist actors in the region enabled the attraction of this diversity of proposers.

Among the proposals, we selected 18 projects. Often, they are on-going, unfinished works. They bring together 49 participants. A third of these participants was affiliated with research institutions, a third with militant institutions, and a third bring forward their artistic practice.

Table 12.1 shows the participants’ profile:

Table 12.1 Participants at the event “Migrations: nos voix, nos chemins de traverse. Rencontre entre arts, sciences et militances”, which took place in Marseille from 24 to 26 October 2018

Seven participants spoke openly about their migration experiences, among them three scholars, three artists and one activist. Ten persons whose projects were selected did not come: here, structural constraints which we briefly mentioned when addressing funding issues prevented them from participating. It means that many benefited from a limited mobility, either for financial or legal reasons. The latter is even stronger when organising an event on migration. The vulnerability of persons who have experienced migration is characterised by constrained mobility, and strong institutional violence. The question of “absence” emerges here, and we will come back to it in another section of this text.

As mentioned in the introduction, these projects need to be presented and discussed with an audience. For this audience to attend, we created disseminating platforms: a WordPress blog where key documents are hosted (this is often mobilised in our field); and a Facebook event, associated with the Facebook pages of our partners. We also spread the word through email. In addition, the day before the event took place, we recorded a radio programme of an hour with a local Marseille radio called Radio Galère (Fig. 12.2).

Fig. 12.2

Recording at the radio station

3 Crossing Practices to Reinvent Migrations’ Representations

3.1 A Hybrid Programme

Space and time were considered initial conditions in the organisation of a programme which would enable bridges between arts, science and activism.

First of all, looking for venues was crucial. Four venues accepted to host our activities: Casa Consolat - an associative canteen which carries out participative and cultural projects -, Dar Lamifa - a cultural venue which adopts popular education practices -, Equitable Café - an associative, cultural and militant café which seeks² to promote positive and solidary alternatives -, and Librairie Maupetit - the oldest bookstore in Marseille, which also organises lectures, workshops and exhibitions.

Space was then a dimension of the attempt to “de-compartmentalised”. When we developed these partnerships, we attempted to introduce scientific productions towards these Marseille artistic labs, and to exhibit artistic productions in venues meant for exchange and debate. The said four venues have in common the fact that they promote social cohesion, social dialogue, and new initiatives and alternatives. They were easily convinced by the relevance of our project and quickly became key partners in the promotion and organisation of the event (Fig. 12.3).

Fig. 12.3

Map of the four venues, Marseille

Second of all we thought of time as another dimension of de-compartmentalisation. We often feel frustrated in academia not to have enough time to exchange, debate or discover. Informal moments were valued, notably those of lunch, coffee break or dinner. This informality enabled elective affinities, some of which have led to lasting collaborations. A fortiori, our objective was to permit local actors to join us, such as local associations’ members but also professionals, so that the audience will be diverse. We favoured afternoons and evenings during the all saints’ day holiday.

At the junction of hybrid times and spaces, we experienced:

• Four exhibitions installed in Casa Consolat’s garage and at Equitable Café (“Correspondances mouvantes: Royacamp”, Morgane Dujmovic and Mathilde Schimke; “Ceux qui passent, ceux qui restent. Le campement de migrants de Norrent-Fontes”, Mathilde Pette and Julien Saison; “Nos super-héros”, Justine Roquelaure and Laura Tortosa-Ibanez; “Recours”, Jaballah et associée)

• Three round tables at Equitable Café and Librairie Maupetit (Les voix de la scène/ La voie des connections radiophoniques/Les arts graphiques en traverse)

• A literary café at Equitable Café (book presentation L’asile en exil, Observatoire Asile Marseille)

• A documentary screening at Equitable café (“Blue Sky From Pain”, Stephanos Mangriotis and Laurence Pillant; “Traversées de la mémoire”, Erika Thomas; “Exodos”, Fabien Guillermont)

• A concert at Dar Lamifa (“Ailleurs” Nouvelle musicale, Cécile Braud)

• A performance at Equitable Café (“Le chef est chef même en caleçon”, Dominique Bela).

3.2 Migrations’ Representations: Co-creation, Stakes and Intentions

Among the presented projects, some were the result of a cooperation between artists and scientists, while others were carried out by people who identified as both artist and scholar, and some more by artists who draw on the results of research projects. Each type of cooperation or co-creation revealed different collaboration intentions and stakes.

The reader has probably not participated in the event. In order to make our descriptions more concrete, we develop below two vignettes. The two productions presented hereafter were selected by the authors because they are both the results of a reciprocal collaboration between an artist and a scholar. Their analysis enables us to think through co-creation.

3.2.1 Nos Super Héros (2018)

Laura Tortosa Ibañez is a plastic artist and scholar involved with social and political art. In her productions and in her research work, she challenges the social function of art. She works together with Justine Roquelaure, freelance photographer and autodidact. Through her photographs, she explores the resilience of persons who experienced ruptures in their lives. That led her to work on representations of exile and migration.

Laura Tortosa Ibañez and Justine Roquelaure presented a photographic and documentary project which plays with representations and reveals the super-powers of children who experienced exile. Nos Super Héros, which we can translate as our Super-Heroes, is based on a sensorial working methodology, focused on displaced families in the Pyrénées Orientales region in France.

Challenging migrants’ representation as well as children’s rights to their image, they thought to explore the “traces” left on families who experienced migration. The project enables children to be children: to play, have fun, invent and be conscious of their talents and their dreams. During collective workshops they developed the super-hero metaphor with displaced children: what super-power would they want, and what would they look like were they super-heroes themselves? Through drawing, scenography, sound and photography, the dreams and strengths of these children – who transform into their own super-heroes – are the subjects of the exhibition. The authors position themselves outside of the spectacle, protecting the children’s anonymity, while favouring suggestive strategies without forcing testimony.

This vignette is particularly interesting for several reasons. On the one hand, it presents the hybrid nature of the duo – an academic and a freelance photographer - which decompartmentalizes their practices. On the other hand, the intention of the project is to allow children, who are generally denied their agency capacity, to reclaim their identity as they want. This project is also built on collaboration with other professionals and with families, hence bringing to light a global and comprehensive vision of the situation of these children. Finally, the authors play with the anonymization of vulnerable persons: we never recognize the child when we see her in huge formats, which allows a result that is both ethical and effective (Fig. 12.4).

Fig. 12.4

Extract of Nos super-héros, Justine Roquelaure and Laura Tortosa-Ibañez (2018)

3.2.2 Blue Sky from Pain (2016)

Laurence Pillant is a geographer. In her work, she questions migratory control in Greece and its imagery. She worked together with Stephanos Mangriotis, a photographer. He has authored several photographic documentaries on migration and on persons who suffer from mental disorder.

This film is based on Pillant’s research. It shows one piece of the migratory control’s construction puzzle, that of confinement. The audience sees images of abandoned detention centres used in the 2000s at the Greek-Turkish border to incarcerate undocumented migrants. A voice over speaks of deprivation of liberty, based on interviews led by the researcher.

Projecting this film enabled a reflection on the stakes of data collection, representation and restitution of absence: the absence of an immigrant who was here but is not anymore. It is also the result of a negotiation between the scientist and the artist: how to share one’s fieldwork with a photographer? How to choose an image? Is it crucial that data be visible, audible or is suggestion enough?

Again, this project is supported by a team that presents different practices. But what characterizes this work is that the two authors were outspoken when it came to presenting the tensions and negotiations. Secondly, this project poses a crucial question: how to show without showing? And the result is a video medium that circulates and is disseminated more easily, which presents less material constraints compared to an exhibition (Fig. 12.5).

Fig. 12.5

Poster Blue Sky from Pain, Stephanos Mangriotis and Laurence Pillant (2016)

3.3 When Co-creations Become “Living Archives”

During this event, we made an almost constant observation: the public was not passive, they participated, they reacted (sometimes even emotionally), the participants invested the spaces for debate and left written traces (for example via letters to the migrants represented). Faced with this observation and based on the event’s ethnography, we argue that the productions resulting from a collaboration between art and science succeed in deconstructing preconceived ideas (which will be developed at the end of this section) and in effectively showing and documenting. As such, they aim at re-establishing a social equality for immigrants who, otherwise, are maintained in a dominated position.

We remind the reader that we started from the following assumptions: a migration “spectacle” made of spectacular and sensationalist images; and trend towards collective amnesia (Noiriel, 1988) when facing migration phenomena. We aimed at inventing new ways to represent migrants and their trajectories, while attempting to escape the violence of the biographic injunction one undergoes through administrative procedures for the migrants’ “treatment” (residency, asylum, children rights). Indeed, these procedures challenge the migrants’ stories while demanding they tell “coherent” and complete stories. Following Paul Ricoeur’s work (1983), a story does not need to be coherent to be seen as “acceptable”: it can be fragmented, even split. Supporting the validity of narrative fragments, moving or still images are therefore true iconographic breakaways: a way of telling one’s story by circumventing the violence of the narrative injunction. Hence and similarly to Karolina Nikielska-Sekula’s photographs (see Chap. 2, in this volume) the documentary film Blue Sky From Pain flips the storytelling: presence is not represented, but absence. Shots are long images, quasi still, which show beds without bodies, shoes without feet, walls without doors.

These images and sounds become traces of the successive operations that shape migration trajectories, and this in a common effort to position them between institutions and individuals, and against the great spectacle of migration and collective amnesia. As Béliard and Eideliman (2008) have suggested, they become “living archives” which do not only reveal precious scenes and materials, but also represent objects to be analysed. These productions, which showed the subjectivity of migration experiences and do not rely on spectacular images, are therefore more effective in informing (this is evidenced by the many messages left by the visitors), and deconstructing accepted ideas than a scientific paper or communication would be. These “traces” are important and efficient because they are shifting, interactive and lasting.

If we were to look at other productions shown during the event in Marseille, the drawings realised by Observatoire Asile Marseille become traces of aid hyper-conditionality and the violation of migrants’ fundamental rights in Marseille; Athia Nu Dem’s musical productions created between Dakar, Ouaga and Marseille display xenophobic institutional discourses and practices; the documentary film Traversées de la mémoire by Erika Thomas enables to sustainably archive the historical dimension of long lasting migrations, otherwise collectively perceived as temporary and extraordinary.

Three trends were identified for these productions to become living archives, and hence act efficiently in the deconstruction of preconceived ideas:

• Associate migration with desire, knowledge, dreams and emancipation, instead of misery, poverty, ignorance and war. Reversing representations aims at transforming the collective sight upon migrants. This is particularly the case of the project Nos super-héros. The children are indeed encouraged to conceive and become the “Super-hero” they want to be: what costume, what posture and, of course, what super powers. Encouraging the participation of migrants in scientific-artistic projects would therefore induce the recognition of the agency of migrants, which therefore contributes to the deconstruction of dominant discourses.

• Support practices that acknowledge that migrants are actors, and not intrinsically passive individuals. Parental or spousal consent, explicitly required by ethical committees, or implicitly understood as a rule of conduct by researchers, acts as a symbolic reminder of a perceived passivity of migrants. Encouraging projects which enable migrants to own space could enable to avoid asymmetry, social unbalance, so to reach some form of social equality (even though it would be presumptuous to assume it is entirely possible). As reminded in the introduction to this volume, these projects can “allow individuals to build an active relationship to citizenship, to confer agency upon them, and to allow them to overcome their post-political condition” (Salzbrunn, Dellwo, & Besençon 2018). This active participation is a form of “citizenship from below” (Pereira, Maiztegui-Oñate, & Mata-Codesal, 2016).

• Resort to suggestion and interpellation in (still or moving) visual artwork. Suggestion and interpellation are presented as an alternative to provoking, sensational, which enable the audience to be reflexive and critical.

4 Disciplines and Practices’ Interculturality: How to Work With?

4.1 Becoming a Reflexive Community

While organising this event, we thought of the crossroads between practices, methods, approaches and languages. The risk was to model, to conclude with ready-made proposals, or even to be satisfied with the illustrative function of art. Understanding this risk, our objective was to form a “collective intellectual” as imaged by Pierre Bourdieu (2001): a community of individuals from different disciplines, but who agree upon the same expectations of rationality, reflexivity, vigilance and knowledge. We have meant to develop our reflection following these expectations. On the one hand, crossing practices enable to increase vigilance. As Laurence Pillant and Stephanos Mangriotis experienced while filming their documentary film, the scientist can guarantee a methodological and ethical rigour (notably when it comes to the rapport with the participants to the enquiry) whereas the artist will be cautious to maintain a more general aim, through the sensorial and emotional dimension of the artistic support. On the other hand, all participants at the event have mentioned at one point or the other the same concerns we have described in the introduction. We share a certain common knowledge related to migration reality, the emergencies of this reality, and our practices face similar stakes while opposed to media and political discourses. We are therefore developing a common rational: it is to serve the same objective – that of finding an alternative to the inward-looking attitudes of a population against the other – that we mobilise certain tools and think about our practices. Finally, co-creations and the dialogues they triggered developed our reflexivity. Even more they have highlighted how crucial it is to produce works that provoke the reflexivity of the audience. Escaping collective amnesia, circulating knowledge between different spheres and engage as to deconstruct preconceived ideas are at stake.

When we aim to following these expectations, cooperation can enable the strengthening of our critical positions against dominant discourse, and lead to what Bourdieu (2001) has called the “collective production of realist utopias”, in other words, applied knowledge and reasoning at the service of a more coherent society.

4.2 Collaboration Under Constraint

Forming a reflexive community is, however, an enterprise under constraint. Firstly, at a structural level, participants share the difficulties they meet before and during the event. All mention the emergency that characterises their production, scarce budgets, exhausted and irritated staff. As we have sketched before, actors work in an institutional void. Political authorities are absent from the event. But for an artwork to be finalised, it needs to be disseminated, and it needs support. Against this void, artists evoke alternative strategies based on solidarity. Nevertheless, we can question the reproduction of exploitative relations these constraints lead to. For instance, photographs of one exhibition were shipped by a cheap shareable truck. This shipping alternative means that one rides in a truck that would drive to Marseille anyway. While we discuss the shipment with the artist, he tells that he eventually met with the driver at the reception and realised that he was an immigrant, that this extra low-cost shipment meant that he waited overtime at the customs, and that his working conditions are far from the ones provided by law.

A second series of constraints is related to co-creation. In fact, cooperation leads to numerous questions and to a feeling of uneasiness. Co-creation is difficult, as we have experienced ourselves in the scientific committee. Our scientific committee included solely scholars who selected, organised and moderated the discussions. What about an artistic-scientific-activist committee? We wished to include other actors. Instead of a mixed committee, what we did was to ask colleagues from various disciplines and professions to read and read again the documents we produced (project, subsidies’ applications and calls). As for a less “scientific” scientific committee, we have invited the participants at the end of the event, and several artists have already shown interest.

Aside from the scientific committee composition, at the scale of the event, co-creation is also often discussed. During the film screening which took place on the first evening, we screened three films: one which aim is to offer a historical perspective over Portuguese migration and anti-colonial activists among them (Thomas 2017); a documentary focusing on the work of the NGO SOS méditerranée entitled Exodos (Guillermont 2017); and the “impressionist” (following Barbash (1997)’s typology) Blue Sky from Pain (Mangriotis & Pillant 2016) which we have described at length in an earlier section. Exodos is immediately controversial: some people in the audience find it moving, hence its objective is reached; others advocate for the end of these spectacular images, arguing that the media provide enough of those. Presenting three different “intentions” during the same night is seen as problematic. Nevertheless, we argue that even though Exodos adopts more from a journalistic sensational genre, it was necessary to propose it so as to trigger a debate (Fig. 12.6). This debate was enabled because of the informality of the encounter. As for Blue Sky from Pain, the debate that followed its screening focused on the difficult cooperation between the geographer and the photographer. Laurence Pillant describes the negotiations that took place: these negotiations relate to what is debated in the introduction of the volume, that is the relations between art and visuals in research. For the geographer, the film is the outcome of a research work, that ought to be contextualised. For the photographer however, the punctum is more important than the studium (Baudrillard, 1999). The authors will compromise and allow some context through the hiring of an actor that reads a text in Arabic, creating the voice over. The images are not shown alone anymore, but accompanied by a text.

Fig. 12.6

A debate in Café Equitable

Finally, even though we assumed that meeting points are crucial to avoid pitfalls, the process of co-creation and hybrid practices can quickly lead to reproducing dominant categories - in the images produced but also in the hierarchies between partners. For instance, at the second day of the event, we organised a roundtable. At this occasion, we witnessed the speed at which we can go back to formal presentations which are authoritative. The roundtable took place at a bookstore located in the centre of Marseille. The last floor is an exhibition space, equipped with chairs, comfortable seats for lecturers and a projector. On this afternoon, a large part of the participants were in fact scholars. The chairs neatly organised in rows, the bigger seats in the front, the mics and projector, played out to recreate a more formal format. All of a sudden, censorship happens, even more from non-academic participants.³ The debate is more difficult. If we oppose this setting with the one of the exhibition Mes super héros which we mentioned before, it takes place in the Garage Imaginaire facing the Casa Consolat. And it is indeed a garage! True, it required some cleaning before hanging the photographs, and both authors had to use their craft to organise the space. But at the opening debate, the garage, open towards the street, cemented, with an eclectic selection of chairs and benches, an Italian coffee maker surrounded by non-matching cups and glasses … enabled an open debate, curious, followed by many questions to the artists.

There are multiple stakes at play: What do we talk about? With whom? Where? At what time? All these elements can constrain the formation of a community.

5 To Conclude. A Deficient Cooperation: Absence of Persons Who Have Experienced Migration

Projects are often carried out only partially with persons who have experienced migration, even though they are the ones they refer to primarily. Dominique Bela, author and comedian of the play Le chef est chef même en caleçon performed the last day of our event. He argues: “Who better than a migrant to talk about migration, “to tell the truth as best as possible”. I am a migrant. This identity sticks to my skin, determines how I get in the offices, in the shops, when I ask for information in the street. […] My hackneyed speech celebrates freedom and how the theatre saved me. Of course I have a lot of hardship, however I develop resistance. I am a “standing man”.” (Bela 2018).

Projects often start with immigrants … to be presented without them. One exhibition selected for the event is an artistic duet, one of them being inadmissible to France (Jaballah et associée 2018). Another is the result of workshops carried out with immigrants who are not in the region anymore (Dujmovic & Schimke since 2017). We have come to realise that some projects were developed without any encounter with persons who have experienced migration, such as the musical novel Ailleurs by Cécile Braud (2017). With the institutional absence we have mentioned, comes the immigrants’ absence. Participants to the event – scholars, artists, activists – are present because they benefit from the privilege of mobility. They assume the responsibility to represent the ones who do not benefit from this privilege. Actors representing the various projects become “brokers” of the migrant voice, the art medium being the material support. Made visible through artistic projects, migrants are nevertheless absent. Artistic projects attempt at filling the void or at least at enabling reflection and raising awareness.

Yet until the privilege of mobility does not become a right, our ambition to become a strong collective intellectual will be weakened by the absence of those which are firstly interested (Chomsky, 1967). This paradox – visibility without presence – is at the heart of what seems necessary to do now, to ensure the sustainability of this first event, and the reflection which followed.

Art works Quoted in This Chapter

• “Correspondances mouvantes: Royacamp”, Morgane Dujmovic & Mathilde Schimke, evolutive project, since 2017

• “Ceux qui passent, ceux qui restent. Le campement de migrants de Norrent-Fontes”, Mathilde Pette & Julien Saison, 2016

• “Nos super-héros”, Justine Roquelaure & Laura Tortosa-Ibanez, 2018

• “Recours”, Jaballah et associée, 2018

• “L’asile en exil”, Observatoire Asile Marseille, 2018

• “Blue Sky From Pain”, Stephanos Mangriotis & Laurence Pillant, 2016

• “Traversées de la mémoire”, Erika Thomas, 2017

• “Exodos”, Fabien Guillermont, 2017

• “Ailleurs”, Cécile Braud, 2017

• “Le chef est chef même en caleçon”, Dominique Bela, 2018