Volume 3. No. 1. Winter 2009/10
ISSN 1752-6388

Counter-Geographies in the Sahara

Ursula Biemann

To engage in a discussion of why geography has been so important for the development of my artistic practice, I need to think back to the moment when I entered the professional world, for it encapsulated the early conjunction between geography and visual culture. By the late 1980s, when I graduated from art school, discourse on art was already considerably “contaminated” by other theoretical currents – such as ethnography, urbanism, cultural and media studies, post-colonial criticism and feminist theories – which did not only represent new content but also provided instruments for reformulating the domain of symbolic production. It had become evident that art theory would no longer be the sole frame of reference for an aesthetic practice which would now have to position itself in relation to other terrains of knowledge production. This important discursive expansion coincided with the vigorous onset of globalization processes and a turn, in the arts, towards content-oriented work, enabling precisely this connection of diverse strands of critical interpretation. I sensed the necessity of developing an aesthetic practice that could respond to this complex and rather unique condition.

My videos and writings of the last ten years chronicle two parallel processes: first, the process of discerning a political and geographical area of interest for my art practice – e.g. the gendered, international labour division along the Mexican border – and, second, the process of tracing out a research field at the juncture of different forms of knowledge production where this practice could be situated. My simultaneous engagement with the geopolitical and social transformations that have been induced by globalization, and with the form in which these could be addressed in the expanded aesthetic field, are conceptually related. It doesn’t surprise that the deregulation of an entrenched world order profoundly troubles the categories and methodologies through which this order has been established and maintained. The emerging protocol for this new world disorder is the unfettered transgression of borders between genres and beyond the boundaries of conventional disciplines. These two ongoing processes – with parallel effects on geography and knowledge regimes – are connected and hinge, in my work, on the concept of the border.1

The proliferation of academic and visual work on border issues witnessed the beginning of geography turning into a major reference for organizing these new and complex contents. Many artists expressed a certain fascination with reinforced border regimes which emerged first along the US-Mexico border, later along the Eastern and Southern borders of the EU. From the beginning, I have been somewhat suspicious about the utility of documenting border fences and impressive surveillance technologies. It seems to me that even from a critical perspective, the focus on the line and its militarization cannot help but reproduce and reinforce the divisive force of the border as a concept. My various border videos are geographic projects in the sense that they engage in a process of visualizing spatial relations. When geography is understood as a spatialization of the dynamic social and economic relationships connecting local systems to the transnational, it becomes clear why border geographies are the site of extreme compression at all levels. Border areas like the Spanish-Moroccan borderlands I document in the video Europlex (2003), are given their cultural meaning predominantly by being traversed: by container ships en route from West Africa to the Mediterranean, by boats transporting migrants on their perilous nocturnal journeys, by helicopter patrols keeping watch, by radio waves and radar lines, by itinerant plantation workers who pick vegetables for the EU market, by commuting housemaids going to work for the señoras in Andalusia, by border-guard patrols along the mountain paths, by buses transporting Moroccan women to Tangier where they peel Dutch shrimps to be shipped back to Holland, by pirates who procure goods from China and by women smugglers who tie these goods up under their skirts and carry them into the medina. This is the mobility I am concerned with in this video – the everyday mobility lived out on a local level, to produce micro-geographies that are deeply intermeshed with one another while reflecting a global schema.


Smuggling activities around the border of the Spanish enclaves in Morocco, Europlex,2003.

Territories of Transit
In later projects I have attempted to develop this notion of geography both as social practice and organizing system.  Sahara Chronicle (2006-2007), for instance, is a collection of videos on the modalities and orientations of migration across the Sahara; it chronicles the sub-Saharan exodus towards Europe as a social practice embedded in local and historical conditions. The project introduces the migration system as an arrangement of pivotal sites, each of which have a particular function in the striving for migratory autonomy, as well as in the attempts made by diverse authorities to contain and manage these movements. Video documents include the transit migration hub of Agadez and Arlit in Niger; Tuareg border guides in the Libyan desert; military patrols along the Algero-Moroccan frontier in Oujda; the Mauritanian port of Nouadhibou on the border to the Polisario Front; the deportation prison in Laayoune, Western Sahara.


Migrants using the iron ore train along the border between Mauritania and the Polisario Front in Western Sahara, Sahara Chronicle, 2006-2007

With its loose interconnectedness and its widespread geography, Sahara Chronicle mirrors the migration network itself. It does not intend to construct a homogenous, overarching, contemporary narrative of a phenomenon that has long roots in colonial Africa and is extremely diverse and fragile in its present social organization and human experience. No authorial voice, or any other narrative device, is used to tie the carefully-chosen scenes together; the full structure of the network comes together solely in the mind of the viewer who mentally draws connecting lines between the nodes at which migratory intensity is bundled.

This text is not primarily intended to interpret these videos; rather, it is a place for making some further reflections about the politics of visual practice with regard to migration, with a particular emphasis on illegal migration. It is also a place for offering some of the connections and insights acquired in the field about the nature of this sophisticated migration network, the intersection of resources and migration routes and the entanglement of migration and sustainability in the Sahara.

As part of the massive economic and political diaspora of our world of transnational capitalism, migrant workers uniquely embody the condition of cultural displacement and social discrimination. But, the task of a political aesthetics today is not to capture an image that best symbolizes our times; rather than positing the ultimate image, the task is to intervene effectively in current flows of representation, their narratives and framing devices. In some instances, the accepted story needs to be undone and we should not get anxious about reassembling it into another story too soon. The preferred mode of signification in Sahara Chronicle, therefore, is fragmentation and disassembly.

The project contains an undefined number of videos, which are never shown all at once, since there is always something unknown, hidden and incomplete about clandestine migration. My preferred way of showing them is in the form of an installation, whereby some videos are projected and others can be viewed on monitors, creating a multi-perspective audiovisual environment that can be inhabited by viewers, in much the same way that migration space is inhabited by the actors depicted.


Sahara Chronicle installation at Helmhaus Zurich, Switzerland, 2009

Imaging clandestinity
The western media has a very peculiar way of representing clandestine migration to Europe. It directs its spotlight on the failure of the stranded migrants (the “Naufragés”) and celebrates police efforts which successfully apprehend transgressors; victorious passages go undocumented. The media seems to succumb to every temptation of condensing reality into a symbol, thrusting the whole issue into discursive disrepair. In a perpetual loop, television clips capture the state of being intercepted, caught in a process of never reaching the destination, a freeze-frame of the Raft of the Medusa drifting off the shores of Senegal. In cinematographic language, this fixed spatial determination is simply called ‘a shot,’ suggesting that the real is no longer represented but targeted. In the staccato of television news, this particular shot becomes the symbol that encapsulates the meaning of the entire drama. It is evident that complex social relations are not negotiated in this frantic manner. Apart from the time compression, which creates an immense discrepancy between representation and social reality, there is something seriously inadequate about this robotic viewpoint when it is directed at the shifting and precarious movements of life.

But the mundane truth behind the trauma-like recurrence might be that these images are not the outcome of intense aesthetic reflection but the convenient product of current media politics under the strain of growing competition. Since their mission is to cover events rather than explain conditions, news channels do not see why they should send out expensive camera teams to remote desert towns in the Western Sahara or Niger, unless some drastic event makes these places internationally newsworthy. So we are likely to be presented with the lazy and less costly version of the story that only covers the most visible end points of a long journey. But there are not only practical explanations for this. The invisible operations – which effectively remain unknown to us thanks to these news strategies – contain another, perhaps quite unsettling, dimension of clandestine migration. 


Main figures in the clandestine migration system channeling West Africans through the desert. Site: desert truck terminal in Agadez, Niger. Sahara Chronicle, 2006-2007

Illegalized migration has become a shadowy, supplementary system, organizing a transitory moment in life. Many migrants completely break with older notions of place, coming to embody the kind of boundlessness that needs to be concealed and rigorously disavowed for it has created an undesirable disorder in global civil society by pushing an immense liminal zone into a neatly mapped post-colonial order, half-way between no longer defined worlds. Through this unspeakable stateless movement, the clandestine traveler emerges only in the imagery of defense and segregation – identity cards, police frame-ups, prison mug-shots, newspaper pictures of fugitives, CCTV monitors and digital identification software – conveying the paradox of making a process visible while keeping it in the forbidden spectrum.

Invisibility is, no doubt, an invaluable resource in the undercover transportation racket, which assumes a certain ambivalence in bringing a clandestine network to light. On the one hand, it obviously functions most effectively when it remains unknown; on the other hand, it illuminates the psychic dimension of the role that these “unruly others,” these “outlaws,” play in stabilizing the phantasmic civil norms that regulate mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. This subliminal dimension of the clandestine realm harbors a disturbing, but possibly productive, moment, if it can lead to a reconsideration of discriminating categories in civil society. When so many people are beyond, between or on a waiting list for citizenship, there is a need to conceive of a different mode of dwelling in this world. Trans-local existence brings to light this unfinished side of citizenship.

Evidence and artifice
Sahara Chronicle includes a number of records of the more or less successful efforts at keeping the fluctuating migration currents through Morocco, Mauritania and Libya in check, by means ranging from off-road patrols in border terrain to aerial surveys by propeller planes and high-tech surveillance drones. Engaging with this politics of containment sucked me right into the gigantic visualizing apparatus and made me a part of it.

One of the records follows the border brigades in the Algero-Moroccan frontier-land, where they half-heartedly poke around popular hiding places for clandestinos near the train tracks. Nobody was found that day, but the colonel in charge of the area was pleased to demonstrate the efforts made by the royal brigades in impeding migration flows to Europe. As their budget is barely enough to cover one surveillance flight per week in the vast desert areas around border cities like Oujda or Laayoune, I didn’t want to initiate an extra flight for aerial filming that would risk the detection of a group of clandestine migrants hiding in the dunes.

The police were willing to give me the photographs they had taken on previous tours; these pictures have a different status from the frames I would have shot from the same plane, functioning as evidence for use within the confidential circuits of police investigation. They capture the moment between recognition and possible disciplinary action. A simultaneous role as witness and record endows these images with a juridical effect, providing evidence of infringement and the occasion for judgment and deportation. Integrating these photographs in my artwork further contributes to the process of exposing the furtive act to the public, bringing it out into the open and positioning the viewer as both voyeur-witness and moral judge of the scene. However, the scrolling text in the video thwarts the fantasy of a potent vision, which has the power to evict, by introducing a thriving solidarity between the transiting migrants and the local populations. Moroccan carpenters have started to prefabricate boat kits, which can be quickly assembled by migrants in their desert hideouts. Distanced judgment is baffled here by a sense of local complicity.

Another video is dedicated to some of the most high-tech surveillance technologies currently being deployed on military missions, from the war in Iraq to the Saharan desert front. Libya has received the newest models of unmanned airplanes from Germany, in return for their active demonstration of hindering migration flux to Europe. These drones glide over the desert borders, transmitting televisual data back to a remote receiver in real time. Other observation machines are equipped with night vision and thermal cameras, extending surveillance into realms invisible to the human eye.


Digital montage of a surveillance desert drone image, Sahara Chronicle, 2006-2007

Colonel Muammar Kadhafi’s military department was not as cooperative as the Moroccan brigades in handing its visual intelligence to me, but we can safely assume that the images produced by these drones are no longer film-based photography like the ones used in Moroccan aerial reconnaissance. They are more likely to be computer generated, able to create visual imagery from recorded data, thus transposing things located outside the spectrum of visibility into a readable image. These technologies have created new ways in which an image can be linked to an actual object; the indexical linkage required in previous concepts of documentary realism has been traded for new methods of attaining and validating empirical knowledge.2 Aerial photography is inscribed in a different discourse than the images composed by optical devices onboard desert drones, since they stand for radically different interpretations of reality; the drone images are simulacra used as representation.

Lack of source material meant that I had to artificially construct it from high-resolution satellite images of the Libyan desert. The soundtrack is composed of many layers of recordings from Saharan and Middle Eastern radio and TV stations, mixed with electronic sounds, music fragments and winds. This artificial videography addresses the important fact that migratory space cannot simply be documented by conventional video-making on the ground. We need to enter the more ethereal strata of signal territories created by the streaming of images and the diffusion of sounds and information – territories with a relentless and excessive meaning production.

The abstraction of these images is offset in yet another video, with sequences of the hard reality experienced by those who have no visa to the borderless world of signs. The over-crowded deportation center in a former colonial prison in Laayoune, Western Sahara, offers a sight that propels you back two hundred years into a somber past. Close your eyes and you can hear the chains jangle. The main light source is a barred skylight, a hole in the roof through which a harsh stream of sunlight pierces the sweaty gloom, making every mosquito and every grain of dust dance in front of your eyes. Slowly getting used to the scene, you see starvation, weakness, disease and sun-scorched eyes; none of this matters when the goal is in sight, but it is excruciating to bear when hope has slid away. The only traces of the migrants’ trajectories are the fragile architectures they had built in the remote desert dunes during the days and weeks of holding out while water stocks were running low. The aerial photographs show that, around some of these shelters, an area is marked by stones like the outline of a garden or a place for prayer, as if the deadly expanse was a place too vast to comprehend.

A network run by a transnational tribe
The core of Sahara Chronicle, however, is set in one of the truck terminals for desert crossing in Agadez3 The town, at the heart of Niger, is the southern gate to the Saharan basin for the main routes coming from West Africa; it is a major trans-Saharan trading center, and capital of the Tuareg. Saharan people live in open space, mobility is everything in this geography. They have developed different methods of mastering the terrain. Of necessity, life is lean. And portable. Tuareg culture has worked out a system of information, a specific topographic literacy, with itineraries and means of communication. They are GPS embodied. In this environment, orientation makes all the difference between drifting and traveling, between fate and destination. In their minds, prosperity and power is located in movement rather than bounded territory.

The video documents the great departure of the “Exodés,” those many young men and few young women from West Africa on a quest for a better life in the Maghreb, or, in a more distant, blurry vision, in Europe. In contrast to the images of failed arrival, these scenes show the moment of potentiality at which anything seems possible. The excitement about the risky outcome of their adventure is very tangible among the passengers. What unites them is the common goal of accessing the labour markets in the north.

In joining this greater venture, they contribute to an elaborate system of information exchange, routing and social organization that spans the immense Saharan region and, in doing so, create a translocal space that will exist for as long as these social practices last. As a human network it is distinct from those facilitated by permanent material infrastructures, such as rails or fiberglass; it is a vibrant process of spatialization performed by the psychic dynamics of desire and anxiety – a web made of obstinacy and vulnerability.

What we witness is a large-scale geographic reconfiguration, activated by growing practices of migration which are highly flexible – proficient at rerouting, reorganizing and going covert in record time. It is in this guerilla fashion that the geography is made productive, by those players defined by global capitalist logic as immobilized: the poor and the deprived. The focus is on the unrepresented, rebellious and obstinate local practices of space, which resist and circumvent any attempts to discipline them.

If we want to understand what makes this emerging migration system work, one of the things we need to look at is the historic condition of the region. For it is the conceptual difference between nomadic and colonial politics of space that lies at the heart of the Sahara being turned once again into a contested zone of mobility. The immense Saharan territory of the Tuareg tribes was split in five by the Empires at the Berlin Conference in 1884. Since then, their space of mobility and livelihood has made up substantial areas of Algeria, Libya, Mali, Niger and Chad. Denied a proper state, the Tuareg constitute a minority within these national cultures and are granted fewer civil rights than native citizens. Nonetheless, as a distinct linguistic and cultural entity, they maintain their identification as a people across the boundaries. Tuareg territorial structure is, by definition, transnational; it provides the framework for social and economic, if not political, organization. The role of these nomads is central to the transnational process of repurposing their old caravan routes as highways for illicit migration. Their unique topographical expertise and tribal ties are in high demand as a steady flow of sub-Saharan migrants pass through Agadez and Arlit.


Tuareg ex-rebel leader who runs the clandestine migration route from Niger to Algeria, Sahara Chronicle, 2006-2007.

The Tuareg rebellion in Niger in the mid 1990s, which made another attempt at consolidating their tribes into a nation state, was directly linked to uranium mining in Arlit and the exclusion of the Tuareg from the wealth found on their territory. The revenue from uranium extraction was shared among the French owners and the Nigerian elite in the remote capital who recruited miners from other ethnic groups from the south. The rebellion ended with a peace treaty which promised better social integration.
I interviewed former Tuareg rebel leader, Adawa, who is current head of the clandestine transportation operations in Arlit on the Algerian migration route. For lack of better opportunities, the returning former rebels saw a possibility of making business with the transit migrants. Transportation services were needed; besides, Arlit, like Agadez, is a desert gate that can be controlled and taxed, but the desert border is a vast terrain and roving border patrols are few and far between. Some passengers were documented, many not. Deploying rebel tactics, they swarm out in jeeps at night and bypass the border checkpoints with their full charge of migrants before melting into the dark dunes.

The regional authority of Agadez saw the need to intervene in these opportunistic developments and formally mandated Adawa to manage the semi-legal transport of migrants in an organized fashion. The local authorities may have welcomed the fact that this locks him into a criminalized position which compromises any further rebellious plans. Semi-legal, yet authorized, the business keeps the rebel pacified while generating extra income and power for the officials: a well-planned, if precarious, balance. This solves two problems at once: putting an experienced man in charge of logistics and keeping him occupied and accountable. Should Adawa ever prove to be uncooperative, the authorities can put him away without much ado. He understands that he has been taken hostage and that his status as a semi-citizen of Niger is directly linked to his guidance of more and more people into a terrain of bare survival in which citizenship is suspended.

What these transit and border recordings aim at is not the consolidation of a national unity, as media reports on border defense inevitably attempt, but its opposite: the permeability and constant subversion of national space. To some extent, television reports on clandestine boat passengers do this too; yet, importantly, the shadowy and potentially subversive circumstances of such border passages are assimilated all too quickly into a disciplined national order in which the interventions of state officials play a leading part. Yet documenting reality today also means to recognize that the massive departures mark the beginning of a migratory existence for a great number of people whose lives will not integrate in a single space and whose interests will no longer be served by one nation state. Images of border passages allow us to cultivate an alternative imaginary to national culture, one that is based on cultural practices that harness and play with national boundaries.

Concluding, I wish to return to some central concerns regarding my artistic practice in the context of Mission Reports (2009).4 First, I want to emphasize that my videos ARE geographies, if by geography we mean a visual form of spatializing territorial and human relations. What makes these videos a distinct geographic practice, rather than say a documentary tool for an earth scientist, is their essayist form. The video essay typically has a non-linear narrative structure and follows a subjective logic that doesn’t shy away from loops and discontinuities. It could end at any point or continue beyond its end and it certainly doesn’t follow a particular line of argument that would assume a proposition, conclusion or deduction. It is not conceived as a sequence in time but as constructed coexistence in space. Not unlike the transnational subjects of my research, the essay practices dislocation, it sets across national boundaries and continents and ties together disparate places through a particular logic, arranging the material into a particular field of connections. In other words, the essayist approach is not about documenting realities but about organizing complexities. This very quality makes the audiovisual essay a suitable genre for my investigation of a subject matter like globalization. In this field of knowledge, many issues around economy, identity, spatiality, technology and mobility converge and are placed in a complicated relationship to one another. The attempt to draw these layers together leads inevitably to the creation of an imaginary space, a sort of theoretical platform on which these reflections can take place and be in dialog with each other. In every work, essayists install this kind of space. We can think of it as an imaginary topography, on which all kinds of thoughts and events taking place in various sites and non-sites experience a spatial order.5 Beyond being extremely suitable for my concerns, the essayist genre has directed my work continuously towards working in the human geographies of migration and global labour as visual-spatial configurations. The fact that this method does not confine my results to an objective logic has allowed me to integrate connections that seem unrelated, such as the encounter with prostitutes in the Turkish border town Trabzon in the context of a research on the Caspian oil geography entitled Black Sea Files (2005).  At first sight, there is no immediate causal relation between the massive capital flows generated by the west-bound oil and the trafficking of women in the Black Sea basin, but their economies and trajectories are intricately connected through international visa agreements, reviving cultural affiliations and regional post-socialist histories. The technological adventure of pipeline building is juxtaposed here with the intimate experience of forced prostitution. These links are fragile but nevertheless very important if we want to convey the complexity and precarity of contemporary human geographies. The inclusion of the prostitutes reflects my ongoing concern of introducing a gendered perspective in the visual investigation of globalization processes and migration systems. Although we see the existence of a significant body of academic literature on women and space, geography, migration, and transnationalism, this gendered sense of geography has not been counterbalanced by a significant boost in the domain of aesthetic production. A spatial perspective on migration harbours the great potential of making a move from the individual and experiential zoom on subjectivity formation to a wider structural and systemic understanding of migration. We are in fact in the process of opening up a field of investigation in which a great deal of visual experimentation has yet to occur.

 

1 My first video essay Performing the Border (1999) is an analysis of the U.S.-Mexico border as a place performed by gender, mobility and labor.

2 Mark J.P. Wolf discusses this shift of the indexical linkage in his essay “Subjunctive Documentary: Computer Imaging and Simulation,” in  Jane M. Gaines and Michael Renov (eds) Collecting Visible Evidence, (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 274-91.

3 For a detailed discussion of this, see Ursula Biemann, “Agadez Chronicle – Post-colonial politics of space and mobility in the Sahara,” The Maghreb Connection (Barcelona: Actar 2006), p. 43-67.

4 Ursula Biemann, Mission Reports. Artistic Practice in the Field: Video Works 1998-2008 (Bristol: Arnolfini 2008).

5 For a more extensive discussion on the relation between transnationalism and the video essay see‘Performing Borders: The Transnational Video,’in Stuffit-The Video Essay in the Digital Age (Voldemeer/Springer, 2003).


This text will appear in Geography & Humanities published by the Association of American Geographers, April 2010

CONTENTS

Editorial

Thomas Hirschhorn

Marcus Steinweg

Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield

Gustav Metzger

Nathalie De Briey

Michael Mersinis

Reviews