Vidéo, 2015

Partis de Guinée, Aliou, Diakité et Boubacar se retrouvent à Ceuta. Ils séjournent dans le Centre de séjour provisoire pour immigrants (CETI), immobilisés entre deux frontières de l’UE : une terrestre (une clôture entourant une forêt au Maroc) et une maritime (le détroit de Gibraltar). Ce documentaire critique s’interroge sur la manière dont la réalisation d’un film avec la participation de migrant à une étape clef de leur voyage, contribue à créer une expérience spécifique de la frontière.

Keina Espiñeira est à la fois artiste et universitaire. Elle s’intéresse Dans ses travaux, les politiques frontalières jouent un rôle majeur.

Pierre Depaz
SimBorder
2016

SimBorder est une exploration algorithmique du système complexe qui entoure les questions d’immigration et de réfugiés à un niveau international.

Le programme génère un ensemble de pays voisins les uns des autres, chacun possédant un panel de politiques publiques ayant directement rapport à l’accueil de réfugiés (contrôles au frontières, allocations financières, rassemblement des familles et naturalisation des étrangers).

L’utilisateur(e) de la simulation peut modifier chacune de ces politiques publiques a sa guise. Un moment de réflexion apparait alors au moment de choisir l’ensemble de critères d’évaluation de ces dernières. S’agit-il de croissance économique? De l’approbation de la population locale? De la survie de la population émigrée? Sans offrir de réponse, SimBorder permet néanmoins de saisir la complexité de l’appareil politique en place.

En tant que simulation, SimBorder n’est pas objective. Elle ne représente que le point de vue de son auteur, comme tout système représente la volonté de celui ou ceux qui le conçoit, qu’il soit politique ou algorithmique, que ce dernier soit législateur ou programmeur.

Pierre Depaz est un artiste et programmeur vivant actuellement aux États-Unis. Diplômé de l’Institut d’Études Politiques de Lille, il est actuellement enseignant à l’université de New-York. Son travail de recherche se concentre essentiellement sur l’utilisation de simulations digitales et de technologies interactives pouvant fournir de nouvelles perspectives sur des sujets de société et de philosophie politique.

Personnal Cinema
Banoptikon
Jeu vidéo, 2010 – 2013
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Le jeu vidéo Banoptikon propose de rendre visible les mécanismes de contrôle et de simuler des situations vécues par les migrants dans différents environnements -urbains et non-urbain- y compris dans le corps humain. Car les corps sont devenus les objets et les outils de la surveillance et du contrôle.

Personal Cinema est un collectif actif dans le domaine des arts numériques. Ce collectif conçoit et organise des projets et des activités qui encouragent les attitudes critiques envers les nouvelles formes de production, de présentation et de distribution des productions audiovisuelles.

Giovanni Ambrosio
Please do not show my face

« Please do not show my face I’m tired I look older than I really am when I call my family I tell that everything is fine »

Sébastien Louis, enseignant d’Histoire à l’Ecole Européeenne de Luxembourg 1, m’invite à l’accompagner dans son voyage scolaire à Dunkerque et Calais. Tu pourrais faire des portraits. Des visages de migrants? Pourquoi je suis ici?

Ce n’est pas une série sur la migration, sur les migrants, dont finalement je sais assez peu. Je voudrais que ce soit une réflexion sur ce que cela pourrait vouloir dire connaître quelque chose, la représenter, que ce soit un une manière de juger (to procees, comme en informatique) mon regard, ma capacité d’établir une relation avec le réel. Je ne sais pas faire autre chose que cadrer des formes dans une autre forme, celle du viseur. Puis-je raconter comment nous avons traversé des frontières? Il y a-t-il autre chose qu’une obsession formelle? Chapitres : 1. Europe. Nouveaux quartiers, parking, anciens sites industriels. 2. Tout est question de seuils et de frontières. 3. Espaces. 4 Archéologie. Dans les camps. Gens. Abris temporaires. Traces, empreintes. 5. Je suis obsédé par les formes. 6. Post photographie : l’outil clarté utilisé pour transformer une image plate en une composition spectaculaire.

Né à Naples, en Italie, en 1978, et basé à Paris. J’aime le sentiment d’être un étranger. Mon travail consiste essentiellement dans la traversée de seuils. J’ai appris la photographie à Naples, avec le cours de Photographie et Désir de Sergio De Benedittis, à l’Atelier Nigma Fotografi et plus tard j’ai été étudiant du Département de Photographie et Art Contemporain de l’Université Paris VIII. Mon parcours d’études principal s’st déroulé en littérature française et portugaise à l’Université de Naples l’Orientale. En France j’ai obtenu le diplôme du Dea de Cinéma, littérature et Société de l’Université Paris X Nanterre. Après avoir été enseignant d’italien langue étrangère, je me consacre entièrement à la photographie et à la recherche artistique depuis 2010. Mon travail personnel est basé sur l’exploitation de genres classiques de la photographie d’art auxquels je fais d’habitude référence en latin: effigies, spatium, argumenta, naturae mortae, abstracta. La photographie est l’une de mes matières préférées: elle est pas chère, facile à travailler et grâce à sa nature électronique, elle peut être infiniment remodelée. Je développe également un corpus de travaux basés sur un geste pictural minimaliste dans lesquels la photographie intervient en dernière analyse pour sédimenter toutes les matières que je rencontre: papier, peinture, poussière, déchets, liquides. D’autre part je travaille à des commandes en photographie, graphisme et communication. J’appelle cela le Studio. C’est pour moi aussi un endroit où je peux me confronter à des matière visuelles qui pourront alimenter ma recherche personnelle.

bsgart.net – black-spring-graphics.com

Postcommodity (Raven Chacon, Cristóbal Martínez & Kade L. Twis)
Repellent Fence
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The Repellent Fence is a project by Postcommodity, an interdisciplinary arts collective. The initiative is a social collaborative project among individuals, communities, institutional organizations, publics, and sovereigns that culminate with the establishment of a large-scale temporary monument located near Douglas, Arizona and Agua Prieta, Sonora. This land-art work is comprised of 28 tethered balloons, that are each 10 feet in diameter, and float 50 feet above the desert landscape. The balloons that comprise Repellent Fence are enlarged replicas of an ineffective bird repellent product. Coincidently, these balloons use indigenous medicine colors and iconography — the same graphic used by indigenous peoples from South America to Canada for thousands of years. The purpose of this monument is to bi-directionally reach across the U.S./Mexico border as a suture that stitches the peoples of the Americas together—symbolically demonstrating the interconnectedness of the Western Hemisphere by recognizing the land, indigenous peoples, history, relationships, movement and communication.

Postcommodity is an interdisciplinary arts collective comprised of Raven Chacon, Cristóbal Martínez, and Kade L. Twist. Postcommodity’s art functions as a shared Indigenous lens and voice to engage the assaultive manifestations of the global market and its supporting institutions, public perceptions, beliefs, and individual actions that comprise the ever-expanding, multinational, multiracial and multiethnic colonizing force that is defining the 21st Century through ever increasing velocities and complex forms of violence. Postcommodity works to forge new metaphors capable of rationalizing our shared experiences within this increasingly challenging contemporary environment; promote a constructive discourse that challenges the social, political and economic processes that are destabilizing communities and geographies; and connect Indigenous narratives of cultural self-determination with the broader public sphere. Postcommodity are the recipients of grants from the Telluride Institute (2007), American Composers Forum (2008), Arizona Commission on the Arts (2009), Elly Kay Fund (2010), Joan Mitchell Foundation (2010), Creative Capital (2012), Art Matters (2013), and the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation (2014). In 2011 the collective’s work was featured in “Close Encounters,” an international Indigenous exhibition exhibited in multiple venues throughout the city of Winnipeg, CA; Contour the 5th Biennial of the Moving Image in Mechelen, Belgium; Nuit Blanche, Toronto, CA; “Half Life: Patterns of Change,” Santa Fe Art Institute, Santa Fe, NM; “The Night is Filled With the Harmonics of Suburban Dreams,” Lawrence Art Center, Lawrence, KS; “Here,” Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts Museum; 18th Biennale of Sydney in Sydney, Australia; Adelaide International in Adelaide, Australia; and Time Lapse, Site Santa Fe, in Santa Fe, NM. In 2013, Postcommodity will exhibit their work at the Headlands Center for the Arts, as well as open their art space, Spirit Abuse in Albuquerque, NM. Throughout 2015, Postcommodity will prepare to stage a site-specific 2 mile long land installation at the US./Mexican border near Douglas, AZ.

Postcommodity acknowledges the important contributions of its previous collaborators: Steven Yazzie (2007-2010), Nathan Young (2007-2015), Andrew McCord (If History Moves at the Speed of Its Weapons, Then the Shape of the Arrow is Changing, and Promoting a More Just, Verdant and Harmonious Resolution), Annabel Wong (Dead River) and Existence AD (Dead River).

Matteo Guidi & Giuliana Racco
The Artist and the Stone
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The Artist and the Stone is a multilayered interdisciplinary project that literally negotiates the twofold movement of a subject (a performance artist) and an object (a 25-ton block of stone) from the same refugee camp in the south West Bank to Europe. The project is concerned with the ways people can bypass restrictions and limitations in their daily life, managing to move through systems imposed on them, creating their own paths, languages and forms of expression, driven by their desires.

The Artist and the Stone speaks of mobility, citizenship, desire and constraint, situating itself at a cross-section of considerations on the expanding role of (artistic) mobility, growing border restrictions, and the trade of goods across borders, while placing emphasis on how context dictates value.

Giuliana Racco (Toronto, Canada, 1976). Artist with a BFA (Honours) from Queen’s University and an MFA from the IUAV University of Venice (2006). She was awarded a research and production grant by the Canada Arts Council for the year 2015. Her practice concerns narration, language acquisition, desire and mobility (including that of workers, migrants and refugees).

Matteo Guidi (Cesena, Italy, 1978). Artist with a Diploma in Visual Communication and a Degree in Ethno-anthropology, University of Bologna. He is a member of AAVC (Associaciò Artistes Visuals de Catalunya) and a professor of Sociology of Communication at ISIA of Urbino. He was awarded the Arte para la mejora social 2014 prize by Obra Social La Caixa Foundation. His investigations look into highly imaginative practices in closed spaces of control (such as cooking and photography in prisons).

View the artists portfolio

Guidi and Racco’s practices converged within the context of factories (2008) and refugee camps in the West Bank (2012). From 2008, they have collaborated continuously and are now both based in Barcelona and  in long-term residency at Hangar (centre for artisticresearch and production).

Guidi and Racco operate at the intersection between art and anthropology, investigating complex contexts of more or less closed structures, i.e. high security prisons, factories, and, most recently, refugee camps. Their practices looks into the ways individuals or groups of  manage their own movement, on a daily basis, through strongly defined systems which tend to objectify them and even induce forms of self-restraint. Reflecting on unpredictable methods of daily resistance sparked by a combination of simplicity and ingenuity, they focus on contexts that are considered marginal or exceptional but, in reality, anticipate more common scenarios.

Together and independently they have participated in exhibitions and festivals and held talks in international contexts, such as the Goethe Institute of Barcelona (ES), GalleriaPiù, Bologna (IT), Department of Justice of Generalitat de Catalunya, Barcelona (ES), AB9 Murcia (ES), Faculty of Fine Arts of the city of Porto (PT), University of Barcelona (ES), Escola Massana Barcelona (E), Kunstuniversität Linz (AT), Il vivaio del malcantone, Firenze (IT), Fondazione Pastificio Cerere, Rome (IT), Double Room, Trieste (IT), Galerija SIZ Rijeka, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Rijeka (HR), Akademie der Künste der Welt Cologne (DE), International Academy Of Art Palestine, Ramallah (PS), Artissima Lido, Turin Contemporary Art Fair (IT), Galleria Civica Mestre (IT), NotGallery, Naples (I), Fotomuseum Winterthur (CH), Festival Loop, Barcelona (ES), SESC de Artes – Mediterrane São Paulo (BR), Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg (FR), Bethnal Green Road, London (UK) and the Center For Design Resarch & Education of Hanyang University, Kyunggido (KR).

They have participated in international research and residency programmes in Portugal (Soft Control / The Technical Unconsciuos); West Bank (Campus in Camps / DAAR Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency Bethlehem); Croatia (Kamova Rijeka); Israel (JCVA Jerusalem Center for Visual Art); Italy (O’, Milan & Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Venice) and Luxemburg (Kulturfabrik, Esch-sur-Alzette). They have conducted workshops in a variety of environments, including universities, prisons and refugee camps.

Photograph from the set of the video ¿Qui assumirà el pes de 25 tones de pedra? (Who will take on the weight of 25 tonnes of stone?), M. Guidi, G. Racco, 2015 – Photograph by Alice Daneluzzo.

Julian Oliver
Border Bumping
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Lorsqu’on voyage, nos appareils mobiles basculent d’un réseau à un autre en fonction des territoires avoisinants, souvent avant même de les avoir physiquement atteints. Le Border Bumping Server collecte les données des antennes cellulaires et les données de localisation et joue avec ce phénomène, le serveur redessine constamment les frontières en fonction de ces décalages. Le travail de Julian Oliver envisage donc l’infrastructure de télécommunication mobile comme une force perturbatrice qui vient bousculer l’intégrité des frontières nationales.

Julian Oliver est néo-zélandais, c’est un ingénieur critique et un artiste basé à Berlin. C’est un défenseur des Free and Open Source Software et il soutient également des initiatives qui encouragent et renforcent les droits sur le web.

Huub Dijstelbloem
Border surveillance and counter surveillance

The concept of surveillance is usually applied to state activities and technologies that aim to register and control certain populations. However, historically the concept of surveillance refers to the initiatives of citizens to control state power as well. This project will study the interaction between surveillance and counter surveillance in the context of border control and mobility management. One the one hand, it aims to investigate recent initiatives in Europe and the United States to digitalize border controls and to extend their operational range from a conceptual, normative and empirical point of view. On the other, it studies how ‘watch dogs’ such as NGOs and humanitarian organizations which support refugees and aim to protect privacy and human rights respond to the specific challenge of border surveillance. In addition, the project researches various initiatives by artist, activists and academics (often in combination) that aim to visualize issues relate to border control. As a result, the project aims to gain more insight in how debates in the public sphere take place in a visual and often technologically mediated way and how the digitalization of border controls affects the nature of surveillance and counter surveillance. As such, the study will offer a deeper understanding of the nature of checks and balances in contemporary highly technological democracies. In order to do so, the project will compare examples of surveillance and counter surveillance at the Southern borders of Europe and the US and identify initiatives of visualizing and counter-visualizing at the Greece-Turkey border and at the US-Mexican border.

Outline

History and philosophy of technology increasingly pay attention to the technological dimension of state formation and the technicalities of the state apparatus. In addition, studies at the intersection of philosophy of science, political philosophy and science and technology studies have emphasized that issues concerning technology and the state relate to questions of democracy as well as they affect the way citizens are included or excluded from state’s activities or the public sphere.

An area in which all these issues are present is the surveillance of borders. Technologies have highly influenced the functioning and meaning of borders and borders control. Three transformations are significant in this respect.

Firstly, border checks do not always take place at entry points such as physical frontiers, harbors and airports, but form part of a much wider area of monitoring, admission requirements and administrative processes; for example, the illegality checks done via personal data registration. Border are increasingly instruments of ‘remote control’. Arguably, the border is omnipresent, as well as portable (ID card) and virtual (databases). As a consequence, the border is not just a wall erected to protect ‘Fortress Europe’ from advancing migrants, but the EU’s new digital borders are connected through the screens of border officials, police, visa offices etc.

Secondly, border control is not only carried out by governments. There may be co-operation with, for example, medical professionals (for X-rays and DNA laboratories to determine family relations) and private business (such as the Schiphol Group, that collaborates in the program Privium on iris scans). Some policy developments in this area are also supported and driven by private industries. The ‘Homeland security market’ has grown considerably in more recent years. Border control is not only in public hands but also in professional and private hands.

Thirdly, border control increasingly targets the human body. The external characteristics of migrants are not only presented in terms of descriptions (height, eye color) in data files; actual imprints of the body such as fingerprints are increasingly finding their way into bureaucratic systems, making bodies ‘machine readable’. The body is interpreted and formatted as if it were an information storage device that simply needs to be scanned in order to be registered. The body becomes ‘the universal ID card of the future’ and indeed, the body functions more and more as a lie detector that can accuse and condemn people but also acquit them.

As a result, border control and mobility management have become part of a large scale surveillance regime. They include not only migrants of all sorts but citizens and so-called ‘trusted travellers’ as well. Policies aim to combine the free movement of people, goods, money and information with security measures to safeguard borders and prevent illegal activities. Attention gradually shifts from ‘representing’ to ‘intervening’ now that different sorts of technologies are concerned with profiling, risk analysis and pre-emptive strikes. A recent example is the ‘intelligence-driven’ approach Eurosur (European Border Surveillance System) which became operational December 2, 2013 and coordinates technologies varying from ships, helicopters and radar to biometrics and databases.

The interoperability of databases making use of biometrics combined with iris scans, GIS technology, radar images, infrared and satellite technology, and statistical risk calculation creates a surveillance network to store and exchange all kinds of data extracted from migrants and travellers. The more recent development of big data analysis is now also increasingly finding its way into public policy making. The state’s perception of reality thus becomes more technologically and statistically ‘datafied’.

This digitalization and datafication is not without consequences for the way watchdogs act. Counter surveillance can be distinguished in vigilance, denunciation and evaluation. It often takes place in decentralized and mediated ways such as by media coverage, internet forums, social media, and NGOs that act as an in between in the public sphere between states and citizens. As such, surveillance and counter surveillance do not consist of a centralized public confrontation between citizens and the state but of a distributed network of technological formats and dispersed places in which this relationship is re-enacted. This re-enactment results in a process of representing in trajectories that connect migrants, data, computers, fingerprints, bodies and civil servant. In those trajectories not only borders but also boundaries between different ‘worlds’ such as political, legal, economic, and moral regimes need to be crossed. As a result, when becoming a public affair the issue of ‘border surveillance’ is related not only to different practices and various forms of knowledge and information but also to different values and worldviews.

The increasing deployment of information technologies not only affects the nature of border controls but the checks and balances of democracies and the nature of the public sphere as well. Digitalized mobility management transforms the relationship between states and people and between policies, interventions and behavior. Technologies applied in border control and mobility management give rise to new questions since they affect migrants’ and travellers’ privacy, bodily integrity, mobility, quality of data, information storage and exchange, and opportunities for correction. In addition, a strengthening of border controls is likely to increase the risks migrants are willing to take to reach their destination.

Migration policy, border control and mobility management are fields in which a clash takes place between state surveillance and counter surveillance by NGOs and human rights organizations. As a consequence, organizations involved with the problems migrants meet in their attempts to cross borders illegally challenge governmental techniques by supplying information on the negative consequences of a restrictive and selective migration policy to media and the public at large. Examples are tactics such as mapping and counter mapping migration routes and refugee camps and the launch of interactive websites that invite the public to report casualties.

The project aims to arrive at a systematic inventory of different forms of counter surveillance and of the different ways watchdogs visualize issues related to border control and mobility management. In doing so, it will study how watchdogs are not only concerned with the representation of specific affairs and the mobilization of public attention, but are also involved with ‘issue formation’ and the shaping of ‘publics’.

Huub Dijstelbloem (dijstelbloem@gmail.com) is Professor in Philosophy of Science and Politics at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and Senior Researcher and Project Leader at the Scientific Council for Government Policy in The Hague (WRR). He studied Philosophy (MA) and Science Dynamics (MSc) in Amsterdam and in Paris at the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation (CSI, supervision: Prof Bruno Latour) of the Ecole des Mines. He completed his PhD at the UvA at the Department of Philosophy.

Huub is board member of the Netherlands Graduate Research School of Science, Technology and Modern Culture (WTMC) and of the Advisory Board of the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies (IIS) of the UvA. Earlier, he was Program Coordinator Technology Assessment at the Rathenau Institute and researcher at Sci-Quest and editor of the open access journal for contemporary philosophy Krisis. He is involved in public debates about science, technology and democracy and is one of the initiators of the movement Science in Transition.

His recent books and co-edited volumes include Bestemming gewijzigd. Moderniteit en stedelijke transformaties (2013), Migration and the New Technological Borders of Europe (Palgrave, 2011), Onzekerheid troef. Het betwiste gezag van de wetenschap (Van Gennep, 2011), Het gezicht van de publieke zaak. Openbaar bestuur onder ogen (Amsterdam University Press, 2010), De Migratiemachine (Van Gennep, 2009) Rethinking the Human Condition. Exploring Human Enhancement (Rathenau, 2008) and Politiek vernieuwen. Op zoek naar publiek in de technologische samenleving (Van Gennep, 2008).

Relevant key publications of principal investigator

Dijstelbloem, H.O. (in press, 2015). ‘Mediating the Med. Surveillance and Counter-Surveillance at the Southern Borders of Europe’, in: J de Bloois, R Celikates & Y Jansen (Eds.), Critical Perspectives on the Irregularisation of Migration in Europe; Detention, Deportation, Death. Rowman and Littlefield.
Broeders, D.W.J. & Dijstelbloem, H.O. (in press, 2015). ‘The datafication of mobility and migration management: the mediating state and its consequences’. In I Van der Ploeg & J Pridmore (Eds.), Digital Identities. Routledge.
Dijstelbloem, H. & Broeders, D. (2014). ‘Border surveillance, mobility management and the shaping of non-publics in Europe’. European Journal of Social Theory. ONLINE FIRST JUNE 2014
Dijstelbloem, H. and A. Meijer (eds.) (2011) Migration and the New Technological Borders of Europe, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.
Dijstelbloem, H., A. Meijer and M. Besters (2011) ‘The Migration Machine’, in: Dijstelbloem, H. and A. Meijer (eds.) (2011) Migration and the New Technological Borders of Europe, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.
Dijstelbloem, H. A. Meijer and F. Brom (2011) ‘Reclaiming Control over Europe’s Technological Borders’, in: Dijstelbloem, H. and A. Meijer (eds.) (2011) Migration and the New Technological Borders of Europe, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.
Dijstelbloem, H. (2009) ‘Europe’s new technological gatekeepers. Debating the deployment of technology in migration policy’ (2009), in: Amsterdam Law Forum, special issue on Privacy and Technological Development, August 2009
Dijstelbloem, H. en A. Meijer (red.) (2009) De migratiemachine. Over de rol van technologie in het migratiebeleid, Amsterdam: Van Gennep.
Dijstelbloem, H. en A. Meijer (2009) ‘Publieke aandacht voor een ongekende machine’, in: Dijstelbloem, H. en A. Meijer (red.) (2009).
Dijstelbloem, H. (2009) ‘De raderen van de migratiemachine’, in: Dijstelbloem, H. en A. Meijer (red.) (2009).

Heidrun Friese
Partire

Since the late 1990s, Lampedusa has evolved into a European borderland and a key layover for undocumented people. The tiny Italian island close to the Tunisian mainland has become – along with the Spanish enclaves Ceuta and Melilla – a prominent symbol of European migration policies, of technocratic utopias of controlling mobility, of border management and of the limits of European hospitality.

The Guardian
Le défi du réfugié : saurez vous entrer dans l’Europe forteresse ?
Serious game

Alors que le gouvernement européen rend la possibilité d’asile en Europe de plus en plus difficile, le flux de réfugiés fuyant les conflits les plus désespérés augmente. Nous vous invitons à faire les choix que les réfugiés ont à faire, et découvrir ainsi à quoi ressemble la recherche de la sécurité dans l’Europe-forteresse.

Jouer au jeu sur theguardian.com