winnie must die

Histories of the Body Serenella Martufi

Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance June 2014

1

Winnie Must Die

Transcending the Neoliberal Discourse in the Representation of the Migrant.

The human has no proper place.

The human is always the event of its multiple exposures.1

Today is the 12th of June 2014. Since the 1st of June of this year more than 5000 migrants have

been reported to have been interjected by the Italian Navy within the project Mare Nostrum in the

Mediterranean Sea.2 The island of Lampedusa, first European destination of the majority of

immigrants from Libya and the Middle East, has an overall population of 6000 inhabitants. This is

just the beginning of summer. Days are clear now, the sea is calm; this is the best time to take a

boat trip whatever the final destination might be.

When Lampedusa becomes visible from the boat, men start shaving off their beards3. There is

great enthusiasm in this practice. If there is someone with a camera on the boat, they start taking

pictures and making videos, showing victory signs with two fingers and boasting their new well-

groomed look with which they will set foot in Europe.

Unfortunately no one will notice this aesthetic effort, instead the body of migrants, their hair,

their outfits, their cheekbones, lips, eyes, make up, the concreteness of their flesh will dissolve in

discourses that generally aim to superimpose a generalizing category on their bodies. The

physicality of migrants is annihilated by referring to their presence either in terms of victimhood

or of threat. Instead of letting their bodies speak, Western representation tends to speak on

behalf of them. However even when the latter is done to protect migrants and to create greater

awareness of the geopolitical dynamics that determine migratory fluxes, there is a tendency to

1 Butler, J. (2013) Dispossession: The Performative in the Political, Conversations with Athena Anasthasiou, Polity Press

[UK/USA] p.32

2 www.marinamilitare.it

3 Naga and Milano Film Festival with the collaboration of Gabriele del Grande - Wanted but not welcome – retrieved

from http://fortresseurope.blogspot.it/2010/09/wanted-but-not-welcome.html

http://fortresseurope.blogspot.it/2010/09/wanted-but-not-welcome.html



2

provide a univocal interpretation that does not leave space for original forms of mutual

recognition between the performers and the spectators of migration.

The liberation of the figure of the migrant from a victimizing discourse is inevitably tied with the

political and social determination of recognition patterns. Judith Butler and Athena Anastahsiou

engage in a very compelling conversation on Recognition and Survival and Surviving Recognition4,

where the possibility of recognition beyond neoliberal patterns is discussed as the only real chance

for an escape from the normative and regulatory pre-imposition of identity. Judith Butler specifies

how recognition is not exactly the same as self definition or even self-determination. It designates

the situation in which one is fundamentally dependent upon terms that one never chose in order to

emerge as an intelligible being. The liberal discursive incitement to recognition as a regulatory

ideal and form of managing alterity manifests itself, in a particularly eloquent fashion, in liberal

discourses of cultural recognition.5 The liberal discourse indeed fosters the aforementioned

category of victim or threat, by closing down the space for a process of recognition that may focus

on different terms to those given by ethical and political parameters. However in mentioning

Fanon’s Black Faces White Masks6, and his personal address to “I want the world to recognize,

with me, the open door of every consciousness.”7 the dialogue between the two scholars moves to

consider the body as the ground of agency8 that makes every other body (me “you” and you

“you”) committed to regarding each and every consciousness as an open door.9 This paper is

interested in analyzing how the body of migrants, rather than their biographies can become the


[UK/USA]


[UK/USA] p. 79

6 Frantz Fanon cited in Butler, J. (2013) Dispossession: The Performative in the Political, Conversations with Athena

Anasthasiou, Polity Press [UK/USA] p. 80

7 Frantz Fanon cited in Butler, J. (2013) Dispossession: The Performative in the Political, Conversations with Athena



[UK/USA] p. 81

9 Frantz Fanon cited Butler, J. (2013) Dispossession: The Performative in the Political, Conversations with Athena




3

space for a recognition that may transcend normative neo-colonialist patterns and instead be a

catalyst in the discourse on contemporary humanness.

The body of the migrant is the terrain for a fight of a new appropriation of identity. Migrants are

like the rest of contemporary men and women dispersed and deprived of a point in absolute

time/space enjoying a physical fixed vantage point from which rationally to calculate [their]

options10. However to such regimented dispossession of identity, the body of migrants has the

means to oppose a resistance based on the concreteness of their physical experience of

geopolitical structures and dynamics. The journeys migrants make from their place of origin to

their place of arrival charges the bodies of migrants with multiple identitarian levels that go even

beyond the dispersed categories of the post-human. Dispersion is somehow appropriated by the

migrant body that is nonetheless able to pursue a clear and single objective that inherently

contests the prescribed economic and social order. During their journey migrants go from being

family members, to being escapees, to being animals, to being heroes, to being survivors, to being

workers, travellers, rebels, friends, spies, prisoners, athletes etc. etc. etc. Their identities are

concrete and so is their goal: entering Fortress Europe or crossing the US border. Once they are on

the other side, the game of identity continues again in very practical terms, toying with

international regulations and linguistic prejudices. Exploiting the ignorance of the system of

arrival, they often pretend to be from countries that they are not, because they are aware of

different international agreements, hence the possibility of being accepted as a refugee or as an

asylum seeker instead of risking being deported back to the point of departure.11 Identity becomes

an even more fluid concept than what contemporary society prescribes in general. The body is

instead the really concrete term of identification and recognition of migrants.

In consideration of such liquid shifts of identity then the language of representation of the migrant

needs to find ways to express the rhizomatic constellation of signs that the bodies of migrants

bring forward. Indeed by referring to migrants solely in terms of victims or of threats, Western

10

Mark Postner cited in Jones, A. (1998) Body Art- Performing the subject, University of Minnesota Press

[Minneapolis: USA] p.200

11 Gatti, F. (2007) Bilal, Rcs Libri [Milan: Italy] pp. 297-333



4

representation only focuses on the identity of migrants in its abstract form, disregarding the

physicality of the experience of migration. The dichotomy that could instead open up subversive

processes of resignification of contemporary bodies in space could instead focus on the duality

body-identity where the latter is enclosed in the former as the flesh is “a physical membrane that

sheds and reconstitutes itself continually, the flesh is never always the same material but always a

contour in process; the flesh exists provisionally both as a permeable, shifting, physical perimeter, a

limbic surround of virtual containment, and as the visible trace of the human body (whose contours

are never stable in one’s or another’s visual field). Metaphorically as well as materially, the flesh is

an envelope, a “limit” inscribing the juncture between inside and outside but also the site for their

joining”.12

The bodies of migrants, the site for joining between the inside and the outside, between

experience and geopolitical order, could thus represent an opportunity for contemporary

humanness to reflect upon its position within institutionalized structures of power. If migrants are

exposed to a confrontation with the West rather than being mediated through pre-emptive

linguistic structures, the space of relation with their bodies can be an opportunity to regain control

of the concreteness of bodies and through this, challenge and resignify the identitarian categories

that push humanness towards the void of abstractness. The dispersed subject is indeed potentially

progressive for women and other subjects historically excluded from the privileged category of

“individual”.13 Therefore an open representation of the migrant can be an occasion for a poiesis

that by opening a space for an independent process of recognition, may subvert the contemporary

dynamics of dispossession, that affect all those individualities that stand beyond patriarchal post-

colonial Western categories.14

12

Jones, A. (1998) Body Art- Performing the subject, University of Minnesota Press [Minneapolis: USA] p.205

13 Jones, A. (1998) Body Art- Performing the subject, University of Minnesota Press [Minneapolis: USA] pp. 197-240

14 Jones, A. (1998) Body Art- Performing the subject, University of Minnesota Press [Minneapolis: USA] p.203



5

1. Who are you?

Postmodernism has challenged the Cartesian syllogism Cogito ergo sum to land on the I think

therefore I hesitate15. The techno-subject of contemporariness is indeed “intimately connected to

the multiplicitous subjectivities put into play by movements critiquing the modernist “individual”, it

is embodied yet multiple and insistently particularized according to various shifting coordinates of

identity that specify its cultural positioning”16 . If the representation of the Western body has been

engaging with this dispersion at least since the 1990s17 the representation of “the other” when

this other is not yet absorbed in the social categories of the West is often still linked to univocal

strands of expression. As previously mentioned, these modalities of representation move along

two vectors either of threat or of victim. The former are clearly linked to anti-immigration

imageries that in order to promote the monolithic image of those who they allegedly represent,

resort to a univocal threatening representation of the migrant as a menace for the established

order and for social well-being. The recent success of nationalistic parties at the European

elections is very informative of the necessity for some portions of the Western population to

assert a definite identity to oppose to that of “others”. I know who I am and therefore I know who

you are. This game of close-circuit recognition allows for what Achille Mbembe defines

necropolitics18 which determines who can be wasted and who cannot; it distinguishes those who

are disposable from those who are not; and it does so in both spectacular and quotidian ways,

insistently and insinuatingly.19 The dispossession of migrants thus works by rendering certain

subjects, communities, or populations unintelligible, by eviscerating the conditions of possibility for

life and the “human” itself.20 At the level of recognition thus anti-immigration representation

15

Gamboa cited in Jones, A. (1998) Body Art- Performing the subject, University of Minnesota Press [Minneapolis:

USA] p.197

16 Jones, A. (1998) Body Art- Performing the subject, University of Minnesota Press [Minneapolis: USA] p.199

17 Jones, A. (1998) Body Art- Performing the subject, University of Minnesota Press [Minneapolis: USA] pp. 197- 240

18 Mbembe, A. cited in Butler, J. (2013) Dispossession: The Performative in the Political, Conversations with Athena








6

makes migrants unintelligible beings, therefore closing any space for independent processes of

intelligibility between performers and viewers of migrations.

The question who are you and therefore who am I? is definitely answered pre-emptively for the

spectator of anti-immigration representations of migration. However it seems that a very similar a

priori process of recognition also insinuates those modalities of representation of migrants that

depict immigrants as victims of the geopolitical reality we live in. By reviewing a number of

documentaries on immigration and on the conditions of migrants when they land in Europe there

is evidence of a consistent victimization of the migrant which dangerously complies with an

“ongoing post-colonial subjection and dispossession[which] are further legitimized, normalized,

and regulated through, and in the name of, discourses of reconciliation, which work to represent

indigenous peoples as silent sufferers. The representation of the migrant that aims at stimulating

sympathy, rage, guilt, despair in the viewer unfortunately closes the possibility of autonomous

engagement of the spectator with the subjects of the documentary. Interestingly the documentary

Ces sont des hommes21 (These are humans) produced within the Anarchical movement No

Borders, which therefore should ideologically reject prescribed patterns of individual recognition,

complies in its very title with the neo-colonial representation of the silent sufferers “Don’t you see

that they are humans too? How can you treat them like this?”. The title thus accentuates a

passivity of the migrant as opposed to the all-determining power of the neo-colonial system.

Therefore, the documentary effectively denies migrants the possibility to stand in an autonomous

confrontation with Western “spectators”. The documentary does not leave space for any mutual

process of recognition, indeed although the title probably aims at establishing a reciprocal terrain

for intelligibility, accentuating the likeness of being human between migrants and spectators.

A representation that prescribes an identitarian term effectively makes the body of the migrant

dither towards the abstractness of the bureaucralist system, chipping the edge that migrants have

in terms of autological determination of the presence of their body in space. If migrants’

occupation and movement within public space is portrayed exclusively as an act of desperation as

opposed to a concrete resignification of public space, the subversive potential of their presence

21

Matthieu Quillet (2010) Ces sont des homes [France] retrieved from

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xbihbm_ce-sont-des-hommes-film-d-1h-sur-ca_news




7

that demands a response from the Western viewer, is instead lost in a dynamic of pre-emptive

and institutionalized categorization of identities.

The biographical element22 is a further angle adopted in many representations of migration,

similarly to a title such as Ces sont des hommes, often the personal story of the migrant is used as

some sort of leverage to generate compassion and sympathy. The problem with biography is

fundamentally one of proportions. Indeed when the microcosm of an individual account is used to

express the magnitude of the injustice of the geopolitical system, the story is almost swallowed by

the capitalist macrocosm. A personal account narrating experiences, feelings, fears, aspirations,

etcetera reduces the space for a recognition that may go beyond the dichotomy victim-threat, as

spectators are not left free to do much more than acknowledging the sufferings of another person.

The distance between the two stays unvaried. There might be some cases of identification or

empathy but fundamentally the identity of the spectator is not modified by the encounter. Mine is

a different story.

“Seeking to attain “knowledge” of the other/the object of art through the masculinist politics of the

gaze, the “viewer” is faced with the impossibility of this search: when she seeks this knowledge

through vision, she always already sees only through (herself)”23

2. Noli me tangere

When the bodies of migrants meet Western bodies there is an experiential gap that can be

difficultly filled by univocal representations. Indeed the terms of the confrontation almost belong

to two different moments of the history of the body. Besides the extremely physical experience of

the journey that the “iconographic migrants”24 make to reach the West, there is the experience

prior to that of physical violence and consequently of the physicality of punishment. If in the West

22 Augugliaro, A., Del Grande, G., Soliman, K. (2014) Io sto con la sposa (On the bride’s side), trailer retrived

from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dv93D83aps4

23 Jones, A. (1998) Body Art- Performing the subject, University of Minnesota Press [Minneapolis: USA]

p.209

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dv93D83aps4



8

the “spectacle of the scaffold” has long been suppressed in favour of a more representational type

of punishment25, in many countries of origin of the great fluxes of migration – especially towards

Europe- the experience of physical violence and of torture is still a reality. Once again then the

concreteness inscribed in migrating bodies clashes with the abstractness experienced by Western

bodies in terms of control and coercion.

Sensorial representation has been used to try filling in the experiential gap between the

performers and spectators of migration. Tamara L. Underiner shares her experience and analysis

of the Caminata (The Journey) Simulated border crossing26 that takes place in the town of El

Alberto in Mexico. Briefly, the indigenous community of El Alberto has developed a participatory

performance of the border crossing between Mexico and the United States. As Underiner explains,

although one of the aims of the Caminata is to generate an “embodied empathy with migrants and

against a certain class-based disdain for those who emigrate”27 this immersive entertainment28

has many other objectives too including the identitarian assertion of the local Hñäñú community -

linked with the Zapatista struggle against the Mexican government-, a spiritual catharsis given by

the experience of border crossing and finally the economic perks brought to the town of El Alberto

by this performative initiative.29

Underiners’ account and reflections on the repeated experience of the Caminata30 are very

interesting when analyzing the relationship between viewer and performers of migrations. In this

circumstance spectators are indeed transformed in performers, who physically experience the

25

Foucault, M. (1991) Discipline and Punishment, The Birth of the Prison Penguin Books [England] (Original work

published in France in 1975)

26 Underimer, T.L.(2011) Playing at Border Crossing in an Indigenous Mexican Community…Seriously, The

Drama Review, June

27 Underimer, T.L.(2011) Playing at Border Crossing in an Indigenous Mexican Community…Seriously, The Drama

Review, June p. 29


Review, June


Review, June p. 30

30 Tamara L. Underiner participated to the Caminata five times.



9

ordeal of border crossing. However the question that rises from such a projection of the

physicality of the migrant onto that of the tourist, once again has to do with the level of

autonomous space given to spectators to effectively engage in a process of recognition with

migrants. Tamara Underiner discusses how the Caminata “alters the relationships that typically

prevail not only between “performers” and “audience” but also between the sheltered privilege of

spectatorship and the vulnerability of the marginal-as-staged.”31 Despite not having taken part to

the performance, and thus not having experienced the exposure that Underiner refers to in terms

of participation, when reading on her personal intimate experience of being “protected a little too

amorously” 32 by one of the guides, what was striking to read was her respectful “in-role” response

and the subsequent intellectualization of what was happening33. Then it is legitimate to wonder to

what extent the extremely immersive performance actually allowed performers/spectators to

truly engage with the violence ad the physicality of border crossing; it seems that the pre-emptive

signification of all symbols of migration determines a response that still distances the migrant

from the Western observer. It is certainly an effective make-believe, and the article insists on how

the experience does change people, and especially people’s attitudes towards migration. However

this modification reproduces the dichotomic pattern victim/threat of the silent indigenous sufferer

and the guilty “I am a supporter of illegal immigration, whether I want to be or not34.”

The Caminata does effectively comply with the neo-colonialist order, as it dangerously puts

forward identatitarian claims for the indigenous Hñäñú, that despite wishing to offer a new

understanding of modernity, where the indigenous is not marginal, this very aim reinforces the

given neoliberal order that requires a marginal population to exploit as workforce and onto whom

apply its concrete power over life and death. This said, sensorial performances can probably be

strategies to reconsider the representation of migration. If “between the senses and language the

31

Underimer, T.L.(2011) Playing at Border Crossing in an Indigenous Mexican Community…Seriously, The Drama

Review, June p. 17


Review, June p. 27


Review, June p.27


Review, June p.30



10

difference is often of degree not one in kind”35, experimenting with sensorial exposure can be a

way to open a space between the West and migrants that may be free of linguistic and geopolitical

superstructures, and that attempts to establish a recognition based on the physicality of

humanness. Especially if, as in this work, the physicality of migrants is considered a vector of

potential resignification of the relationship between contemporary dispersed bodies and space.

3. Winnie must die.

o you, o my body36 and Fanon opens a space for dialogue towards a “you,” it does so in such a way

that the other body becomes capable of addressing a you as well. This is where linguistic agency,

responding, and talking back become possible37. This opening of a space for dialogue between the

body of migrants and that of Western spectators is successfully accomplished in the work Burial of

Ten Workers38 by Santiago Sierra. This was performed in the winter of 2010 on a beach near

Livorno and the documentation was exhibited later the same year in Livorno. Currently the work is

available on Santiago Sierra’s website.39 Differently to the majority of other works documented on

the artist’s website which are a collection of separated stills of his performances or videos, Burial

of Ten Workers is presented as a slideshow of five images rotating continuously without giving the

spectator the possibility to have control over the images. This seemingly minor detail is very

informative of the position in which Sierra puts the spectator. The latter is indeed forced to an

inexorable course of events as much as the ten workers that the artist gradually buries under the

sand. Considering that the work is only available in a mediated form, the choice of making the

spectator as constricted as the performer is a very powerful strategy to immediately create a

common experiential ground. The latter does not and cannot pretend to reproduce the same

bodily experience between spectators and performers, but instead it translates physical

35 Lepecky, A. and Banes, S. (2007) The senses in performance, Routledge [New York: USA] p.7





38 Sierra, S. (February 2010) Burial of Ten Workers [Calabrone: Italy] retrieved from http://www.santiago-

sierra.com/201001_1024.php?key=4

39 www.santiagosierra.com

http://www.santiago-sierra.com/201001_1024.php?key=4




11

constriction to terms that can be relevant to the two different contexts of performers and

spectators. The ten workers cannot move because the sand is trapping them, spectators cannot

move because the images are changing at a speed beyond their control, hence they have to stay

for a set amount of time in order to see the work. This dynamic is consistent in the whole work, in

the sense that Sierra, contrarily to much representation of migration, does not ask spectators to

feel like immigrants or to emphasize with them, instead he generates an array of signs that

stemming from an objective concreteness (landscape, body, pose, angle of the camera, title of the

work) reverberate in the two directions of migrants and spectators to generate a meaning that is

not set, and that especially cannot exist without the presence of both linguistic agents.

The ten buried workers are not up to their heads in the sand talking at us of their condition and

exhibiting their biography, they are not Winnie40, they are actually her absolute death. Spectators

are not told anything they are simply placed in front of a set of carefully designed images as well

as being open to unpredictable modifications in the landscape. The signs that Sierra put in the

image are not at all univocal, and any spectator will inevitably read into them differently.

Moreover the order of the images, as much as it is chronological, manages to raise the question of

linearity of time, as what is seemingly the first picture, the empty beach in front of an horizon

shared with an industrial port, also becomes the last picture that allows inferring the complete

burial and death of all ten workers. This interpretation that I just gave reflects exactly the space of

poieis that Sierra’s work creates. The subjectivity of interpretation is allowed to roam freely in the

work, telling me a lot about myself and my imagery, through the body of migrants. Indeed, in this

work specifically, but also in a number of other works41 Sierra is capable of placing spectators in a

position that from their individuality can cover the whole arch of signification expressed by

“universal” signifiers, effectively liberating viewers from the limits of biography and launching

40

The reference to the character of Happy Days by Samuel Beckett was considered suitable both for the image of the

performance and for the linguistic strategy adopted by Sierra that is consistent with the theme of Beckett’s play.

41 For further examples of Sierra’s work in the same direction see 133 people paid to have their hair dyed

blond, Arsenale, Venice, Italy, June 2001 http://www.santiago-sierra.com/200103_1024.php?key=4 and

Wall Enclosing a Space, Spanish Pavilion, Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, 2003 June http://www.santiago-

sierra.com/200303_1024.php?key=4






12

their participation in a mythical dimension.42 This space is very interesting in terms of recognition

processes and also in relation to those interpretations of Sierra’s work that describe his relational

dynamics as antagonistic.43 The extreme responses that the artist’s work can generate can

probably be interpreted as successful attempts to bring spectators besides themselves, by

trapping them in a forced responsive disposition with the other: “The self here does not refer to

an autological and “self”-contained individuality, but rather to responsive dispositions towards

becoming with one-another, as they are manifested, for example, in the various affects that throw

us “out of joint” and “besides ourselves”, such as indignation, despair, desire, outrage and hope.”44

To express how the piece Ten Buried Workers makes the bodies of migrants recognizable as

potentially subversive figures and catalysts for a wider reflection of contemporary humanness, I

will necessarily have to resort to my participatory response to the work. As a middle-class Italian

citizen I cannot ignore the choice of Sierra to refer to the ten bodies on the beach as workers,

which I read as a multi-layered intention of the author. As the performance takes place in Livorno,

the workers who are all black, are most definitely immigrants who Sierra raises to the (allegedly)

highest social category of my country that in the first article of its constitution states that Italy is a

republic founded on labour.45 In terms of definition then there should be no social difference

between (Italian) spectators and the Ten Workers, which is itself a strong statement in a country

where labour and immigration are the two most problematic issues that politics is proving

incapable of dealing with. In the burial of the ten workers then there is the metonymic burial of all

Italian workers. The aforementioned physical constriction then acquires even more meaning as it

expands its signification not only to the bodies of spectators and performers but also to their

position within the Italian social fabric. The piece contains a number of such mutually involving

signs, notably the choice of placing the work on a beach where the horizon is parted between

infiniteness and an industrial shipping site. This part closure of the horizon can thus speak

simultaneously of the arrivals and departures to and from the sea, which can equally refer to

42

Barthes, R. (1993) Mythologies, (Lavers A. trans.) Vintage (Original work published in 1957)

43 Bishop, Claire Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics p.71

44 Butler, J. (2013) Dispossession: The Performative in the Political, Conversations with Athena Anasthasiou, Polity

Press [UK/USA] p.

45 Art.1 Costituzione Italiana “L’Italia è un paese fondato sul lavoro”.



13

immigration and emigration fluxes. The former seeing the arrival of workforce from the South of

the world to Italy and the latter relating to the “brain drain”46 of the youth of the country. In one

of the stills there is a man walking past the burial that does not turn his head towards the scene

but instead carries on in his direction probably following a dog (he seems to be holding a leash). If

the category of workers is considered as applicable to both viewers and performers, then the

ignorance of the man on the beach speaks to me of both the conscious disregarding of the public

opinion of the genocide of migrants that is occurring in the Mediterranean Sea – the same sea in

front of which the workers are standing, and suffocation being the same cause of death – and also

of the effective carelessness with which the topic of unemployment is being addressed in Italian

work policies.

In the use that Sierra makes of migrants bodies, there is then an element of subversion given by

the choice of referring to a “category” in physical terms rather than in abstract ones. Migrants are

actually being buried and represented as buried, however through their physicality, Sierra is

concretising the abstract issue of work that affects the whole population of spectators. The Burial

of Ten Workers then becomes a vector for a broader discourse on “the slavery” of labour and the

physical constrictions (immigration/emigration) determined by the capitalist system which

imbricates those inside and outside Fortress Europe in very similar ways. With the difference that

migrants physically show the signs of the geopolitical constriction whereas spectators are

engaging with the system on mainly abstract terms, determining their impossibility to turn their

grievances in a bodily form.47

It seems that there is a presence implied by the idea of bodily-exposure, which can become the

occasion of subjugation or acknowledgement. The coercive exposure of bodies at checkpoints or

other sites of intensified surveillance can be one instance of the former.[…] We can say that at

these instances the person who must pass through check point is “present” in a way that Is bound

up with subjugation. But similarly when acts of resistance happen at the check point, when bodies

46

Term used to describe the mass emigration of young professionals from Italy to Northern Europe and to countries

with greater possibilities of professional recognition.

47 Demonstrations are a kind of bodily form however they are also very determined in terms of spatial presence

structure and choreography.



14

show up or move through ways that are not allowed, or when communities form on either sides to

limit or counter military practices, a kind of presence occurs.

Conclusion

The representation of migration is closely linked with the recognition that the migrant undergoes

when entering the Western Fortress. Neo-colonialism determines who and when is worthy of

recognition as a human; in the case of migrants this recognition as humans is given only to the

extent that as “victims” they must be thankful for normalization within a capitalist legal, economic

and social system. Effectively the regimentalization of migrants corresponds to a their subjection

to the condition of cheap and un-righteous workforce. Despite some legal and welfare

consequences the recognition of the migrant within a bureaucralist system does not engage in a

dialogue with the presence of the migrant, but is carries out a univocal discourse based on the

economic and normative necessities of the West.

The indigenous, colonized subject – as a discursive by-product of the colonialist historical condition,

knowledge, and imagination – is absolutely deprived of any of the kind of mutuality that the very

possibility of formulating the political claim of recognition would require. A certain self-alteration

would thus be necessary for the emancipation of the colonized from the colonial order.48

In order to modify the terms of representation of migrants, one of the possible alterations lays in

the realm of linguistics. Indeed the migrant needs to be considered one of the two dialogic agents,

where the concept of “otherness” is treated as a mutually altering factor. For this reason in order

to open up a space of mutual recognition that may transcend prescribed identitarian attributions,

the representation should aim to move on terrains where dialogue can develop outside

experiential individuality but instead transforming personal biography into a door to consciousness

that may reflect on the human in absolute terms. The encounter between the performing migrant

and the spectator must then occur in a space where both linguistic agents are given an

opportunity of participation that can generate an autonomous recognition of the other. Only by

refusing the dichotomic image of the migrant as a victim or as a threat can Western viewers also

48

Butler, J. (2013) Dispossession: The Performative in the Political, Conversations with Athena Anasthasiou, Polity

Press [UK/USA] p.78



15

emancipate themselves from a superimposed recognition as either producers or consumers. The

subversive trespassing of institutional demarcations of space can be the cue for Western bodies to

reflect on the physical possibilities that their own bodies offer them to defy a neoliberal definition

of the world in terms of phantoms and abstract entities, against which the body does not know

how to rebel.



16

Bibliography

Barthes, R. (1993) Mythologies, (Lavers A. trans.) Vintage (Original work published in 1957)

Bishop, Claire Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics

Butler, J. (2013) Dispossession: The Performative in the Political, Conversations with Athena

Anasthasiou, Polity Press [UK/USA]

Foucault, M. (1991) Discipline and Punishment, The Birth of the Prison Penguin Books [England]

(Original work published in France in 1975)

Jones, A. (1998) Body Art- Performing the subject, University of Minnesota Press [Minneapolis: USA]

Lepecky, A. and Banes, S. (2007) The senses in performance, Routledge [New York: USA]

Gatti, F. (2007) Bilal, Rcs Libri [Milan: Italy]

Underimer, T.L.(2011) Playing at Border Crossing in an Indigenous Mexican Community…Seriously, The Drama

Review, June p.30

Websites

www.dailymotion.com/video/xbihbm_ce-sont-des-hommes-film-d-1h-sur-ca_news

www.fortresseurope.blogspot.it

www.marinamilitare.it

www.santiagosierra.com


http://www.fortresseurope.blogspot.it/

http://www.marinamilitare.it/

http://www.santiagosierra.com/

winnie must die

Documents